Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  “Mr. Chairman,” interrupted Gottschalk. “I call the gentleman to order.”

  “I expected it,” said Pulitzer, to the laughter of the delegates.

  “I undertake to say that this language is unparliamentary,” said Gottschalk, at which point the chairman joined in. “Mr. Pulitzer will come to order,” he said.

  “Well, the truth is never unparliamentary,” rejoined Pulitzer, again eliciting a wave of laughter.

  “The Gentleman will confine himself to the proposition before the Committee,” ordered the chairman, trying to bring an end to the dispute, which was threatening to disrupt the work of the delegates. Pulitzer prevailed and the amendment died. Despite the impression of acrimony between Gottschalk and his impertinent young sparring partner, the two men remained good friends.

  As the summer heat settled down on Jefferson City, the delegates worked day in and day out on crafting a new, acceptable constitution. They began their day at eight in the morning and sat until six-thirty in the evening. After a break for dinner, they met in committees, often until ten or eleven at night. “Really it is the hardest working body I ever saw,” one of Pulitzer’s friends wrote home.

  Pulitzer’s style as a delegate was unchanged from when he had been a legislator. He was uninterested in the structure and form of the proposed state government. Instead he stuck to his far more parochial aim of freeing St. Louis, the city, from county rule and from state interference. The rural delegates resented St. Louis’s insistence on unique consideration in the constitution. But Pulitzer and his old friend Brockmeyer argued that the city deserved preferential treatment because it held a quarter of the state’s population and provided half of the state’s revenue. A special committee was created to consider St. Louis’s demands.

  Behind closed doors, the committee struggled to produce a consensus that could win the delegates’ support. Pulitzer was excluded from its work. Instead, he resorted to being a gadfly on the floor, never letting the issue rest. For instance, when other delegates worried about setting an unusual and difficult precedent by caving in to the city’s demands, Pulitzer applied his rhetorical weapon of choice—sarcasm. Precedent, he said, is “the feeble expression of a feeble mind, lacking the inherent ability to express original views that is compelled to seek refuge in a still feebler vestige of ancient, decayed precedents.”

  In the end the committee produced a compromise that would allow St. Louis to separate from county jurisdiction, permanently delineate its city limits, and create its own autonomous governing institutions. The following year, the “great divorce” was mediated by the city and county governments. The city, as Pulitzer and other reformers had hoped, gained independence. St. Louis became the first American city to enact a home rule charter, and the achievement was widely hailed as the nation began to look for innovative ways to govern its burgeoning metropolises. But Pulitzer and other advocates did not foresee that their well-intentioned remedy would eventually cripple St. Louis. Barred from annexing land and facing severe constitutional restrictions on raising taxes, the city would, over time, become impoverished, deserted by its wealthier citizens, and transformed into a destitute urban core surrounded by a wealthy county.

  As the convention neared its end, a short-lived debate arose on freedom of the press. A delegate wanted to expand the legal safeguards for newspapers against libel suits. He modeled his amendment on an existing clause in Pennsylvania’s recently adopted constitution. Under its provisions, both public and private individuals would have to convince a jury that the offending article had been maliciously or negligently published.

  Pulitzer was only one of three delegates to speak about the proposal. Years before he would become a publisher besieged with libel suits, he delivered his earliest public view on freedom of the press. Pulitzer said that he, like the author of the amendment, had worked in newspapers. “I, sir, stand with a guilty conscience ready to admit that the law under which I contributed some little activity perhaps in that branch of the profession should in my opinion be rather strengthened than weakened. I am sorry to say it, ready to confess that perhaps I have been myself guilty of slandering and libeling persons, not maliciously, certainly not.”

  Under the proposed plan, he said, it would be impossible to convict any proprietor of a newspaper, because proprietors so rarely have anything to do with the content of newspapers. Rather, a newspaper is assembled by editors and reporters. “In other words those who own newspapers scarcely ever make them.” For evidence he pointed to the newspapers of St. Louis. “The leading papers in that city today are run and conducted by persons who do not own them and…the persons who do own them are scarcely fit to write the smallest and most unimportant part of the paper.”

  The law, Pulitzer claimed, needed no alteration, and newspapers required no additional constitutional protections. “The power of the press, Mr. President, is sufficiently large,” Pulitzer said. “They have prospered and grown powerful under the very laws which the gentleman from Boone now charges with being dangerous and working great injustice.”

  Then, in a singular moment, Pulitzer turned to confession. He told his fellow delegates that he had been part of three or four libel suits while at the Westliche Post. “I do not know of a single instance where injustice was done to the press and I could mention several instances to the contrary. Perhaps, if I have at this moment impressed any of my friends who have no occasion to become familiar with the practical workings of the newspaper fraternity, I shall consider it in the nature of an atonement for many acts heretofore committed for which I am sorry.” Years later, when his enemies sought to rein in Pulitzer’s power as a newspaper publisher, no one thought to consult the convention transcript.

  In July the convention ended, its work complete. Pulitzer returned to a St. Louis that seemed increasingly empty. He was unwelcome at the Westliche Post and in the homes of Schurz and Preetorius. Equally discouraging, many of his best friends were moving east to Washington and New York. Pulitzer was once again at a crossroads. Professionally, it was a stretch for him to consider himself a lawyer, as he had no established practice. Nor could he call himself a journalist, as he had no permanent affiliation to any newspaper. His small political revival as a member of the constitutional convention was at an end and there were no other such opportunities on the horizon. Financially, he had a comfortable place in his adopted country, but he remained socially adrift and professionally rudderless.

  In the fall of 1875, Pulitzer retreated to a quiet life in St. Louis. He handled a few minor legal chores and took on some occasional newspaper work for Hutchins at the St. Louis Times. After years that had promised success in journalism and politics, Pulitzer entered a barren stretch, compounding his aimlessness. He was twenty-eight years old. He had no definite profession, and not even a home other than a room at the Southern Hotel.

  A sense of failure hung over him. Even his characteristic combativeness was subdued. He declined, for instance, to enter a squabble involving Schurz, instead writing to his friend Hermann Raster, editor of the Illinois Staats-Zeitung in Chicago, “I naturally would prefer not to be pulled into the controversy, since I do not have a newspaper at my disposal.”

  The only good news on the horizon was that Pulitzer and his Liberal Republican friends had been the cause of the newest scandal facing the Grant administration. It was sweet revenge. The public was learning that during the Missouri Republican insurgency, Grant had dispatched his supervisor general of internal revenue to St. Louis to fight the rebellion. To fund his counterinsurgency efforts, the supervisor and others recruited distillers, storekeepers, and revenue agents and others into a conspiracy to sell more whiskey than was reported, thereby defrauding the government of thousands of dollars of taxes. The money of the “Whiskey Ring” then was redirected to newspapers that favored their cause and also served to create financial incentives for those newspapers that still remained on the fence.

  In May, when Pulitzer had been in Jefferson City working on the new con
stitution, federal agents apprehended the swindlers. The five ringleaders included William McKee, formerly of the Democrat but now the proprietor of the St. Louis Globe. Suddenly, it became clear to Pulitzer and others why McKee had fired Grosvenor during the 1872 election and returned to the ranks of Grant’s supporters.

  In December a grand jury in St. Louis indicted General Orville E. Babcock, Grant’s private secretary, on a charge of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. Treasury. Babcock’s trial was set for February 7, 1876, and wags in the local press promised that the event would be as important as the trial of Aaron Burr or the impeachment of President Johnson. Reporters came from all parts of the nation. Among them was Albert Pulitzer.

  No longer a teenage waif camping in Joseph’s room at the boardinghouse, Albert returned to St. Louis for the trial as a tall, slender, dapper, twenty-five-year-old correspondent for the New York Herald. His softly spoken English betrayed only the slightest accent. His ascendency to the New York Herald had completed Albert’s professional metamorphosis and also brought a dramatic change in his personal life.

  During his first year at the paper he was sent to the Grand Central Hotel, then the largest hotel in the country, to follow up on a story of an Englishwoman who, even in the company of a chaperone, had been defrauded of all her money upon arriving in New York. Albert located the victim and discovered that she was young, attractive, and unattached. His interview for the paper turned into a courtship and on June 15, 1873, Fanny Barnard and Albert Pulitzer were married.

  At the Herald, Albert won a reputation for his interviews. “Cool, genial, winning, indefatigable, incapable of being rebuffed, he was the champion interviewer of his paper,” said one noted British journalist and politician. “No one could hold a candle to him.” He was certainly persistent in pursuit of his quarries. Once he obtained an interview with the embattled Mayor Oakey Hall, caught up in the Tweed scandal, by shouting questions through the keyhole of a bathroom where the mayor was hiding.

  Joseph joined Albert at Babcock’s trial. Hutchins had assigned Joseph to cover the event for his St. Louis Times, a minor paper in comparison with Albert’s. A small journalistic triumph, though, helped Joseph overcome the discomfort of being overshadowed by his younger brother. About a week before the trial got under way, the attorney general sent a letter to prosecutors prohibiting any plea bargaining. The letter ostensibly reflected the “no deal” policy that the president had proclaimed in an effort to seem supportive of a vigorous criminal investigation. However, the real effect of the letter, as any lawyer knew, would be to scare off witnesses and curtail a prosecutor’s best means of persuading guilty parties to testify against higher-ups.

  When he received his letter, U.S. District Attorney David P. Dyer in St. Louis immediately understood what its publication could do to his case. He sealed it up in another envelope and put it away. “I did not think it prudent at the time to publish the letter or let any one have it; there was no man in my office, not even my assistants, that saw it,” Dyer said.

  A few days later, Joseph came to the U.S. attorney’s office and handed Dyer a clipping from the Illinois Staats-Zeitung. Laughing, Pulitzer said, “I wish you would read this slip.” Dyer took the sheet from Pulitzer, gazed at it for a moment, and replied that, as he could not read German, the only word he recognized was the name of the attorney general.

  “Now,” Pulitzer said, “I want to read you the translation I have made of that letter and I want to know whether you have such a letter in your possession.” Pulitzer then read his English translation. Dyer confirmed that, indeed, he had a letter that sounded very much like the one Pulitzer had just read.

  “Won’t you permit me to examine your letter and compare it with my translation, to see whether the translation is correct?” asked Pulitzer.

  “No,” Dyer said, “you cannot see any official letter in my office.”

  “I will publish the letter anyhow tomorrow morning, whether you give it to me or not, and if not correct, you will have to take it to be correct.”

  “You can publish what you please from other papers, but you cannot get my letters.”

  Pulitzer returned to the St. Louis Times office. The next morning the paper published the letter. A furious Dyer, in the company of James Broadhead, who after serving in the convention with Pulitzer was now working as an assistant U.S. attorney, arrived at the office. They went immediately to see Hutchins and Pulitzer. Dyer told Hutchins he had made a mistake in publishing the letter if he really wanted to help convict the ring’s members. Its publication was crippling the prosecution. His remarks were greeted by laughter by Hutchins and Pulitzer, but as a small concession, the Times ran an item the next day stating that Dyer was not the source of the leaked letter.

  In April, Pulitzer’s restlessness prevailed. Even with the 1876 nominating season approaching, Pulitzer left for New York and took a ship bound for Europe. He went first to Paris, armed with a letter of introduction from former senator John Henderson of Missouri to Elihu Washburne, the American minister to France. Henderson detailed the political service of “my young friend” and asked that he be extended official courtesies. Washburne complied and even offered to supply Pulitzer with theater or opera tickets. Pulitzer, however, cut short his stay in Paris without availing himself of Washburne’s cultural amenities.

  In Germany, Pulitzer took in a political meeting. Unlike the boisterous affairs he had become used to in the United States, the German gathering was orderly and businesslike. Its conclusion was also a shock for an American. “Suddenly a hitherto silent and quiet man arose upon the platform and walked up to the chairman,” Pulitzer said. The chairman then interrupted the speaker and the unknown man replaced him at the podium. He revealed that he was an officer of the law and declared that the meeting was over because the speaker had violated the law by criticizing the cabinet. “The chairman muttered some words of protest,” Pulitzer said, there “were some indignant expressions in the audience, but the interrupted speaker spoke no more, and in a very few moments the meeting was actually dissolved.”

  As much as Europe captivated Pulitzer, the calendar inexorably drew him back to the United States. It was an election year—a presidential one. Ever since witnessing Lincoln’s reelection while in the Union army, Pulitzer regarded elections as the high holy days of democracy. They couldn’t be missed.

  Chapter Ten

  FRAUD AND HIS FRAUDULENCY

  The presidential campaign was under way by the time Pulitzer boarded the Cunard steamship Bothnia in Liverpool on July 15, 1876. Disembarking in New York eleven days later, he repaired to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where, in possession of New York newspapers, he caught up on the political news, having survived for three months on the incomplete and dated dispatches that reached Europe.

  By his absence, Pulitzer had passed up a chance to attend the Democratic national convention, which had concluded the previous month in St. Louis. His friends and political partners hadn’t missed it. Hutchins and Slayback were delegates from Missouri, and Watterson was a delegate from Kentucky. In fact, Watterson had brought the hall to its feet when he urged delegates—descendants of Jackson, as he called them—“to wrest the government…from the clutches of rings and robbers.” The Democrats were convinced they had, at long last, picked a winner in selecting as their candidate Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York, who prosecuted Boss Tweed. If corruption was the issue, no better white knight could be found.

  Pulitzer was elated with the choice and immediately put himself at the service of the party. While his friends were asked to work solely in their own political backyards, Pulitzer was invited to engage the enemy on the important battleground of Ohio and Indiana. Because they held their state government elections in October, the two states were considered bellwethers, exercising extraordinary influence on November’s federal elections. Pulitzer’s status as a former Republican, widely known among German voters, made him useful in reaching voters in the two states, each of which had a large German pop
ulation.

  In early September, Pulitzer made a jubilant return to Indianapolis, where he had campaigned in vain for Greeley four years earlier. This time he was convinced that he was traveling on behalf of a winning ticket. The Republican convention’s nomination of Rutherford Hayes, whose main attribute was his inoffensiveness, only increased Democratic optimism. “The hosts of reform are marching to victory all over the state, and the days of Grantism and Mortonism are doomed,” prophesied the Democratic Indianapolis Sentinel. The euphoric sense of an approaching Democratic triumph infected thousands of party stalwarts. On Saturday night, September 2, they marched to the Grand Hotel to escort Pulitzer to the hall where he was to give his address. The main thoroughfare teemed with Democrats bearing torches. “As far as the eye could reach out Delaware Street, the lights were seen until they blended in one almost on the horizon,” reported the Sentinel.

  When Pulitzer and his entourage reached the hall, only a few seats remained empty. As the rambunctious audience quieted, Pulitzer began by describing the suppression of the political meeting in Germany he had witnessed a few months earlier. “Such is liberty in Europe!” exclaimed Pulitzer, “I, too, though but a stranger there, felt the outrage; but greater than my indignation at that moment was my pride in knowing that I, too, was an American, a free man in whose country no peaceable meeting could be dispersed at the bidding of the police.”

  However, he continued, his pride in his American freedoms had been damaged by the actions of Republicans. In the decade since he had become an American, he had seen a president impeached in an act of “reckless partisanship” the South given up to “public plunder like so much conquered booty” a reconstruction act turn masters into “political slaves” and slaves into “masters” the election of a president who had never “read the Constitution,” with a “servile Senate at his feet” a “self-confessed thief” in the cabinet; and political appointees consorting with “notorious thieves.” At the heart of his complaint was that the Republican Party—the party founded on a belief in equality—“gave up principles for power,” said Pulitzer. “I saw laws and Constitution trampled upon, and crime and corruption flourish.”