Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [256]
The law was intended to punish assault and murder on the high seas, which were beyond the reach of state laws, and was never intended to be used to prosecute an offense that could easily be tried in a state court. “The curious and ingenious mind, which for the first time in eighty-five years, twisted the statute to meet the ends of this prosecution has retired, and this case has been left to the present Attorney General to press as a matter of department routine,” Nicoll told Judge Hough. “You might as well revive the sedition laws, or pass another one like it. They would be a better law than this one.”
The U.S. attorney Henry Wise, who had taken over for Stimson, rose to challenge Nicoll’s interpretation and argued that the law as amended covered libel as well. But Judge Hough had little patience with this view. “I am clear,” he said interrupting the two bickering lawyers, “that the construction of the act of 1808 proposed by the prosecution in this case is contrary to the spirit which actuated the members of Congress in passing this law.” Hough granted Nicoll’s motion to quash the indictment and suggested strongly that the jurisdictional issue be settled not by him but by the Supreme Court.
“I am naturally somewhat surprised,” said Wise when reporters surrounded him outside the courtroom. “If any further action is to be taken it will rest with the Attorney General of the United States.”
The only party on the winning side still unhappy was Pulitzer. Anxious until the day of the trial, he now wanted to win his argument before the Supreme Court. “If there still remains the likelihood that someday another Roosevelt will prostitute his power by invoking the act to protect harbor defenses in order to prosecute newspapers that have offended him, the sooner there is a final decision of the Supreme Court of the United States the better,” Frank Cobb wrote in the World the morning after the decision. As the victor, however, Pulitzer could not appeal. Only the administration could. One day before the time for an appeal would have run out, Taft’s cabinet decided to take the case to the Supreme Court.
In March, Joe came to Cap Martin on an important mission. In January he had pleaded with his father to grant his long-standing wish to marry Elinor Wickham, a fetching dark-haired daughter of an old family in St. Louis. “We are anxious to end the demoralizing suspense of this long three years of waiting this spring,” he said, “and I beg to you to end it by giving your consent.”
Even Wickham had written to Joseph in hopes of softening his heart. Her letter only gave him a chance to vent. “Try your moral sense and get him to tell you the truth what his conduct toward me has been for the last ten years,” Joseph wrote back, “and see whether you cannot influence him toward a father who is already old and broken, totally blind, cannot sleep, has an infinite variety of infirmities with one foot and half in the grave, and expects nothing from his children except a little less intense selfishness and some sympathy.”
In person, Joseph was rarely the ogre who dictated the letters. When Joe arrived, Joseph gave him a gift of $1,000 for his twenty-fifth birthday and consented to the marriage. His father’s kindness, once again, had the effect of inducing guilt in Joe. As the train left, he looked back at Cap Martin and saw his father’s villa. “It made me realize more keenly than I have realized in all my life under what deep obligation I am to you and how very much at fault I have been in the past in not feeling this obligation,” Joe wrote to his father. “In a way I hated to leave you back there, even now, with the happy prospect that I have before me I feel very selfish in going away.”
The children gone, Pulitzer once again fiddled with his will. He decided to include a warning along with the