Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [262]
Pulitzer’s German reader and pianist Friedrich Mann took over for Ireland. He read from Christopher Hare’s The Life of Louis XI. By midmorning, Mann reached the chapter portraying the death of the French king. Louis XI was sixty-three and had ruled for twenty-three years. Pulitzer was sixty-four and had ruled the World for twenty-eight years. As had been his habit, Pulitzer quietly murmured, when the reading began to help him doze off. “Leise, ganz leise,” he said. “Softly, very softly.”
At one o’clock, Pulitzer awoke with a sharp pain in his chest and then fainted. Several minutes later, Kate arrived. She entered the cabin with Herbert. For about twenty minutes, they remained at the bedside as her husband of thirty-three years drew his last breaths.
The following day, a coffin of silver-mounted Spanish cedar containing Joseph’s body was brought to the Charleston train station and placed in a railcar lined with mourning cloth. Kate, Herbert, and four of Joseph’s men boarded a second private car, the one Kate had ridden from New York. The train pulled out at four-thirty in the afternoon for the overnight ride to New York. Joe and Ralph came from St. Louis and New York, respectively, to meet the train on its route north. Constance, who was living in Colorado Springs, and Edith, who was in France, both made hurried plans to go to New York.
When the train reached the city at five past two on the afternoon of October 31, 1911, flags at the World, as well as at the Tribune and other newspapers, were flying at half-mast. Pulitzer’s death was on the front page of almost every newspaper in the land. The obituaries uniformly focused on Pulitzer’s achievement in making the World a dominant newspaper, on his innovations in journalism, and on his financial success. It would have disappointed the subject of the stories. “I hate the idea of passing away known only as the proprietor of the paper,” Pulitzer wrote a few months before his death. “Not property but politics was my passion, and not politics even in a general, selfish sense, but politics in the sense of liberty and freedom and ideals of justice.” His rival Hearst understood. “In his conception, the newspaper was not merely a money-making machine,” Hearst told his readers. “It was the instrument of the will and power of its hundreds of thousands of readers, the fulcrum upon which that power could be exerted in the accomplishment of broad and beneficial results.”
Pulitzer’s death was publicly attributed to heart troubles: Dr. Wilson, who completed the death certificate, listed angina as the cause and gallstones as a contributing factor. No mention was made of Veronal or any of the other medications. The press charitably avoided comment on Pulitzer’s well-known two-decade struggle with depression and other maladies.
The body was brought to the family home on East Seventy-Third Street and placed in the library, which was filled with flowers and wreaths. The next morning, hundreds of the World’s staffers came uptown to pay their final respects. At noon, representatives of the Grand Army of the Republic held a service for their former member and placed a flag on the coffin. Pallbearers, including President Butler of Columbia University, the former managing editor George Harvey, the former mayor Seth Low, Pulitzer’s doctor James W. McLane, and the business manager Angus Shaw escorted Pulitzer’s coffin to a waiting cortege of carriages. The procession made its way twenty blocks south down Fifth Avenue to St. Thomas Episcopal Church, where more than two dozen policemen did their best to keep order as a crowd of thousands gathered on the street in front.
So many former editors and reporters of the World had been summoned that they were instructed to gather in the Gotham Hotel two blocks away. At the appointed time, the alumni were to emerge and join the funeral procession. However, the plan went awry. “Happy pairs, reunited after decades, danced together on the pavement,” said Elizabeth