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By Root 2370 0

Herald. He was on assignment for the Herald in Egypt when he succumbed to a brain hemorrhage while in a hotel barber’s chair. The World made only modest note of his passing. Pulitzer was heading north and could have attended the funeral service when Cockerill’s body reached New York in May, but he chose not to. Instead he left it to Chauncey Depew, who had presided with Cockerill at the laying of the cornerstone for the Pulitzer Building, to represent the missing half of the partnership that had transformed New York journalism. A few days later, Cockerill’s will was probated. “I name as my executor Joseph Pulitzer,” Cockerill had written, “who has been a faithful and sincere friend to me, and to whom I am indebted for much that I enjoy.”

Pulitzer found tranquillity at Moray Lodge, the princely manor in Kensington, England. The peacocks were done with their mating and the place was quiet. “No discordant echoes of the city’s ceaseless human hum disturb the restful quiet of the place,” noted one caller who found Pulitzer in the elegant study, which was lined with the landlord’s books. He was in better health than he had been in several years. His worries in New York rested in an untended pile of telegrams and letters strewn over a desk. London was like a tonic.

Its pleasures were made all the greater when, in June 1896, a delegation of British peace societies came to pay homage to Pulitzer and the World for helping defuse the Venezuelan crisis. They brought a proclamation, engrossed on vellum, deeming the effort a “beneficent exemplification of the marvelous facilities of modern journalism in the dark days of last December.” A decade after Pulitzer had brought an American tribute to Gladstone, his own statesmanship was the subject of British praise.

“I’m deeply touched,” Pulitzer told the gathered religious, social, and political leaders, “but am unfortunately an invalid and under a doctor’s orders and I ask permission that my response be read by a young American friend—my son.”

It thus fell to sixteen-year-old Ralph to read his father’s long speech on the value of international arbitration. Pulitzer earnestly believed that war could almost always be avoided. He hated the saber rattling endemic in American political culture and had little taste for the bellicose rhetoric exemplified by men like Theodore Roosevelt. “Civilization is no more possible without peace than permanent peace is possible without arbitration,” Ralph said, as he made his way through the thousands of words.

Yet an American war loomed as Ralph read his father’s speech. In Cuba, an independence movement had gained such strength that the Spanish government dispatched 150,000 troops to put it down. The Cubans who resisted were being turned into heroes by the World, the Journal, and other newspapers.

Before returning to the United States, Pulitzer detoured to Wiesbaden, Germany, for a short stay at the Hotel Kaiserhof, adjacent to the Augusta Victoria baths. There, between Turkish baths and mud and hot sand treatments, Pulitzer gave more thought to his problems back in New York. “We must recognize the extraordinary competition, no doubt, but we must also recognize extraordinary foolishness, not imitate it,” he wrote to Norris. Publishing a penny newspaper constrained the size of the paper but not its quality. “I regard it as more important to have the best paper than the biggest in size.”

Unable to let his staff do their jobs without his constant interference, Pulitzer sent a stream of telegrams through the underwater Atlantic cable bearing instructions on topics ranging from the rate for help-wanted classifieds to changing the grade of paper used in certain editions. He instructed Brisbane to make the Sunday edition of interest to intelligent readers (“Make real popular magazine not a magazine of horrors”); reviewed the World’s printing capacity (“Shall we order six new color presses in order that we may meet the Journal?”); and pushed him to compete with the Journal for out-of-town readers (“if you are sure of your grounds and more particularly of