Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

The Evening Chronicle’s fresh tone and low price attracted readers, and its pricing policy stirred up the newsboys to demand that Pulitzer sell them three, instead of two, copies of his paper for five cents. When he refused, the boys once again staged a strike of sorts. Some of them stood outside the Post-Dispatch offices and taunted others who tried to deliver papers. Pulitzer was unfazed. Unembarrassed to be waging an industrial war against children, Pulitzer knew that, as in his previous skirmish with the boys, he could withstand their assaults. He defended himself to his readers, pointing out he made only as much on each newspaper sold as the newsboys did, “and we furnish the white paper, ink, presswork, type-setting, and just enough brains to keep the thing going.”

  Pulitzer was comforted also by the Post-Dispatch’s continued growth. The paper had already surpassed the circulation of Hyde’s Republican by 25 percent. Only McCullagh’s morning Globe-Democrat outsold the Post-Dispatch, and Pulitzer anticipated that he would overtake it within months. With the growth in circulation came continued prosperity. Pulitzer’s cashier predicted that the paper should net more than $85,000 by the end of 1880.

  On August 8, Charles Johnson stopped in at Pulitzer’s house and found Pulitzer huddled with Irish ward bosses, discussing his plan to run for Congress. Johnson, who had earlier tried to persuade Pulitzer not to pursue a career in law or politics, told him the project was an act of folly. But Pulitzer wasn’t in a mood to listen. His hunger for political office was so overpowering that he ignored both his old friend and his own ethics.

  To get the nomination, Pulitzer was willing to dance with the devil. In this case his name was Ed Butler, also known as “de boss of St. Louis” or more unassumingly as “the village blacksmith.” Butler, who had been born in Ireland in 1838, ran a smithing business in the Fifth Ward, which Pulitzer had represented in the state legislature. Early on, Butler found it profitable to get involved in city politics. After helping one mayoral candidate in 1872, he earned the contract to shoe the city government’s horses and, later, the horses that pulled the city’s trolleys. By 1880, Butler’s power extended over the entire city. His powerful organization was known to its detractors as the “Dark Lantern.”

  Butler had a simple system. For the payment of a fee to the Dark Lantern, a candidate would receive the Democratic nomination. Although this was the kind of corrupt practice the Post-Dispatch denounced, Pulitzer himself paid between $6,000 and $10,000. It was worth it. Being nominated was tantamount to winning the election, as the Second District was overwhelmingly Democratic.

  Believing that his nomination was secure and that he would be in Congress when the Democrats regained the White House, Pulitzer refocused his energy on the national campaign. As he had in 1872 and 1876, he turned to Indiana. It was widely believed that its 15 electoral votes, perhaps with New York state’s 30, would decide the election. Indiana was also one of the states that had additional political importance, because it held its elections for state office in October, helping build momentum for the winning party in the national vote a month later. “We all regard Indiana as the battle ground,” Pulitzer wrote to the vice presidential candidate, English.

  Pulitzer crafted a speech to give in Indianapolis, where Schurz had delivered a long and widely noted address for the Republicans. In a sense, this would be a reprise of the 1876 election, when Pulitzer indirectly debated his former mentor. But in the four years that had passed since then, Pulitzer had become a newspaper publisher whose fame was equal to, if not greater than, Schurz’s. The Democratic press now described Pulitzer as the editor of “one of the most influential papers” Republicans called him “notorious.” In either case, he was no longer simply the “German orator.”

  Pulitzer was pleased with this transformation. He told organizers in Indianapolis that he would make his speech in English. If they insisted, he could deliver a second address in German. “There is no difference to me whatever between the two languages,” he said. “I prefer to deliver the principal speech in English solely because I know that will make it more effective—even among Germans.”

  On the evening of August 14, Pulitzer stood before a large crowd in the Indianapolis Wigwam, an auditorium often used for political functions. For almost an hour, he accused the Republicans of demagoguery and centralization. In an unusually personal moment, Pulitzer said he was better equipped than native-born men to recognize the danger, describing how he came to the United States “friendless, homeless, tongueless, guideless” and how he renounced his allegiance to an emperor to become a citizen. “I joyfully complied with that condition,” he said. “I have kept faith; I am only keeping faith now.”

  Launching his most direct attack yet as a politician, publisher, or orator, Pulitzer challenged America’s upper class and the elected officials who did its bidding. In a succession of sentences that left both speaker and audience breathless, Pulitzer said, “Show me a land where one person controls 8,000 miles of railroad, mostly built by government subsidies; where another has forty-seven million of government bonds registered in his name, and where still another can appear at a White House reception with diamonds on her body worth over a million dollars; show me a land where the money power, the organized capital, privileges and monopolies of the country, the railroads, telegraphs, banks, protected manufacturers, etc. are favored and fostered by the government…and you have shown me imperialism. It is the issue of the hour and the duty of the Democracy is to meet it, battle it, overthrow it, and restore and re-establish the sane principle of true, popular, self-government.”

  Pulitzer did not frame the election in terms of commonplace issues such as tariffs or civil service reform. Rather, he argued that the growing prosperity of the nation endangered its political freedoms. The wealthy, who benefited most from industrialization, were seeking to protect their interests by controlling the government. “Let us have prosperity, but never at the expense of liberty, never at the expense of real self-government, and let us never have a government in Washington owing its retention to the power of the millionaires rather than the will of the millions.”

  In September, Pulitzer set aside his work for the national ticket in order to tend to his own race for Congress. Anyone else might have been simply content to enjoy success as a publisher. But Pulitzer was not yet ready to give up his pursuit of elective office. His ambition had taken root when, at a formative age, he had watched Carl Schurz win office, respect, success, and adulation through journalism. For one who had Pulitzer’s ego and need for control, politics was a siren—even more so when, after he had been rejected by voters, it offered redemption in the form of a comeback.

  As the primary neared, the acrimony between Pulitzer and Hyde increased. Still stinging from his defeat in Moberly, Hyde was not going to let Pulitzer seize his mantle without a fight. He and his paper’s publisher, Charles Knapp, set to work to derail Pulitzer’s nomination. They persuaded Thomas Allen, president of Iron Mountain Railroad, to give up his aspirations for the Senate and run for the House seat. Even though he had once charitably given Pulitzer’s brother a job, Allen despised the Post-Dispatch and the older Pulitzer. There was no doubt how Pulitzer felt about him. When Allen ran for the Senate in 1879, Pulitzer had fired off an editorial barrage, attacking him as a tool of capital, and insisting that if he was elected the railroads would rule the state. “No one outside of the lunatic asylum,” Pulitzer wrote, “believes that Tom Allen’s name would be even mentioned if, instead of having riches and railroads, he were poor and penniless.”

  With Allen’s entry into the race, the other candidates withdrew, leaving the field to the newspaper publisher and railroad magnate. “His candidacy simply represents the spite, the hatred, the jealousy and business rivalry of the Knapp cabal,” wrote Pulitzer in an editorial “There never was a better time to put a quietus on the dictatorial gang of political pirates who infest the Republican office.”

  Calling Pulitzer a demagogue who prostituted his paper by turning it into a mudslinging machine, Hyde said that the
Post-Dispatch would not thwart Allen’s candidacy. “If anybody is to be hurt by the dirt-throwing, which the Post-Dispatch began as soon as Mr. Allen consented to run for Congress, it is Pulitzer. His mud will all fall back on himself, and it will stick there.”

  Hyde enlisted the wealthiest and most influential residents of each ward to serve as delegates, election judges, and clerks in the primary. Together they brought economic pressure to bear on Butler and his Dark Lantern organization by threatening Butler’s control of the streetcar shoeing business. The plan worked. The night before the primary, Butler’s men were ordered to change their votes to Allen.

  The Republican greeted Election Day with confidence. The campaign had taken such a turn that it was almost like a chapter from Alice in Wonderland. Everything was now upside down. Allen, the railroad magnate representing St. Louis’s oligarchy, was running as the candidate of reform. Pulitzer, the real enemy of entrenched interests, was tainted by his brief fling with corrupt machine politics. The paper urged voters “to bury Pulitzer out of sight at the Democratic primary election today.” That’s what they did. Pulitzer received only 721 votes to Allen’s 4,274. In Butler’s ward, Pulitzer did not receive a single vote. “The machine, as I expected, sold Pulitzer out,” Johnson wrote that night in his diary.

  When Pulitzer lost his seat in the legislature in 1870, it had been at the hands of the opposing political party. Now his own party rejected him. Despite his ego and his mounting sense of importance, Pulitzer accepted this shellacking. Johnson was impressed. “Pulitzer takes his defeat more philosophically than I should,” he said. The day following the election, Pulitzer told his readers, “The past is past. We have nothing to take back. We look and think forward, not backward.” The nomination had been settled with the selection of Allen. “The next question is, Shall he be elected? We say, emphatically, Yes!”

  Pulitzer wasted no time before returning to the stump for the national ticket, leaving behind a pregnant Kate, nearing her due date. Only a few days after his departure, on October 3, 1880, she gave birth to their second child, Lucille Irma. Father would not meet his new baby for several weeks because in Pulitzer’s world little if anything was more important than an election. In this case, he had an executive committee meeting in New York and was to give speeches along the way in Ohio. He arrived at the national Democratic headquarters full of enthusiasm. “I have not the slightest doubt of carrying Indiana,” he told a reporter. “Why should I?”

  But, the reporter persisted, “the story is here that the Republicans are preparing to send a great deal of money into Indiana.”

  “I see that this story is circulated,” said Pulitzer. “With the shadow of the Presidential contest projected over the State battle, I do not believe money will change enough votes to affect the results in any appreciable manner.”

  Following the party leaders’ meeting, Pulitzer took to the road again. He first went to Boston and then quickly headed back to Indiana and Ohio, predicting victory to all he met. “If Ohio were to elect tomorrow it would go Democratic,” Pulitzer told one reporter. But the election would turn on Indiana, he predicted. “It is agreed on all sides that as Indiana goes this year, so goes the Union.”

  Pulitzer had one major speech scheduled before the Buckeyes and Hoosiers voted. On October 7, he was the main event at a large Democratic, and very German, rally at Memorial Park in Cleveland, Ohio. Pulitzer dug right into his class-based attack on the Republicans. He asked the Germans in the audience if they had not left their native land to escape a government controlled by one class. The ruling class would turn the United States into the same system they had escaped unless their participation in the election turned the tide. Allied against them, he warned, were an army of patronage and a coalition of corporations, banks, and railroads. “The Blaines, Conklings, Shermans and others traveling on special trains, unlike common people; hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars raised by Wall Street and capitalists in Boston, New England, and Philadelphia. Raised for what? To corrupt the elections and prevent a change.”

  Despite the size and enthusiasm of the crowd, Pulitzer sensed that the tide in these two crucial state elections was not in the Democrats’ favor. He was right. Several days later, the Republicans scored an easy victory in Ohio and squeaked by in Indiana. The prospects for the White House looked dim once again. Nonetheless Pulitzer continued his campaign, making speeches in the crucial state of New York. Speaking in Chickering Hall on Fifth Avenue, he clung tenaciously to his populist themes. “The country is in danger, not from below, but from above; not from segregation, but from centralization and imperialism—from organized corporations, organized privileges, and from the army of 100,000 office holders.”

  Pulitzer the journalist dropped any pretense of confidence. He telegraphed a signed article back to the Post-Dispatch with a gloomy estimation of Hancock’s chances in the election. In fact, Pulitzer went as far as to forecast a victory for Garfield, earning the wrath of other partisan papers. Such a prediction was the political equivalent of violating baseball’s prohibition against using the term “no-hitter” before the last batter is out.

  When Election Day came, it looked for a brief time as if Pulitzer would be proved wrong. The popular vote turned out to be a virtual tie: each major candidate had 48.3 percent of the vote, with the remainder going to third-party candidates. But the electoral votes gave Garfield the election. With Indiana and Ohio voting Republican, New York turned out to be the key state. A shift of a few thousand votes in the Empire State—5,517, to be precise—would have made Hancock president. The lesson was not lost on Pulitzer, who studied election maps with a mania. If the Democrats were to end their drought, those votes would need to be found in New York.

  His dream of owning a New York paper took on new urgency.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ST. LOUIS GROWS SMALL

  On many nights in early 1881, Pulitzer lay awake in his bed listening to the bells of the St. Louis Pilgrim Congressional Church peal out the passing hours. The third- or fourth-largest set of bells in the United States, they could be easily heard across the city. Pulitzer liked the ringing because it let him know how much time remained until dawn. The long, taxing days and the never-ending demands at the paper had taken a toll. Even though success was near, Pulitzer found it harder to sleep. But his insomnia did not stem from business worries. It was as if he could not shut down.

  Neither the Post-Dispatch nor Pulitzer had financial woes. The paper’s net income was growing every month, and Pulitzer himself brought home more than $4,000 a month—more than what many of his elite neighbors earned. The only business challenge facing Pulitzer that spring was a modest one. The local typographical union wanted the Post-Dispatch to recognize it as the bargaining agent for the paper’s compositors and printers, as the Globe-Democrat had done. Intellectually, Pulitzer was sympathetic to the aims of the labor movement. But this was different from writing an editorial dictating the behavior of others. Pulitzer would not abide anything that challenged his rule within the paper.

  A few printers sought to meet with Pulitzer and threatened to stop work if their demands were not met. Pulitzer was absent, so no meeting occurred. Nor would the meeting occur upon his return, because these printers were summarily fired by his managers. The Post-Dispatch, Pulitzer declared, “declines to be told who it shall and shall not employ. It refuses to be instructed as to how to measure its type, feed its press and to be limited to the number of apprentices it shall take into office training.” He conceded that workers had the right to organize “but the right to manage the internal affairs of this office, employ and discharge and to direct when and how labor shall be performed, is one that the proprietor reserves to himself.” Simply put, Pulitzer was a democrat in politics, but a paternalistic despot in the office.

  Pulitzer, however, did not treat his workers badly. In fact, the 1881 campaign by the typographical union came to an end because an overwhelming majority of Pulitzer’s compositors had sig
ned a statement proclaiming their happiness with their working conditions and their loyalty to their boss. Pulitzer paid better than other publishers, granted vacation time, frequently rewarded good work with bonuses, and remained intensely loyal to those who served him. He even gave his employees wedding and birthday gifts. At Christmas, he made it a tradition to send turkeys to his staff, and newsboys were invited to yuletide dinners where the tables groaned under the weight of food.

  Pulitzer claimed that his benevolence was self-serving. “Without good men you cannot get good work, and without good work no paper can prosper largely,” he said. Yet he was deeply charitable. Once he became wealthy, he rarely declined any financial appeal, and he was particularly receptive to appeals from people he had met on his way up. For the remainder of his life, he quietly made arrangements to send monthly checks to widows of men who had toiled for him. He remembered how his mother had faced poverty when her husband died.

  That Pulitzer was absent when the printers came to see him was not surprising. As during the 1880 campaign, he used his increasing freedom from managerial responsibilities to spend time in the East. No matter how successful he was in St. Louis, New York remained the center of American journalism and politics. Pulitzer wanted in.

  With its theaters, concert halls, museums, banks, corporations, and millionaires, New York was the capital of everything important in the United States. Swampy, uncivilized Washington, D.C., may have been the seat of government, but New York remained the capital of politics. In journalism, Park Row was the dream destination of every reporter and editor. In the few short blocks, more newspapers were clustered than in any other spot of the world. Their offices were so substantial, their circulation was so large, and their news gathering was so extensive that the rest of nation’s papers seemed like small-town sheets.