Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  “Has he accepted the resignation?” asked the reporter.

  “I don’t know,” replied Pulitzer, smiling.

  “As far as you know, has he accepted the resignation?”

  “I don’t know—no; the governor wrote me that he wasn’t prepared…” said Pulitzer without finishing the thought.

  “Then he hasn’t accepted it yet?”

  “No.”

  Police commission work felt inconsequential to Pulitzer. He was giving his entire effort to sustaining the Westliche Post and supporting the Greeley campaign. Working every day from eight in the morning to midnight, he seamlessly switched from editor to campaigner, sometimes making no distinction between the roles.

  As fall approached, Pulitzer began traveling for the ticket. In an era when speeches were considered beneath the candidates’ dignity, others made passionate campaign speeches on their behalf. In September Pulitzer was on the stump almost full-time. By one count, he delivered sixty speeches to German audiences in Indiana and Ohio. His campaign trail crossed the path of Simon Wolf, a prominent Jewish lawyer from Washington, D.C., who was campaigning for Grant’s reelection. Wolf sat in a hotel reading the newspaper after completing a campaign speech in the same town where Pulitzer was speaking on behalf of Greeley. Two men came into the hotel, sat down near Wolf, and ordered drinks. “Did you ever hear such German as that man Pulitzer got off? Nobody could understand him,” said one man to the other.

  “Naturally,” said Wolf. “Pulitzer had spoken over their heads and they were disgusted with his culture. When I met Pulitzer that same evening, I told him, and we had a laugh at his expense.”

  The campaign produced a surprising dividend for Pulitzer. “Some of the proprietors of the Westliche Post,” he said, “became nervous, wanted to retire, thought the paper was ruined by the Greeley campaign.” They approached him to see if he would like to buy into the paper. Pulitzer was the most valuable member of their staff and had toiled for them for five years. Before newspapers became big businesses, journalists dreamed of owning at least part of a newspaper. There was no money to be made in writing for a paper, only in owning one.

  The potential changes in the ownership of the Westliche Post were soon a subject of gossip among St. Louis Republicans. The rumors reached the Missouri Democrat, whose editors dispatched a reporter to follow up on them. “Schurz was said to be disgusted with the course of the paper, and Plate, the senior member of the firm, anxious to buy the other proprietors out,” reported the Democrat.

  “What’s the news?” asked Pulitzer when the reporter climbed the last flights of stairs leading into the Westliche Post editorial rooms.

  “I don’t know; I hear there is trouble in the Post office.”

  “How?” replied Pulitzer, smiling at the visitor from a desk stacked high with paper.

  “Well, there are rumors on the street that there is trouble in the office between Mr. Plate and Mr. Schurz and Preetorius; that he wants to buy them out, or have them buy him out.”

  “Whoever heard of such a damned thing?” said Pulitzer, laughing and leaning back in his chair.

  “Then it’s not true?”

  “No. It’s a lie, it’s a damned lie. Why, it’s so absurd.”

  At best, Pulitzer was being disingenuous. As in his previous dealings with reporters, Pulitzer was willing to misinform if it was to his advantage. He was not ready to make public that twenty-four hours earlier he had signed a note payable to Preetorius. It provided Pulitzer with $4,500 in credit at an interest rate of 8 percent, 2 percent lower than the rate common at the time for such loans. Pulitzer was in the process of signing other, similar notes. With these funds he bought a stake in the paper on, in his words, “very liberal terms.”

  “They thought I was necessary to the paper,” he said. “They probably would have done the same thing to any other man who worked sixteen hours a day, as I did through that campaign.”

  Within a week, he was an owner. By late September 1872, Pulitzer was referring to the Westliche Post as “our newspaper” in a letter to Schurz. Thus seven years after reading his first copy of the Westliche Post in hopes of finding employment in St. Louis, Pulitzer was an American newspaper publisher.

  While Pulitzer’s stock rose, Greeley’s and Brown’s sank. The prospect of victory was becoming increasingly dim. “Everything depends on the result of the October elections,” Pulitzer wrote to Schurz in Washington in late September, referring to the states that held a first round of voting a month before others. “Here in St. Louis and Missouri it is looking miserable. The area crazies are ruining much, and it seems advisable to me that you temporarily make no arrangements for speeches but rather return as soon as possible.”

  Pulitzer’s forecast and Schurz’s nightmare turned out to be true. On Election Day, Greeley and Brown carried only six states: Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Tennessee, Texas, and Missouri. The ticket could manage only a slim victory in the state where the movement began. Democrats carried the day in other states’ races. Even St. Louis, city and county, returned to the Democratic fold.

  For two years Pulitzer had dutifully served the Liberal Republican cause, renouncing the Republican Party, where he had begun his political life. His break had been a principled one over fundamental political differences. Pulitzer believed in the Liberal Republican Party’s precepts and had tied his political fortunes to the party’s success. Greeley’s ignominious defeat not only killed the party, but politically stranded Pulitzer as a man without a party in the partisan world of nineteenth-century America.

  Chapter Eight

  POLITICS AND PRINCIPLE

  The crushing defeat of the Liberal Republican movement imperiled Pulitzer’s tenuous hold on his patronage post. His one-year term on the St. Louis police commission was set to expire in February, leaving his reappointment in the hands of the newly elected governor, the first Democrat in Missouri’s executive mansion since before the Civil War. Although Governor Silas Woodson knew that he partially owed his election to Liberal Republicans, he had little interest in retaining any Republicans—Liberal or other—in state offices.

  Pulitzer mounted a campaign to remain on the commission. Keeping the job would allow him to retain a small foothold in politics and continue earning easy money. Governor Woodson hadn’t even been sworn in before Pulitzer’s loyalists took action. His friend James Broadhead, an unwavering Democrat who had been both a Unionist and a defender of slavery, was among the first to tell Woodson that Pulitzer had high standing in St. Louis, had done a good job, and represented the important German interests in the city. Others joined in. Newspaper editors, such as those at the St. Louis Dispatch and St. Louis Times, and city officeholders, including the city council president and city registrar, also wrote in support of Pulitzer.

  Pulitzer turned for help to Hutchins and Johnson, who now had considerable political influence. For them, the election of 1872 had been munificent. Hutchins won a seat in the House and Johnson was elected as Woodson’s lieutenant governor. With friends like these, Pulitzer’s case for reappointment looked strong. The governor, however, didn’t show his hand. Pulitzer may have had allies in high places, but he still had strong enemies, particularly among politicians in St. Louis County who had not forgotten his efforts to depose them and deny them the pecuniary rewards of their work.

  Word leaked from the governor’s office that Woodson was preparing to send his selections to the state senate on Monday afternoon, January 20, 1873. Hutchins feared that Pulitzer’s name would not appear on the list and pleaded on behalf of his man. “If undecided to make the appointment requested by Lt. Governor Johnson and myself,” Hutchins wrote Woodson, “do me the favor to hold it in abeyance until I can see you.”

  Monday came and went without any appointments coming down from the governor’s office. A silence worthy of the Vatican descended. For several weeks Pulitzer’s supporters continued their campaign, framing the issue around complex ethnic politics. “The Germans of this city ought to be r
epresented on the Police Board not for nativistical reasons but so as to make sure that not only Irish Policemen are sent into German districts,” wrote one man. But this approach was undercut by the reluctance of the city’s best-known representative of German interests to join the bandwagon. The Westliche Post remained mum.

  Preetorius was opposed to a second term for Pulitzer. In a private letter to Grosvenor, he explained his reasoning. “It was that, not in spite, but rather in consequences of my good wishes for Mr. Pulitzer, I could not recommend his reappointment,” he wrote. His opposition stemmed from Pulitzer’s confessions to him during his first year on the commission in which he “earnestly declared by himself, as wholly at variance with his qualifications as well as his own taste and liking.”

  On March 4, a month after Pulitzer’s term legally expired, the governor finally broke his silence. Pulitzer, he announced, would be replaced with a former Confederate and loyal Democrat. Woodson’s selection left the police commission devoid of any Germans. It took only a few hours for the news to reach St. Louis. Pulitzer was infuriated. He put pencil to paper and angrily scrawled out a letter to Senator Benecke, his old ally in the state senate.

  Woodson’s appointments were so unthinkable that Pulitzer said he couldn’t find anyone who believed the report. Hurriedly he continued, impetuously scratching out unsatisfactory words as he wrote, “Nobody held it possible that the highest officer of our state evinced such a lack of all feelings of justice and propriety because it was supposed Mr. Woodson knew what everybody else knew, namely that since the existence of the Police Commission the German element always had one and for the greatest part of the time even two representatives in said Commission.

  “If Mr. Woodson should insist upon these appointments and put himself on the record as an ‘ignoramus’ and ‘knownothing,’” concluded Pulitzer, “then we hope that at least the Senate will prove that it knows its duty. We have a right to expect from the Senate the prompt rejection of such ridiculous appointments.” The senate did not share Pulitzer’s sentiments, and the nominees were promptly approved. With this loss, it seemed as if Pulitzer’s political career was at an end. He had been voted out of his House seat; the promising Liberal Republican movement had ingloriously died; and now, even with one of his best friends serving as lieutenant governor, he could not win reappointment to the police board. Pulitzer the politician was out in the cold.

  Pulitzer’s career in journalism was also imperiled. Schurz’s and Preetorius’s ardor for their young protégé had cooled. The editorial office had grown too small for all three men. Preetorius’s opposition to Pulitzer’s reappointment to the police commission strained their relationship. Schurz, who was now a pariah in his party and knew that his reelection to the U.S. Senate was doomed, resented having to share the last bit of the public stage he held. To readers, the Westliche Post had become almost as closely identified with Pulitzer as with the mostly absent Schurz. Schurz and Preetorius offered to buy Pulitzer out. The price they proposed was commensurate with their desire to be free of him. On March 19, 1873, the men concluded a deal. After paying off his notes to Preetorius and others, Pulitzer walked away from the Westliche Post with about $30,000, three to six times his original investment.

  Pulitzer immediately sought out Theodore Welge, who had assisted him in his defense after he shot Augustine. He was at a loss as to what to do with his vast sum of money. “This money he wanted me to deposit for him, which I declined to do,” Welge said. Instead, he introduced Pulitzer to an entrepreneur who had created a shipping empire of riverboats operating out of St. Louis. The man persuaded Pulitzer to entrust the money to the nineteen-year-old State Savings Institution, which paid 3 percent interest.

  Freed from the necessity of work for a while, Pulitzer left Missouri’s journalism and politics behind and headed for Europe. That he would return to St. Louis, however, was certain. Before leaving, he paid a year’s rent on a room adjoining Johnson’s law offices. He had the room carpeted and purchased a writing desk for it.

  On his way to Europe, Pulitzer visited his brother, who now lived in New York. Albert had become captivated by journalism. His choice of vocation did little to lessen the competition between the brothers. After landing a job on the Illinois Staats-Zeitung in 1869, Albert had become fluent in English by obsessively studying Dickens and Shakespeare and engaging anyone he could in conversation. Later, he set his sights on New York and on breaking out of German-language journalism. “Chicago has treated your dear Baruch very well indeed,” he wrote to their mother, using the Jewish name meaning “blessed,” “but he is going to try his fortune once more in New York. Don’t be alarmed. It is destiny.”

  Albert arrived in New York in 1871 with no prospect of work. He rented a dark room on Bleecker Street for $1 a week and sustained himself with apples that cost a penny apiece. He began his quest for a job by knocking on doors along Park Row, home to the nation’s leading newspapers. James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald, Greeley’s New York Tribune, and Charles Dana’s New York Sun, along with less-known papers such as the New York Times and the World, all plied their trade within earshot of one another. It was America’s Fleet Street.

  Only twenty years old and with only brief experience at a German paper in Chicago, Albert audaciously applied to the Sun, the most successful newspaper in the nation. Established by Benjamin Henry Day in 1833, the Sun had launched a new style of journalism in antebellum America. Instead of reporting on international and national events of limited interest to the masses, it focused on city news, violence being its favorite topic, and presented this news in a highly readable, though sometimes flippant, style. In comparison with the stodgy journals favored by city’s elite, the Sun was a blast of fresh air. It was compact, always four pages long, and, as the nation’s first penny newspaper, it was cheap.

  At the time Albert approached the Sun’s six-story building at Nassau and Frankfort streets, the paper was at the height of its fame and selling more than 100,000 copies a day. It had been bought three years earlier by Dana, who had been Greeley’s managing editor at the Tribune and was considered a genius among editors. Building on the paper’s original mission, Dana inspired and enforced a regime of tight, coherent, bright, lively writing intended to provide “a daily photograph of the whole world’s doings in the most luminous and lively manner,” as he put it in his first editorial. The paper was a pastiche or quilt of urban tales. It was an irresistible feast of information that won wide attention in an era of generally dull journalism.

  Under Dana’s regime, the paper prospered even more, and its circulation rose to new, unheard-of heights. Whereas Joseph could only dream of working for Dana, Albert was not intimidated. He walked up the flight of stairs to the Sun’s newsroom and spoke to the night editor. The editor asked Albert how long he had worked for a city newspaper.

  “Only a short time, sir,” Albert replied.

  “That’s rather vague,” the editor said, adding, “You have a slight accent.”

  “I shall not have the accent long, sir. And I write better than I speak.”

  The editor decided to give Albert a test assignment, a rather difficult one intended to discourage the youth. Albert “made a Parisian bow and disappeared,” said the editor. But to his surprise, Albert returned with the story and won himself a trial period on the staff of what many considered the best-written paper in town. In fact, soon after Albert landed this job, a letter appeared in the Sun from one reader in St. Louis. “I read The Sun regularly,” Joseph Pulitzer wrote. “In my opinion it is the most piquant, entertaining, and, without exception, the best newspaper in the world.”

  Albert rose rapidly in the ranks of city reporters. His big break came when he was assigned to cover the Halstead murder in Newark, the city’s first murder in four years. General O. S. “Pet” Halstead had been shot dead in the rooms of Mary S. Wilson, described by the New York Times as “a woman of the worst character.” Apparently George “Charcoal” Botts, a charcoal peddler who pa
id for her lodgings and company, did not take kindly to the presence of Halstead in Wilson’s bedroom. Albert wrote colorful accounts of the courtroom scenes and even obtained an interview with the condemned man a few days before his execution. “It was a kind of reporting that was new in those days, especially in Newark, and made a decided hit in this city,” a writer for the Newark Advertiser recalled.

  In February 1873, Albert moved to the New York Herald. Started by James Gordon Bennett in 1835, the Herald was in a different class from the Sun. It had pioneered the use of many modern reporting methods, such as telegraphing news and dispatching an army of correspondents to the far-flung reaches of the globe. Its in-depth reporting on finances, politics, and society, mixed with a healthy dose of crime and scandal, gave the Herald a huge circulation. Its large circulation was accompanied by heft. Unlike the Sun, the Herald was taken seriously.

  The fit was a good one for the tall, rosy-cheeked, twenty-one-year-old Albert, although his writing style was considerably different from that of his colleagues. “Everybody on the Herald admitted that Albert Pulitzer’s style was rather florid,” said an editor. “He was saturated with Dumas, Balzac, and other French writers and could ‘pile on agony’ in a court scene to an extent to which not another man about the place would have ventured.”

  After the brotherly reunion, Joseph sailed for Europe. It was the second time he had gone abroad since arriving in the United States in 1864. In Paris, he met up with Henry Watterson, one of the Quadrilateral editors who had worked behind the scenes of the Liberal Republican convention. The two spent a day wandering through Montmartre, a popular drinking and entertainment quartier. They arrived at a theater (a “hole-in-the-wall” said Watterson) where Les Brigands was playing. The three-act opera by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, set to music by Jacques Offenbach, provided a theatrical revenge for the French, who had lost the Franco-Prussian war two years earlier. Parisians erupted in wild applause when the heroine, Joan the Maid, sent the beer-guzzling Teuton chieftain sprawling onto the sawdust-covered floor.