Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [100]
If Pulitzer could talk Seymour into running, he would not only save the party but score a journalistic coup. On April 24, 1880, Pulitzer traveled to Utica, New York. He rode a carriage across the Mohawk River and up the Deerfield hills to the Seymour home, a small house framed by tall hemlocks and a century-old black cherry tree in front, perched so high in the hills that it had a twenty-mile view of the valley below. Seymour greeted Pulitzer at the door. Although Seymour would turn seventy years old the following month, Pulitzer thought he hardly looked sixty. He stood tall and erect, his hair had little gray, and his hazel eyes remained clear. His only infirmity was a slight loss of hearing.
They entered the house, which was filled with colonial and revolutionary era antiques. As they sat, Pulitzer displayed rare diffidence and held off raising the question of who should be the Democratic Party’s nominee. Instead the two conversed about politics, the “Negro problem” (as it was then called), and the coming election. Finally the all-important topic came up as the two prepared to part. At the door to the house, Seymour said the party had a wide choice of excellent candidates and listed several of the leading ones. “I am too old,” said Seymour. “You had better leave me to die gracefully by myself. That is an act few men understand, and perhaps I had best begin to try it now.”
“But Governor,” Pulitzer replied, “if the people think you are the strongest candidate for your state as well as the country, and if their delegates at Cincinnati fix upon you as the man of all others to lead them in this campaign against centralization and imperialism, I have always said that you were too good a patriot and too good a Democrat to decline the leadership. Have I said wrong?”
Seymour stood at the doorway for a while looking at his guest and made motions as if he were going to say something. Instead, he grasped Pulitzer’s hand and shook it. Pulitzer told him he was satisfied with this silent reply. Seymour laughed. “You had better lay me on the shelf and get a younger man.” Despite this final pronouncement Pulitzer rode away “with exultation in my heart,” believing that Seymour might still be a candidate.
The harsh light of reality struck Pulitzer upon his return to Missouri. Seymour had been sincere in declining the honor Pulitzer had proffered. There was no realistic way that the aging Seymour could undertake a national campaign. Without a candidate, Pulitzer could only try to deny Tilden the nomination. This goal took on a personal element because the leader of Tilden’s crowd in Missouri was none other than William Hyde.
Missouri Democrats gathered in late May for their state convention in Moberly, a railroad town in the middle of the state. Both Hyde and Pulitzer were delegates. When Pulitzer’s turn came to address the convention, Hyde’s supporters packed the galleries and tried to shout him down. But no matter what Hyde’s men tried, Tilden’s day had come and gone. There was nothing Hyde could do. The convention selected twenty-one of its thirty national delegates from the ranks of anti-Tilden men. Pulitzer returned to St. Louis triumphant. “A cloud of gloom rests over the Tilden cause,” noted the Washington Post in reporting the results at Moberly. Hyde avoided complete defeat by securing a spot as a delegate at-large. Pulitzer was selected as one of two delegates from the Second Congressional District, which he hoped to represent after the election.
At the end of June, Pulitzer traveled to Cincinnati for the Democratic national convention. Years earlier, he had come as a dewy-eyed organizer of the insurgent Liberal Republican movement. Then he had been a twenty-five-year-old dissatisfied Republican newspaper editor. Now he was one of the most talked-about newspaper publishers, and comfortable in his new political home among the Democrats.
The convention, which opened on June 22, 1880, looked almost as wild as the