Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  In St. Louis Pulitzer took up residence again at the Southern Hotel. This time he took two rooms on the fifth floor. When the six-story Ohio sandstone hotel opened in 1865, to great fanfare, the local press had invoked the image of the Egyptian pyramids. The Southern Hotel was still among the nation’s largest, occupying most of a block and capable of accommodating 700 guests.

  On April 10, Pulitzer celebrated his thirtieth birthday at a friend’s house with Hutchins and others. At midnight, he returned to the Southern, walked through the office past the night clerk, and rode the elevator to his rooms, where he promptly went to bed. A little over an hour later, muffled noises awoke him. He thought he heard the word “fire” but concluded that the voices were coming from the street and that the fire was elsewhere, so he turned over to go back to sleep again. “Suddenly I heard women’s shrieks, seemingly in the hotel,” Pulitzer said. He jumped from his bed, lit the gas lamp, and looked at his watch. It was one-thirty in the morning.

  In his nightshirt, Pulitzer dashed into the hall. It was filled with smoke. He took the stairs down to the fourth floor, where he found two frantic women. “I tried to pacify them and took them to the parlor floor,” he said. “The ladies were en negligée and I took them to a room of a lady on that floor who gave them apparel.” Then, foolishly, Pulitzer ran back upstairs to his own room. There he donned his pants, which contained his wallet, and put on a vest. When he exited his room, the smoke had become so dense that the gaslights no longer illuminated the halls. Yet Pulitzer turned back one more time, to retrieve his eyeglasses, thinking they might help. As he at last descended the stairs, he saw that almost every floor was engulfed in flames.

  The fire engines arrived at the hotel a few minutes after Pulitzer reached the street. Red flames burst from first- and second-story windows, and smoke poured from every opening in the building. Guests continued to spill onto the street, but it became obvious to rescuers that many remained inside. “First one window and another in rapid succession were violently raised, heads of men, women, and children were seen everywhere, and a wild cry for help filled the air,” said a reporter who arrived on the scene.

  As the firemen raised ladders into position, they urged the trapped guests to remain calm. But it soon became apparent that the ladders could not reach above the fourth floor. Panicked guests began climbing down on knotted sheets. One man slid from the sixth floor on tied sheets, only to realize when he got to the end of his makeshift rope that he was still 120 feet above the ground. With flames leaping about him, he jumped. “He was immediately picked up and carried into an adjoining saloon, and lived long enough to say that his name was J. F. Stevens, when he expired,” the reporter said. “Two other faces soon appeared at the window from which he had jumped, but the flame and smoke closed them from view almost instantly, and left no doubt of the awful fate that befell them.”

  By dawn nothing remained of the hotel. Firemen hosed down the embers as the search for bodies began. In all, twenty-one people died in the fire. On April 16, a coroner’s inquest was begun. A jury was sworn in over the body of Kate Nolan, one of the servants who had perished in the fire; her body had been kept in the morgue for this purpose.

  Pulitzer was the first witness called. He recounted how he had been awakened, had helped the two women, had returned to his room, and then had fled the hotel. One of the jurors asked Pulitzer if he was certain about the time when he awoke. Pulitzer said he didn’t know how close his watch was to “telegraph” time, but he felt confident it was between half-past one and quarter to two when he made his escape. “I will say that no alarm was given in the house, so far as I heard,” he told the jurors. “I think the shrieks of the women were very fortunate, for had it not been for that, fully one hundred persons would have perished. I know I would have been one, for I am a very sound sleeper.”

  On April 27, the jury concluded that the fire had originated in the basement of the hotel, possibly in the wine cellar, and that it had spread quickly to the upper floors through the elevator shaft. The building was deemed to have been safe, but the hotel management was faulted for doing an inadequate job of fire prevention.

  When the coroner’s jury issued its report, Pulitzer was back in New York, again staying at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. He and Albert had received word that their mother was ill and might be dying. They decided that only Albert would go to Hungary. Joseph had no work obligations, but his phobia of funerals overwhelmed his filial devotion. In order to make the trip, Albert persuaded the New York Herald to send him to cover the war between Russia and Turkey, which had just erupted. Before leaving he compiled in a small notebook a list of items to buy in Europe. These included lingerie, gloves, a fan, and a brooch for his wife and alpaca for his son’s nurse. For Joseph, he promised to buy a frock coat and an overcoat. On April 26, Albert left New York on the Hammonia, bound for Hamburg.

  A month later, Albert reached Detta, the Hungarian city where their mother had moved after remarrying. The day he arrived, Elize died. Upon receiving the news, Albert’s wife wrote a consoling letter from their house on Washington Square, where she had remained with their newborn son, Walter. “Oh, why can I not fly to you, my poor, bereaved darling, and mingle my heart-felt tears with thine,” Fannie Pulitzer wrote. “I wish you had gone sooner. I suppose the thread of life was so fragile within her that whenever you had gone the shock would have killed her.”

  Their mother’s death left Joseph and Albert the only living members of the large, original family. For Joseph, Elize had been the single most important element of his youth in Hungary. When he reached the United States in 1864, he had sent her the gold coin handkerchief ring, bought with his first earnings. In St. Louis, he had shown his miniature portrait of her to all his new friends. At least twice in the intervening years, he had made the arduous trip home to Hungary to see her. In the best of circumstances, the loss of one’s only surviving parent inspires self-reflection. For Joseph—now thirty, and with no specific profession or even a home—such introspection was demoralizing.

  Whenever Pulitzer was in turmoil, he would become restless and pick up and go elsewhere, as if he were searching for a geographical solution to his woes. Now he left New York and traveled to Saratoga and then to Springfield, Massachusetts. There he visited Samuel Bowles, another newspaper editor with whom he had been friends during the Liberal Republican crusade. Although Bowles edited the modest Springfield Republican, started by his father in 1824, he was one of a few editors outside New York who were nationally famous, such as Halstead in Cincinnati and Watterson in Louisville.

  Pulitzer found the aging editor living in a beautiful ivy-covered cottage surrounded by acres of flowers, shrubbery, fountains, and walks amid maple, oak, and magnolia trees. They spent several hours together, talking politics. To his dismay, Pulitzer discovered that Bowles supported the Hayes administration. “He may be wearied by his long fight against both parties; he may be softened by growing years and the growing sweetness of home,” said Pulitzer. Because of Bowles’s stature, Pulitzer’s visit had the flavor of a pilgrimage. He shared the experience in a reverential account published in the New York Sun.

  The 800-word article, filled with praise for Bowles’s journalism, revealed Pulitzer’s own literary growth. It was not that Pulitzer had become a polished writer. In fact, many of his allusions seemed forced, his sentences wordy even for an era of breath-challenging sentences, and his choice of vocabulary highly self-conscious. But the piece was the work of a well-read thirty-year-old immigrant comfortable in his new tongue.

  He began by introducing his readers to Bowles’s hometown. “Trees remarkable for size and beauty; streets picturesquely winding over promontories; every house a garden; the silver stream of the shallow Connecticut obsequiously washing the feet of precipitous bluffs; steeped in the softest green; streets well made and rarely tidy; school houses and churches numerous and of good architecture; Swiss cottages for dwellings; wherever you look, green and air and room—this is the town of Springf
ield, Mass.”

  With a flourish, typical of the slow-paced style of the set pieces of the era, Pulitzer laboriously—as if confessing—revealed that the purpose of his journey was to see Samuel Bowles. “I am glad it is out,” he wrote. “With all regard for delicacy, one might as well see ‘Hamlet’ without the part of the Prince of Denmark as write about Springfield with Sam Bowles omitted.”

  In August, Charles Johnson came east to spend time with Pulitzer, but when he reached the Fifth Avenue Hotel he found that Pulitzer had gone to take the baths at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Johnson wrote and persuaded Pulitzer to meet him at Long Branch, New Jersey, a coastal resort that had become glamorous when President Grant chose to summer there. Other friends, including Alfred Townsend, joined them. They spent their days bathing in the ocean and riding horseback. “In the evening,” Johnson said, “we discussed almost everything.”

  Pulitzer sprained his ankle and was confined to his room. Albert, who had returned from Europe, came down to stay with him. A few days later, the group left Long Branch for New York, where they took in shows, including one in an old railroad depot that had been converted by P. T. Barnum into a hippodrome named Gilmore’s Garden in honor of Patrick S. Gilmore, a bandmaster whose best-known composition was “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” (Two years later, the hippodrome was renamed Madison Square Garden.) Pulitzer and Hutchins tried to talk Johnson into accompanying them to the White Mountains in New Hampshire, but he declined.

  In early October, Pulitzer returned to St. Louis. He saw a performance of Hamlet by Edwin Booth, the nineteenth century’s most famous American Shakespearean actor (and brother of the assassin). Just as Hamlet is concerned with his famous question of being, Pulitzer still had no answer for the one that confronted him. At the end of 1877 he was no closer than four years prior, when he had left the Westliche Post, to finding a place for himself in his adopted land. Politics had let him down. After experiencing New York, St. Louis confined him. And, aside from a brief attraction to a neighbor’s daughter and to one of Schurz’s daughters, Pulitzer had thus far remained free of love. By the end of the month, he was on the move again, this time back to Washington.

  Chapter Eleven

  NANNIE AND KATE

  As 1877 ended and 1878 began, Pulitzer was caught between two places, two professions, and two women. The confluence of all three problems pressed the thirty-year-old Pulitzer for decisions. “I am almost tired of this life—aimless, homeless, loveless,” he wrote.

  St. Louis grew less attractive and Pulitzer spent more time in Washington, which he had come to know while covering the 1876 election debacle for the New York Sun. His friend Hutchins had also moved to the capital and was starting a new Democratic newspaper. On December 6, 1877, the first issue of Hutchins’s Washington Post hit the streets. Four pages long, it looked a lot like the St. Louis Times. Although it had no graphics, the Post was a lively contrast to the dull papers of Washington. “The newspapers of that city were dreary mockeries of the profession,” said the poet and journalist Eugene Field, who used to accompany Pulitzer to musical soirees with the “five nightingales” in St. Louis and had come to work at the Post.

  Field was not the only one on the Post staff that Pulitzer knew. John Cockerill, whom Pulitzer befriended at the convention of 1872, had signed on as Hutchins’s managing editor. Under Cockerill’s rule, the Post packed in more news per square inch than any other paper in town, wrapping it around punchy editorials. The paper was an immediate hit. “It was the marvel of Washington journalism,” Field said. “The newspaper world of the continent, who had no idea any good could come out of Nazareth, gaped in astonishment when this bright, saucy, vigorous bantling pranced blithely into the ring.”

  Journalism, however, was not on Pulitzer’s mind. He had come to Washington not as a reporter but as a lawyer for an election dispute. In Missouri’s Third Congressional district, the Democrat, Richard Graham Frost, had been designated the winner, with one vote more than his Republican opponent, Lyne Metcalfe. But Metcalfe persuaded the courts to award him the seat, successfully claiming that Frost’s supporters had changed a “7” to a “9” in one of the poll books to supply the winning margin. Now Frost’s only remaining recourse was an appeal to the House Committee on Elections. To pursue this, Frost hired Pulitzer, whom he knew as a colleague in the St. Louis bar.

  The Committee on Elections began its work in late January. Pulitzer asked the members to order that ballot boxes, roll books, election returns, and other documents be brought from Missouri to Washington. They turned him down and told him that the place for any recounting should be Missouri. The decision was a signal that he faced an uphill fight. He would have only one chance to make his client’s case. The committee set February 20 as the last day it would hear any remaining arguments for why Metcalfe should not be seated.

  While awaiting judgment day, Pulitzer turned to the Washington Post. Already, the paper had given front-page coverage to the dispute and was pushing Pulitzer’s argument that the race could not be decided without a recount conducted in Washington. Now Pulitzer gained access to the paper’s editorial page. The resulting article was vintage Pulitzer.

  If the Committee on Elections should deny Frost the seat in the House, the Post editorial began, it would simultaneously decide that he was “a perjurer in several divers and sundry particulars.” A decision favoring Metcalfe would mean that Frost had lied under oath. “We do not know how the Committee will act, but we do know that there is not even a political antagonist in the Third Missouri District who would dare to question R. Graham Frost’s statement under oath. In fact, those who know him prefer the simple word of R. Graham Frost to the oath of many, if not most, men. Nor do we, in the least, doubt that Mr. Frost was swindled out of his seat by a series of extraordinary frauds.”

  The editorial had little influence on the members of Congress. On the appointed day the committee listened patiently as Pulitzer read from several affidavits and begged for additional time to build his case. The following day, it unanimously turned down Pulitzer’s motions for more time. The seat was Metcalfe’s.

  Despite this loss, Washington suited Pulitzer. In the time he had spent there since the fall of 1876, he had developed a busy social life. In the first month of 1878, he was among the guests at a glamorous reception given by the Spanish legation at Wormley’s Hotel in honor of their king’s wedding. A week later, he was dancing to Jacques Offenbach’s music at the Willard Hotel. Pulitzer also helped support the Penny Lunch Room, which opened in January to feed the many citizens who had become destitute as a result of four years of steady wage cuts caused by the economic panic of 1873. He joined a committee to raise money for this lunchroom, participated in a fund-raising ball at the Riggs House, and even ate lunch at the facility to draw attention to its work.

  Pulitzer did not lack for friends in the capital. Anthony Ittner, who had been his roommate in Jefferson City, had been elected to the House. Hutchins hosted a popular salon in his parlors that attracted a colorful cast of characters, such as Senator Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, who drafted the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession and served in the Confederate diplomatic corps in Russia and other places; Representative James Proctor Knott, whose humor was known to laugh a bill off the floor; and Representative Samuel Sullivan “Sunset” Cox, a former foot soldier with Pulitzer in the 1872 Liberal Republican campaign. The men ate and drank late into the night while the colorful Freemason Albert Pike held the floor with folktales or black singers from a nearby church performed.

  On January 12, 1878, Pulitzer attended the wedding of Udo Brachvogel (who had been his housemate in St. Louis) at the First Trinity Lutheran Church, known as the German church of Washington. In his company was a twenty-five-year-old woman, tall and slim with large dark eyes set in a pale face framed with coils of dark brown hair. “One of the belles of Washington,” proclaimed the Post. “One of the reigning belles of that city,” if an out-of-town newspaper was to be believed.
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  Her name was Kate Davis, and she was the youngest daughter of a family with both a Confederate and a social pedigree. Representative John B. Clark of Missouri, an old Confederate himself, had introduced her and Pulitzer to each other. Davis’s father, William Worthington Davis, came from a Virginian family distantly related to Jefferson Davis, the president of the late Confederacy. Her mother, Catherine Worthington Davis, was a distant cousin of her father’s from Baltimore, Maryland. Financially, however, the family was on a decline. William and his three brothers worked a small family farm in Tenleytown, within the city limits, with three servants who were former slaves. But to make ends meet, two of the brothers also held jobs outside the farm, and William served as a justice of the peace.

  Though attractive, Davis was passing the age by which most women of her time were married. Her older sister, Clara, was about to turn thirty and no closer to the altar. For his part, Pulitzer’s charm, mesmerizing blue eyes, and simmering intensity made up for his awkward, gangly appearance. His intelligence, wit, evident ambition, and appearance of financial means worked to his advantage.

  But to Davis’s parents, a match between their daughter and Pulitzer was a mixed blessing. Pulitzer had no dependable career. He did have means, having carefully husbanded the money he made from his newspaper deals, his investment with Eads, and land he owned along the south side of the newly created Forest Park in St. Louis. On the other hand, his bloodline was not likely to impress the southern landed gentry. His remaining accent betrayed his eastern European origins, and for churchgoing Episcopalians like the Davises, the issue of his religion was a concern.