Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [259]
Concluding his meeting with Cobb, Pulitzer picked up his family in New York—all except Joe and Elinor, who were traveling by train from St. Louis—and sailed north to spend the summer in Bar Harbor. Chatwold was at its best. After years of remodeling, the summer mansion at last provided the quiet refuge for which Pulitzer yearned. He slept in the upper floors of his unconventional, eccentric “tower of silence.” He could swim in a pool of heated seawater in the basement and spend his days on a large veranda facing the ocean. Whereas Joseph craved solitude, Kate and their daughters thrived on the summer social whirl, which as the New York Times predicted, “will decidedly outshine that of 1910 in every way.”
Joseph spent time with his family at intervals. On most days he ate lunch or dinner with Kate, one of their daughters, or Herbert, and a secretary, at a table set for four in the magnificent main floor library. Visits with Ralph and Joe were mostly confined to boat rides. Joseph was exhausted by the contact with the family. “The intensity of his family emotions was such,” noted Alleyne Ireland, Pulitzer’s newest secretary, “that they could only be given rein at the price of sleepless nights, savage pain, and desperate weariness.” Nonetheless, he remained intensely curious about his children. “Everybody had to be described over and over again, but especially young Master Ralph, a bright and handsome child, born long after his grandfather had become totally blind,” Ireland said.
Joseph’s favorite indulgence was a ride on his large electric launch boat. He would sit in an armchair at the center of the vessel, with two companions nearby, as the boat navigated the calm waters of Frenchman Bay. In early August, Clark B. Firestone, recently hired at the World, joined Pulitzer for one of the rides, and for his requisite education as an editorial writer at the hands of the master. As the men rode about, Pulitzer began, as always, with his belief that independence was a paper’s most valuable attribute. No political, financial, social, or personal influence could be brought to bear on the World’s editorial positions. He warned Firestone, who only recently had been hired away from the Evening Mail, that he should not let any friendship influence his editorials, now that he was a writer for the World. “I wish,” Pulitzer said, “that these writers would realize far more fully than they do the immense asset of their independence and exercise to the full their right to say anything they please, fearless of naught save overstatement and untruth.”
Next to independence, the most important criterion was that the editorials should be readable, Pulitzer said. To succeed in this regard, they should be on a theme of popular interest, be free of unfamiliar terms and phrases, and be trimmed to the tightest possible construction. Pulitzer recalled that when Cobb came to the paper after working in Detroit, he believed that the leading editorial should run as long as half a column. Pulitzer rapidly disabused him of that idea. In order to win Cobb over to a more terse style, Pulitzer told Firestone, he summoned as “gems of compact and telling expressions” the ten- to twelve-line editorials the Sun used to publish.
The point, Pulitzer said, was to make an impression on the readers that they could not shake off. “Every day The World should contain some striking utterance, something out of the ordinary, something