Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  After Sedalia, it was on to Versailles, Warrensburg, and Knob Noster. A Republican newspaper reporter was on hand to chronicle Pulitzer’s visit to the small town of Knob Noster. Casting Pulitzer as a pretentious Bourbon Democrat aghast at the provincialism of rural Missouri, the reporter spun a humorous, sarcastic tale. Like his cartoonist brethren, the reporter highlighted Pulitzer’s nose from the start, describing Pulitzer’s arrival at the train station and his discovery that the town had no hotels. “The look of surprise and indignation that overspread his nasal protuberance was fearful to contemplate,” wrote the reporter.

  The highlighting of Pulitzer’s nose—three times in the article—was more than a humorous jab to score partisan points. Like the caricatures by Pulitzer’s friend Keppler, these depictions were a minimally disguised way to let readers know that the subject was Jewish. Just as readers of Tom Sawyer knew when Jim said, “She tole me to go an’ git dis water,” that the speaker was black, newspaper readers knew that a person with a “nasal protuberance” was a Hebrew.

  The nose became a common symbol because many of the traditional markers that societies favored to distinguish Jews had fallen into disuse by the late nineteenth century. For instance, the notion that Jews could be distinguished by their “swarthy skin” had gone by the wayside when it had become widely accepted that color—with the obvious exception of “coloreds”—could be modified over time by migration and other factors. Instead, an emerging generation of social scientists obsessed with racial classification turned to the “Jew nose.” They studied the “nostrility” of the Jew and connected the characteristics of the “Jewish, or Hawknose” with their view of Jews as shrewd and capable of turning an insight into profit. They determined that the “Jew nose” became even more evident in the children of mixed marriages. Thus even a Jew who gave up his or her cultural accouterments retained a marker still visible a generation later.

  From Knob Noster, Pulitzer turned back toward St. Louis. One of the last stops of the speech-a-day statewide tour was in Boonville. The visit offered a wonderful window into the era’s partisan press. The Boonville Advertiser, the Democratic paper, referred to Pulitzer as “the eloquent German orator” and told readers he had “delivered an able and logical speech [and] was listened to with marked attention.” The Republican Boonville Weekly Eagle saw things differently: “The general impression was that he had more nose than eloquence. The fact was at once palpable, but we did not like to seize it,” said the paper, adding italics for its readers insufficiently witty to pick up on the editor’s humor.

  Pulitzer’s speeches were coherent, well organized, carefully composed, and weighty. It had been only a decade since his arrival in the United States as a teenager unable to speak more than a word or two of English. Now twenty-seven years old and a U.S. citizen, Pulitzer was using his newly acquired tongue with enough skill to earn praise from his supporters and to draw derision from his detractors. He still had an accent, but he was no longer simply a German orator.

  A few weeks after the tour, Pulitzer’s gubernatorial candidate was swept into office. Had Pulitzer stood for office as a Democrat, he might have also returned to the state legislature. As it was, the election offered him a chance to relaunch his political career. By a very narrow margin (283 votes out of 222,315), voters called for a constitutional convention. Pulitzer threw his hat into the ring and joined the campaign for the sixty-eight delegate seats. On January 26, 1875, his friends James Broadhead the lawyer and Henry Brockmeyer the philosopher were among those selected by the voters. And, to Pulitzer’s joy, the voters had picked him as well. His old paper, the Westliche Post, angry at his conversion to the Democracy, greeted his election with derision. It said Pulitzer was as ill-suited to draft a constitution as a hedgehog was to shave one’s face.

  Chapter Nine

  FOUNDING FATHER

  On the evening of February 21, 1875, Pulitzer and Joseph McCullagh, of the St. Louis Globe, caught up with A. C. Hesing, the publisher of Illinois Staats-Zeitung in a hall of the elegant Southern Hotel of St. Louis, where Pulitzer now lodged. The publisher, a Republican leader of such power in Chicago that he was called “Boss Hesing,” was the most sought-after man that night, according to McCullagh. “As he stood, sat or walked in the corridors of the Southern, last night, there was no minute when he was not either talking or listening to some party or other, anxious to look at him, stand by his side and hear him talk.”

  McCullagh wanted to interview Hesing for an article. Pulitzer had a more pressing personal need. Although they were members of opposing parties, Pulitzer wanted Hesing’s take on the changing political landscape. It had been only a few months since Pulitzer had converted to the Democratic Party, and he was still seeking confirmation that he had made the right decision. He got it from Hesing.

  “Everything is getting more and more Democratic day by day,” Hesing said.

  What will happen to those Republicans who supported Greeley and Brown in 1872? McCullagh asked.

  “Probably fuse with the true Democratic Party,” Hesing said. “I know they will in my state, and in many others. There’s no doubt but that they are thoroughly and eternally disgusted with the present Radical Administration.”

  “And Carl Schurz?”

  “Well, I tell you what I think,” said Hesing, who was not only a fellow Republican but a German like Schurz. “I don’t think so very much of Schurz either as a journalist or politician.”

  Hesing’s words were comforting. Pulitzer had been wise to throw his lot in with Democrats and had also made a timely end to his allegiance with his mentor Schurz. For their part, Democrats were thrilled to have Pulitzer. He had toiled in their successful effort to retain the governor’s mansion, and they worked to make him feel welcome.

  With his political fortunes on the rise, Pulitzer’s fiscal affairs also took a turn upward. James Eads’s scheme for dredging the Mississippi delta, in which Pulitzer had invested $20,000, was a triumph. The payoff gave Pulitzer enough money to live for a number of years. He could concentrate on politics without any concern for finding work. Pulitzer expressed his gratitude to Eads by joining dozens of other prominent St. Louisans in the parlor (No. 5) of the Southern Hotel to plan a banquet in Eads’s honor. The first to speak was Pulitzer himself. “Twenty years from now,” he said, “we will have Eads Places, Eads Avenues, and, I hope, Eads monuments.”

  Leaving the committee of citizens to do its work, Pulitzer headed east a few days later on the first of what would be half a dozen trips to New York that year. He had in mind breaking into journalism in New York. But, unlike his brother Albert, he didn’t want to work for someone else’s paper; he wanted to use his capital to acquire his own. He set his eyes on the Belletristisches Journal, a German weekly run by Rudolph Lexow, but the two men could not come to terms.

  On this trip, as well as on subsequent visits to New York in the 1870s, Pulitzer favored the Fifth Avenue Hotel between West Twenty-Third and West Twenty-Fourth streets. Completed in 1858, the six-story, marble-fronted hotel was the first to have a “vertical railroad”—or what would later be called an elevator. It became very popular after the Civil War for its luxurious rooms, each with fireplaces and private bathrooms. Deep-pile carpets with the sultry smells of anthracite and coffee in its immense public rooms, the hotel was favored for party conferences by Republicans, including Liberal Republicans when their stock was rising.

  By the 1870s, however, newer hotels eclipsed the Fifth Avenue. “The hotel, for all its sober state, was no longer fashionable,” lamented Edith Wharton in her novella New Year’s Day. “No one, in my memory, had ever known anyone who went there; it was frequented by ‘politicians’ and ‘Westerners,’ two classes of citizens whom my mother’s intonation always seemed to deprive of their vote by ranking them with illiterates and criminals.”

  At the Fifth Avenue Hotel one day in March, Pulitzer came across a newspaper from St. Louis. Eager to catch up on news from his city, he dived into the issue. Suddenly he
spotted his name, in connection with a prominent trial. Several years before, in 1872, a group of businessmen in St. Louis had invested money to rejuvenate the aging Varieties Theater. Pulitzer’s friend Hutchins had sunk a considerable sum into the project. It soon failed, but during the ensuing fiscal and legal chaos, Hutchins expanded his investment by buying out other members’ shares, at a steep discount. His plan was to force a bankruptcy sale of the theater and its fixtures and then make a claim to the proceeds as a creditor. But other creditors and investors had outmaneuvered Hutchins. As a last resort, he sued.

  Pulitzer had not been involved in any part of the business and was not accused of any wrongdoing. Yet he was swept up into the scandal because of his friendship with Hutchins. The defendants wanted to put Pulitzer on the stand because they believed he would contradict Hutchins’s claims and corroborate testimony helpful to them.

  Two of the city’s most notorious and colorful attorneys, Frank J. Bowman and Britton A. Hill, who had helped Pulitzer’s defense in the shooting case four years earlier, represented the defense. The legal duo made a most unlikely pairing. Bowman was a tiny man, said to weigh only 125 pounds. He looked even more minuscule next to the 300-pound Hill. But what he lacked in size, Bowman, nicknamed the “Machiavelli of the St. Louis Bar,” made up for in bulldog-like tenacity. He was widely feared by attorneys and businessmen because he had little patience for legal ethics and took his legal battles outside the court, on more than one occasion, by challenging his opponent to a duel.

  The legal machinations of the case were so complicated that only the most sophisticated lawyers could understand the particulars. But that didn’t matter. With so many prominent St. Louisans ensnared, the trial had become the city’s most popular soap opera in the spring of 1875.

  The press suggested that Pulitzer was absent—hiding, in fact—in order to help his friend Hutchins.

  After setting down the newspaper at his New York hotel, Pulitzer telegraphed the judge in the case. “Never heard anything of the case until just now, and stand ready to take the next train and leave for home and testify,” Pulitzer wired. “Please telegraph immediately whether there will be time enough.” No reply came, but Pulitzer decided to return anyway. He boarded a train bound for St. Louis the next night, reaching the city on March 20, 1875.

  An enterprising reporter for the Missouri Republican got word that Pulitzer was back in town and sought him out. He first asked for Pulitzer at the Southern Hotel. “No, sah, not in,” said the clerk. Next he tried the Westliche Post. A young reporter assured him not only that was Pulitzer not there but that he rarely set foot in the building. Deterred, the reporter retreated to his office. A few minutes before midnight, a messenger delivered a letter from Pulitzer. It was addressed to the “Press of St. Louis.”

  “Just returning from New York,” wrote Pulitzer, “I am both amused and amazed by the animadversions on the part of the generous and unbiased press of St. Louis to connect my purely accidental absence from the city with a pending suit of a scandalous nature.” The Missouri Republican, which was used to Pulitzer’s lack of honesty with the press, published his comments but added that they “must be taken as ‘sarkasm’” and deemed unbelievable “the calm and lofty manner in which he remarks that the opera-house suit was too infinitesimal in proportions to have been heard of by him.”

  The paper was correct. In both his telegram to the judge and his letter to the press, Pulitzer was playing fast and loose with the facts. He had been in St. Louis on March 9, and as an avid newspaper reader, he knew that Hutchins’s widely publicized trial was opening on March 8.

  When the trial convened for its final day on March 23, visitors to the courthouse might have thought they had taken a wrong turn and entered the city’s playhouse. That was certainly the image on the mind of the reporter from the Missouri Republican. “A good play of any kind is sure to draw, and Mr. Bowman has put on the stage the best play of the season,” he wrote. “The plot of the piece is intricate, the positions startling, and the players all stars. It is no wonder therefore that the play has drawn full houses for over two weeks.”

  The seats in the courtroom were all filled an hour before the curtain was to rise on the last act, and still spectators streamed in. Former mayors, legislators, businessmen, and even judges from other courts had come to watch. Pulitzer knew most of the audience. Among others, there were James Broadhead and Lewis Gottschalk, fellow delegates to the coming constitutional convention; and Colonel Alonzo Slayback, a prominent Democratic attorney with whom Pulitzer had worked in the campaign the previous year.

  A few minutes before ten o’clock, Bowman made his appearance, and at ten sharp the judge entered. Pulitzer immediately pressed to the front of the courtroom and announced his presence. He said he had learned through the papers that he had been subpoenaed and was prepared to give his testimony.

  “Not subpoenaed, Mr. Pulitzer,” replied the judge. “Subpoenas were issued for you, but returned ‘not found.’”

  “It has been intimated that I went away to avoid being summoned,” Pulitzer continued, undeterred. “Now, your honor, I am perfectly willing to tell anything I know about the matter.”

  The judge was unmoved. He told Pulitzer the time for testimony had passed and the case was closed. “You are a member of the bar, and, of course, understand that no further testimony can be introduced after the case is closed.”

  Pulitzer, however, would not desist. “May it please the court,” he said, “I have seen in the papers, flings and innuendoes, and insinuations calculated to throw discredit upon me, and I would like the opportunity to make a statement in my own defense.”

  “You are not upon trial,” interrupted the judge.

  “All I ask is simple justice, and this is a court of justice.”

  “Not for everybody,” quipped the judge, causing laughter and Pulitzer’s retreat. Bowman then rose and began his two-hour summation. That afternoon the jury rewarded the loquacious attorney and returned a verdict in favor of the defense. Bowman had triumphed and Hutchins was out of his money.

  Hard feelings put aside, many of the same men who had battled in the courtroom gathered the following night for the planned celebration of James Eads at the Southern Hotel. Dining on Solid Rock Oysters, Mock Turtle Soup, Boiled California Salmon with Anchovy Sauce, mutton, beef, turkey, chicken, venison, and sweetbreads, and washing them down with Château Margaux and Krug champagne, the men praised the past and future achievements of their city’s famous bridge builder, and Pulitzer celebrated his financial windfall from his association with Eads.

  In early May 1875, Pulitzer was riding the train to Jefferson City. As he had done five years earlier, he was traveling to the capital as an elected official. This time he was on his way to join sixty-seven other delegates to the constitutional convention in the chambers of the Missouri house of representatives at the capitol. The lobby was filled with spectators eager to see the men who had the task of coming up with a new constitution. The delegates were a fairly homogeneous group; all male, as women did not yet have the right to vote; wealthy, since only a few could afford to spend several weeks away from work; and mostly lawyers. Politically, they represented a backlash against Radical rule. Democrats had complete control of the proceedings. In fact, the convention was almost a Confederate reunion, with more than half of the delegates having served in the Confederacy or having been sympathetic to the cause.

  At age twenty-eight, Pulitzer was by far the youngest of the delegates—in fact, about twenty years younger than the average. He certainly stood out. He was the only one to have his photograph taken with a hat on, cocked ever so slightly to his right. It was a slouch hat, a style introduced to the United States by the revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth when he fled Hungary. Along with this hat Pulitzer wore a pince-nez, a mustache, a narrow pointed goatee trimmed in a style known as a Napoleon III, and a royale (a tuft of hair under the lower lip)—if he was seeking to be noticed, he succeeded.

  Pulitzer ha
d done his research, and he exuded confidence. His tenure as a reporter and a lawmaker had provided him with considerable parliamentary skills, which he was not reluctant to wield. But his sharp tongue, which had aroused Augustine’s anger in 1870, was also soon heard. This time he took aim at Lewis Gottschalk, a fellow delegate from St. Louis. As the convention got under way, Gottschalk asked that the secretary of state be directed to report to the convention on rumors appearing in the press about supplementary election returns, which, if counted, would reverse the election results calling for the convention. “I believe,” Pulitzer said, “it will be self-evident that the resolution is an insult to the intelligence of this Convention, which is offered by my very learned and honored colleague; and it is certainly an insult to his own intelligence.”

  The war of words rapidly escalated. Gottschalk wanted the new constitution to include an acknowledgment that the state of Missouri and its people were part of the American nation. By themselves the words were innocuous, but coming a decade after the end of the Civil War, they were an attack on the delegates’ loyalty to the Union, and they struck a nerve with Pulitzer.

  “Well, Mr. Chairman, I stand here as an American representative, and as an American,” said Pulitzer as he took the floor. “You might as well ask a child to state in writing that he or she is the off-spring of the parent,” he continued. “I ask further, Mr. Chairman, I ask the Convention upon what ground, upon what logic other than that of fear, than that of catering to an extravagant and extreme partisan spirit which for a selfish and cowardly purpose…”