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People in competitive businesses purchased secret codebooks designed for composing telegrams. The Acme Commodity and Phrase Code, for example, was a 902-page compendium of 100,000 five-letter codes. Pulitzer sent coded messages enthusiastically, but instead of using a commercially available codebook, he developed his own.

The 5,000-entry book shed light on the concerns, interests, and obsessions of its creator. Pulitzer developed a nomenclature for all the elements of his world. He had codes for politicians, rivals, business terms, dates, amounts of money, family members, and even the weather. William Jennings Bryan became “Guilder,” Theodore Roosevelt “Glutinous,” and Hearst “Gush.” The amount of business completed was “merciful,” a gain was “piggery,” and a discount—which Pulitzer loathed to grant—was “menodus.” Almost every telegram asked about “potash,” the term for advertising, including display ads, known as “memorials.”

In constructing his coded world, Pulitzer went beyond hiding corporate and political communication from prying eyes. He devised codes for his family and his fixation on sickness. The health of the children and family alone merited thirty-seven terms. The weather on his voyages was hardly an important secret, yet there were forty-eight codes for fog, clouds, sun, and temperatures.

To stay out of trouble, staffers had to include the critically important word “semaphore” in their reply. A veteran editor instructed those who received a codebook to underline the word in the “reddest ink” and understand its meaning: “I have read twice and fully, clearly, surely understand and acknowledge your cable. I will do my best after consideration and would certainly cable back and ask a question if I did not understand or felt uncertain.”

Each of Pulitzer’s lieutenants possessed one of the six-by-nine-inch books, about 300 pages long, with two alphabetically tabbed sections. Owning one was an important mark of power at the World, as the code was the sacred language of the inner court. Like high priests translating a religious text, the men sat each day at their desks under the gold dome with their own annotated codebooks, carefully deciphering a new stack of telegraphs and memos. Each man had his own code name. Don Seitz was “Gulch” Pulitzer’s old partner Dillon was “Guess” the editorial writer and Pulitzer’s protégé, Phillips, was “Gumboil” the business manager, Norris, was “Anfrancto” and the financial adviser, Clarke, was “Coin.”

For himself, Pulitzer reserved the lofty name “Andes,” after the highest mountain range in the Americas. It became so frequently used by editors and reporters that the moniker no longer hid his identity. In fact, aside from JP, “Andes” became the most common nickname for Pulitzer at the World and at rival newspapers.

In late June 1900 the first of the Pulitzer children graduated from college. But when Ralph accepted his Harvard degree from President Charles Eliot, his parents were nowhere to be seen. They had not considered the event sufficiently important to alter their travel plans. Ralph’s father was on the ocean, returning from a month spent in England, and his mother was undergoing a cure in Aix-les-Bains. Joseph did find time to bestow a graduation check large enough for Ralph to seek investment advice from his father’s banker.

Like most of his 982 classmates, sons of America’s wealthiest families, Ralph had passed his four years at Harvard in considerable luxury. Each month Shaw sent him $500 for living expenses, such as $30 for beer, $30 for theater tickets, $75 for meals at La Touraine restaurant, $25 for his boxing instructor, and $50 for clothes and presents. The amount had been increased by $60 in his last year, after his father suggested that Ralph should pay for the services of his manservant and a maid himself. “Not on your life!!!” Ralph had written to Butes. “When he said in London that he thought I must have a competent man to look after me, I am sure he had no notion of making me pay the man’s wages.