Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [171]
Pulitzer, for his part, had lost interest in Harvey. He had marked another member of his staff for personal grooming. That spring, David Graham Phillips, a six-foot-three Hoosier-born graduate of Princeton University who turned the heads of the women in the stenographers’ pool, had joined the World after three years with Dana’s Sun. He was as ambitious in character as he was striking in physique. Upon arriving in New York, in search of a reporting job, he had written to his father, “Here I am in this great city, and no man, woman or child cares whether I am dead or alive, but I will make them care before I am done with them.”
Phillips received an invitation to dine at Pulitzer’s house—a considerable honor since the publisher was in New York for only seventy-two hours, and many of the World’s staffers wanted time with him. After the meal, the two men retired to the drawing room to discuss politics, poetry, and philosophy. The sartorially splendid Phillips lived up to his advance billing as a charming conversationalist. Pulitzer invited him on the spot to return to Europe with him and become the World’s correspondent in London.
Within forty-eight hours, Phillips had packed, put his affairs in order, and caught up with Hosmer, Ponsonby, and Pulitzer on a ship bound for England. His presence greatly enlivened Pulitzer’s traveling party. While Ponsonby and Hosmer tended to the publisher’s many needs, Phillips provided the kind of lively intellectual conversation that Pulitzer cherished. More important, Pulitzer saw in Phillips a potential journalistic heir apparent. It seemed unlikely to him that his asthmatic eldest son would ever be able to take over the reins of the paper. Convinced that any one of his maladies could end his own life, Pulitzer worried that the World would die with him.
Pulitzer was so completely taken with Phillips that, in a moment of weakness, he consented to give his young traveling companion something he had thus far denied to all his correspondents at the World. He would permit Phillips to publish the London dispatches with a byline.
By June, Pulitzer was already back again. He now had two U.S. homes that provided privacy away from New York. He was eager to spend time at his newest one, a beautiful estate that he had leased. It was named Chatwold, and it overlooked the ocean in Bar Harbor, Maine. Despite the distance from New York, this small community was drawing the likes of the Vanderbilts, eclipsing Lenox, Massachusetts, and rivaling Newport, Rhode Island, as a summer haven for the wealthy.
Geographically nearer to the World and closer to its day-to-day operations than he had been in more than a year, Pulitzer couldn’t resist meddling with its management. Whereas he left the Post-Dispatch entirely to itself, he could not keep his hands off the World. Actually, at this moment, the paper needed help. Its affairs were in disarray and two of its top managers weren’t speaking to each other, communicating only by memo. Pulitzer slashed the salary and powers of one of the two; but, unsurprisingly, that did little to restore harmony.
The problem was larger than an office squabble. Since Pulitzer had sent Cockerill packing, he had never found an editor who was Cockerill’s equal. George Harvey worked himself into exhaustion and pneumonia trying to be the next Cockerill, to no avail. The only person who ever met Pulitzer’s expectations was Pulitzer himself.
He believed the solution to his troubles was a brash editor working for a competitor in St. Louis. Pulitzer knew that Colonel Charles H. Jones, who had replaced William Hyde at the Missouri Republican, had boosted the paper’s circulation with an aggressive style of journalism not seen in St. Louis since Pulitzer had left a decade ago. Aside from his undesirable sympathy for the populist free-silver movement, Jones seemed to possess the determination and drive Pulitzer wanted at the helm of the World. He sent Jones an invitation