Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [257]
After several more cruises in the Mediterranean, Pulitzer spent the summer in Chatwold and returned to roam Europe in the fall. Roosevelt’s prosecution of the World played its last inning on October 24, 1910, when the government asked the Supreme Court, a majority of whose members had been appointed by Roosevelt and Taft, to overturn the lower court’s decision throwing out the case. James McReynolds, appearing on behalf of the Justice Department, said the government only sought to protect those that were in the federal enclaves where the World had circulated. It didn’t matter, he said, where the paper was printed. Rather, the crime of libel could occur where the paper was read, as well. Justice Holmes and others questioned him at length and pointedly asked if New York’s laws had not been sufficient.
Pulitzer’s attorney once again presented his elaborate, theatrical history of libel, which now included a long excerpt from Roosevelt’s message to Congress holding it to be a “high national duty” to prosecute Pulitzer. This time Nicoll hammered away at the pernicious nature of Roosevelt’s action. With more than 2,000 federal enclaves, a president could bring simultaneous grand jury proceedings in all parts of the country, financially crippling most newspapers, Nicoll said. “Whenever the President of the United States wished to destroy a newspaper that had offended him by political criticism he would have had only to compel it to match its scanty resources against the vast resources of the United States government.
“This was the real issue involved in the Roosevelt proceedings,” Nicoll continued, “and in resisting the claim of Federal jurisdiction the World was fighting to preserve not only its own constitutional rights but the constitutional rights of every newspaper published in the United States.”
Ten weeks later, on January 3, 1911, the court ruled unanimously in favor of the World. It concluded that the federal government had no right to prosecute the case. Reading the decision from the bench, Chief Justice White said the federal government could not claim that just because a newspaper circulated on its property it could pursue a federal libel case, especially when ample state remedies existed. He placed the decision on the desk before him. “It would be impossible to sustain this prosecution without overthrowing the very State law by the authority of which the prosecution can be alone maintained,” White said.
In short, Roosevelt’s stubborn refusal to listen to Stimson and his insistence on pursuing Pulitzer using federal powers had fatally flawed his effort from the start. By challenging a well-accepted division of prosecutorial power between the states and the national government, Roosevelt missed his mark.
Pulitzer got word of the Supreme Court’s decision in Cap Martin. It was one of the sweetest victories of his life. Though the Supreme Court’s ruling was narrow, covering only a jurisdictional issue, Pulitzer believed he had rebuffed a wider assault on the nation’s independent press. He left it to Frank Cobb to put this into words. The Court’s action, Cobb wrote, meant that “freedom of the press does not exist at the whim or pleasure of the United States. It is the most sweeping victory won for freedom of speech and of the press in this country since the American people destroyed the Federalist Party more than a century ago for enacting the infamous sedition law.” Pulitzer’s vanquished foe was speechless. “I have nothing to say,” Roosevelt told a reporter for the World who took a train out to Oyster Bay.
The pleasure of the victory,