Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  The reviews over, Pulitzer’s military career was at an end. The government wanted to quickly disband the hundreds of thousands of armed, uniformed men. While awaiting their turn to muster out, the members of Pulitzer’s Lincoln Cavalry were kept on the move. At first they camped in the hills of Annandale, roughly ten miles south of Washington; then they were relocated to a busy encampment closer to the Potomac River. Rumors swept through the camp that they might be deployed south, this time to Mexico, to enforce the Monroe Doctrine against French troops fighting against Maximilian. The news was disconcerting to the soldiers, and particularly troubling for Pulitzer. His uncle Wilhelm Berger was serving under Maximilian. The rumor died, but the troop movements didn’t. For several days they moved back and forth from one encampment to another, until at last they were instructed to begin surrendering their gear and horses.

  When Pulitzer’s turn came, he had the horse but not all of the government-issued equipment. He was missing two saddle straps; one carbine socket, sling, cartridge box, and swivel; one currycomb; one saddle blanket; one bridle; a pair of spurs and straps; and his horse’s feed bag. The items were part of the standard gear given to cavalrymen. The carbine socket, for example, was a small leather thimble-like device through which one slipped the barrel of a rifle so that the weapon would be held in place when worn on one’s back while riding. The clerk described Pulitzer’s loss of equipment as “by his own carelessness.” It may have been. But it was very likely that Pulitzer, like other men, had found it profitable to sell his equipment or, in some cases, even use it in a wager. Pulitzer was docked $13.25. On June 5, 1865, he received his honorable discharge after completing about 270 days in uniform, less than three-quarters of his promised term of enrollment. For his service to the Union cause, Pulitzer pocketed $135.35.

  With money to spend, the troops celebrated at night, under a full moon, with bonfires, civilian food, and illicit alcohol. The soldiers knew that they were returning to a civilian workforce already suffering considerable unemployment. The men in Pulitzer’s company, all with homes overseas, had to decide where to go in the United States. The choice was soon made for them.

  On June 26, the regiment marched to the railroad station to begin the trip back to New York. After a journey filled with delays, the troops reached New York two days later. Because of the tardy arrival the reception committee had dismissed a musical band of thirty pieces, as well as a cavalry escort. So the men marched up Broadway unaccompanied and unnoticed except by the odd pedestrian who recognized the regimental colors, battered and torn on the battlefield. At the Eighth Regiment Armory, on Twenty-Third Street, the men were seated at tables, which had been loaded with fruit and flowers the day before, and were served the dinner that had sat waiting for them. After they finished their meal, and the dignitaries concluded their welcoming speeches—not a word of which was understandable to Pulitzer—the men marched back down Broadway to the Battery and rode the John Romer out to Hart Island, where they had begun their military service.

  Peace had its risks. On July 7, Pulitzer joined legions of unemployed soldiers on the streets of New York. The economy could not accommodate all the veterans looking for work. Although many returned to their farms or prewar jobs as craftsmen or professionals, others, in particular foreign-born recruits, were looking for new situations. With few employable skills and still unable to speak English, Pulitzer had no luck in finding work. His money soon ran out.

  Bewildered, alone, and desperate, he turned homeward for help and wrote to his family for money. In the interim he continued to look—in vain—for work, wandering the streets of New York at day, and at night sleeping in doorways and any other place he could find. Frequently his bed was a bench in City Hall Park in front of French’s Hotel and the newspaper buildings that lined Park Row. “Every pleasant night until I found employment,” Pulitzer said, “I slept upon the bench, and my summons to breakfast was frequently the rap of a policeman’s club.”

  One day, as he sat on his bench, Pulitzer was approached by a man who asked if he wanted a job. What kind of job? asked Pulitzer. Three years’ work, replied the stranger. Food and lodging were included. Pulitzer agreed to follow him. They went down a side street to a small, unkempt office whose reception room was crowded with men, most of whom were drunk. The office belonged to a shipping agency recruiting men to ship out on a whaling vessel. Unwilling to enter a maritime purgatory, Pulitzer declined and after some effort escaped the clutches of the recruiter, whom he called a “land shark.”

  At last, the long-awaited money arrived from Pest. Pulitzer decided to leave New York and try his luck in St. Louis. The city’s large German population was like a safe harbor, and its promise of jobs was drawing German-speaking immigrants like a beacon. Passage on an immigrant railcar, with its plain bench seats and communal cooking stoves, could be had for only a few dollars. Pulitzer paid the fare for what he hoped would be a fresh start at finding a place for himself in postwar America.

  Once again, he headed west.

  Chapter Three

  THE PROMISED LAND

  When Pulitzer got off from the train at the end of its journey, he found that too much water and too little money kept him from his destination. Though railroad construction had resumed with a vengeance since the end of the war, there was still no bridge spanning the Mississippi River when Pulitzer reached its eastern bank in the fall of 1865. The only way across to St. Louis was to pay the Wiggins Ferry Company, which held a monopoly on the busy cross-river traffic. But Pulitzer had not a cent left. “I was hungry, and I was shivering with cold,” he said. “I had no dinner, no overcoat. The lights of St. Louis looked like a promised land to me.”

  Through the darkness, Pulitzer spotted a ferry pulling into a slip on his side of the river. He edged his way to the gate and, as he neared it, he overheard a pair of deck hands conversing. Surprisingly, they were speaking in German. He called out to them. One walked over and struck up a conversation with him. Finally, Pulitzer asked if there was a way he could get across. The deck hand told him that a fireman had quit and offered to go and find out if the ferry company needed to hire a replacement.

  The deck hand returned in the company of the engineer, who asked Pulitzer if he could fire a boiler. “I said I could,” Pulitzer recalled. “In my condition I was willing to say anything and do anything.” They opened the gate and led Pulitzer to the boiler, which sat exposed on an open deck, gave him a shovel, and told him to start feeding coal to the fire. “I opened the fire box door and a blast of fiery hot air struck me in the face. At the same time a blast of cold driven rain struck me in the back. I was roasting in the front and freezing in the back.” Long into the night, Pulitzer fed coal to the boiler. “I don’t remember how many trips back and forth across the river I made that night, but the next day I went ashore and walked the streets of St. Louis.”

  It was like coming home. The boats along the riverbank were tied up in the same fashion as the barges that clung to the Danube’s shore a few blocks from his boyhood home. Walking past the throngs of steamboat hands, stevedores, levee rats, and river men in gaiters, Pulitzer reached Second Street, where signs directed traffic to eateries and inns such as the Brod- und Kuchenbäcker, the Eichenkranz, the Basel, and the Pfälzer Hof. Men and women greeted each other with “Guten Tag,” and boys hawked newspapers published in German. “One who passed through this street could imagine himself transplanted to Germany,” recalled one immigrant.

  St. Louis was already one of the most important and most rapidly growing cities of the West. Despite recurring floods, visitations of cholera, and a fire that destroyed much of the downtown, the fourteen-square-mile city had risen to become the eighth most populated city in the United States. The war was over; local leaders predicted a golden age for their river city. But rather than the promise of St. Louis, it was the pollution from the soft Illinois coal burned in homes and businesses that visitors first noticed.

  “The smoke,” wrote Mark Twain, “used to bank
itself in a dense billowy black canopy over the town, and hide the sky from view.” Nor did visitors forget their first sip of St. Louis water. Drawn from the Mississippi River, the water served in restaurants and homes was thick and muddy. “My first impression at the table d’hôte was that everyone was drinking coffee in tumblers, and from its rich color I concluded that it must be very good,” said one British traveler. “How great was my dismay, therefore, when I touched the glass, and found it icy cold. ‘Iced coffee,’ I thought; then I sipped a little, and in great disgust set it down. It was simply muddy water!”

  Despite its foul air and dirty water, St. Louis was a vibrant place, drawing hundreds of newcomers every week. Its streets teamed with a multitude of nationalities and races. The original French-flavored atmosphere had become a distant memory. Germans were in the ascendant. For Pulitzer, who spoke no English, the city was a utopia.

  He found work and accommodations on the south side of downtown in a ward that was two-thirds German. One could wander from one end to the other without hearing any language but German. Not only were the words familiar and comfortable to Pulitzer, but so were the street noises, smells, and tastes. During the day, when the sound of a beer keg being tapped at Tony Niederwiester’s Valhalla or George Wolbrecht’s Tivoli rang out, work would stop so that the workers could get a fresh glass. Between ten and noon, tavern keepers would offer workers lunches of rye bread, blood or summer sausage, salted dried herring, dill pickles, and gallons of lager beer, a new, lighter style of beer. Lager had grown so popular that commercial brewers had just achieved a national production record of 1 million barrels in a year.

  For the first several months after reaching St. Louis, Pulitzer worked at a variety of jobs. He tended mules for a short time at the Benton military barracks, which had served as an encampment for Union troops during the war. “Never in my life did I have a more trying task,” said Pulitzer. “The man who has not cared for sixteen mules does not know what work and trouble are.” Next, he landed work as a coachman for a well-to-do family. The family members were apparently impressed by their French- and German-speaking driver and referred to Pulitzer as their “educated coachy.”

  In 1866 Pulitzer labored as a deck hand on a riverboat. During his evening breaks, he would sit behind a stove on board and read one of the city’s many German newspapers. The boat’s captain spoke to his wife in French, hoping to keep his communications from the ears of his deck hand. Pulitzer let him know he would have to use a language other than French or German if he did not want to be understood. Ironically, that could still include English.

  Despite Pulitzer’s inability to speak much English, he continued to pick up jobs. He worked as a stevedore unloading bales and barrels from river steamers and as a day laborer in construction. He even tried working as a waiter at Tony Faust’s Oyster House on Carlonet Avenue close to his rooms. “The trial period for proprietor, guests, and, last but not least, the novice waiter was very brief,” one close friend remembered. “It came to a conclusion at the end of the second meal when a beefsteak, having been rejected in a rather impolite manner, found itself, after an exchange of words that quickly developed into personal affronts, dropped onto the head of the guest rather than onto his plate, thereby bringing an end as abrupt as it was drastic to the serving glory of the presenter.”

  One time Pulitzer, along with about forty other men, responded to an advertisement promising high-paid jobs on a sugar plantation in Louisiana. The employment agent informed the men they would need to pay $5 each as a fee for transportation down the river. That night they boarded a steamer and headed downstream. At three in the morning, they were rousted and disembarked at a deserted spot some forty miles south of the city. Realizing they had been had, the men marched back to St. Louis together, with murderous intentions. Fortunately for the agent, he was nowhere to be found.

  The various jobs allowed Pulitzer to improve his English and get a toehold in St. Louis. As soon as he had set aside a little money, he paid his room and board for weeks ahead. “Thus I was secure,” he said. “I did not have to worry and could look about for something better.” Late in 1866, Pulitzer did find something better. The Deutsche Gesellschaft, the German Immigrant Aid Society in St. Louis, recommended him for an opening as a clerk. Many immigrants owed their first employment to this aid society. It had been created seven years earlier to provide job placement and other assistance to new German-speaking residents and was funded by established members of the German community who had not forgotten their own early struggles.

  In Pulitzer’s case the German aid society had located an assistant clerk’s job at Theo Strauss’s lumberyard on Franklin Street, not far from where Pulitzer roomed. Upon meeting Pulitzer, Strauss and his family were impressed. “We found him to be bright and highly educated, speaking German and French without an accent and very good English,” said Theo’s son Adalbert Strauss. The younger Strauss and Pulitzer were about the same age. “I was drawn to him,” said Strauss, “by his uniformly kind manner and great courtesy.” When meeting Strauss’s mother, Pulitzer would exclaim, “Ich küss die Hand gnädige Frau,” a characteristically Viennese expression from courtly etiquette. Visiting Pulitzer in his room, Strauss also learned about his new friend’s devotion to his own mother when Pulitzer showed the miniature portrait of his mother he had brought with him from Hungary.

  Strauss was also a witness to Pulitzer’s strong will. One day, Pulitzer showed up at work late, explaining that he had hardly slept, on account of an aching molar. “When I asked him how he obtained relief,” said Strauss, “he informed me that he had heated an eightpenny nail red hot in the flame of a gas burner and inserted it into the cavity.”

  With the steady pay from his job at the lumberyard, Pulitzer began to explore his new home. He discovered the Mercantile Library, one of the city’s gems. A vastly successful civic project, the library was created in 1846 as a stock corporation by a group of merchants who were inspired by the example of New York City’s Mercantile Library. Young single men, these merchants reasoned, lived primarily in boardinghouses with no parlors in which to entertain themselves when they were not working. A library could offer lectures, concerts, and classes for “mutual improvement,” then considered the path of social and economic elevation, a much better alternative to bars and other less virtuous haunts.

  Pulitzer paid the $2 initiation fee and $3 annual dues and signed his name in the members’ ledger on July 18, 1866. He was one of 275 clerks who joined the library that year, many enticed by a discounted membership aimed at recruiting them. Housed in a three-story building at Fifth and Locust streets, the library held a large collection of books, carried newspapers from all over the country and abroad, and was open each day of the week from morning until late at night. Pulitzer spent every free moment he had at the Mercantile, often bringing a pair of apples for sustenance so as not to waste a moment leaving the library for a meal. In the elegant library’s main room, he had his choice of 27,000 books stored behind glass on shelving extending to the ceiling, with a small catwalk to reach the higher shelves. Sitting at one of the eight-sided desks, above which rested busts of important writers from the past, Pulitzer applied himself to polishing his rudimentary English.

  He approached the task with marked diligence and persistence. For instance, to expand his vocabulary he studied synonyms for all the words he was learning—a habit he recalled later as “the wisest weakness I had as a youth in acquiring some deeper knowledge of the English language.” The librarian, who lived in a chamber off the reading room, did not entirely approve of Pulitzer’s quest to use the library to learn English, because he didn’t confine himself solely to books. In fact, Pulitzer badgered members in hopes of persuading, or in some cases provoking, them into conversation. To the librarian Pulitzer seemed “just a noisy and unruly young man who ignored the posted signs commanding silence.”

  His hours in the library paid off. Not only did he polish his English, but Pulitzer came into contact with
lawyers, newspapermen, politicians, and other leading figures. One group of men, in particular, exerted considerable influence on the atmosphere of the library. A few months before Pulitzer joined, a dozen or so men had created the St. Louis Philosophical Society under the leadership of Henry C. Brockmeyer, a Prussian Jew who was said to be a “midwestern Thoreau.”

  His moniker stemmed from an episode during the previous decade, when he had spent two years in a backwoods Missouri cabin studying the work of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel with such intensity that he might have succumbed to fever and other sicknesses had he not been found by a schoolteacher who nursed him back to health at civilization’s closest outpost, St. Louis. In no time this small clutch of would-be philosophers made its mark on the city’s cultural landscape, and Hegel was the rage. At the library, spirited members frequently blocked traffic at the checkout desk while arguing a philosophical point. No young member of the city’s German community with intellectual leanings remained free of its influence.

  When he wasn’t studying, Pulitzer loved to spend time in a popular chess room off the reading room. Since childhood, he had loved chess, and in the Civil War he had sharpened his skill during his monotonous winter encampment. His play attracted attention. “When he played, everyone in the room hovered about his game and watched it closely,” recalled one young boy. “The attraction, of course, was his superlative playing.”