Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  In October 1869, Pulitzer became city editor when Willich left the paper. With control of the Westliche Post’s news pages, Pulitzer intensified his assault on the county government. During the fall, he reported on other exorbitant payments to contractors, on the county’s insistence on paying men to light the gas streetlights rather than using the new electric ignition systems, and on the shoddy brickwork at the jail.

  The county court faced a new and effective enemy.

  Despite the interminable hours at the paper and his work with the Republican organization in his ward, Pulitzer still found time to socialize and widen his circle of friends. “When first meeting JP one would find him to be rather distant and serious, bent only on his work,” recalled a friend at the police department. “But when one got to know him one found he was genial and social.” At the end of the day, Pulitzer could often be found at Fritz Roeslein’s bookstore, a popular gathering place for bookish Germans. The books, however, were beyond Pulitzer’s reach, with the little he earned. An errand boy who worked at Roeslein’s remembered Pulitzer taking an interest in a dinner of homemade sausage and bread the boy’s mother had packed. “Mr. J.P. saw me go after it, he asked me what it was, I then offered some and he helped me finish up.”

  At night, Pulitzer retreated to 307 South Third Street, only a few short blocks from the newspaper. There he rented a small room in a boardinghouse run by an aging widow and her two daughters. It was a gloomy two-story building across the street from a bathhouse that gave the block a stench of sulfur. He was, however, in good company. His friend the poet Udo Brachvogel and an editor from the Anzeiger des Westens also took rooms there. The three of them often sat together, talking, late into the night.

  Joseph’s brother Albert, however, was still a wandering soul. After his stint selling magazines door to door, Albert had taken a tutoring job on a German farm and had taught German in the St. Louis schools. In late spring of 1868, he walked into a wealthy neighborhood south of his brother’s home and came across a group of boys sitting on the steps of one of the more handsome houses on the block. Albert asked a passerby whose house it was and learned that it belonged to Thomas Allen, president of the Iron Mountain Railway and a figure of considerable political influence in St. Louis.

  “In my desperate lonely position,” Albert said, “I cast to the winds all timidity, boldly walked up to the doorstep.” He asked if Allen was home. To his amazement he was led into the house. “I stammered out that I knew German and might teach the German language to those bright boys I had seen on the doorstep.” Allen said the idea appealed to him but he and his family were leaving to spend the summer in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. “Though I did not have the faintest idea where Pittsfield might be, I, nothing daunted, intimated as well as I could in broken English that I would be delighted to wend my way Pittsfield-ward.”

  It turned into an idyllic summer. Each day after concluding his tutoring lessons, Albert, armed with an English-German dictionary, worked his way through Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. When the group returned to St. Louis, he spoke a passable form of English. Back at the Mercantile Library, he had a fortunate encounter with a member of the Hegelians who had become superintendent of the public schools. The man had received an inquiry from a school in Leavenworth, Kansas, that was looking for a German teacher. The $100 monthly salary was a princely sum for an eighteen-year-old. But Albert was not successful at the job and was soon returned to St. Louis. Deciding he was not cut out for teaching, he set his sights on entering his brother’s field.

  This new plan did not sit well with his older brother. Pointing out that Albert was never without a copy of Dickens or Shakespeare in his hands, Joseph instead suggested that a literary career would be more suitable. “Think, Albert, how proud our mother would be,” he said. “You are too much of a dreamer ever to make any money for the family. Leave the commercial grind to me.”

  Ignoring Joseph’s advice, Albert headed to Chicago, where, he heard, the Illinois Staats-Zeitung was hiring. Astonishingly, without any newspaper training, he duplicated Joseph’s luck at getting a job on the Westliche Post and landed a reporter’s position at $10 a week. “The Staats-Zeitung, however, although printed in German, was an excellent school for me, since four-fifths of its new matter was drawn from English-speaking sources. I had perforce to know English first.” The paper shared a building with the Chicago Evening Post, whose reporters gave him yet more opportunity to work on his English. “His object,” recalled one reporter, “was to master the language so that he could take a writing position on an English paper, and he told me that when he felt sure of himself in this respect he should go to New York and begin there.”

  In November 1869, advertisements appeared in the Westliche Post, and other newspapers, announcing a special election in the Fifth and Sixth districts of the General Assembly to fill seats emptied by resignations. Since one of the elections would take place in the ward where Pulitzer served as a Republican Party officer, he went to work hurriedly organizing the nominating meeting necessary to select a candidate. The Democrats held their gathering first, meeting in Uncle Joe Locke’s Hall on the night of December 13, 1869. Pulitzer attended in his capacity as a reporter. It was a boisterous affair and several fights almost broke out before the Democrats settled on a candidate.

  The Republicans held their meeting the following evening in Turner’s Hall. They had little hope of victory in the election. The ward had been solidly Democratic for the past twenty-five years. Nonetheless Pulitzer urged that Republicans turn out for the meeting. “No one,” he wrote in the Westliche Post, “should be nominated who does not possess the absolute trust of a majority of the citizenry and can be considered their representative.”

  Despite bad weather, a sufficient number of Republicans turned out that night to hold the nominating meeting. It quickly became clear, however, that the man they had hoped would run was not interested in the nomination. In the disarray one man moved that the ward secretary, Pulitzer, who was then out of the room, be declared the candidate. This motion was followed by one to close the nominations, and Pulitzer was selected unanimously. The hall reacted with applause, according to Republican press accounts—or with laughter if the Democratic reporters were to be believed. More commotion arose when Pulitzer reentered the hall, unaware of what had just occurred.

  The next morning, Pulitzer the reporter gave a third-person account of the reaction of Pulitzer the politician. “In a few, apparently heart-felt words that he spoke to the meeting, he explained that he in no way had sought out this office, that he did not believe himself worthy of the trust that his fellow citizens had placed in him with this nomination, but that if elected, it would be always his highest and only goal to reward this trust.” The Democrat, doing its best to hold up the Republican Party banner, described Pulitzer as “well-known…a gentleman of character, considerable attainment, and decided and energetic” and one “who stands high in the estimation of the Germans in the ward” with “many friends among the Americans.” The paper predicted an election victory.

  The wishful thinking suddenly became a possibility when the Democrats ran into candidate trouble. Their first choice declined the nomination. The party turned next to Stilson Hutchins, a Democratic friend of Pulitzer who was a newspaper editor, but he too turned it down. So with only four days left before the election, the Democrats settled on a tobacco dealer with no political experience. The stand-in candidate received a rapid political baptism when Pulitzer tarred him in the Westliche Post. “Who is this new candidate exactly?” wrote Pulitzer. “Few know, but they say that he is a bankrupt merchant, who had strong Rebel sympathies during the war.” A day later Pulitzer charged that the Democrat was ineligible to be a candidate. “He is neither registered in the ward that he wishes to represent in the legislature, nor has he ever voted in that ward.” In this attack, Pulitzer was playing with fire. He himself was constitutionally ineligible for the office. The minimum age to serve in the General Assembly was twen
ty-four. Pulitzer was not yet twenty-three.

  With three days remaining before the election, Pulitzer went to the registrar’s office to sign a loyalty oath, as required by the Reconstruction constitution. In signing the oath, Pulitzer fulfilled a requirement for election, but he also engaged once again in dishonesty about his age. The same day, the Westliche Post published a letter of support for Pulitzer’s candidacy signed by a “Soldier and Worker.” It defended Pulitzer against what it called the “arrogant nose-turning and diplomatic shoulder-shrugging about the young age of the Radical candidate.” His youth, it argued, was no fault of his own and would “dissipate with each passing day.” The letter sounded suspiciously like the work of the candidate himself.

  Not a day had passed when Pulitzer did not use the pages of the paper to tout his candidacy. In humble prose, sounding rather like Dickens’s Uriah Heep, Pulitzer wrote—in the third person—that he would have surrendered the nomination to a more seasoned candidate had one emerged. “It is therefore the unforbearable duty of Mr. Pulitzer to accept this unanimously imposed candidacy and see it through.” He contrasted his attributes of watchfulness, tirelessness, and fearlessness with his opponent’s supposed Confederate sympathies, rumored bankruptcy, and alleged ineligibility. The Radical ticket is “pure gold compared to the candidates of the Irish Democrats…. They say that they would vote for the Devil himself in order to defeat the candidates of the Germans,” Pulitzer wrote on election eve. “What do our German friends have to say about that?”

  On election day snow and freezing rain poured down. Only a little more than 300 voters, less than one-fourth the usual turnout, managed to make their way to the two polling stations: the German Emigration Society, on the river side of the ward; and R. Eitman’s Grocery Store, on the western side. The eastern portion of the ward, more densely German, cast 156 votes for Pulitzer and 66 for the Democrat. The margin for Pulitzer allowed him to overcome the Democrat’s anemic victory in the more Irish side of the ward, which the Democratic Party took by a vote of 81 to 53. The final count of 209 to 147 gave Pulitzer the seat in the legislature.

  “We doubt that an election has ever taken place in our city under such unfavorable conditions and turned out as relatively satisfying,” wrote journalist and legislator-elect Pulitzer in the next day’s Westliche Post. The Radical victory in the Fifth Ward was important because the ward, though not a “fortress of local Democrats” and “Rebel elements” like the neighboring Sixth Ward, might still be considered a Democratic enclave, Pulitzer said. “Regardless the ward elected a Radical representative yesterday in place of its previous Democratic one. The majority of 62 that elected Mr. Pulitzer may seem small, but not when one takes into account that the total votes for both candidates in both precincts did not top 356.”

  As if he were giving a victory night speech, Pulitzer continued his postelection analysis by thanking his colleagues. “The local press exhibited, with one single exception, such an honorable and collegial spirit with regard to Mr. Pulitzer’s campaign, that it is a true pleasure to give voice to our grateful recognition.” The one miscreant was the rival German newspaper Neue Anzeiger, which, according to Pulitzer, “deviated spitefully from the generous stance of the entire rest of the press.” His sensitivity to the one sour note of public criticism revealed that it had not yet dawned on Pulitzer that he had crossed the Rubicon. In only five years he had grown from a bounty-hunting Hungarian teenager to an American lawmaker.

  He was now an elected politician.

  Chapter Five

  POLITICS AND GUNPOWDER

  Shortly after New Year’s Day 1870, Pulitzer left St. Louis for the state capital, Jefferson City, and his new life as a legislator. It was a short, bucolic train ride along the meandering Missouri River, whose banks alternated between rich farmland and high overhanging cliffs. For those having political business in the capital, the trip was often gratis, as the Missouri Pacific Railroad gladly offered free passage to those who were in a position to return favors. In fact, it was a common practice for newspapermen, public officials, judges, politicians, and lawmakers to ride “deadhead,” as it was called. Pulitzer, who was among the poorest lawmakers that year, opted instead to obtain a travel per diem from the state.

  The state capital, though not necessarily a backwater, was not a destination of choice for politicians from St. Louis and Kansas City. Many legislators remained unconvinced that this isolated former river trading post was a suitable spot for their deliberations; and when Pulitzer arrived, they were still introducing resolutions to move the state capital. The annual descent of lawmakers was about the only thing that disturbed the calm of Jefferson City.

  Bringing with them a carnival atmosphere, the legislators packed Schmidt’s Hotel and caused its bartenders to stock extra supplies. Although Pulitzer would take his meals there, he avoided Schmidt’s pricey rooms. Instead, he chose to room with his friend Anthony Ittner, who had also been elected as a state legislator. The pair obtained lodgings in a boardinghouse, nicknamed the “German Diet” because of the preponderance of German legislators who favored the place.

  On January 5, 1870, as the legislature opened for business, Pulitzer took his oath of office, swearing, for the second time in a month, to uphold the state’s constitution but meanwhile violating its minimum age for service in the legislature. For one born in Europe, state legislatures were a marvel of American democracy beyond compare. Each state had its own semi-sovereign government with a legislature in session, on average, eighty-seven days a year. Almost every law of significance—criminal, social, or economic—was made by state legislatures. It would be another half century before the federal government would begin to assume its modern dominant role in governance.

  In Jefferson City, and in fourteen other state capitals that month, lawyers, doctors, farmers, merchants, businessmen, and even newspapermen gathered to make the laws of the land. It was exhilarating, and Pulitzer was eager to join in. On his first day, he offered two resolutions, one dealing with printing the governor’s annual message in German, the other a routine measure for printing copies of the House rules for use by members.

  Pulitzer’s fellow Radical Republicans controlled the legislature and had one of their own in the governor’s seat. Having disenfranchised some 60,000 citizens with the loyalty oath, the Radicals were at the apex of their power. But political fissures were growing among the ranks of the party. Republican rule was an unnatural state of affairs in a state with strong and deep Democratic Party roots. As in other border states, Republicans had neither a popular base nor public support.

  Suffrage was the dominant and most divisive issue before the lawmakers. The governor urged them to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment, giving black American men the right to vote, and to similarly amend the state constitution. But he startled many in his own party by suggesting it was time to lift voting restrictions on Democrats. Although it was only a vague promise, it gave voice to a central issue facing Republicans. How much longer could they deny taxpaying, law-abiding white voters the franchise?

  Pulitzer, like a growing number of Republicans, felt that the party had to respond to constituents’ demands if it wanted to take permanent root in the state. Five years after the end of the war, a considerable amount of reconciliation had already taken place in Missouri, and the hatred engendered by the conflict was greatly diminished. The animus toward former rebels seemed particularly hard to justify if former slaves were to be given the vote.

  The state’s constitution, passed during the first years of Reconstruction, specified that the legislature would be constitutionally free to begin tampering with its onerous voting restrictions in 1871. But many Republicans were unwilling to wait. They feared entering the fall campaign with only a promise to do something about lifting the restrictions later. The growing consensus among the moderates was to submit to voters that fall a constitutional amendment which would enfranchise all adult males.

  From the start, Pulitzer was in the moderates’ camp. On
his first full day, he proposed a roll-call vote to help defeat a measure aimed at stemming a slight expansion of suffrage. There was no question in his mind that the right to vote must be given to all men, regardless of their participation in the war or the color of their skin. His faith in the expansion of suffrage was sustained by his sense of wonder at American politics, his absolute faith in democracy, and his youthful idealism. Unlike the veteran legislators, he had not considered the electoral math should the vote be restored to thousands of Democrats. He “is with us,” a Democratic Party leader happily told his mostly disenfranchised colleagues in Pulitzer’s Fifth Ward.

  On a Sunday evening in late January, Pulitzer boarded a train for Jefferson City after spending the weekend in St. Louis. As the train neared Hermann, a German river town about halfway to the capital, the track, probably weakened by the winter cold, broke in three places. The locomotive remained on the railway, but the express car and the sleeping car in the rear came uncoupled and rolled down the steep embankment leading to the river. The remaining cars, including the one in which Pulitzer rode, left the track but remained upright, although teetering and appearing as if they would follow the others down the hill.

  Pulitzer scrambled out with the other uninjured travelers and surveyed the scene. “Picture a large sleeping-car, in which at that moment was occupied by over 50 people (and for the most part undressed and sleeping),” Pulitzer said. “One must imagine this car, imagine it rolling down a 20-foot high railroad embankment with increasing momentum until a mighty tree obstructs its passage, the car’s interior smashed into a thousand pieces, and the car rests on the ground, but not in its typical position, but rather vice versa, i.e. on its head, and one will have a rough idea of how the scene of the catastrophe looked.”