Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [207]
Kate had not yet been consulted about the plans for the house. She was still recovering from the trauma of the fire. Her doctor urged her to go for a cure at Aix-les-Bains in southern France. “She is feeling the strain of all she went through at the time of the fire and needs very much to rest and the treatment at Aix,” he wrote to Joseph. Persuaded, her husband authorized his financial officer, Angus Shaw, to give Kate $750 to pay for her passage to Europe. She in turn persuaded Shaw to give her $830 to cover the cost of her maid and taxes, and Shaw feared that Joseph might make him deduct the additional $80 from a future payment.
At the World, matters were no more settled than at home. Pulitzer continued to fret about the paper’s sloppiness. In one story, a reporter erred in stating Standard Oil’s stock value. “Accuracy! Accuracy!! Accuracy!!!” Pulitzer angrily telegraphed. Of greater concern was the restlessness among many of his key editors and managers.
Since January, the business manager, John Norris, had been hinting that he was preparing to leave. On April 2, he made his plans known. “Temperamentally, I am not equipped to get along with you,” Norris wrote. To be sure that Pulitzer would not try to stop him, he added that nothing could be done to keep him on the paper. Pulitzer accepted his departure, and Norris went to work for Ochs at the New York Times. Even John Dillon, Pulitzer’s original partner at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, took another job. He joined the Chicago Tribune after laboring quietly in the World’s editorial shop for years.
Phillips was also feeling some wanderlust. Earlier in the winter, he had complained about his nerves and had requested a leave of absence. Pulitzer wanted to keep Phillips at all costs. He still believed the young writer might eventually take the helm of the paper. During a carriage ride around Lakewood, Pulitzer told Phillips he could have a two-month, all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. In late April, the young writer accepted the offer, picked up an advance on nine weeks of his salary, and left.
After more than a decade of on-and-off absentee ownership, Pulitzer could still not find a suitable way to run the World to his satisfaction. Earlier, when Cockerill and Smith had been in charge, he felt that he had responsive alter egos at the helm. Now he had to beg his editors to follow his instructions. As he told them that year, “My being disabled from performing this duty, involves the necessity of your thinking, as nearly as possible, what you think I think.”
To run his paper by remote control, Pulitzer contrived an intricate, even labyrinthine, means of communication. He kept his secretaries busy at all hours by dictating to his editors and managers a stream of telegrams filled with complaints about even the smallest mistakes in the paper—chastisement, praise (though rare), and incessant demands for every possible kind of up-to-date information about circulation and finances. The cable offices at Wiesbaden, Germany; Cap Martin, France; London, England; Bar Harbor; and Jekyll Island always knew when Pulitzer was in town.
The telegrams tested the patience of Pulitzer’s personal staff. Once, on Jekyll Island, the duty of taking down and sending a telegram fell to Hosmer because Pulitzer’s secretary, Butes, had remained in New York. After spending thirty minutes with Pulitzer as the latter composed a 300-word telegram, Hosmer retreated to his room and neatly transcribed the message so that the club’s clerk could telephone it to Western Union. “But just as he is shirking off by the back door to place it beyond hope of recall,” Billings wrote to Butes, “a messenger reaches him with instructions not to send it until Mr. P. has read it again and the circus begins afresh.”
The public nature of the telegraph—one of the wonders of the nineteenth century—created a further challenge. Telegraph operators were privy to the content of any message and secrets were not safe. Furthermore, like in the children’s game of “whisper down the lawn,”* repeated transmissions of