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By Root 2309 0

however, was muted by other news from New York. On January 23, 1911, Pulitzer’s onetime journalistic heir apparent, David Graham Phillips, was walking toward the Princeton Club in New York City to pick up his mail. Almost a decade had elapsed since he had worked for Pulitzer. In the intervening years he had established himself both as a successful author of socially conscious fiction and as a leading muckraking journalist. In fact, when Theodore Roosevelt in a speech coined the term “muckraking” to disparage the work of reform-minded writers, he had Phillips in mind. As Phillips neared the club, a well-dressed young man approached him.

“There you go,” said the man, as he pulled out a .32 caliber automatic pistol and opened fire, sending six bullets into Phillips.

“Here I go,” he said, firing a final round into his own head. The deranged assailant, the son of a prominent family in Washington, D.C., believed that his family, and especially his sister, had been defamed in Phillips’s books. A policeman rushed over from the park and three of Phillips friends came bounding out from the club.

“Graham, what happened?” asked the first friend to reach Phillips.

“He shot me in the bowels,” Phillips replied, referring to the dead assailant lying on the pavement. “Don’t bother with him. For God’s sakes get a doctor.”

An ambulance rushed Phillips to the hospital. At first the doctors believed he would recover from his wounds, but the hemorrhaging could not be stopped. The following evening, Phillips declined rapidly. “I could have won against two bullets, but not against six,” Phillips murmured a few minutes before dying at eleven-thirty that night.

Funeral services were held two days later at St. George’s Episcopal Church, at East Seventeenth Street and Stuyvesant Place. Many of Phillips’s former colleagues from the World packed into the church, along with admirers of the writer. Even if it had not been for Pulitzer’s aversion to funerals, this was one for which distance was a legitimate excuse—not to mention that Pulitzer was beset by an increasing number of ailments. “I have been extraordinarily tired, fatigued and exhausted ever since you left,” he wrote to Ralph in early March. “I am not fit for business, cannot attend to it in a perpetual state of headaches and pains.” A cure in Wiesbaden brought no relief. In May, Pulitzer’s men told Kate that though Joseph’s blood sugar was down from a dangerous level, his nerves were shot and he was plagued with continual indigestion.

One of Pulitzer’s many doctors reviewed medications with him. He urged his patient to take Veronal, a relatively new sedative. “It induces a thoroughly normal sleep and, for most people, causes absolutely no side effects,” he told Pulitzer. “Even over the course of multiple years, Veronal taken in doses of 8–12 grains is totally harmless, and the fear of Veronal poisoning wholly unfounded.” However, patients built up tolerance to this drug and required increasingly higher dosages. Several years later, experts would warn patients of its dangerous side effects. “Veronal must be ranked among the treacherous somnifacients,” reported one of the main medical manuals. “The number of serious and fatal cases of poisoning is so large that great care should be employed in its use.” Neither Pulitzer nor his doctor knew this when he began taking the drug.

In the summer of 1911, Republicans nervously faced the prospect that Theodore Roosevelt would challenge President Taft’s renomination, and Democrats were stirred by the belief that Taft could be defeated. Presidential elections could still ignite Pulitzer’s passion, and he sailed home to confer with his editorial page writers. Pulitzer’s interest in “the Page,” as it was called, remained strong, although he was becoming uninterested in the operation of the paper. As he told one correspondent that spring, “My whole aim and end in life is to know nothing of the affairs of the World.”

Pulitzer and Cobb met on board the Liberty off the shore of New York at the end of June. Pulitzer wanted the World to promote Woodrow