Pulitzer

Home > Other > Pulitzer > Page 10
Pulitzer Page 10

by James McGrath Morris


  Out of office but not out of work, Pulitzer returned to Jefferson City in the second week of January 1871 to cover Gratz Brown’s inauguration for the Westliche Post. Instead of taking a seat as a lawmaker, he watched as a reporter when Brown was escorted to the Speaker’s dais in the house chamber. “We have arrived at the close of a revolution,” Brown told the hundreds who crowded the hall. “The lingering animosities of Civil War have been supplanted by an accepted reconciliation on all sides.”

  Not quite. Schurz and Grosvenor were complaining that Democrats were gaining the upper hand and that the governor, a onetime Democrat, was being excessively friendly to his former party. As far as they could see, too many jobs in the state government were going to Democrats.

  Pulitzer did not share his partners’ intense hostility toward Democrats. While it was certainly true that he had lost his reelection bid to a Democrat, Pulitzer recognized that the seat he had briefly held traditionally belonged to Democrats. As a newcomer to politics, he was relatively free of the war-related party animosity, unlike Grosvenor and Schurz, who were twelve and eighteen years his senior, respectively. Democrats were among his closest friends. For instance, both Charles Johnson, who was defending him in court, and Stilson Hutchins, a newspaperman, were supporting the Liberal Republican movement. To Pulitzer, it made little sense to think of Democrats as the enemy.

  Any concern about looming political fratricide was soon forgotten because Brown, Schurz, and Grosvenor all had a common enemy—Grant. Besides, a more serious blow to Liberal Republicans’ harmony now came from the owners of the Missouri Democrat. For mysterious and suspicious reasons, they had fallen back into the ranks of Grant Republicans and fired Grosvenor. “Much as I had been warned that they would go back and throw me overboard as a journalist,” Grosvenor wrote to Schurz, “I did not believe they would dare to do either, or be mean enough to do the latter.”

  In 1870, the loss of the Missouri Democrat would have been fatal to the cause. But in 1871, editors such as Horace White at the Chicago Tribune, Samuel Bowles at the Springfield Republican, Murat Halstead at the Cincinnati Commercial, and Henry Watterson at the Louisville Courier-Journal were spreading the gospel.

  The growing movement thrilled Pulitzer, but he had a more mundane concern. The previous year, he had boosted his income considerably with his service in the state legislature. The election opened a fountain-head of patronage posts and Pulitzer sought one in the legislature. State Senator Louis Benecke, a Democrat who had worked with Pulitzer in the fall campaign, hired Pulitzer as a clerk for the committee on banks and corporations, which he chaired. For a second year in a row, Pulitzer spent the winter months in the capital.

  When the legislative session ended in March 1871, Pulitzer returned full-time to St. Louis and his work at the Westliche Post. The presidential election was still more than a year away, yet the excitement generated by Missouri’s Republican rebellion infected Pulitzer’s friends, most of whom were working for the cause. Optimism ran high. “And why may not the campaign of 1870 in Missouri, be reenacted in the nation?” asked Brown.

  Since being fired from the Missouri Democrat, Grosvenor was spending all his time directing the affairs of the ad hoc Liberal Republican organization. Schurz, though still holding out hope of taking back the party from Grant stalwarts, was increasingly identified in the national press as the movement’s leader. And Preetorius was overseeing a barrage of editorials intended to rally Germans to the cause. Working at the Westliche Post put Pulitzer at the center of this growing political movement, though in the shadows of its better-known leaders.

  But that too was changing. A few months later, when the magazine Every Saturday commissioned the artist Alfred Waudran to produce a full page of engravings featuring the faces of about four dozen “of the foremost St. Louisans,” he included, along with his depictions of Schurz, Hutchins, and Grosvenor, one of Pulitzer. A profile view accenting Pulitzer’s protruding chin and nose, the drawing shows a clean-shaven Pulitzer sporting small wire-rim glasses.

  As the summer and fall of 1871 passed, Pulitzer divided his days between working for the Westliche Post and promoting the Liberal Republican cause with Grosvenor. The Radicals, eager to extinguish the Liberal Republican committee, set a trap. They invited all Republican leaders to an October meeting in St. Louis in order to issue a joint call for a state convention in January.

  Members of the State Republican Committee voted to accept the call, but Pulitzer and Grosvenor worked to organize a “no” vote by the Liberals. Accusations immediately flew that the two were violating party rules by using proxies wrongly. “Under the ill-famed leadership of Joe Pulitzer and Bill Grosvenor, Liberals bolted from that resolution, and filled up its deficit by proxies of very dubious authority,” reported the Missouri Staats-Zeitung.

  Pulitzer’s patron, State Senator Benecke, offered advice on countering the charge. “I desire to inform you,” Benecke wrote to Pulitzer on October 26, “that the various lies reported in the Missouri Democrat in reference to yourself and the action of the Committee should be ‘nailed’ which could easily be done by publishing the whole proceedings of our Committee.” Pulitzer, as well as Grosvenor, left the complaints unanswered. It was becoming increasingly clear that the Liberal Republicans now had the upper hand.

  If Pulitzer wanted to serve the cause in the presidential battle of 1872, he would need another, more substantial, patronage job. But to earn a gubernatorial political appointment he would have to overcome a major hurdle. Still hanging over him was an indictment in Cole County for felonious assault, stemming from his having grazed Augustine’s leg with a bullet. The lobbyist had recovered from his wounds, but the political damage to Pulitzer lingered.

  Charles Johnson came to Pulitzer’s rescue. Since the shooting, he had acted as Pulitzer’s pro bono counsel. So far, each time a court date neared, Johnson had obtained a delay, often so close to the appointed time that Augustine and other witnesses had already made the trek to Jefferson City in anticipation of their day in court. By fall of 1871, delay was no longer an option. On November 20, Pulitzer stood before a Cole County judge. By his side stood Johnson, who as circuit attorney for St. Louis prosecuted criminals in his city for the state. Also appearing for Pulitzer was Britton A. Hill, a 300-pound St. Louis attorney with a reputation for coarseness and bluntness. One suspects that the prosecutor of bucolic Cole County didn’t stand a chance against these big-city heavy hitters and might have been glad to be rid of the case.

  The charge was rapidly settled with a modest fine. In all, aside from the embarrassment, the Augustine affair cost Pulitzer approximately $400 in court costs, travel, and other expenses. It was money that he did not have. Johnson borrowed it from Pulitzer’s friends. When Pulitzer became wealthy years later, he wrote to Johnson and settled his debts with the lenders who had come to his aid.

  Freed from this legal encumbrance, Pulitzer was now eligible for a patronage post if Governor Brown was willing to grant one. There was good reason to believe he was. Brown was increasingly convinced that he could be the Liberal Republican candidate for president in 1872, and Pulitzer had been a good foot soldier since 1870. Again, Johnson took on Pulitzer’s cause.

  A seat on the St. Louis Police Commission was about to open up as the result of a resignation. It required very few hours of work and paid $1,000 a year, at a time when the average skilled worker earned less than $600 a year working six days a week. On January 12, 1872, Johnson met with the governor and was assured that he would appoint Pulitzer to serve out the unexpired term. Returning to St. Louis, Johnson told Pulitzer the news. But when, several days later, the nomination was sent to the state senate, Pulitzer developed cold feet. Johnson went to see him and was surprised by his reaction. “He is one of the most unreasonable men I ever knew withal,” Johnson wrote in his diary. “He is really foolish.”

  All day, Pulitzer remained obstinate. After meeting with Johnson one last time, he left the distinct impression that he would not take the jo
b. Apparently Pulitzer feared that he would be trading one job for another, that by accepting Brown’s nomination he would lose his job with the paper. If so, his fear was not without merit. Earlier that week, when Johnson stopped in at the Westliche Post, Preetorius had suggested that Pulitzer might have to leave the paper if he became a police commissioner. In the end, Pulitzer’s reluctance disappeared as quickly as it had developed. He accepted the nomination and kept his job at the paper.

  The conservative Anzeiger des Westens railed against the appointment: the job of police commissioner required tact, dignity, and other qualities of a virtuous character, “and you will not find any of them in Pulitzer. He is undoubtedly a clever political runner. Maybe the governor fancies that in the next nomination for President the new Police Commissioner will be of good service. All of this is possible; but as Police Commissioner, Mr. Pulitzer will remain a caricature—a most ridiculous farce.” The Irish newspaper The Western Celt also damned the selection: “A more infamous prostitution of the gubernatorial power it would be difficult to imagine.”

  The grumbling by the press mattered little. The nomination moved to a vote. During the debate it was asked if Pulitzer was not the member of the House who “did a little shooting up here two years ago?” It was confirmed that he was, indeed, the man, but the senate was in a forgiving mood and approved the nomination.

  Chapter Seven

  POLITICS AND REBELLION

  In late January 1872, Pulitzer and Grosvenor headed to Jefferson City to light the spark of a national political rebellion. The Liberal Republican state executive committee was convening to issue a national call to disaffected Republicans to gather and select a ticket to run against President Grant. “The time is ripe for an uprising of the people, in kind not unlike that which swept this state in 1870,” Grosvenor said.

  As these reform-minded activists traveled by train to Jefferson City for an act of popular sovereignty, the capital’s station was a scene of celebration that morning for a symbol of the undemocratic Old World. A huge crowd stood in the damp cold to await Russia’s Grand Duke Alexis, who was coming in his $3,500-a-day private train, to lunch with Governor Brown at the new executive mansion. The completion of the mansion was also going to be celebrated with a ball, preparation for which had required many ladies to sleep upright lest they ruin their new coiffures.

  As Liberal Republican activists descended amid this hallabaloo, they grabbed the last remaining hotel rooms, to the immense pleasure of the innkeepers. “There is a big crowd here—make no mistake about that,” reported Joseph McCullagh. “That is to say, the hotels are what the landlords will call very comfortably, and what the guests will consider very uncomfortably, full.”

  McCullagh was among the throngs in Jefferson City on assignment to cover the meeting for the Missouri Democrat. He had recently rejoined the paper, where he had worked as a young reporter before the war. Since his modest start, McCullagh had served as a Civil War correspondent and then won national fame as a Washington correspondent who published a series of interviews with the embattled president, Andrew Johnson. McCullagh made a memorable impression on most who met him. Born in Dublin, Ireland, the short, thick, and pugnacious reporter was known to all simply as “Mack.” According to the novelist Theodore Dreiser, “He was so short, so sturdy, so napoleonic, so ursine rather than leonine, that he pleased and yet frightened me.”

  On his first night in Jefferson City, McCullagh noticed that Senator Schurz had remained in Washington and left his less-known lieutenants Pulitzer and Grosvenor in charge. “If I had to select from the large crowds that throng the halls and doorways the most prominent managers of the Liberal movement,” McCullagh wrote, “I should, at a guess, point to Joe and Bill, as they are familiarly called by each other and by all their acquaintances.” From Schurz’s perspective this was a worrisome state of affairs. If the convention were a henhouse, Grosvenor would be the farmhand in charge, Brown a fox, and Pulitzer an unreliable watchdog.

  That night Pulitzer and Grosvenor conferred with Brown, who left the festivities at the mansion to come to Schmidt’s Hotel. The prospects were good. About 130 had showed for the meeting. An equally promising sign was the diversity of the delegates. “In fact, while Liberal Republicans of all classes were more fully represented than ever before,” Grosvenor observed. “It was remarked with pleasure and surprise by German Liberals, that, for the first time, they were outnumbered by American Liberals.”

  The following day, a few minutes before noon, Grosvenor and Pulitzer were caught in the sea of delegates and spectators jamming the floor of the House chambers.

  “Joe,” Grosvenor yelled.

  “All right, Bill,” replied Pulitzer from deep in the crowd on the floor as he made his way over to Grosvenor.

  “Let’s organize the damned thing,” Grosvenor said when Pulitzer reached him.

  “All right, Bill. You get into the chair and call them to order,” Pulitzer instructed.

  Grosvenor ascended the dais and welcomed the “vanguard in the army of reform,” eliciting a wave of enthusiastic applause. “The time has come, gentlemen,” he said. “We are here because we can be nowhere else. The Republican party still clings to abuses which no true Republican can excuse.” Charles Johnson followed Grosvenor, and stirred the crowd even further with a harangue about the Grant administration. “The word ‘carpet-baggers’ figured around hundreds of times in his speech,” McCullagh, a defender of Grant, said.

  The like-minded delegates took no time to issue the call for a convention to be held in Cincinnati on May 1 and ratify the draft of a platform calling for universal suffrage and amnesty, civil service and tariff reform, and control of big business. “The times demand an uprising of honest citizens to sweep from power the men who prostitute the name of an honored party for selfish interests,” proclaimed the document that was finally adopted.

  Their work complete, the delegates called on Governor Brown to address the convention. He promised that if Missouri led the fight against executive despotism and corruption, others would rally to the cause. It was a bit much for McCullagh, who simply couldn’t resist pointing out Brown’s hypocrisy to his readers. The governor, he said, had failed to give one single “instance in which Grant had made such an unfit appointment as that which has recently disgraced his own administration. I mean, of course, Pulitzer as Police Commissioner, which stands out single and alone, and challenges comparison with history or tradition.”

  Grosvenor and Pulitzer were keenly aware that the fortunes of the Missouri declaration depended on successfully conveying to the nation’s press an impression of a political groundswell. To that end, they enlisted William Hyde, the managing editor and part owner of the Missouri Republican. He persuaded the Associated Press to transmit his sympathetic coverage of the meeting. The plan succeeded to a great extent, and countless newspapers described the meeting as a political prairie fire. The success of the propaganda left the anti-movement New York Times fuming: “The Missouri Democrat, through its well-known correspondent ‘Mack,’ instantly exposed the fraud, but the exaggeration had got twenty-four hours start in the head-lines of thousands of newspapers all over the land, and the truth never overtook it.” The “truth,” according to the New York Times, “was that the Convention was contemptible in numbers and more than contemptible in the political standing of its members.”

  In the short span of a few days, both the good and the bad press coming from the convention closely identified Pulitzer with the movement. “Among the by-no-means unimportant factors in the great multiple of Liberalism, was and is the brilliant Pulitzer, Senator Schurz’s whimsical lieutenant on the Westliche Post, of St. Louis,” noted one newspaper. The Jefferson City convention was a triumph for the political partnership between Pulitzer and Grosvenor, one that even McCullagh was forced to concede. “Writing now a day after the whole matter has gone into history,” he said, “I cannot see a better title for it than the Bill-and-Joe Convention. What there was of it that didn’t
belong to Bill was purely Joe-ical, and vice versa.”

  When he got back to St. Louis, Pulitzer took his seat on the four-member police commission. One of the other members was William Patrick, the lawyer who had given Pulitzer some work during his first years in St. Louis. Providing police protection was a serious affair. The city was the fourth-largest in the United States and quite spread out. The geographic area patrolled was larger than that of any American city except for Philadelphia. As a result, St. Louis maintained a good-sized police department with a force of 432, including detectives, sergeants, and captains, and a large budget.

  The police commission was charged with overseeing its operation, approving all expenses, reviewing citizens’ complaints, and enforcing discipline. The last of these was a not infrequent occupation of the board. For instance, in the summer of 1872, a patrolman, Patrick Conway, was found intoxicated in a house of prostitution. That he was a police officer was evident, because he was in uniform. Drunk, he had nevertheless remained true at least to one of the police department requirements: that one remain in uniform at all times.

  For the first few months, Pulitzer diligently attended the biweekly meetings of the commission. He was asked to look into the police force’s effectiveness at coping with gambling—a rising problem in the city. But the duties of police commissioner were not high in his mind. Rather, politics took first place. Grosvenor put Pulitzer on the road and he spent most of February and March in the East, drumming up support for the national convention.

 

‹ Prev