Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [220]
Harvard decided that if Joe passed a set of entrance exams, it would accept him. He was ecstatic upon getting the news and pledged to redouble his efforts with his tutor. The gift, however, did not come without strings attached. His father stipulated that Joe would have to promise to study hard in order to win admission without conditions, to work hard in college, to be satisfied with an allowance that was small by Pulitzer’s standards, and not to come to New York except during vacations.
After her time with Joseph on Jekyll Island, a rare interlude of comity between them, Kate returned to New York to cope with the finishing touches at their new house on East Seventy-Third Street. Joseph left for Aix-les-Bains. “I wish there was more sunshine in your life—worry and wearisome work are dull companions,” Kate wrote to him when he was settled in Aix. “If you could only take pleasures in things outside your work it would be a Godsend.” In his absence, the World marked the anniversary of his ownership quietly. Kate, however, couldn’t let it go unnoticed. She wrote to Joseph, “We will pass over what it has been to me, and my heart was so full of the conflicting elements of pride and pain that I could not speak of it.”
In May 1904, George Harvey, Pulitzer’s former managing editor, who was now president of Harper & Brothers, brought out a work dictated by Pulitzer describing his plans for the journalism college, as the main article in the company’s North American Review, a highly regarded magazine. At length, Pulitzer explained the need for professional training and what kind of training he envisioned. But he laid out a grander vision for the school’s purpose than simply churning out well-trained reporters and editors.
“In all my planning the chief end I had in view was the welfare of the Republic,” he wrote. Better-trained journalists would make for better newspapers that would better serve the public good. “Our republic and its press will rise or fall together,” he continued, in words that would later be mounted on the walls of his school. “An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and the courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a shame and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself.”
However, in the year since inking the agreement to create the journalism school, Columbia University’s officials had been exposed to Pulitzer’s less lofty side and had suffered from his irascibility. At first, he insisted that Columbia take the lead on the project, only to subsequently threaten to kill it if his choices—including the presidents of Cornell and Harvard—were not appointed to the advisory board. When Columbia’s president, Butler, objected to the appointment of presidents from rival institutions, he was rebuked. “Understand jealousy,” Pulitzer wired from St. Moritz to Bradford Merrill, into whose hands Pulitzer had entrusted the final arrangements. “Telegraph Butler my insistence. Unalterable. Final.”
Butler consented but counseled that the public announcement of the gift be delayed until the entire advisory board had been selected and approved by the trustees. He also believed that a board comprising illustrious men would defuse charges that Pulitzer was building a monument to himself. Pulitzer would have none of it. He ordered that the World break the news. Merrill, however, defied his boss and acquiesced to Butler’s wishes. It took him less than twenty-four hours to learn what his boss thought of that decision. Pulitzer ordered Merrill off the project, forbade any further meetings with Butler, and demanded once again that the news be published.