Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [195]
Pulitzer joined the chorus. But to do so he had to support war only as a last resort, in order not to contradict his support of international arbitration three years earlier during the Venezuelan crisis. He had not renounced the idea. Only the year before, he had instructed Seitz to publish a pamphlet on arbitration and send it to every member of the Senate “with compliments of the World.”
“If we are on the brink of a conflict it is due to the deliberate policy of Spain—not to a desire for war by our people, by our President, or by our Congress. If Spain were to yield, even now, peace would be assured,” Pulitzer began his signed editorial that appeared on his fifty-first birthday. “God forbid that the World should ever advocate an unnecessary war!” But, listing instigations ranging from the years of Spanish oppression in Cuba to the destruction of the Maine, he said the time had come for military intervention. “No lover of peace, no lover of justice, no lover of his country ought to hesitate in urging the government to strike one swift and decisive blow, now that the conflict is made inevitable by the mad folly of Spain.”
The war would be short and thus merciful, Pulitzer concluded. The government ought to send the fleet to Cuba and Puerto Rico, where it would easily overcome the Spanish. “With these islands captured the affair will be over—and Cuba free. It would hardly be a war, but it would be magnificent.”
On April 19, 1898, Congress gave President McKinley authority to use force against Spain. Three weeks later, Commodore George Dewey sailed his squadron into Manila Bay in the Philippines and in six hours overwhelmed the Spanish ships in the harbor. By then, Pulitzer was already miles from New York.
Upon completing his pro-war editorial, he left for England on the Majestic. Ledlie raised Kate’s hopes that Joseph had overcome the grief he had felt on Jekyll Island and “that you will be greeted on the other side by a reasonable gentleman who I think begins to be anxious to get over where you are.” It was a wishful prognosis. Joseph remained unsettled by Lucille’s death and distracted by the mortal combat facing his cherished World. He wandered aimlessly in England and France for several weeks. His somber mood was not even lightened when he saw Kate and his youngest daughter in Aix-les-Bains. “When are we going to see you again?” Constance wrote plaintively after her father departed without leaving a word.
On his return to the United States, Pulitzer could not bring himself to open Chatwold for the summer so soon after Lucille’s slow death there. Compounding his anguish were an Atlantic crossing marred by asthma attacks and a discouraging consultation with his eye doctor upon reaching New York. Instead, Pulitzer engaged a mansion at Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island, on a sea bluff overlooking a beach where he walked each day in the company of one of his men.
The “Journal’s war,” as Hearst called it, or the “splendid little war,” as a friend writing to Theodore Roosevelt described it, was a romp. Hundreds of thousands had volunteered for duty. Roosevelt gave up his post as assistant secretary of the navy to become a colonel of the U.S First Volunteer Cavalry, bound for Cuba. He sent a telegram to Brooks Brothers in New York to make him a uniform of blue cravenette. On the island, he led a regiment of Rough Riders in his famous charge up San Juan Hill. One of the most media-savvy politicians of the era, Roosevelt had made sure the press was along for the ride.
By the war’s end in August, both the Journal and the World had achieved record heights of circulation but were drowning in an ocean of red ink. Pulitzer had no mother with profitable copper mines to pay for his deficits. The World’s executives were summoned to Narragansett. The pressure was on to cut expenses. Pulitzer punishingly lectured