Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

As the Cincinnati convention neared, Pulitzer continued promoting the governor’s presidential candidacy. “Brown has…given Joseph an office to reward his service for an anti-patronage candidate, and the rewarded one is faithful,” the Missouri Democrat snidely reported. But Pulitzer’s partners were acting coy about whom they supported, particularly Schurz, who still harbored resentment at Brown’s postelection behavior.

  There were four viable candidates for the Liberal Republican nomination aside from Brown: Charles Francis Adams, a former congressman and diplomat who was the son of President John Quincy Adams; Supreme Court Justice David Davis, appointed by Lincoln and known for having written the opinion in a landmark civil liberties case; Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, who alternately was a Democrat and a Republican but while a Republican broke with his party and voted against the conviction of President Johnson during the impeachment; and Horace Greeley, the aging, famous editor of the New York Tribune. This last candidate had the virtue of unquestioned integrity, especially in contrast to Grant, but he was seen as somewhat of a screwball who supported temperance and women’s rights and dabbled in a decidedly un-American European import, socialism.

  On an April evening, Pulitzer and Stilson Hutchins went to Johnson’s house to work on plans to secure the nomination for Brown. When Hutchins went home, Johnson and Pulitzer moved to Brown’s house, where they worked until two in the morning. “He is very confident of getting the nomination at Cincinnati,” Johnson wrote of Brown that night in his diary. “He fears Adams of Massachusetts. Schurz is playing shy. Nobody knows how he stands.”

  Pulitzer and Grosvenor left town by train on April 24 to arrive in advance of most delegates. Reporters from around the country were heading the same way. On the leg from Chicago, Pulitzer sat with William A. Croffut, the managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. “This tall, rawboned youth was twenty-four years old,” Croffut recalled, “had a nose like Julius Caesar, had already acquired a picturesque history.”

  Reaching Cincinnati in the early morning of April 25, Pulitzer and Grosvenor immediately repaired to the St. James Hotel, where they set up their political headquarters. “They kept their camp fires burning from dawn until after midnight,” said one Chicago reporter. The St. James was the center of press attention. In particular, reporters sought out the Missourians, who had one of the largest state delegations and were considered the progenitors of the rebellion. “Considering themselves the parents of the Liberal movement,” noted the Chicago reporter, “the delegation labored under the delusion that their points could be easily carried.”

  The press was intensely interested in the convention. Only once before had Cincinnati been the host of a national political convention: in 1856, contentious Democrats had taken seventeen ballots to nominate James Buchanan for president. There was similar potential for drama at the Liberal Republicans’ convention, as no candidate had enough votes to win the nomination.

  Not only did the convention put Pulitzer at the center of an exciting political battle, but he also met journalists from around the country. In particular, he was drawn to a local press figure, John A. Cockerill, the managing editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer. The two had a lot in common. Both were over six feet tall—six inches taller than the average American—and they were only two years apart in age. Most important, their passion for politics, reform, and journalism created an instant bond between them, which years later would bring them together in a legendary journalistic partnership.

  The convention was a striking example of the confluence of independent journalism and politics. Like a fly on the wall, Pulitzer witnessed a few of the nation’s most powerful publishers try to impose their will on the convention. They met secretly in a room adjacent to Schurz’s that Pulitzer frequented. There were five men: Schurz; Henry Watterson, of the Louisville Courier-Journal; Samuel Bowles, of the Springfield Republican; Murat Halstead, of the Cincinnati Commercial; and Horace White, of the Chicago Tribune. Though they numbered five, they named themselves the Quadrilateral, after four northern Italian fortresses that had been prominent in the Milanese insurgency of 1848. As they saw it, the task before them was not solely to report the news of the convention but to shape it.

  The group agreed that the convention should choose either Adams or Trumbull. “The first serious business that engaged us was the killing of the boom for Judge David Davis,” said Watterson. “The power of the press must be invoked. It was our chief if not our only weapon.”

  Sitting at the same table, the editors wrote editorials for their respective papers, saying that there was no support among the delegates for Davis, despite the arrival of 700 of his supporters in Cincinnati, and that he was allied with Democrats to steal the convention away from the movement. After the editorials had been wired to the newspapers, they were reprinted in the Cincinnati Commercial, impressing on the arriving delegates the futility of supporting Davis. The editors failed, however, to shroud their machinations. It wasn’t long before the New York Times traced the “demoralization” of Davis’s followers to “a newspaper caucus of independent journalists late at night, in which it was determined to kill off Davis instantly by an editorial blast in four quarters of the country.”

  On May 1, the convention got down to business. Delegates and spectators, on foot and in carriages, streamed from hotels toward the wood-framed Exposition Hall. They were a motley group. “A livelier and more variegated omnium-gatherum was never assembled,” said Watterson. “They were long-haired and spectacled doctrinaires from New England, spliced by short-haired and stumpy emissaries from New York…. The full contingent of Washington correspondents was there, of course, with sharpened eyes and pens to make the most of what they had already begun to christen a conclave of cranks.”

  The Sängerhalle, as it was known to the large German population of the city, was ready. The three stages, typically used by musical choruses, were decorated with flags and emblems; and a larger single stage was set at the center with 300 to 400 chairs for the conventiongoers to watch each state’s delegation parade in. A last-minute crisis was averted when someone discovered that the ladies’ gallery—the only place in the hall where the fair sex would be permitted—had been inadvertently closed but was able to get it opened in time.

  At noon, Grosvenor called the convention to order. To Pulitzer and Grosvenor, who had run the Jefferson City enclave that created this gathering, the sight was an impressive achievement. Seven hundred delegates from every state in the union except Delaware sat expectantly in rows on the floor below, surrounded by stands filled with 6,000 or 7,000 spectators, many of whom had come long distances. At that time, political conventions made for good theater. “This convention originated in a single state and has now embraced representatives of the Republican Party from every state of the union,” Grosvenor said, to thunderous applause. As their first order of business, the delegates accepted the nomination of officers, including Pulitzer, who was rewarded for his work by being selected as one of the secretaries.

  Opening business concluded, the delegates began to clamor for Schurz to speak. He declined, despite noisy cries of “Now! Now!”—but he said there would be time later. It was an intoxicating moment for Pulitzer, standing on the floor sporting a new mustache and a little tuft of a beard on his chin. Grosvenor, his political partner, held the convention’s gavel, and the man for whom the audience clamored was his mentor. The Bill and Joe Show had launched a national movement.

  The next day the main order of business was the long-awaited speech by Schurz. He began with a litany of criticisms of the Grant administration, ranging from its alleged disrespect for law to its tyrannical tendencies. But Schurz knew that a music hall filled with idealistic Republicans would not be enough to prevail in the fall. “I earnestly deprecate the cry we have heard so frequently, ‘Anybody to beat Grant,’” said Schurz. “We don’t want a mere change of persons in the administration of government. We want the overthrow of a pernicious system.”

  Schurz’s speech conclude
d, the delegates went to work on adopting a platform. Most of the planks were polished versions of the well-known Liberal calls for reform. With the exception of a tortured compromise on the tariff plank, the platform looked pretty much like the one adopted in Jefferson City four months ago when Grosvenor and Pulitzer ran the show. In fact, one newspaper called the convention’s final platform “a literal transcript from the platform of Bill and Joe.”

  The delegates went back to their hotels for a night’s rest before the anticipated long struggle to select the man who would lead the party into the fall elections. The coming battle caused the first split between Pulitzer and his mentor. Schurz had grown increasingly hostile toward Brown since the 1870 election and now favored Adams for the nomination. Pulitzer remained loyal to Brown. He was not planning to desert his political patron even if his mentor did.

  During the day, one of Brown’s delegates had wired the governor to say that Schurz and Grosvenor were working to deny him the nomination. Brown immediately boarded a train for Cincinnati—a dramatic action in an era when candidates were expected to stay away from a nominating convention. In the company of Senator Francis Blair, Brown reached the city late that evening and went directly to the St. James Hotel. Running up and down corridors and knocking on doors, Grosvenor yelled, “Get up! Get up! Blair and Brown are here from St. Louis!”

  When the bleary-eyed delegates came down to the lobby, Grosvenor told them that Brown had come to Cincinnati to withdraw from the race and throw his support to Greeley. The startled delegates—especially those who supported Adams or Trumbull—stayed up into the morning hours reworking their strategies for the coming day of balloting. Members of the Quadrilateral also milled about, but they were mostly powerless because time was too short to write editorials, wire them, and publish them back home.

  At long last, the moment arrived to select the convention’s candidate. Nominating speeches were not permitted, and the first roll call got under way. Brown, who was seated with the Missouri delegation, sent a note up to Schurz asking to be permitted to address the convention. Remarkably, Schurz consented.

  On the floor Pulitzer watched his candidate ascend the steps of the platform. With the light from a window far above beaming down on him, Brown thanked the delegates for voting for him. Even though the first tally had not yet been announced, most delegates kept their own count and knew he had close to 100 votes. Then Brown made public what those who had been up most of the night anticipated. He would no longer be a candidate. Instead he asked that his delegates support Greeley. Applause and hisses filled the hall, the former coming from the ladies’ gallery because Greeley supported women’s rights.

  Brown returned to his seat, and the results from the first round of balloting were announced. Adams led with 205 votes, Greeley had 147, and the other five candidates divided the remainder. The math was ominous for Adams and Trumbull. If Brown’s votes went to Greeley, the New York publisher would equal or outdistance Adams.

  Watterson, who had been absent during the morning, arrived in the hall and found Pulitzer, who filled him in on what had just occurred. He struggled to explain why Schurz had stuck to his pledge of neutrality when he assumed the convention chair. Like many delegates, Pulitzer was convinced that Schurz had the power to direct the convention. “A word from him at that crisis would have completely routed Blair and squelched Brown,” Pulitzer told Watterson. “It was simply not in him to speak it.”

  The contest narrowed to Adams and Greeley. On the second ballot, to the relief of Adams’s supporters, Brown’s endorsement of Greeley was not as strong as they had feared. Their man still had the lead, though only slightly. As the balloting continued, Adams inched toward the nomination. On the fifth ballot, delegate-rich Illinois decided to throw its lot in with Adams. As the sixth ballot began, everyone assumed it would be the last. But Illinois made a tactical mistake. It decided to pass. Instead Indiana, which had swung to Greeley, announced its change of heart, setting off chaos in the hall. It looked as if Greeley might win, after all. The chair could hardly restore order.

  When Illinois finally reported its vote, Adams was back in the lead, but the tide had turned in Greeley’s favor, washing away any chance Adams had of winning. In many conventions, a candidate whose fortune rises quickly becomes unstoppable. States changed their votes, and the convention surged in Greeley’s favor. He became the nominee. Pulitzer’s man, Brown, was immediately rewarded with the vice presidential nomination, and then it was over.

  Despite all of Schurz’s work in bringing the rebellion to this point, the delegates he inspired had selected an aging editor with no electoral experience and a running mate whom Schurz regarded as his opponent. For Pulitzer, his first national convention taught him that outcomes were hard to control and even hard to predict. Schurz and Pulitzer retreated to the house of Judge John Stallo, who was an Ohioan and a Hegelian and, like Schurz, had raised a regiment of Germans during the Civil War. There the men drank and ate until evening. The convention had turned into a wake. “Reformers hoist by their own petard,” said Watterson.

  This was a disconcerting moment for Pulitzer. Schurz was distraught by the convention’s outcome. Brown, to whom Pulitzer owed his patronage post, was elated by his selection for the national ticket. But in winning his prize, Brown had wrecked Schurz’s plans for the convention. This left Pulitzer at a crossroads. He couldn’t oppose Brown, but to actively support him would be a blow against the man who had given him his start in politics.

  Back in St. Louis, Pulitzer made his choice. He, along with Grosvenor, joined the Greeley-Brown campaign while Schurz retreated to Washington to nurse his political wounds. Schurz said he didn’t care if his reputation was hurt by his silence; such damage paled in comparison with “the disappointment caused by the loss of so great an opportunity as we had.”

  Much of the German community was dismayed by the selection of Greeley, but Pulitzer gave his support unhesitatingly. He took on the job of secretary of the Liberal state executive committee in addition to continuing his work as city editor of the Westliche Post. Conveniently, the committee’s offices shared the same Chestnut Street building that housed the paper.

  Greeley’s favorable attitude toward temperance was both an economic and a cultural affront to Germans. Pulitzer urged Whitelaw Reid at the New York Tribune to persuade his boss to make some sort of personal statement distinguishing his personal views on alcohol from those he held as a candidate. Though Reid was ten years older than Pulitzer, and more experienced, the two journalists found they had much in common serving as assistants to famous politicians and were soon carrying on a backstairs correspondence about their bosses.

  Of concern to Reid was a meeting in New York at which leading Liberal Republicans, including Schurz, plotted to dump the convention’s choice. “I knew of the danger of that conference in New York but have no fears,” Pulitzer wrote. “I really think that the conference will result in strengthening Mr. Greeley though the very opposite was its original object. Our element will have the majority in it and our views will prevail.”

  A sense of optimism prevailed in the St. Louis Liberal Republican office. Perhaps matters were not as bleak at they seemed. On June 14, Grosvenor and Pulitzer convened a meeting of the executive committee and told the press that a “larger number of Liberal Republicans in Missouri now support the ticket nominated by the Cincinnati National Convention than supported the Liberal State Ticket in 1870.”

  But Pulitzer’s work for the Greeley campaign was a nonstop effort at damage control. Not only was the candidate prone to gaffes; Pulitzer’s colleagues in the press were unimpressed by having one of their own as a candidate. Riding a train to New York in midsummer, Pulitzer read in the Philadelphia papers that only one German newspaper supported Greeley, the inconsequential Davenport, Iowa, Demokrat. The Westliche Post, the article added, was also maintaining “an ominous silence.” Pulitzer was incensed. It was bad enough for the item to appear in the Philadelphia Republican press; an appear
ance in other newspapers around the country would damage the ticket. “Each reprint,” Pulitzer said, is “the theft of a falsehood.”

  Upon reaching New York, Pulitzer immediately published an irate correction in the New York Tribune, Greeley’s paper. “Instead of ‘but a single German Republican daily still clinging to Greeley,’” he wrote, “every single German Republican daily (except one) that supported the principles of the Liberal movement previous to the Cincinnati Convention, now supports Horace Greeley.”

  As for the “ominous silence of the Westliche Post,” he continued, “I simply say that the paper was never more earnest and outspoken in the good cause than now. I do not hesitate to predict that when the vote shall have been counted in November it will appear even to the blindest or wildest Grant criers that Mr. Greeley has received a much larger proportion of the German vote than has ever before been united upon any Presidential candidate.”

  In New York, Pulitzer was cheered by some good news. The Democrats, meeting in Baltimore, decided to support the Liberal Republican ticket and, for first time in party history, chose not to nominate a candidate of their own. But Pulitzer’s growing skill at electoral math left little doubt that even the Democrats’ support would not change the uphill nature of the election. Greeley, one of the most eccentric men ever nominated for president, was not inspiring voters. It did not take much in the way of political tea leaf reading to sense that the election was shaping up as a disaster for Liberal Republicans.

  After New York, Pulitzer returned briefly to St. Louis. The campaign had ended Pulitzer’s diligent attendance to his duties with the St. Louis police commission. He missed all the meetings in July and almost every meeting until December. If Pulitzer worried about his attendance, his qualms did not restrain him from collecting his salary. He did make a stab, of sorts, at resigning. He confirmed to a reporter in St. Louis that he had sent a letter of resignation to Governor Brown.