Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [291]
Tunstall was well-educated: Nannie Tunstall to Virginia Tunstall Clay, 3/21/1884, NT-DU.
In February, while: NYT, 2/17/1878, 2. Unless otherwise indicated, the quotations from the letters of JP to Tunstall are drawn from the Joseph Pulitzer Letters, AJHS.
“Is there no”: JP to Tunstall, 5/2/1878, EFJC.
On a spring day: WaPo, 3/6/1878, 4, and 3/22/1878, 2.
Indeed, Pulitzer was: House Journal, March 3, 731; Constitutional Convention, Vol. 4, 123; SeDe, 6/5/1875, 3.
Pulitzer longed not: JP to KP, undated but probably April 1878, reprinted in DCS JP, 91–92.
“You can now see”: JP to KP, undated but probably June 1878, reprinted in DCS-JP, 93. McCullough was in Washington, appearing in the theater, in early June. He was also, indeed, scheduled to sail to Europe on June 15 (WaPo, 5/31/1878, 2) as Pulitzer noted in his letter. Thus this letter to Davis was written in the first week of June 1878.
“I must have business”: JP to KP, June 1878, reprinted in DCS-JP, 94–95.
The ceremony actually: “Large, roomy and with an air of sober reliability about it, one feels the sentiment of respect for it,” wrote a newspaper reporter who had passed through its iron gates in search of newsworthy items only a month before; Tripp Jones, archivist, interview with author, Church of the Epiphany, Washington, DC, August 4, 2005. Examples of Washington luminaries who were members of the parish in 1878 would include Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman and Chief Justice Morrison Waite. “A Notable Church,” WaPo, 5/11/1878, 2.
The newlyweds, whose union: Pulitzer told this tale to a neighbor in St. Louis. George S. John, “Joseph Pulitzer: Early Life in St. Louis and His Founding and Conduct of the Post-Dispatch up to 1883,” Missouri Historical Review (January 1931), 67.
The Reverend John H. Chew: As H. L. Mencken observed, “Most Americans when they accumulate money climb the golden spires of the nearest Episcopal Church.” Quoted in Collier, The Rockefellers, 36–37. The stained-glass window has since been moved to the front wall of the church: Jones, interview.
CHAPTER 12: A PAPER OF HIS OWN
This chapter, as well as subsequent ones, benefits greatly from internal Post-Dispatch documents that came to light in 2008, when the Fogarty Papers became known. For more information, see page 12.
In the early morning: At Hudnut’s pharmacy downtown, the temperature had hit ninety-two degrees the afternoon before. The Pulitzers may have been lucky and avoided much of the heat by staying for several days along the ocean at Long Branch, New Jersey, where Joseph held reservations at the West End hotel, which opened for the summer season the day following their wedding. With each passing year, Long Branch was becoming an increasingly popular destination for the wealthy seeking a cool spot for the summer. It had a safe blue-blooded pedigree. As one hotel operator told the New York Times that June, he had “not received a single application for rooms from a Jew this year, while at the same time last year he had many.” (NYT, 6/11/1878, 1.)
Having spent all: NYS, 10/20/1878, 3.
When Joseph and Kate: NYS, 10/6/1878, 3. The socialists were the demagogues and were dangerous, admitted Pulitzer. But the despotic solution chosen by Bismarck was equally, if not more, dangerous. “To Germany it is a choice between the Scylla and the Charybdis,” said Pulitzer, referring to a mythical Greek sea monster and a whirlpool whose positions in a narrow channel meant that fleeing from one put one in danger of the other.
In Paris, Kate: KP to JP, 10/2/1904, JP-CU.
The two-month honeymoon: NYT, 9/12/1878, 2.
The Pulitzers’ European: NYS, 9/6/1878.
Because Pulitzer hated: Ibid., 3. Pulitzer’s friends Hutchins and Cockerill, at the Washington