Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [109]
The hostility grew to the point where Pulitzer was assaulted on the street. In late March, as he was leaving Ecker’s restaurant, where he had lunched, a burly man armed with a small whip tried to strike him. Pulitzer seized his assailant by the throat and threw him against a store window, breaking it. The man, who left no clue as to the cause of his anger, ran off, escaping through a nearby saloon.
For Kate, her husband’s notoriety was painful. Despite her pedigree, she found herself increasingly snubbed by the social elite whose company she coveted. The Pulitzers moved from their house on Washington Avenue, but there was little they could do to decrease their sense of isolation. Compounding Kate’s unhappiness was the uncertain health of the children. Both Ralph and Lucille were delicate. Ralph, in particular, was small and weak for his age and suffered from asthma and other ailments. As 1882 began, Kate was pregnant again. She remained alone a great deal of time, especially as Joseph increasingly spent time away from St. Louis.
In March, on one of half a dozen long trips to the East that year, Pulitzer joined up with Hutchins in Washington to interview Garfield’s assassin in the jail where he awaited execution. Charles Guiteau had used as a legal defense the technically correct claim that the president had died not from the bullets but rather from the incompetence of the doctors who, as Pulitzer had reported, had misdiagnosed and mistreated their patient. Despite their shared low regard for Garfield’s doctors, Pulitzer was filled with an intense hatred of Guiteau. When he reached the cell, his enmity grew. The prisoner jumped up and greeted Pulitzer in perhaps the most wounding manner possible. “Why, how do you do, Mr. Schurz,” said Guiteau. “I know your brother very well—have spoken from the same platform with him. How much you look like him.”
Pulitzer turned to Hutchins with a look of disgust and they both shook their heads. “I did not care, however, to lose time by explanations as to his mistake of my identity,” said Pulitzer, who decided to let the insulting misidentification go unchallenged. “My business was to study.” Perhaps, but Guiteau’s business was to make money. He earned about $50 a day selling photographs and autographs to visitors. Before the interview progressed, the required business was transacted, and Pulitzer and Hutchins soon owned their own Guiteau memorabilia.
“He handles his greenbacks,” Pulitzer said, “like a bank teller and talks about the different points and features of his different photographs precisely as if he were standing behind the counter selling ribbons or lace.” Pulitzer found Guiteau unrepentant. Nor did Guiteau show any signs of lunacy. In fact, Pulitzer thought the man, whose actions had changed the leadership of the nation and the fortunes of thousands of ambitious men, seemed no different from a typical businessman or clerk. “He could have been taken precisely as he stood and transferred behind the counter of some dry-goods store as a perfectly fit figure.”
By the end of the visit, Pulitzer was even more repelled by the assassin than he had been at its beginning, almost as if Guiteau’s apparent normality made the crime more heinous. As the two newspapermen rode away from the jail, Hutchins noticed that his companion “was constantly engaged in washing his hands with invisible soap in imperceptible water.”
Perhaps inspired by his brother’s success with the Post-Dispatch, Albert Pulitzer was bitten by a similar ambition. He had been working as a $45-a-week reporter on Bennett’s New York Herald that spring when he shared his plan with a friend who worked at the New York Times. Pausing in front of the Equitable Building on Broadway, Albert told his companion that he intended to