Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  The Cole County grand jury was not impressed by Pulitzer’s public defense. “The grand jury of this town who are a very ‘rambunctious’ set at the best, are determined to find a bill against Mr. Pulitzer, charging him with assault with intent to kill,” reported one newspaper. Indeed, after listening to testimony from Augustine and others, the grand jury returned an indictment against Pulitzer on a charge of felonious assault. He was arrested, and once again Ittner rescued him by pledging a $1,000 bail bond. His friends rallied, and Charles Johnson agreed to represent Pulitzer and immediately won a postponement of the trial.

  Pulitzer sheepishly returned to the floor of the House on February 4, a little more than a week after being the object of a potential expulsion vote. He cast a vote and left. But several days later, he was back in speaking form. Instead of addressing his colleagues’ many questions about the shooting, Pulitzer chose to introduce a fairly routine bill to strengthen the qualifications necessary to be a director of the St. Louis public schools.

  This was not entirely out of character and reflected his growing understanding of the workings of the legislature. Pulitzer knew he had little to gain by mentioning the shooting, since that would give his critics another opportunity to comment on it. He was better prepared for being a lawmaker than other newcomers to the legislature after having spent time covering the previous session as a reporter.

  He showed parliamentary savvy unusual for a freshman legislator when a bill came up to erect a statue of General Nathan Lyon, who is credited with preventing St. Louis from falling into Confederate hands. The funding measure, which Pulitzer supported, was going down to defeat, but there was hope that it might win approval when more members were present. As the bill headed for defeat, Pulitzer changed his vote at the last minute. By being among those who voted “no,” he retained the right under parliamentary procedure to call for the bill’s reconsideration. He immediately exercised the right and persuaded the House to send the bill back to committee, where it could live for another chance at passage.

  Pulitzer’s choice of an education measure on his first full day back was good politics. Although he himself had hardly ever seen the inside of a classroom, he knew from his contacts with the Hegelian philosophers and his friendship with Davidson that the public schools were highly valued by Germans in St. Louis. Any assault on schools was seen by Germans as an attack on their community. In early March a bill reached the floor that would require the city’s school board to give $10 to each pupil attending a private school. If it was enacted, the school system would effectively be bankrupt. In battling the bill, Pulitzer found himself up against his old foes, including the doctor-legislator who had attended Augustine after the shooting. Pulitzer won, warding off what the press called “a death blow aimed at their public school system” and frustrating the county court crowd, who thought they had seen the last of him.

  A reinvigorated Pulitzer returned to ferreting out corruption. On March 8, he seized another chance to pursue his efforts. A Democrat from St. Francois rose on the floor to give public voice to a rumor that bribes were being used widely to gain passage of legislation. Though he did not specify the source or purposes of the payments, it was widely understood that he was speaking of railroad interests. The House opted to create a five-member committee with the power to issue subpoenas to investigate these claims.

  Pulitzer immediately moved that the committee’s charge be expanded to include determining “whether any members of the House had been employed as an attorney in any case that was pending in this body, and, as such, received any compensation whatever.” His alteration was accepted. The House voted to establish the committee, and Pulitzer was given one of five seats on it. The assignment was a plum for a freshman seeking publicity, but also a minefield because it would look at the behavior of more senior and more powerful legislators. Two days later, the committee reported its recommendation that a member be expelled from the House for accepting bribes.

  The legislative session ground onward, and Pulitzer knew that time was running out for his main objective—throwing out the county court in St. Louis. Since introducing his measure, Pulitzer had expanded on his original efforts to restructure the county government by writing a bill that would provide for the election, rather than the appointment, of the collector, assessor, and engineer in St. Louis County.

  On March 10, members of the St. Louis delegation met with Pulitzer in the Senate chambers to consider his proposal languishing in legislative limbo. For two hours, the men argued. Finally, the group put the plan to a vote. Pulitzer’s bill survived by a one-vote margin. Next, opponents tried to water down the bill. Again, he survived the attack by one vote. Seeking to broaden support, Pulitzer’s supporters persuaded him to amend the proposal slightly by delaying the election for the new county court to the fall. Next they decided to rush the new version of the bill through the Senate and prepare for a fight in the House, where the county’s strongest defenders lay in waiting.

  The plan almost worked. A week later, Ittner brought the moderated version up for consideration in the House. Together, he and Pulitzer argued strenuously for the bill, claiming that it would eliminate the scandalous fee-based salaries and clean up the corrupt county government, even once again bringing up the court’s extravagance on Augustine’s “well of fools.” But it was to no avail. Though the final tally was 56 to 36 in favor of the bill, the rules required a majority of the entire House, not just those present. Pulitzer’s measure fell 23 votes short.

  As the first day of spring approached, the session’s end neared. The weather hardly seemed springlike. Late winter snow and deep cold gripped Jefferson City, and, to his misfortune, Pulitzer, along with his roommate, fell prey to a gang of coat thieves who swept through the capital, raiding the rooms of legislators careless enough to leave their doors unlocked. Pulitzer and Ittner were thus among three legislators who “made their appearance shivering” on March 12, “one of the coldest and dreariest of the session.”

  On March 24 the session drew to a close. The train to St. Louis carried back to the city a very different man from the one who had arrived in the state capital that winter. Although none of his bills had become law, and although the county court retained the upper hand, Pulitzer’s legislative efforts had turned him into a well-known figure, made him new political allies, and placed him in an emerging Liberal Republican movement poised to take center stage.

  Chapter Six

  LEFT BEHIND

  In March 1870, when the lawmakers went back to their farms, law offices, or places of business, Pulitzer returned to the Westliche Post. But instead of being merely a reporter covering political ward meetings, he was now a player in Missouri politics. No longer was the Westliche Post identified solely as the paper belonging to Schurz and Preetorius; it was now also the newspaper where Pulitzer worked.

  The shooting of Augustine had given Pulitzer considerable notoriety, which in his quixotic struggle against the county court was not necessarily a bad thing. But it also created a serious legal problem. After all, he had shot someone, perhaps with the intent to kill. So far, thanks to the legal skills of his friend Johnson, the day of reckoning had been postponed. But at some point, Pulitzer would have to face a trial.

  The prospect of mounting a decent legal defense improved. Theodore Welge, the lime merchant who did business with Augustine, decided to come forward. Although he considered himself a friend of Augustine’s, Welge admired Pulitzer for his efforts against political corruption. “I made up my mind, come what will, that I would call on Mr. Pulitzer and tell him what Augustine told me he was going up to Jefferson City for,” Welge said. So he made his way to Pulitzer’s boardinghouse on Third Street.

  At first, the landlady informed Welge that Pulitzer could not be disturbed. “I told her to go back and say to him, that a party wanted to tell him important news probably greatly affecting his future.” A few moments later, Welge was admitted to Pulitzer’s room. “When I told him about the talk I had with A
ugustine, he stood up in a white night shirt looking like a ghost,” said Welge. “I told him I was ready at any time to go to Jefferson City to testify without any summons.” Pulitzer hugged his surprise visitor and repeatedly thanked him for coming.

  The trial was still months away, and so was the fall political season. In the interim, Pulitzer returned to Hungary for the first time since he had left six years earlier. To obtain a U.S. passport, he once again lied about his age, moving his birth back two years to conform to his previous deceptions. With the $410 that he had earned for his service in the legislative session, he booked passage out of New York on the Allemannia, the same ship that had brought Albert to the United States, and sailed to Europe on May 24. Pulitzer’s return to his native land was a heady experience. The penniless teenager who had left in 1864 came back to his family and friends as a twenty-three-year-old American lawmaker with money in his pocket. He used his status to open new doors—calling, for instance, on the mayor of Buda, Ferenc Házmán, who, after years of work, was nearing his goal of uniting Buda and Pest into one city.

  By mid-July, Pulitzer was back in Missouri and deep in electoral politics. On August 25, 1870, he ran the Fifth Ward Republican meeting at Wolbrecht’s Tivoli Concert Hall and was selected as one of the delegates for the coming state convention. There was trouble brewing for the Republican governor, Joseph McClurg. At Pulitzer’s meeting, the delegates decided not to support McClurg’s renomination as governor. In fact, it was a bad night throughout St. Louis for the incumbent governor. When all the ward meetings had concluded their business, McClurg won no support whatsoever. Instead, all of St. Louis’s delegates lined up behind the reformist B. Gratz Brown.

  A former U.S. senator and Free Soil Democrat who had worked to end his party’s pro-slavery position, Brown was winning favor with Republicans who wanted to restore the vote to former rebels. Pulitzer and his friend William Grosvenor, who edited the Missouri Democrat, threw their lot in with Brown. Pulitzer’s German readers were already on board, but Grosvenor’s editorials in favor of Brown emboldened moderate English-speaking Republicans who were growing weary of their party’s extremism, which for many appeared to be sustained by hate. In addition, the clamor for reforming the civil service and the tariff was gaining strength among moderate Republicans, who had an economic interest in a growing economy as well as efficient, honest urban governments.

  Radicals were quick to perceive the danger posed by these “Liberal Republicans.” They were called heretics, and party operatives warned President Grant that he would have to put down this Missouri rebellion politically, just as he had ended the Southern rebellion militarily.

  Five days following the city ward meetings, Pulitzer, Senator Schurz, and Grosvenor went to Jefferson City for the Republican state convention. At the capitol, more than 700 delegates crowded into the House chamber, which was regularly used by other groups when the legislature was not in session, and even for religious services on Sundays. This, however, was no church meeting. Within twenty-four hours the Liberals mounted their attack and turned McClurg’s hoped-for political coronation into chaos.

  The initial confrontations developed when a resolution came to the floor supporting the suffrage amendments on the fall ballot that would immediately remove all voting disqualifications. Seeking to avoid an immediate, divisive vote, the resolutions were referred to the resolutions committee chaired by Schurz. The committee, by a slim majority, returned to the hall with an endorsement of the proposal.

  “Upon this question,” proclaimed Schurz, “we cannot yield.” The delegates, however, yielded and defeated the motion on a vote of 439 to 342. One of the Liberal delegates, yelling as loudly as he could over the noise of agitated delegates, called for those who had voted for the majority report to withdraw to the Senate chambers. Schurz, Grosvenor, and Pulitzer led the exodus.

  Once resettled on the other side of the capitol, the rebellious Republicans made Schurz chairman and proceeded immediately to nominate a ticket, with Gratz Brown at its head, and draft a platform. Written by Grosvenor, it contained the text of the defeated majority resolution and other planks of the Liberal cause. Before adjourning, the renegade assembly appointed Pulitzer secretary to the state executive committee. The rebellion had made a team of the beefy Grosvenor and the ectomorphic Pulitzer.

  Meanwhile, in the House chamber, the Radicals renominated McClurg and adjourned. The news of the bolt reached all parts of the country. “The Republican Party of Missouri has split in twain on the question of enfranchising the ex-rebels,” reported the Chicago Tribune. “The Missouri Radicals are in trouble,” proclaimed the Mountain Democrat in Placerville, California.

  The split between Liberal and Radical Republicans was far more than a debate over who should be able to vote and when. It was the beginning of a fight over the soul of the Republican Party. Liberals believed that the Radicals’ opposition to restoring the vote and the corruption surrounding Grant were a betrayal of the party’s ideals. For Pulitzer, Grant was Pope Leo X and the corruption scandals were the church indulgences that drove Martin Luther to pin his ninety-five theses on the church door in Wittenberg. It was a matter of political faith, not politics.

  With the conventions done, Pulitzer and Grosvenor returned to St. Louis to prepare for the fall electoral battle. Pulitzer threw himself into the fray. He bore all the grunt work of the Liberals’ executive committee while continuing his work at the Westliche Post. On September 20, he single-handedly ran the Republican First Congressional District meeting in Turner Hall, which was filled almost entirely with Liberal Republicans. He chaired the resolutions committee, read aloud the Liberal Republican platform, obtained approval for it, and shepherded the congressional nomination to his friend Johnson, who was home ill.

  As exciting as it was to be at the center of a political rebellion, Pulitzer had his own reelection ahead. On October 18, he was renominated without opposition. But Radical Republicans were intent on punishing Liberal Republicans and mounted behind-the-scenes efforts to enlist new black voters, who were not eager to enfranchise former slave masters. “On the McClurg ticket,” wrote Pulitzer, “the Germans are distinguished by—their absence. Of course! McClurg and Co. are depending on Negroes to carry their cause, and obviously do not expect to receive a single German vote.”

  On their side, the Liberals counted on Democrats, many more of whom could come to the polls in 1870 because the state had eased its strict enforcement of the loyalty oath. Brown was a former Democrat, and the Democrats had no one of their party on the top of the ticket to support. But in other races, such as those for the legislature, the Democrats were fielding candidates. A high turnout among Democrats might elect Pulitzer’s gubernatorial candidate but would be bad news for his own reelection.

  Grosvenor did his best at the Missouri Democrat to push Pulitzer’s candidacy. “He makes mistakes at times, and is sometimes misinformed,” he told the readers, “but the people appreciate a man who never fears to say what he thinks, and never yields to compromise of principle, and so, while he makes some enemies, he makes more friends.” But Grosvenor knew that Pulitzer was in trouble.

  On November 3, Liberal Republicans of St. Louis gathered for a torchlight procession and rally in a large public market. Pulitzer, Anthony Ittner, and Preetorius, of the Westliche Post, were among the speakers. Later, Pulitzer went to the courthouse and signed another loyalty oath to ensure his legality as a candidate. In doing so, he once again betrayed the oath he took. Constitutionally he still remained too young to serve in the legislature.

  All the rhetoric, charges, countercharges, campaigning, and torchlight parades came to an end on November 8, 1870, Election Day. Brown’s victory was expected, but for Pulitzer the picture looked gloomy. “In the Fifth district Mr. Pulitzer, the Liberal Republican candidate, has the opposition of the county court and court-house ring against him, on account of his opposition to their schemes in the last legislature,” reported the morning’s edition of the Missouri Republican
. “Mr. Bell is confident of being elected by a two hundred majority.”

  In the morning, the extent of Brown’s victory astonished everyone. He carried the state by a huge margin. Liberal Republicans were ecstatic. The election of their man as governor and the 88 percent vote they garnered for the amendments were a rebuke to Radicalism and, in particular, to the Grant administration. It was “the most remarkable political revolution of the age,” said the New York Journal of Commerce. “Let men look to Missouri if they would learn how the political revolution of the future is to be brought about.”

  In Pulitzer’s ward, for instance, Brown swamped McClurg by a three-to-one margin. But in Pulitzer’s camp, the mood was somber. The high turnout among Democrats that propelled Brown to victory spelled trouble. Pulitzer’s Democratic opponent won 991 votes to Pulitzer’s 673. The vote was a complete reversal of Pulitzer’s victory the prior year. Writing in the Westliche Post the following day, Pulitzer blamed his loss on 250 Negroes and 60 Frenchmen: “In general, the Negroes and the white McClurgites voted according to the maxim, better to see Democrats elected than the Liberals.”

  The electoral truth of the matter was simple. Pulitzer had won in 1869 because the unusual political configurations had favored him. The continued legal suppression of Democratic voters, the party’s ineptitude in selecting a candidate, and the traditional low voter turnout for a special election hampered by bad weather had produced Pulitzer’s winning margin. A year later, with Democrats returning to the polls in large numbers, Pulitzer as a Republican—even a Liberal Republican—was doomed.

  Pulitzer’s friend Joseph Keppler, the cartoonist, rendered a graphic interpretation of the loss. In a cartoon captioned “Too heavy a load,” Keppler drew Pulitzer and two other losing politicians on a wooden platform supported by Brown, Schurz, and Grosvenor. Brown is bending down, unable to bear the weight, and Pulitzer is falling off. The revolution in which Pulitzer had played an important role had been won, but it had left him behind.