Pulitzer
Page 62
A seat on: Johnson, Diary, 1/15/1872, WRR, 23. Amazingly, as of 2006, the governor of Missouri still appointed the police commissioners in St. Louis; and even more remarkably, they still earned $1,000 a year for their service.
The conservative Anzeiger: Anzeiger Des Westens, 1/18/1872, translated in MoDe, 1/23/1872, 3; Western Celt quoted in MoDe, 1/18/1872, 2.
The grumbling by the press: MoDe, 1/19/1872, 1. One of the five senators from St. Louis voted against Pulitzer. His identity was not publicly disclosed, because only the delegation’s total vote was leaked to the press, but certainly Pulitzer knew who it was.
CHAPTER 7: POLITICS AND REBELLION
In writing about the 1872 convention there is a danger of adopting Henry Watterson’s view that it was a gathering of cranks with little chance of succeeding against Grant. The reality of politics at the time probably did doom the Liberal Republican effort no matter who it nominated, but to the conventiongoers it was a serious affair, an act of rebellion against what they perceived as crimes against democracy. That said, the convention did generate some wonderfully hilarious coverage. My favorite is a little book called That Convention; Or Five Days a Politician self-published by Fletcher G. Welch and illustrated (profusely) by Frank Beard.
In late January: MoDe, 12/18/1871, 2.
As these: Peterson, Freedom and Franchise, 206; Grand Duke Alexis’s arrival in New York City a few months earlier was covered by Albert Pulitzer, who was then working for the New York Sun.
As Liberal Republican: MoDe, 12/18/1871, 2, and 1/24/1872, 1.
McCullagh was among: Dreiser, Newspaper Days, 107. McCullagh also became the subject of a poem by Eugene Field called “Little Mack.”
On his first: MoDe, 1/25/1872, 1. The microfilm for this edition is almost unreadable. Copies of the original paper at the Library of Congress don’t include this particular date, but a clipping from the edition may be found in the Grosvenor Papers, Columbia University.
That night Pulitzer: Grosvenor’s remark was contained in a letter published in an unidentified newspaper, 2/15/1872, WG-CU, Box II.
Grosvenor ascended the: SeDe, 2/27/1872, 2. Benecke was given a seat on the committee for a permanent organization, and he and Johnson were assigned to the resolutions committee. (People’s Tribune, 1/31/1872, 3.)
Their work complete: MoDe, 1/25/1872, 1.
Grosvenor and Pulitzer were keenly: NYT, 4/24/1872, 1. The New York Times’s effort to “correct” the Associated Press’s coverage of the convention was a dispatch from St. Louis that appeared on 1/27/1872, 3. “The Associated Press report of the so-called Liberal Republican Convention, at Jefferson City, on the 24th, was a gross exaggeration of the importance of the whole affair,” it read in part. See Ross, The Liberal Republican Movement, 151–152, for a discussion of personal abuse and misrepresentation in the press during the 1872 campaign. The Times’s articles on Liberal Republicans were so poisonous that the paper lost much of the reputation it had gained in 1871 when it brought down Boss Tweed by publishing evidence of his corruption.
In the short span: Unidentified 1872 newspaper clipping in WG-CU, Box II; MoDe, 1/26/1872, WG-CU. Pulitzer’s public profile was sufficient that he was among the targets of a fraudulent telegram supposedly from President Grant but concocted by Grant’s opponents. Printed on the front page of the Sedalia Daily Democrat, the telegram, purportedly to the chair of the Radical Convention, read: “Return my thanks to the Republicans of Missouri for the confidence reposed in me. Will defeat the plans of Sumner and Schurz. Show this to Brown, Pulitzer and Charley Johnson.” (SeDe, 2/27/1872, 1.)
When he got back: Scharf, History of Saint Louis City and County, Vol. 1, 743–744; Morris, The Police Department of St. Louis.
The police commission: Minutes of the St. Louis Police Commission, 8/30/1872, 347–352, SLPDL.
For the first few months: Minutes, 3/5/1872, 287–290, SLPDL. Pulitzer’s association with this led to two myths about him. His biographer Seitz claimed that Pulitzer “warred with the local gambling ring,” but an anonymous biographer, who published a political tract intended on thwarting Pulitzer’s bid for the U.S. Senate, claimed that he had been on the take: Tusa, “Power, Priorities, and Political Insurgency,” 188. Pulitzer was absent from the police commission meetings for the first time on 3/30/1872 (Minutes); Brown to Grosvenor, 2/17/1782 WG-CU. Pulitzer’s March trip to the East is mentioned in MoDe, 3/13/1872, 2.
As the Cincinnati convention: MoDe, undated but weeks before the convention, Clippings files, Box II, WG-CU.
On an April evening: Johnson, undated April diary entry, WRR, 26.
Pulitzer and Grosvenor left: Croffut, An American Procession, 142. Pulitzer was actually twenty-five at the time.
Reaching Cincinnati in: Chamberlin, The Struggle of ’72, 334.
Not only did the convention put Pulitzer: King, Pulitzer’s Prize Editor, 77.
The group agreed: Henry Watterson, “The Humor and Tragedy of the Greeley Campaign,” Century Magazine, Vol. 85 (November 1912), 29–33. This account also appears in Watterson’s memoirs, but the version published by Century is of greater value because it is accompanied by letters from Horace White and Whitelaw Reid, who read and commented on it. See also NYT, 5/1/1872, 1.
On May 1: Watterson, Henry Marse: An Autobiography, Vol. 1, 242–243. Appropriately, the hall to which the delegates made their way was built over a potter’s field that had been used by the Commercial Hospital and Lunatic Asylum.
At noon, Grosvenor: The Philadelphia Inquirer erroneously reported his appointment as “Joseph Pulitzer, of Wisconsin.” Evidently Pulitzer’s fame as a warrior in the Liberal Republican cause had not yet reached the City of Brotherly Love. (Philadelphia Inquirer, 5/3/1872, 8.)
The next day: Proceedings of the Liberal Republican Convention, 9–10.
Schurz’s speech concluded: Newspaper clipping, unknown paper and undated, Box II, WG-CU.
When the bleary-eyed delegates: Lena C. Logan, “Henry Watterson and the Liberal Convention of 1872,” Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 40, No. 4 (December 1944), 335.
Watterson, who had: Watterson, “The Humor and Tragedy,” 39.
The contest narrowed: An excellent account of the convention may be found in Matthew T. Downey, “Horace Greeley and the Politicians: The Liberal Republican Convention in 1872,” Journal of American History, Vol. 53, No. 4 (March 1967), 727–750.
Despite all of: Watterson, “The Humor and Tragedy,” 39.
Back in St. Louis: Looking back at the convention at the end of the year, Schurz called it “the ‘slaughter house’ of the most splendid opportunities of our time.”(Schurz to Grosvenor, December 25, 1872, WG-CU.) “Schurz about an hour ago finally agreed to recede from his Cincinnati speech and adopt the popular word of ‘anybody to beat Grant.’” And, in fact, Schurz wrote an editorial in which he repudiated or, in the words of the Missouri Democrat, “ate” his previous condemnation.
Of concern to: JP to Reid, 6/12/1872 and Reid to JP 6/17/1872, WR-LC.
A sense of optimism: ChTr, 6/22/1872, 4.
But Pulitzer’s work: ChTr, 7/15/1872, 6.
After New York: Minutes of the St. Louis Police Board, August 14–December 3, 1872, SLPDL; DCS-JP, 74; ChTr, 7/22/1872, 2; MoDe, 9/20/1872, 2.
Police commission work: JP to Schurz, 9/24/1872, CS.
As fall approached: Wolf, The Presidents I Have Known, 84–85.
The campaign produced: Schurz mentioned acquiring a larger number of shares in the paper at about this time, in a letter to his parents. (Schurz to parents, 11/14/1872, CS; JP to St. Clair McKelway, NYW, 11/7/1913.)
The potential changes: MoDe, 9/19/1872.
Within a week: The original note is in the possession of Eric P. Newman of St. Louis: Pulitzer to Schurz, 9/24/1872, CS. Typically, Pulitzer also claims that because of his efforts “our newspaper is already much better!” The Indianapolis Sentinel saw Pulitzer’s purchase as “evidence that he will continue on that journal the fine service,which has heretof
ore been the strong point of his reputation”: JP to St. Clair McKelway, NYW, 11/7/1913. The evidence suggests that the “proprietors” to whom Pulitzer refers did not include Schurz. He did not believe that the election had damaged the paper. “We did not suffer during the campaign,” Schurz wrote to his parents after its disastrous conclusion. (Schurz to parents, 11/14/1872, CS.)
While Pulitzer’s stock: JP to Schurz, 9/24/1872, CS.
CHAPTER 8: POLITICS AND PRINCIPLE
Pulitzer mounted a campaign: Letters of support quoted in subsequent paragraphs may be found in Woodson Governor, Box 25, Folder 6, MSA, unless otherwise indicated.
Preetorius was opposed: Preetorius to Grosvenor, 2/27/1873. WG-CU.
Woodson’s appointments: JP to Louis Benecke, 3/5/1873, LB.
Pulitzer’s career in journalism: One assumes some inflation in the price paid to Pulitzer from the retelling of the tale over the years. But the paper itself was certainly worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Missouri Democrat, with a circulation only slightly higher than that of Westliche Post, changed hands the same week for $456,100. Date of note redemption is marked on the note itself. Note in private possession of Edwin P. Newman.
Pulitzer immediately sought: Weldge to JPII, 6/6/1913, PDA.
Freed from the: MoDe, 9/19/1872; Unser Blatt, 12/7/1872, also cited in WRR, 103–104; “Remarks of Gov. Chas. P. Johnson, Birthday Anniversary Dinner,” 4/10/1907, PDA. In December his friend Keppler had drawn a cartoon of Pulitzer’s shadow falling on a map of New York, with the caption “Coming Events Cast Their Shadows before Them.”
On his way: APM, 61–62.
Albert arrived in: Ibid., 82–83.
At the time: To come up with the necessary $175,000 to purchase the Sun Dana enlisted several friends, including Senator Roscoe Conkling, who would later become one of Joseph Pulitzer’s close friends, and Senator Edwin D. Morgan. See Turner, When Giants Ruled, 84; Sun editorial quoted in Emery and Emery, The Press and America, 217. By 1876 the newspaper had a circulation of more than 130,000 copies.
Under Dana’s regime: APM, 84–85. The editor was John B. Wood, who was called the “great condenser.” Walter Rosebault, a Jewish reporter from Savannah, who like Albert was only twenty, remembered that Albert “spoke with a slight, but not unpleasant, foreign accent.” (APM, 88.)
The editor decided: NYS, 8/24/1871, 2. It is also quoted in WAS, 22. One wonders if the “friend in New York” referred to in the article might have been Albert.
Albert rose rapidly: APM, 90–93; NYT, 7/7/1871, 5. “The work Pulitzer did on that trial gave him a big reputation among Newark reporters of the seventies, and put him in the class with Julian Ralph, Frank Patten, Johnnie Green and other talented New York reporters of the day.” (Newark Advertiser, quoted in APM, 92.)
The fit was: APM, 128, 130.
After the brotherly: Watterson, Marse Henry, Vol. 1, 210–211.
In the fall: A copy of the menu may be found at the MHS. It was printed, with the paper’s compliments, by the Missouri Democrat, which had so strongly opposed Pulitzer and Grosvenor’s efforts with the Liberal Republicans a year earlier.
Pulitzer resumed his: Interview with John Johnson, in Kelsoe, undated letter, PDA; “Birthday Anniversary Dinner,” 4/10/1907, PDA.
Membership in AP gave: The third owner, George Fishback, won the auction by bidding $456,100, or $100 more than the pair’s final offer. (Hart, A History of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 113.) McCullagh, who remained with the Missouri Democrat, attacked the new rival paper, dubbing it “Robbers’ Roost” for supposedly stealing news items from the Western Associated Press.
Neither McKee nor Houser: GlDe, 1/8/1874, 4.
The owner of the Democrat: The papers loved insulting each other. Responding to an item in the Democrat that factiously suggested the Globe was published in German, McKee and Houser wrote, “For all the influence it has, the Democrat might as well be printed in Scandinavian.” (GlDe, 1/8/1874, 4.)
The legal maneuvering: One person recalled that Pulitzer earned $47,500 from the deal, but this figure seems high. (Rosewater, History of Cooperative News-Gathering, 181.)
In the spring: ChTr, 7/5/1874, 1. Built at a cost of more than $10 million, the bridge rested on a masonry foundation sunk deep into the riverbed, using caissons filled with pressurized air. A dozen of the 352 men who worked in these underwater air chambers died.
Pulitzer confessed that he: Eads to JP, 1/19/1885, JP-CU. Pulitzer’s friend Whitelaw Reid declined Eads’s invitation to invest in the Mississippi project. Reid to Eads, 3/2/1875. JBE.
After turning the money: It was Papin Street, off Chouteau Avenue, DCS-JP, 77; Dubuque Herald, 10/28/1873, 1; Freeborn County Standard, 8/17/1892, 2; A. S. Walsh to JPII, undated but probably June 1913, PDA. T. Saunders Foster, who knew Pulitzer around this time, recalled that “he was very fond of riding, and owned a fine saddle horse on which he took long morning rides.” (George S. Johns, “Joseph Pulitzer in St. Louis,” Missouri Historical Review, XXV, No. 3. April 1931, 415.) Also JP to Schurz, 6/3/1874, CS; Ed Harris, memo to JPII, 2/29/1942, JPII.
Financial freedom also: JP to EP, 5/25/1905, JP-CU. A copy of the illustration reproduced in early editions of DCS-JP, between 78–79; Charles Nagel, A Boy’s Civil War Story, 397. Nagel eventually becomes a cabinet member in the Taft administration. Katherine Lindsay Franciscus, “Social Customs of Old St. Louis,” originally published in PD, 12/9/1928, and reprinted in Bulletin of Missouri Historical Society, Vol. 10, No. 2, 157–166; JP to Davidson, 1/15/1875, TD. Playing Mephistopheles was a minor frivolity for Pulitzer. But interestingly, in his life yet to come Pulitzer would be repeatedly identified publicly and privately with this character. Those who were present when his anger rapidly surged, or who felt his hot temper or listened as he eviscerated an editor, would more often than not reach for Mephistophelian metaphors to describe what they witnessed.
Finally feeling prepared: Pulitzer took his bar exam before Judge Napton; MoRe, 7/2/1874, 8.
The treatment the bolters received: Galveston Daily News, 8/28/1874, 1.
On September 2: The interview, real or not, was the work of McCullagh, who had left the Missouri Democrat to join his old bosses at the St. Louis Globe. McCullagh had probably learned of Pulitzer’s disillusionment with the People’s Party directly from him and chose to report it as a reconstructed interview; GlDe, 9/6/1874, 1.
For Pulitzer, the: MoRe, 9/7/1874, 2.
Drawn into civic life: Undated clipping, GlDe, 9/1873, WG-CU.
The Missouri Democratic Party: SeDe, 10/9/1874, 4.
Not an eyebrow: Liberal Republicans also failed to recognize the threat to Black Americans. Grosvenor referred to the “phantom of a Ku-Klux excitement” and Brown said, “The Ku Klux Klan has been magnified a hundredfold in order to furnish capital for the hungry carpetbaggers that infest the South.” (ChTr, 4/22/1871, 2; Peterson, Freedom and Franchise, 201.)
After Sedalia, it: Versailles Weekly Gazette, 10/14/1874, 3; Warrensburg Standard, October 9, 1874, 2; Kansas City Journal of Commerce, 10/16/1874. Pulitzer’s nose, ridiculed by the reporter, became an object of admiration among his supporters. One reader of the Sedalia Daily Democrat complained of criticism about Pulitzer’s nose. Claiming it had “perfect Grecian symmetry,” the letter writer said he would prefer to have “one like Pulitzer’s than a dozen such purple-hued smellers” as that found on the face of a particular critic. (SeDe, 10/16/1874, 2.)
The highlighting of: MoDe, 9/20/1872, 2; Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 14. It was reported that when Pulitzer and Keppler used to while away the hours at cafés in St. Louis, Keppler would end the evening with the comment, “Well, Joey, there’s only one thing left to do. I’ll go back to the office and draw your nose.” (DCS JP, 2–3).
The nose became: The nose, according to the historian Sander Gilman, became “the central [locus] of difference in seeing the Jew” Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 169–193.
From Knob Noster: Boonville Advertiser, 10/16/1874, 2;
Boonville Weekly Eagle, 10/23/1874, 3.
A few weeks: WP, 1/27/1875.
CHAPTER 9: FOUNDING FATHER
On the evening: ChTr, 2/22/1875.
Hesing’s words were: JP to Governor Hardin, 1/14/1875, Folder 15402, Charles Hardin Papers, MSA.
With his political fortunes: MoRe, 3/10/1875, 5. Actually, Pulitzer was wrong. The only recorded monument to Eads in St. Louis is a medallion on a pedestal in Forest Park. Eads’s bridge, however, was designated a national monument and still stands.
Leaving the committee: DCS-JP, 87.
By the 1870s: Wharton, Old New York, 240.
Two of the: “When others abandoned a cause as hopeless, when the last ray had been extinguished, then it was that Bowman would clench his hand, bring all the devious methods of his intellect to bear, and ultimately triumph over his enemies.” ChTr, 10/22/1883, 1.
After setting down: MoRe, 3/23/1875, 8.
“Just returning from”: The press in St. Louis got wise to Pulitzer’s dishonesty. By 1879, one reporter referred to this habit as “old tactics that have puzzled many a news-gatherer.” (GlDe, 8/19/1879, 5.)
The paper was correct: Hutchins also offered misinformation at the trial. Speaking of Pulitzer’s appointment to the police board, he said, “I know that Joseph Pulitzer was, to my surprise, appointed police commissioner, without any agency of mine and without my knowledge that he was an applicant.” As the two worked closely on Liberal Republican affairs and spent time together with Charles Johnson, who helped Pulitzer get the seat on the commission, Hutchins’s testimony was hardly credible. But Bowman did not challenge it. Testimony was published in MoRe, 3/12/1875, 8.