Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [178]
That summer the remodeled Chatwold stood ready to receive Pulitzer and his guests. More than 100 men had worked through the winter rebuilding the country mansion to Pulitzer’s specifications. The most difficult task had been an excavation down through fifty feet of rock to sea level, where a steam-heated underground room had been carved out for a plunge bath. Aboveground, the house had been extensively rebuilt, with the addition of a granite tower specially constructed to prevent sound from entering. Inside it, according to one reporter, “the great chief can hide away from the sordid cares of the world and be at peace with his soul—or at war with it—and no one will be the wiser.”
The “tower of silence,” as his secretaries called it, also revealed that Pulitzer’s retreat from the paper was no longer a search for a cure but rather a permanent condition. “So Mr. Pulitzer,” noted one of his men, “dictated the destinies of his manifold interests at long distances in intervals between seizures when his infirmities utterly incapacitated him—a giant intelligence eternally condemned to the darkest of dungeons, a caged eagle furiously belaboring the bars.”
Pulitzer’s talons, however, remained sharp, especially with regard to Theodore Roosevelt. The politician had recently become New York City’s police commissioner and was cleaning up its notoriously corrupt police force. This cheered New Yorkers until he also decided to enforce blue laws that forbade saloons—but not private clubs—to serve alcohol on the Sabbath. Roosevelt agreed that the law was pigheaded and led to corruption, but said that he had no choice except to enforce it. Pulitzer, who had long opposed any form of temperance, directed Bradford Merrill to bring up the World’s editorial guns.
Roosevelt’s claim that his enforcement might actually inspire a lifting of the ban was disingenuous, said the World. “You know that those who have such power are in no way annoyed by your nagging and exasperating activity in preventing the hard-working laborer from getting a pitcher of beer for his Sunday dinner,” the editorial continued, addressing Roosevelt directly, as the World always did when he was the subject of Pulitzer’s condemnation. “Does it commend ‘reform’ to have the innocent annoyed in its name while crime runs riot and criminals go free?”
Reading the editorial, Roosevelt told his friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge that the World was among the New York papers “shrieking with rage.” He told another friend that the World and Herald “are doing everything in their power to make me swerve from my course; but they will fail signally; I shall not flinch one handbreadth.” But being despised by drinkers and the New York press had no ill effect on Roosevelt’s national popularity. In fact, it increased. One paper asked, “Will he succeed Col. Strong as Mayor; or Levi P. Morton as Governor; or Grover Cleveland as President?”
Indeed, Roosevelt’s ambitions far exceeded cleaning up a city’s police department. He was certain that his combativeness and manliness were appealing. He was convinced that the entire nation, not just Manhattan, lacked virility. “There is an unhappy tendency among certain of our cultivated people to lose the great manly virtues, the power to strive and fight and conquer, not only in a time of peace, but on the field of battle,” he told one audience. He thought the time had come for the United States to flex its military muscle outside its borders, and he saw an opportunity in a crisis brewing in Venezuela.
Roosevelt,