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By Root 2445 0

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