Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  For more than an hour, Pulitzer’s attacks on his former political party enthralled his decidedly partisan audience. Although he was still called a “German orator” and his command of English had been long in coming, he now displayed the erudition inspired by Davidson and acquired at the Mercantile Library. The speech was well organized, with broad themes supported by clever use of examples, possessed an effective cadence, built on alliterative lines, and marshaled such linguistic force that it both inspired converts and won grudging respect from the opposition. The Indianapolis Sentinel reproduced his speech in full, and it was quoted in newspapers as far away as Texas.

  Fresh from his triumph in Indianapolis, Pulitzer dashed around the state, speaking at a dozen smaller venues. He took time to stop in Cincinnati and visit with John Cockerill, whom he had met at the Liberal Republican Convention. As in 1872, Pulitzer and Cockerill were on the same side politically, but now only one of them commanded a newspaper. It wasn’t Pulitzer. Cockerill had risen to become managing editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, a Democratic paper, and was using every part of his seven-column editorial page to boost Tilden’s candidacy, accusing the Republicans of illicit use of money and power.

  In mid-September, Pulitzer dropped off the campaign trail for two days of rest in St. Louis. From his room at the Southern Hotel, he sent an exultant letter to the famous journalist George Alfred Townsend, another veteran of Greeley’s campaign. “My success was probably as astonishing to myself as it was to others. If you looked at the Western papers you probably saw how undeservedly well I was treated.” The false humility of the letter was betrayed by his real objective in writing. Pulitzer wanted Townsend to publish a sketch about his life. To that end, he enclosed an entry about him from a new book. “You certainly have sufficient data now,” Pulitzer wrote. “If possible try to get it into the Philadelphia Times.” Campaigning for Tilden served the party’s cause, but it also benefited Pulitzer’s cause. “Whether Tilden or Hayes be elected,” Pulitzer said, “I shall strive to bring some reputation out of this campaign.”

  The next day Pulitzer returned to the railroad and a grueling campaign schedule that took him to Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Boston, and New York. On the road, he continued to hammer away at Hayes, and at Levi Morton, financial chairman of the Republican National Committee. But he added a new target. With growing regularity, Pulitzer took aim at Carl Schurz, who had come in from the cold and was now supporting the Republican ticket. “If the great Schurz tells the truth, the great Morton is a liar,” Pulitzer said in one speech, highlighting the inconsistencies of the two men and drawing cheers. “If the great Morton tells the truth, the great Schurz is a liar,” he continued, to increasing cheers. And then, bringing down the house, he concluded, “If they both speak the truth they must both be liars!”

  To the delight of the press, Pulitzer challenged Schurz to debate him. Schurz’s spokesman gave a dismissive response wrapped in courteous language. “In arranging for a joint discussion between gentlemen,” said the spokesman, “certainly some regard should be had to their character, services, and reputation. Having this in view, of course the proposition is declined.” Pulitzer’s friend Hutchins couldn’t resist joining the fray with a jab or two of his own in the St. Louis Times. “Of course, Mr. Schurz will not consent to a discussion of the issues of the campaign with Mr. Pulitzer, because he would be the last man to acknowledge the intellectual equality of his former lieutenant and associate.”

  Although Schurz remained above the fray, his paper did not let the attack pass unchallenged. The Westliche Post published a long, scathing article on its former star reporter, editor, and part owner. “The advantage and gain, should such a debate have taken place, would all be on the side of Pulitzer,” said the paper, taking Pulitzer’s favorite tack: sarcasm. “The contest would have been like one between a louse and an elephant—the former could climb upon the latter, but the elephant would crush the louse with his left toe.” Even the New York Times, which had excoriated Schurz during the Liberal Republican revolt, now took his side. Pulitzer “belongs to the large class of unappreciated fools who mistake themselves for great men. Who is there to mourn for Pulitzer? No one.”

  Pulitzer sought to portray his feud with Schurz as political, not personal. But his actions wounded their friendship, and Pulitzer confessed as much in late September. “I followed myself in the course of this counterfeit reformer with enthusiasm and admiration only possible to the warm impulses of youth that blind cold judgment,” he said. “But however much I should have preferred in ordinary times to remain silent at the grave of departed friendship, the present crisis in our history must dwarf all personal considerations.”

  The drudgery of stump speeches, the tedium of railway travel, and battered friendships faded as October brought encouraging news. Democrats won the state elections in both Indiana and Ohio. The result was the very outcome that Tilden’s opponent, Hayes, feared. It seemed as if a victory for Tilden was now only a matter of time. With a favorable political wind at his back, Pulitzer appeared at the biggest venue yet—Detroit’s opera house—on October 18. He was introduced to the capacity audience as the man Schurz wouldn’t face. “And,” said the speaker introducing him, “Mr. Pulitzer, I promise you, will first analyze Mr. Schurz and then pulverize him.”

  As in his other speeches, Pulitzer tore into Schurz. But this time he also offered his most direct explanation yet of his political migration during the past decade. “I am glad to say I am no partisan,” he said. “I cordially cooperated with the Republican Party so long as it pursued the right path, and as cordially oppose it now, convinced that it is a mass of corruption. I do battle willingly for Tilden and Reform and will as freely oppose misrule by the Democratic Party.”

  At the end of October, Pulitzer reached New York City. By this time he had given more than seventy speeches, but he remained willing to deliver a few more in Brooklyn, in Queens, and across the river in Hoboken, New Jersey. New York Democrats rewarded him with an honor, including him among the guests at a reception at the Manhattan Club for the party’s presidential candidate. About 300 politicians attended, including members of the Democratic National Committee; August Belmont, the banker and American minister; and Oakey Hall, the former mayor, whom Albert had famously trapped in a bathroom for an interview.

  Pulitzer’s role in the campaign came to an end the following evening with a speech at Cooper Union, the great hall where, in 1860, a relatively unknown Abraham Lincoln had given a famous address that set him on the path to the White House. To cheers and the accompaniment of a band, Pulitzer once again took up Schurz as his theme. “I came here to answer Carl Schurz,” he said. “And in speaking of him you will pardon me for saying that I do so more in a spirit of sorrow than of anger. I have no ill feeling against him.

  “In earlier days I followed the leadership of that man, but I am free to say that if I ever did think he was a great light which any patriotic citizen could follow, I think now that he is but a great Will ’o the wisp,” he continued, to the laughter of the mostly German crowd. Then, casting doubt on his claim that he had no ill feeling toward Schurz, Pulitzer continued his attack, like a dog unwilling to loosen its grip on a bone. He highlighted all of Schurz’s inconsistencies, changes of heart, and electoral vacillations. “He is perfectly consistent in advocating the election of every popular candidate whose nomination he had previously denounced and damned, and also damning and denouncing the nomination of every popular candidate whose election he afterward supported and favored.”

  Bringing his assault on Schurz to a close, Pulitzer then made his pitch to elect a Democrat for the first time since before the Civil War. “I stand here to say the war is over, and it is time that it should be,” Pulitzer said. Ringing out one applause line after another, he told the audience that the Union had not been saved for robbers, thieves, and carpetbaggers. “The Southern people belong to us and we belong to them. Their interests are our interests; their rights should be our rights; the
ir wrongs should be our wrongs. Their prosperity is our prosperity; their poverty is our poverty,” he said, to waves of applause and cheers. “We are one people, one country, and one government; and whoever endeavors to make the union of all the people impossible, is a traitor to his country.”

  The New York Sun gave front-page coverage to Pulitzer’s address at Cooper Union. As an unabashed admirer of the Sun and of its editor, Pulitzer went to call on Charles Dana. The Sun was on the same block of Park Row as the New York Tribune’s new building, which rose ten stories and towered over everything else in New York except the spire of Trinity Church. As newspapers sought new ways to find readers, the circulation wars of Park Row expanded into architecture. Dana had abstained from this new battle. The structure that housed his enterprise, which had once served as headquarters to Tammany Hall, was aging and run-down. To reach Dana’s office, Pulitzer ascended a narrow iron spiral staircase and passed through a cavernous loft filled with reporters and editors dashing about, shouting, in an atmosphere of controlled bedlam.

  The famous editor’s office was a quiet refuge. From its door, its occupant and his long, white flowing beard and gleaming, bespectacled eyes gave him almost a look of Santa Claus. (Years later, after Dana’s time, the Sun published the famous editorial “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus.”) But Dana’s personality was hardly charitable. Not only were his editorials direct, pointed, often caustic, and at times abusive; he also ran a very efficient, no-nonsense, parsimonious business.

  Although he was much Dana’s junior, Pulitzer had a lot in common with him politically. The Grant administration had caused them both to abandon the Republican camp. But, unlike Schurz, Dana was willing to support a Democrat. Tilden had been a favorite of Dana’s since his fight against the Tweed Ring, and the Sun had contributed heavily to his election as governor of New York. Now Dana hoped his paper would help put his man in the White House.

  After a while, Dana brought Pulitzer out of his office and introduced him to his editor and heir apparent, Edward P. Mitchell. The paper was in a frenzy over the election, but the topic foremost on Pulitzer’s mind was his own desire to get a perch in New York journalism. He had tried and failed to buy the New York Belletristisches Journal. Only months before, while walking with a friend in Washington, he had confessed that he still couldn’t shake off his ambition to run a New York paper. Now he shared his idea with Mitchell and Dana.

  Pulitzer told the men he wanted to launch a German edition of the Sun to compete with the New York Staats-Zeitung, a prominent German paper. The plan he put forward was that the Sun would own and publish the new paper but that he would edit it, translate for it, and add his own material. Dana, however, was uninterested, and Pulitzer left, no closer to breaking into Park Row.

  On election night, the nation’s telegraph lines transmitted the results to New York, where the parties had their headquarters. As predicted, Hayes carried most of New England, but his margins were weaker than those of Grant four years earlier. Tilden carried New York and New Jersey, both states that Grant had won. In the Midwest, Tilden won Indiana, Missouri, and a solid swatch of states to the south. It looked as though the electoral count, though close, would be in the Democrats’ favor for the first time since before the Civil War. The popular vote was unquestionably for the Democrat: Tilden had 51 percent of it, and Hayes 48 percent.

  But as the night went on, Oregon and three states in the South refused to fall into the Democratic column. The southern states were South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana—coincidentally, the last remaining Confederate states in which Grant still kept federal troops. As officials squabbled over the results, the electoral votes from the four disputed states were not tallied. In the morning, Tilden had 184 electoral votes, one short of the majority needed to win. Hayes had 165.

  The nation’s partisan press roared to life, each newspaper declaring its man the winner and refusing to concede. Pulitzer quickly joined the fray. Writing in the St. Louis Times, he bravely proclaimed that the “hopes of Republicans about the result of the election are as groundless as the fears of the Democrats. Mr. Tilden is elected.” Whether he was putting on a brave face, believing that this was tactically smart, or was unable to concede that his side might have lost, Pulitzer continued to claim Tilden had won.

  “I do not share the grave apprehensions of nearly all my Democratic friends,” he said a week later. In every scenario that he could dream up, such as the election’s being thrown into the House or the Senate’s certifying the contested states, the result would still give the presidency to the Democrats. “For these reasons I don’t think there’s much ground for serious alarm about the final results,” he said. If it were to come out differently, Grant and the Republicans “would be the rebels fighting against their country.”

  In New York, Dana refused to doubt that the election was anything but a victory for Tilden. But it became clear that the outcome would be resolved by Congress. For the second time in a decade, Dana hired Pulitzer to write for the paper. He asked him to go to Washington and cover the disputed election. It was a choice assignment. When Pulitzer arrived in Washington in late December, the unresolved election had stirred the city into a frenzy. Armed conflict did not seem out of the question, especially after President Grant stationed additional soldiers near the city. “It is not impossible that such a condition of affairs might have led to bloodshed,” wrote one politically savvy observer.

  As a member of the Washington press corps, Pulitzer watched the comings and goings at the Capitol, interviewed members of the Senate, and kept an ear open to the conversations of the city’s politicos. His first dispatches to the Sun appeared just after Christmas. They were a marvel of optimism. “There will be no war,” he began. “The woman that hesitates is lost. The Republican confederates hesitated. They will lose.”

  By this point, both the House and the Senate had appointed special committees to devise a means of resolving the election. Pulitzer believed that the outcome rested in the hands of nine Republican senators. “My answer, based upon close observation, direct information, and personal conversation with the members of the Senate, is that these nine will be found on the right side when they are really needed,” Pulitzer reported.

  Dana permitted Pulitzer a byline, a rare privilege in that era; and, considering that the Sun was only a four-page paper, the space devoted to his dispatches gave Pulitzer considerable prominence. For the first two weeks of January 1877, Pulitzer continued to predict a victory for Tilden. Pulitzer’s reasoning was not without foundation. By the end of January, the House and Senate had passed, with strong Democratic support, a bill creating the Electoral Commission, whose job it would be to resolve the election, presumably in Tilden’s favor.

  Pulitzer did not limit his advocacy of Tilden to the pages of the Sun. On January 8, 1877, he joined his friend Watterson at a mass meeting at Ford’s Theater under the auspices of the Tilden-Hendricks Reform Club. Though the flyers had promised that prominent members of Congress would attend, the two most recognizable speakers turned out to be Watterson and Pulitzer. Watterson offered a fiery denunciation of the Republicans’ efforts to thwart Tilden’s election. He declared that 100,000 unarmed citizens would descend on the capital on February 14. The announcement startled many Democrats, who had heard of no plans for any demonstration. Pulitzer followed Watterson’s lead and delivered a harangue that even a sympathetic newspaper called “incendiary and revolutionary.” Pulitzer said he was “ready to bare his breast to the bullets of the tyrant, and rush headlong upon his glittering steel.”

  Pulitzer’s intemperate speech troubled Dana. Pulitzer’s dispatches disappeared from the pages of the Sun for the remainder of the month. It was not until February 10 that Pulitzer resumed his articles. By then, it was becoming clear Tilden’s cause was lost. The Electoral Commission was going to side with the Republicans because a tactical mistake had resulted in giving the deciding vote on the fifteen-member panel to a Republican. “When the work of the return
ing boards of South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida was finally completed,” Pulitzer wrote, “and these states given to Mr. Hayes, wresting the fruits of success from the party to whom they have seemed to belong, by a bare majority of one, the chagrin of the Democratic Party was deep seated and bitter to the last degree.”

  On March 2, the wrangling came to an end. Congress awarded the presidency to Hayes. Democrats accepted the result because a tacit deal had been made whereby their acquiescence would be rewarded with a withdrawal of federal troops from the South. In fact, after assuming office, Hayes removed the remaining federal forces from southern state capitals, and Reconstruction came to an effective end. The Democrats lost the White House, but for southern Democrats, their second rebellion against the national government—this one nonviolent—was a success. Dana could not accept the defeat. For the next four years, his paper referred to Hayes as the “Fraudulent President.”

  Disgusted, Pulitzer left Washington for St. Louis. A week after the inauguration, he admitted the fight was over. “We may have lost much as American citizens, but we have lost little as partisans,” he wrote. “It is only four years. We have not been defeated, but defrauded.”

  The loss stung. Pulitzer understood that politics, though exhilarating, could include defeats, but each path he took came to the same conclusion. As a Republican, he had lost his office. As an insurgent reformer, he had joined a movement that went nowhere. And, now after crossing a political Rubicon by changing his affiliation to a party whose victory seemed inevitable, the result was unchanged. It was not hard to conclude that politics, like journalism, seemed to be a dead end.