Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [179]
For years Venezuela had been bickering with Great Britain about its border with British Guiana. After the discovery of gold, the quarrel intensified. The United States took Venezuela’s side, broke off diplomatic relations with England in late 1895, and demanded arbitration. The British, who ruled the seas, considered this an insult and refused.
The rebuff drew an angry message from the president to Congress. Invoking the Monroe Doctrine, Cleveland promised that if England dared to take any land the United States deemed as belonging to Venezuela, the United States would “resist by every means in its power.” Congress rushed to the president’s side, and the saber rattling put the little-noticed dispute on the front pages. WAR ON EVERY LIP was the Chicago Tribune’s headline. WAR CLOUDS proclaimed the Atlanta Constitution. The editorial pages clamored for a fight. “Any American citizen who hesitates to uphold the President of the United States is either an alien or a traitor,” said the Sun.
Pulitzer refused to let the World join in. He thought Cleveland had gone too far. Put the headline A GRAVE BLUNDER on the lead editorial, Pulitzer told one of his writers over the telephone from his rented house in Lakewood, New Jersey. Weighing each word carefully, he composed a four-paragraph assault on the president’s logic. Great Britain’s actions in Venezuela posed no danger to the United States, he said. “It is a grave blunder to put this government in its attitude of threatening war unless we mean it and are prepared for it and can hopefully appeal to the sympathizers of the civilized world in making it.”
Pulitzer had long feared militarism. Seventeen years earlier, he had seen firsthand how Bismarck used the threat of French territorial claims to maintain a large standing army and impose oppressive taxes to pay for it. The ruler’s actions created a warlike state, though without battle, much as Thomas Hobbes famously described it in Leviathan. “This they call peace!” the young Pulitzer had written. “Next to war itself I cannot imagine anything more terrible to a great nation than such a peace.”
Pulitzer now expanded his efforts to douse the war fever. Over his signature, his staff sent telegrams to leading statesmen, clergymen, politicians, editors, leaders of Parliament, and the royal family in Great Britain, urging them to publicly express their opposition to war. Within days, the World published replies from the prince of Wales, Gladstone (out of office again), the bishop of London, the archbishop of Westminster, and dozens of other leaders. Each telegram professed England’s peaceful intentions and strove to lower the transatlantic rhetoric. “They earnestly trust and cannot but believe the present crisis will be arranged in a manner satisfactory to both countries,” read the message from the British throne. “No feelings here but peaceful and brotherly,” wired the bishop of Liverpool. “God Speed you in your patriotic endeavor,” added the bishop of Chester.
The World’s issue for Christmas Day 1895 reproduced the telegrams from the prince of Wales and one from the duke of York under the headline PEACE AND GOOD WILL. Soon, said another of Pulitzer’s editorials, the holly and mistletoe would be gone, as would the voices of children singing carols. “But we shall retain our hopes. The white doves, unseen, will be fluttering somewhere.”
In England, the telegrams sent by the prince and the duke generated considerable support and were on the front page of most newspapers, reported an excited Ballard Smith. The reaction in the United States was quite different. Roosevelt, who had already written a letter of congratulation to Cleveland for his belligerent threats, told Lodge that Americans were weakening in their resolve for war. “Personally, I rather hope the fight will come soon. The clamor of the peace faction has convinced me that this country needs a war.” He was furious at Pulitzer and Edwin Godkin at the New York Post, who had joined in urging