Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [75]
Pulitzer was the first witness called. He recounted how he had been awakened, had helped the two women, had returned to his room, and then had fled the hotel. One of the jurors asked Pulitzer if he was certain about the time when he awoke. Pulitzer said he didn’t know how close his watch was to “telegraph” time, but he felt confident it was between half-past one and quarter to two when he made his escape. “I will say that no alarm was given in the house, so far as I heard,” he told the jurors. “I think the shrieks of the women were very fortunate, for had it not been for that, fully one hundred persons would have perished. I know I would have been one, for I am a very sound sleeper.”
On April 27, the jury concluded that the fire had originated in the basement of the hotel, possibly in the wine cellar, and that it had spread quickly to the upper floors through the elevator shaft. The building was deemed to have been safe, but the hotel management was faulted for doing an inadequate job of fire prevention.
When the coroner’s jury issued its report, Pulitzer was back in New York, again staying at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. He and Albert had received word that their mother was ill and might be dying. They decided that only Albert would go to Hungary. Joseph had no work obligations, but his phobia of funerals overwhelmed his filial devotion. In order to make the trip, Albert persuaded the New York Herald to send him to cover the war between Russia and Turkey, which had just erupted. Before leaving he compiled in a small notebook a list of items to buy in Europe. These included lingerie, gloves, a fan, and a brooch for his wife and alpaca for his son’s nurse. For Joseph, he promised to buy a frock coat and an overcoat. On April 26, Albert left New York on the Hammonia, bound for Hamburg.
A month later, Albert reached Detta, the Hungarian city where their mother had moved after remarrying. The day he arrived, Elize died. Upon receiving the news, Albert’s wife wrote a consoling letter from their house on Washington Square, where she had remained with their newborn son, Walter. “Oh, why can I not fly to you, my poor, bereaved darling, and mingle my heart-felt tears with thine,” Fannie Pulitzer wrote. “I wish you had gone sooner. I suppose the thread of life was so fragile within her that whenever you had gone the shock would have killed her.”
Their mother’s death left Joseph and Albert the only living members of the large, original family. For Joseph, Elize had been the single most important element of his youth in Hungary. When he reached the United States in 1864, he had sent her the gold coin handkerchief ring, bought with his first earnings. In St. Louis, he had shown his miniature portrait of her to all his new friends. At least twice in the intervening years, he had made the arduous trip home to Hungary to see her. In the best of circumstances, the loss of one’s only surviving parent inspires self-reflection. For Joseph—now thirty, and with no specific profession or even a home—such introspection was demoralizing.
Whenever Pulitzer was in turmoil, he would become restless and pick up and go elsewhere, as if he were searching for a geographical solution to his woes. Now he left New York and traveled to Saratoga and then to Springfield, Massachusetts. There he visited Samuel Bowles, another newspaper editor with whom he had been friends during the Liberal Republican crusade. Although Bowles edited the modest Springfield Republican, started by his father in 1824, he was one of a few editors outside New York who were nationally famous, such as Halstead in Cincinnati and Watterson in Louisville.
Pulitzer found the aging editor living in a beautiful ivy-covered cottage surrounded by acres of flowers, shrubbery, fountains, and walks amid maple, oak, and magnolia trees. They spent several hours together, talking politics. To his dismay, Pulitzer discovered that Bowles supported the Hayes