Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [21]
For Joseph the Westliche Post became a gateway to the German community’s leading politicians, lawyers, merchants, and writers. They came to the Chestnut Street newspaper building each day to discuss the news of the day or to plot election strategy with Preetorius and Schurz. The likelihood that Schurz would become a U.S. senator made the Westliche Post a mandatory stop for anyone of significance traveling through St. Louis. Often the daytime gatherings continued into the night at Preetorius’s house, which Pulitzer also frequented. Preetorius’s wife, Anna, took a liking to the young reporter and doted on him, especially as he often entertained her infant son. The world into which Pulitzer peeked seemed to be one with limitless possibilities. To be a newspaper editor was to do more than report on the world; it was to shape it.
Pulitzer was comfortable in the cultured and political atmosphere of the paper, and during the evenings at Preetorius’s house. He was unschooled, but not uneducated. Like his younger brother, he had been inculcated with a love of literature, music, and the arts; and his strong drive to learn made up for any lack of formal instruction. It was not long before the visitors took an interest in Pulitzer. “That young fellow clinches the future,” said Brockmeyer, the principal mover behind the Hegelian St. Louis Philosophical Society. “They think because he trundles about with himself a big cob-nose, a whopper jaw, and bull-frog eyes that he has no sense; but I tell you, he possesses greater dialectical ability than all of them put together—I know it for I have felt it.”
Pulitzer attended a few of the study groups spawned by Brockmeyer’s Philosophical Society. For many of the participants, it was as though they had found the key to the universe in Hegel. Their study created a kind of secret fraternity of understanding for every field of activity from music and art to history and politics. They saw the Civil War as an inevitable conflict of the Hegelian dialectic, playing out the inherent conflict of Southern rights and the Northern morality. Most significant of all, their belief that their city would emerge as the new center of postwar America helped spark a broader “St. Louis movement” that spread among citizens, giving rise to pamphlets, books, and even legislation calling for relocating the nation’s capital to St. Louis. The philosophical society “took the character of a subtle pervasive influence, rather than an organized propaganda,” said one member. “Its life pulsed in the small coteries which met usually in parlors or private rooms for the study of some special book or subject.”
But for Pulitzer, it was not the society’s philosophical insights that changed his life. Rather, the society brought him Thomas Davidson, into whose orbit he would be drawn, first as a pupil, then as something more.
A nomadic philosopher from Scotland, Davidson arrived in St. Louis in the fall of 1867, shortly after alighting in Boston where he had been welcomed by the transcendentalists. The superintendent of the St. Louis school system offered the twenty-seven-year-old Davidson a position teaching Latin and Greek, in hopes of making him part of the coterie of Hegelians. It worked. Shortly after arriving, Davidson was elected an associate of the St. Louis Philosophical Society.
In contrast to the serious Hegelians, the broad-framed itinerant philosopher stood out from the crowd. Davidson’s rural Scottish origins, red hair, bright blue eyes, and mellifluent voice with its almost musical cadence gave him a personal charm that caught the attention of many. He was ebullient, and his laugh was infectious. “Davidson