Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  As Pulitzer and Watterson walked away from the entertainment, Pulitzer said, “We are brigands, differing according to individual character, to race and pursuit. If I were writing that play, I should represent the villain as a tyrannous city editor, meanly executing the orders of a niggardly proprietor.”

  “And the heroine?” asked Watterson.

  “She should be a beautiful and rich young lady who buys the newspaper and marries the cub—rescuing genius from poverty and persecution,” Pulitzer replied.

  In the fall, Pulitzer drifted back to St. Louis. On November 13, 1873, his friends there put on a grand celebration to mark his return. The event, held at the Southern Hotel, was so elaborate that it included a printed menu “in Commemoration of his Evacuation of Europe and Re-Invasion of St. Louis” featuring a cartoon showing a towering, skinny Pulitzer holding a top hat and looking over a crowd that included recognizable caricatures of Grosvenor, Hutchins, Johnson, and other friends.

  With plates filled with salmon, lobster, venison (with jelly sauce), croquettes of chicken à l’anglaise, beef, turkey, duck, and quail, the group toasted Pulitzer with Ike Cook’s Imperial Champagne, bottled locally by the American Wine Company. Johnson led off the tributes and was followed by Hutchins and Grosvenor. Though he may have been without a defined place in the St. Louis establishment, this night Pulitzer was surrounded by the many successful friends he had made since he was a cub reporter on the Westliche Post six years earlier. Tellingly, neither Schurz nor Preetorius attended.

  Pulitzer resumed his on-again, off-again study of law in the building where he had rented a room before his trip. He spent his time studying Johnson’s law books and books lent to him by another lawyer friend, William Patrick, with whom he had served on the police board. The erstwhile philosopher Brockmeyer and another attorney took turns tutoring Pulitzer. “He was charmed with the excitement and horrors of the courtroom and determined to quit journalism and become a lawyer,” recalled one friend. Johnson, however, was unconvinced of the value of Pulitzer’s legal studies. “To tell the truth,” he said, “I never thought him cut out for a lawyer. He was too easily agitated, too restless, of too nervous a temperament.”

  Pulitzer had not been long at the law books before he spotted a journalistic business opportunity. Although he had been enjoying a genteel life of travel, secure with a healthy bank balance, millions of others in 1873 faced a far different fate. On September 18, the collapse of the banking firm Jay Cooke and Company, which acted as the chief financing agent for the nation’s railroads, started a severe national depression. Among the victims of the economic downturn was the Staats-Zeitung, a small German-language newspaper in St. Louis.

  The paper was put on the auction block on January 6, 1874. No newspaper had changed hands in the city since 1872, and considering the economic conditions it was unlikely that there would be many, if any, bidders for this one. But Pulitzer saw value where others didn’t. He won the auction, paying a modest sum, and announced that it was his intention to start a German evening paper. This was a smoke screen.

  The Staats-Zeitung had too few subscribers to make it viable as a newspaper. But what the corporation owned caught Pulitzer’s attention. Aside from presses and typefaces, the Staats-Zeitung was a member of the Associated Press (AP). The AP had been created as a news cooperative in 1849 by leading New York newspapers to share the high costs of news dispatches rapidly distributed by the recently invented telegraph. Because it restricted its news items to its members, a membership in AP was a valuable asset. Those that were not members were excluded from a vast source of national and international news.

  Membership in AP gave a newspaper a tremendous competitive advantage, and midwestern publishers had quickly grasped the importance of this cooperative monopoly. In St. Louis, all the major German and English newspapers were members of the Western Associated Press except the St. Louis Globe, which had been started by Pulitzer’s friends William McKee and Daniel Houser after they lost their share of ownership in the Missouri Democrat in a contentious court case. Their St. Louis Globe was hamstrung without membership in AP. But when they tried to buy a membership, the surviving owner of the Democrat vetoed their application.

  Neither McKee nor Houser had thought to bid for the Staats-Zeitung. The mistake cost them. With the German newspaper’s corporate papers in his hands, Pulitzer went to them with a proposal. If they bought the entire corporation, they would gain membership in AP. Pulitzer would then buy back the presses, type, and office equipment that they didn’t need. The following morning, the St. Louis Globe was carrying AP stories. Its masthead explained how: McKee and Houser had purchased the Staats-Zeitung corporation and its AP membership. Then they had changed the language of the German paper to English and its name to the St. Louis Globe.

  The owner of the Democrat was enraged by the legal chicanery. He called for an immediate meeting of the St. Louis board of the Western Associated Press. Gathering in the library of the Missouri Republican, the owners of the eight major newspapers listened as Houser and McKee explained the transaction and examined the documents showing their purchase of the Staats-Zeitung corporation and its assets. Hutchins then offered a resolution recognizing the legitimacy of Pulitzer’s sale. It prevailed.

  The legal maneuvering over and the last of the insults lobbed, Pulitzer disposed of the Staats-Zeitung presses, typefaces, and office furniture. These were bought by a group of investors who made a short-lived attempt to publish a German newspaper. In his forty-eight-hour tenure as a newspaper publisher Pulitzer netted between $11,000 and $20,000. For the second time in a year, he had parlayed a newspaper investment into a considerable cash return. He now had between $30,000 and $40,000 in capital. This time, instead of looking for a safe place to stash his earnings, Pulitzer was ready to gamble.

  In the spring of 1874, James B. Eads, one of the nation’s best-known engineers, was putting the final touches on his massive stone-and-steel bridge across the Mississippi. When completed, it would be the longest arch bridge in the world and would connect St. Louis to eastern train traffic for the first time—to the horror of the Wiggins family, whose ferry had brought Pulitzer across the river nine years earlier.

  Eads was now looking south to an even riskier engineering challenge. He had proposed to the federal government to deepen the key channel that led from the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico. If he succeeded, the government would pay him between $1 million and $2 million. But under the terms, if Eads failed the entire cost of the attempt would rest with him.

  Pulitzer confessed that he knew little about “jetties” but had great faith in Eads, whom he had known for five years. He took $20,000 of his capital and invested it in Eads’s scheme, knowing, as Eads warned, that the “payments by the government depended wholly upon our securing deep water, and that if the jetties failed to secure the specified depths you would lose your investment.”

  After turning the money over to Eads, Pulitzer returned to his study of law and took on the air of a gentleman of leisure. He purchased a horse and every morning rode in the company of friends; he also took rooms on the elegant street where Schurz lived. Charles Balmer, a composer of some note who had conducted the music at President Lincoln’s funeral in Springfield, Illinois, also lived on this street. He had five unmarried daughters, whom Pulitzer called the “five nightingales.” The Balmer house held a musical salon that Pulitzer, often in the company of the poet Eugene Field, would attend.

  “The front door would open and in one of them would stride, like it or not orating from some Shakespeare play,” recalled Lillian Balmer, one of the five nightingales. A feast of potato herring salad, sauerbraten, beer, and wine would be set out, and soon the room would be full of music and singing, with the father on the piano and one of the daughters on the violin. Pulitzer was intrigued by Bertha Balmer, who was the more stately and intellectual of the daughters and had a fine soprano voice. But even though they were frequently left alone, nothing came of his advances.r />
  Financial freedom also permitted Pulitzer to indulge his passion for music, “the denial of which from mere poverty and the necessity of earning my livelihood was for many years the greatest of my regrets,” Pulitzer said. For those with money, St. Louis offered concerts, operas, theater, and social galas. At a charity ball, the French artist Edward Jump captured Pulitzer dancing. Taller than all the other tailcoat-clad men, Pulitzer is dapper, with a new mustache and goatee, wearing pince-nez, and dancing with an unidentified woman only as tall as his shoulders. Pulitzer even joined a theater production at the Germania Club. He took the part of Mephistopheles, with a St. Louis belle, widely noted for her beauty, playing Faust’s love Gretchen.

  Finally feeling prepared, Pulitzer stood successfully for the bar in late June. With the coming of fall, Pulitzer’s interest, as always, turned to the oncoming elections. By 1874, Liberal Republicans had begun a slow drift back into the ranks of the Republican Party after their ignominious defeat in 1872. For Democrats, such as Johnson, there was no shame in returning to the fold of the party, because the Liberal Republican movement had helped restore its health. But for Pulitzer, Schurz, Preetorius, and Grosvenor, no one was welcoming them back.

  The treatment the bolters received from the Republican Party had been harsh. The Grant administration and party leaders did everything they could to drive the rebels out like an infestation. “Here at home,” wrote an out-of-state reporter from St. Louis, “the Liberals have received no better treatment. They have been constantly insulted, vilified and persecuted by the Republican leaders during the past four years and will never be forgiven.”

  A decision by the Missouri Grange to enter politics created an opportunity for Liberals to forestall their day of reckoning. Originally a social and educational organization for farmers, the National Grange jumped into electoral politics to fight exorbitant railroad freight rates. In July 1874, the Missouri Grange issued a call for a convention to meet in Jefferson City to create a People’s Party that would be above partisan bickering. Newspapers, particularly Republican ones, applauded the idea, believing it might reunite the party under a new umbrella and provide the strength to beat the Democrats.

  The idea was quickly embraced by party leaders, who announced that there would be no Republican convention that year. Schurz and Grosvenor jumped at the prospect of repeating their success of 1870 and restarting the reform movement under a new banner. Pulitzer followed along. After all, Schurz was his former mentor and Grosvenor his political partner, the other half of the “political firm of Bill and Joe.”

  On September 2, 1874, the new party met in Jefferson City to select its candidates. For governor, the party members settled on William Gentry, a prosperous, affable farmer who had no political experience and was entirely clueless regarding the major reform issues. The choice was an echo of the Cincinnati convention of 1872. The ebullient gathering, clamoring for reform, selected a candidate who pleased few of the ardent reformers. Schurz and Grosvenor supported the convention’s choice. Pulitzer couldn’t. He renounced the selection and abandoned the movement. In an interview in the St. Louis Globe, Pulitzer proclaimed his conversion. He repudiated his mentor and ended the political partnership on which he had risen to the top of a national movement. “The firm of Bill and Joe did not last long,” said the Globe, “but it was a grand firm while it lasted.”

  Pulitzer charged that the newspaper’s interview with him was fraudulent yet he did not dispute its contents. The next day he explained his conversion in a long article in the Missouri Republican. Pulitzer said he did not question the honesty of “Farmer Gentry” nor did he impugn his friends’ participation in the convention. But neither Gentry’s honesty nor the good intentions of his fellow reformists could “reconcile me to so palpable a result of politics without principle.”

  The concept of politics with principle might seem oxymoronic, given the nature of politics at the time, but Pulitzer was sincere. Unlike those who had risen through ward politics in the chaos of competing parties, interests, and causes, Pulitzer had entered politics with an inordinate amount of idealism. As a young newcomer he had been exhilarated by Schurz’s rebellion against corruption. Whereas his compatriots now sought the spoils of electoral victory, Pulitzer sought principle; where they saw compromise, he saw a betrayal of promise.

  For Pulitzer, the convention created not a party of reform, but rather a Trojan horse carrying Grant’s Republicans into power. “To men of thought and principle, both platform and ticket are deaf and dumb,” Pulitzer said. “Selecting candidates upon the whole very much inferior to those of the Democracy, the convention remained still further behind by failing to protest against the real causes of the prostrate condition of the country—the corruption, the lawlessness, the usurpation and profligacy of the national administration.”

  Drawn into civic life for idealistic reasons, Pulitzer believed that such compromises were like lying down with the devil. His belief in democracy was a civic religion, and reform was its holiest tenet. For Schurz and Grosvenor, the good fight had been waged and lost, as often happened in politics. Rejoining the party ranks was coming home for these two, who had spent all their political lives as Republicans. “I am a Liberal Republican, and nothing else,” said Grosvenor in 1873. “Because that is true, I am a Republican whenever the old issues are brought up, and the choice is between the Republican and the Democratic parties. ‘Do the duty that lies nearest thee,’ says Goethe.”

  But Pulitzer had none of those allegiances and was unwilling to beg forgiveness from leaders whom he perceived as having defiled democracy’s temple. He was now a Democrat.

  The Missouri Democratic Party embraced its new member. In October, Pulitzer was dispatched on a statewide canvass for the Democratic ticket, beginning in Sedalia, a new but rapidly growing town on the Missouri Pacific rail line in the western part of the state. The town’s paper, stalwartly Democratic, hailed his conversion and promoted him as a new star in the party. “Wherever Mr. Pulitzer speaks,” it reported, “the people crowd to hear him, and those who hear him become convinced of the truth he so eloquently utters.”

  In his speech, which lasted close to an hour, Pulitzer explained his conversion. “The war with bullets was over. But it left us a legacy, a war with ballots,” Pulitzer began. “The enemies of the country are no longer in the South. They are in Washington.” In this struggle, Pulitzer said, he was volunteering to fight “as the same humble private as which in the last war I stood on the side of the Union,” thereby answering the obligatory question of whose side one had favored, still a hurdle for many aspiring Democratic politicians.

  The enemy in this new conflict is “the great army of office-holders, carpet-baggers, monopolists, protectionists and all those selfish people interested naturally in alliance with the ‘powers that be,’” Pulitzer told the crowd at Sedalia. Across the nation they are easy to identify because they run under the Republican banner, but not so in Missouri, where reform has had the upper hand and the Republicans have gone into hiding, he said. “And so in this State alone do we enjoy the spectacle of seeing the Grant party turn with band and baggage, postmaster, gaugers, assessors, disfranchisers, colored brothers and all, into ‘people,’ and hear how lustily they cry for reform! Reform!”

  Like the James boys, highway robbers who wore masks, the People’s Party was the Republican Party in disguise, Pulitzer said. To prove his point, he exhaustively compared the new party’s platform with that of previous Republican Party platforms. “They say it is a party of reform, and we see as the most officious reformers, the most notorious postmasters, Federal office holders and corrupt demagogues in the state.” Pulitzer lumped both Schurz and Grosvenor, mentioning them by name, in with the forces of Grant and corruption, though he studiously avoided accusing either one directly of wrongdoing.

  As at a revival, Pulitzer washed himself of the sin of having been a Republican. “I confess that coming fresh from the army not much more than a boy, for a very short time, I
have myself belonged to the party of proscription.” But his sin, he insisted, was not as great as that of the party, because when he served in the legislature he had campaigned for elimination of the disenfranchisement provisions. Opponents claimed that this action would drive out Union men and re-enslave the Negroes or, worse, massacre them. “Well, these rebels have now voted for four years, and show me the first Union man who has been disturbed, show me one Negro who has been molested on account of his Union sentiments! The only Negro who has been molested that I know of in the whole state was a fellow in St. Louis County who ravished a poor girl. And he was only lynched. Not by rebels, however, but by honest Germans and strong Union men.”

  Not an eyebrow would have been raised at Pulitzer’s approbation of a lynching. Between 50 and 100 lynchings took place each year, and almost always the victims were blacks charged with some alleged sexual crime for which there was little or no evidence. Only a few Americans, such as Ida B. Wells, spoke out against the horror. The government’s effort to stop this domestic terrorism consisted solely of President Grant’s Civil Rights Act of 1871, which strengthened the federal government’s hand against the Ku Klux Klan. Pulitzer’s animosity to Grant, fueled by his experiences with Schurz, Grosvenor, and Brown, blinded him to the virtues of that law.

  Like many whites, Pulitzer was indifferent to the plight of black Americans. There was little in his own experience to relate to their oppression. As a Jew in Hungary, he had experienced hardly any discrimination. He had joined the Civil War late, had remained cocooned in a platoon of non-English-speaking recruits, and was not exposed to the abolitionists’ antebellum propaganda or to their triumphant rhetoric at the conclusion of the war. The worst injustice he had endured as a civilian was being the butt of anti-Semitic humor, but it had not thwarted his efforts at landing a job, finding housing, or making friends.