Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  After a week’s delay, which gave Pulitzer a chance to continue his frantic work behind the scenes, a crowd assembled at the courthouse believing the sale would finally take place. Several properties were auctioned, but to the audience’s disappointment Chambers, the star of the event, never showed up. Instead, he sent his attorney to announce that the sale had been postponed indefinitely. He knew what the crowd was about to learn. He had been beaten.

  Rather than a funeral for the Post-Dispatch, the moment was a triumph for Pulitzer. He mounted the steps in front of the crowd. With the flourish of a stump speaker, Pulitzer declared that Chambers’s allegations were false and that his access to AP dispatches was secure. “Look at this,” he cried out and held aloft, for all to see, a new certificate of membership in the AP.

  His exuberance stemmed from more than this one victory. For the first time since he had bought the Dispatch, Pulitzer felt free. Circulation was increasing at such a rate that it would almost triple by the end of the year. His books showed that if the trend held steady the paper would earn $88,000 that year. “It owes nothing beyond a few accounts which will be adjusted on presentation,” wrote Pulitzer, keeping his loan from the wealthy Democrat a secret. “It has no unhappy stockholders, no unpleasant litigation, and its circulation and its patronage show each month a gratifying increase. And that’s how the Post-Dispatch plunges into the New Year.” With Cockerill in place as his trusted lieutenant and the staffing changes complete, Pulitzer no longer needed to give the enterprise his undivided attention.

  At home, his growing income allowed him to provide Kate with three servants to run the house and care for the baby. Kate also had an easier entry into St. Louis society. She and Joseph attended the exclusive Home Circle ball at the Lindell Hotel. Described as “a very brilliant brunette,” she wore a costume of pale blue and delicate pink satin, with ribbon bows. “The lady’s ornaments,” noted the press, “were diamonds.”

  Unencumbered by financial and managerial demands, Pulitzer turned his attention to his most important passion. Since his return to St. Louis, the silence regarding his political plans had been like waiting for the other shoe to drop. All his friends, as well as his detractors, knew that Pulitzer still wanted to hold office. His success as a newspaper publisher had strengthened his chances and his resolve. The day following his speech at the courthouse, word leaked out that he would run for the U.S. House of Representatives from the second congressional district of St. Louis.

  Pulitzer made plans to devote time to his own election, and to the entire Democratic ticket. But they almost all unraveled while he was out of town on his first political trip a couple of weeks later. At quarter past midnight on January 23, 1880, a Post-Dispatch employee smelled smoke. He ran into the deserted street yelling “Fire!” A nearby watchman tried to ring an alarm, but his key was so plugged with dirt he couldn’t open the box. Luckily, a police officer spotted flames bursting through the windows of the paper’s back building and set off an alarm, summoning two corps of firemen.

  By one o’clock in the morning, when the business manager arrived on the scene, the facility was a wreck: half burned, half soaked in water. Later, the foreman of the pressroom was found standing disconsolately in the midst of the steaming wreckage. The new Hoe press had been warped by the heat, and the stockpile of paper was rendered useless by the water. Telegrams were dispatched to Pulitzer, who was staying at his favorite New York hotel, the Fifth Avenue. Early estimates put the loss at more than $6,000, probably closer to $8,000. But although he had risked his savings in the enterprise and had operated for many months with little or no cash, Pulitzer had not risked going uninsured. Seven paid-up insurance policies covered his losses.

  Awakened with the news of the fire, McCullagh sent word that the paper could be printed at the Globe-Democrat, as it had been before the Post-Dispatch obtained its own presses. In the morning Cockerill wrote an editorial headlined OUR BLACK FRIDAY, predicting that the paper would take two weeks to get back on its feet. The paper, concluded Cockerill, “is a thoroughly established institution and is able to survive the ordinary vicissitudes of life.”

  In New York, the fire put Pulitzer in a foul mood. A reporter for the New York Tribune approached him about the election prospects for Democrats. A Republican will be in the White House for another four years, Pulitzer curtly replied (leading Hutchins at the Post to quip that “Pulitzer should always be interviewed just after dinner and a cursory examination of rent-rolls”).

  Reports from Cockerill calmed Joseph and he left New York to meet Kate in Washington. There, he and Kate returned to the Church of the Epiphany, this time to baptize Ralph. Kate’s unmarried older sister Clara Davis and Joseph’s friend U.S. Representative John Bullock Clark Jr. served as witnesses. The priest did not ask Joseph for a profession of faith; only the godparents were required to give that. Yet standing by the baptismal font and agreeing to have his child raised as an Episcopalian, Joseph sealed his departure from Judaism.

  By early February, with his family in St. Louis, the paper back in its office, and circulation holding steady, Pulitzer once again turned eagerly to the oncoming election. Despite his dour pronouncement to the Tribune’s reporter, all signs pointed to a Democratic victory. In 1878, the party had taken back both houses of Congress for the first time since 1858. The Democrats’ political fortunes were such that the presidency, which they had not won since 1856, should at last be theirs.

  With a heightened sense of power as one of the new breed of independent newspaper publishers, Pulitzer intended to both direct the Missouri Democratic Party and help the national party find a suitable standard-bearer. He and his friend Henry Watterson, of the Louisville Courier-Journal, were determined to anoint a man who could win.

  Pulitzer’s vision of himself as the party’s leader in Missouri did not sit well with William Hyde, editor of the Missouri Republican. That paper, managed from an elegant five-story building with Renaissance-style ornamentation, had long been the acknowledged party sheet. Over time, however, its support of the city’s oligarchs had left many Democrats out in the cold, especially those in the middle class. They were gravitating to the Post-Dispatch, creating a political and economic competition between Pulitzer and Hyde.

  Despite the enmity between the two men, both Hyde and Pulitzer sat on a committee assigned to lure the 1880 Democratic national convention back to St. Louis, where it had been held four years earlier. Pulitzer conveniently missed the committee’s trip to the Washington meeting where it lost out to Cincinnati. Upon returning to St. Louis, Hyde discovered that Pulitzer had published a telegram suggesting that the committee failed because its members spent their time drinking in Washington’s bars. If Hyde’s anger was not sufficiently stoked by this, a cheeky poem continuing the paper’s abuse of him appeared in the five o’clock edition of the March 1 Post-Dispatch.

  At six that evening, with—as one reporter described it—anger coursing though his veins “like a mountain-fed stream in the early spring,” Hyde left a friend’s office and headed down Olive Street to his newspaper. Meanwhile, Pulitzer exited Maranesi’s candy store, where he had bought a supply of caramel, and was strolling to Willie Gray’s bookstore for a copy of Harper’s Weekly. At the corner of Olive and Fourth streets, the editors came face-to-face.

  “Now damn you, I’ve got you at last,” said Hyde. He swung his fist at Pulitzer, but managed only a glancing blow to the right eye, knocking Pulitzer’s glasses off. Blinded, Pulitzer returned the punch with equal ineffectiveness. He then grabbed Hyde by his tie and shirt and wrestled him to the ground. The two scuffled until bystanders pulled them apart in the nick of time. Pulitzer had managed to reach under his heavy overcoat and had withdrawn a pistol from his hip pocket. Before he could get a shot off, one of the men knocked the gun away. A decade after the shooting in Jefferson City, Pulitzer was still taking aim at St. Louis’s pols.

  Pulitzer was shaken. He couldn’t see without his spectacles. In the darkness and cold, he let him
self be led to a nearby cigar store. As he stepped away, he yelled in Hyde’s direction, “You cow! Anybody could do that.” Hyde imperiously dusted himself off, and with an escort of two men retreated to a doorway next to Ettling’s barbershop, where he received the congratulations of friends.

  The election of 1880 lacked any major issues. The economy had recovered from the doldrums of the 1870s, Reconstruction was a dead issue, and the clamor for civil service reform had faded. The partisans of the time were glad to concoct disputes, but the supposed issues were little more than proxies for regional and factional differences. When it came to the ballot, the nation was still divided by the Mason-Dixon Line.

  Early in the race for the Democratic nomination, Tilden was the leading contender. Pulitzer was adamantly against Tilden because he was still angry about the New Yorker’s acquiescence in the 1877 bargain that gave the presidency to Hayes. As early as February 1879, Pulitzer argued against the rising tide for Tilden. “It seems absurd that Mr. Tilden should ask a vindication in the shape of the Presidency, when his own inexcusable conduct alone made the success of the electoral crime possible.” Pulitzer flirted briefly with other potential candidates, but soon lost interest in them.

  With only a month remaining before the selection process began, Pulitzer was still without a man. He feared that if he couldn’t find a strong candidate, the party would go back to Tilden. Pulitzer decided to try luring another former New York governor, Horatio Seymour, who had run against Grant in 1868, out of retirement.

  If Pulitzer could talk Seymour into running, he would not only save the party but score a journalistic coup. On April 24, 1880, Pulitzer traveled to Utica, New York. He rode a carriage across the Mohawk River and up the Deerfield hills to the Seymour home, a small house framed by tall hemlocks and a century-old black cherry tree in front, perched so high in the hills that it had a twenty-mile view of the valley below. Seymour greeted Pulitzer at the door. Although Seymour would turn seventy years old the following month, Pulitzer thought he hardly looked sixty. He stood tall and erect, his hair had little gray, and his hazel eyes remained clear. His only infirmity was a slight loss of hearing.

  They entered the house, which was filled with colonial and revolutionary era antiques. As they sat, Pulitzer displayed rare diffidence and held off raising the question of who should be the Democratic Party’s nominee. Instead the two conversed about politics, the “Negro problem” (as it was then called), and the coming election. Finally the all-important topic came up as the two prepared to part. At the door to the house, Seymour said the party had a wide choice of excellent candidates and listed several of the leading ones. “I am too old,” said Seymour. “You had better leave me to die gracefully by myself. That is an act few men understand, and perhaps I had best begin to try it now.”

  “But Governor,” Pulitzer replied, “if the people think you are the strongest candidate for your state as well as the country, and if their delegates at Cincinnati fix upon you as the man of all others to lead them in this campaign against centralization and imperialism, I have always said that you were too good a patriot and too good a Democrat to decline the leadership. Have I said wrong?”

  Seymour stood at the doorway for a while looking at his guest and made motions as if he were going to say something. Instead, he grasped Pulitzer’s hand and shook it. Pulitzer told him he was satisfied with this silent reply. Seymour laughed. “You had better lay me on the shelf and get a younger man.” Despite this final pronouncement Pulitzer rode away “with exultation in my heart,” believing that Seymour might still be a candidate.

  The harsh light of reality struck Pulitzer upon his return to Missouri. Seymour had been sincere in declining the honor Pulitzer had proffered. There was no realistic way that the aging Seymour could undertake a national campaign. Without a candidate, Pulitzer could only try to deny Tilden the nomination. This goal took on a personal element because the leader of Tilden’s crowd in Missouri was none other than William Hyde.

  Missouri Democrats gathered in late May for their state convention in Moberly, a railroad town in the middle of the state. Both Hyde and Pulitzer were delegates. When Pulitzer’s turn came to address the convention, Hyde’s supporters packed the galleries and tried to shout him down. But no matter what Hyde’s men tried, Tilden’s day had come and gone. There was nothing Hyde could do. The convention selected twenty-one of its thirty national delegates from the ranks of anti-Tilden men. Pulitzer returned to St. Louis triumphant. “A cloud of gloom rests over the Tilden cause,” noted the Washington Post in reporting the results at Moberly. Hyde avoided complete defeat by securing a spot as a delegate at-large. Pulitzer was selected as one of two delegates from the Second Congressional District, which he hoped to represent after the election.

  At the end of June, Pulitzer traveled to Cincinnati for the Democratic national convention. Years earlier, he had come as a dewy-eyed organizer of the insurgent Liberal Republican movement. Then he had been a twenty-five-year-old dissatisfied Republican newspaper editor. Now he was one of the most talked-about newspaper publishers, and comfortable in his new political home among the Democrats.

  The convention, which opened on June 22, 1880, looked almost as wild as the renegade gathering of 1872. Nineteen hopefuls sought the presidential nomination. Pulitzer gained a seat on the resolutions committee, chaired by Watterson. Together they crafted a platform of fifteen planks that included opposition to centralization and to protective tariffs, support for the gold standard, and an end to Chinese immigration. The platform also stated the election of 1876 had been fraudulently stolen and that Tilden should be thanked for his selfless service to the party.

  With the preliminaries out of the way, the convention turned to its main business on the morning of June 24. Though stifling heat made the convention hall almost unbearable for the delegates, they began to sift through the many candidates. Tilden gracefully bowed out, and on the first ballot the new leading candidate, General Winfield Hancock, took 23 percent of the vote. It looked as though it could be a long day. But when the second ballot began, delegates abandoned their first choices and formed a bandwagon for Hancock.

  Pulitzer faced a quandary. He had promised to speak on behalf of the candidacy of William English, a former Indiana congressman who was now a dark horse. The changing developments on the floor made this impossible, however. “I saw before Missouri was called that the nomination would sweep through the convention like wildfire,” Pulitzer later told English. “I did not think it wise to interrupt the room, and sacrificed my own inclination and pleasure rather than do what seemed needless.”

  Pulitzer’s judgment was sound. His own state, which had split its votes among five men on the first ballot, now gave Hancock all but two of those votes. The counting of the ballots would be only a formality. “The mob howled and shrieked, so that for some time no business could be done,” said a reporter on the floor. “But while the disorder prevailed there were hurried consultations among the delegates and unmistakable signs of a stampede.” It would be for General Hancock.

  With that decision made, the convention chair asked for a recess until later in the day. But Pulitzer instead moved that the convention immediately select the “next vice president,” with an assurance that caused some laughter. At this moment, Pulitzer’s friend English was more fortunate. His status as a former congressman from the important battleground state of Indiana made him an easy choice for the convention, and he was given the second spot on the ticket.

  The Republicans, meeting in Chicago, had a harder time making their selection. It took them thirty-six ballots before they settled on U.S. Representative James Garfield, from Ohio, and on the New Yorker Chester Arthur as his running mate.

  The Democrats’ choice of Hancock meant that Pulitzer had to do some rapid editorial backpedaling. On the eve of the convention, he had warned that selecting a general as a candidate would be a “stupendous mistake” because putting a military man in the White House would be inherently dangero
us to liberty. Now he did an about-face. Of all the soldier-politicians, he assured his readers, Hancock was the one most devoted to civilian rule, habeas corpus, and strict interpretation of the Constitution.

  On his return to St. Louis, Pulitzer spoke to a large, enthusiastic Democratic rally at the courthouse. Most men would have been physically exhausted by the travel and the long hours of the convention, but Pulitzer displayed dazzling energy, sustained by the adrenaline surge elections gave him. He had not been home for even a day before he wrote to a political operative in Indiana, “Is there anything I can do in your state on the stump? I shall be glad to serve as in 76, of course, at my expense.”

  Back at his desk, Pulitzer found that his paper had recovered from the fire and had prevailed in a dozen libel suits, including one brought by the famous Italian soprano Carlotta Patti—the Post-Dispatch had insinuated that she was very well, perhaps too well, acquainted with liquor. But now a different danger arose. On the streets in late July, newsboys were hawking a new paper, the Evening Chronicle. It sold for two cents—three cents less than the Post-Dispatch—and the street urchins were excited because they received the paper free of charge and could pocket the entire revenue.

  The publisher challenging Pulitzer’s dominance of the afternoon field was Edward W. Scripps. Pulitzer was not the only one who had discovered a way to succeed in the new era of independent journalism. Scripps, who had been an Illinois farmboy, launched his first newspaper at age twenty-four in Cleveland. His formula was to produce an inexpensive, tightly edited, but sprightly written paper aimed at the growing working classes of the nation’s new industrial centers. His editorial policy matched the goals of the audience he sought. His papers were fierce advocates for labor unions and collective bargaining.