Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [209]
Ralph’s fifteen-year-old brother, Joe, who attended St. Mark’s School, an exclusive boarding school west of Boston, possessed similar expectations. In the spring, he had asked his father to spend $1,300 for a sailboat. “I am afraid you will think that pretty steep but boats are pretty expensive things, as you know,” he said. He also hoped his father would hire someone to take care of the boat, should it be purchased.
Neither Ralph nor Joe had much contact with the world beyond that of mansions in New York, manors in London, houses in a fashionable arrondissement of Paris, or summer cottages in Maine and Georgia. From their earliest years they had been cared for by nannies and educated by tutors until consigned to boarding schools for the finishing touches when they were as young as eight years old.
It was not until Joe was a teenager that he learned of his father’s Jewish ancestry. In his first year at St. Mark’s, which was Episcopalian, he heard boys making a hissing sound or calling him “sheeny” when he walked by. Joe confronted his Episcopalian mother about his heritage. She told him that he had nothing to be ashamed of, that the Jews were a great people, and she proceeded to list the names of prominent Jewish New Yorkers.
Pulitzer supervised the children’s tutoring, training, and care—especially with Ralph, whose precarious health had required long stays in places like St. Moritz. Herbert, born late in the marriage, was still too young to be molded. To Pulitzer’s immense frustration, both Ralph and Joe failed to show promise. The eldest was most willing to please his father, but was frail and more interested in the social world than the newspaper one. “I hardly know how to treat him, his ignorance is so terrible and my disappointment so great that I fear I discourage him,” Pulitzer told Seitz when he sent Ralph to him for training at the World after graduation.
Pulitzer had even less hope for Joe, although Joe was robust and healthy. He was willing to stand up to his father, had little interest in his studies, and had a predilection for getting into trouble. His career at St. Mark’s came to an abrupt end in 1901, when he and some friends sneaked into town to buy beer. Finding the school locked on their return, Joe led them up the ivy-covered walls and through an open window. Unfortunately, it led into the bedroom of the headmaster and his wife. “He has committed a crime against his father, his mother, his sisters and his own good name and future. This should be rubbed into him,” Joseph wrote to Kate, blaming her for having spoiled the child.
Pulitzer took less interest in Constance and Edith. They spent far less time with him than the boys, including Herbert. This did not mean, however, that they were exempt from his supervision at a distance. Examining bills, he noticed some books by the French writer Alphonse Daudet that fourteen-year-old Edith had purchased. “I would as soon give her strychnine as let her read the average French novel at her formative impressionable age,” Joseph told Kate. “You should watch this very sharply and tell the governess to do the same. I still cling to the hope that it must be a mistake.”
With the sole exception of his departed Lucille, Joseph endlessly expressed his disappointment in his children to his secretaries, editors, and managers; to Davidson; and especially to Kate. Once, when his mail contained only a letter from Constance, he told Kate, “To all the rest of the children you can say I do not love them and they ought to be ashamed of themselves for not writing.” Most who witnessed these harangues were cowed and lacked the courage to contradict him when he tore into his children. Only his distant cousin Adam Politzer, a distinguished professor of otology in Vienna, offered rare counsel.
“Do not forget, that they were born and brought up under quite different circumstances than we,” Politzer wrote. “Self-made men like you and myself only come to maturity in that battle for existence—and who knows should we have been the sons of wealthy parents, if we were what we are now?