Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [23]
Ten days later, Pulitzer received a reply from Davidson. It was less than he hoped. “Tom!!!” Pulitzer wrote back. “The battles of Salamis, Sadaina or Ledars were nothing compared with the struggle that just closed in my breast.” Pulitzer was looking for a signal to join Davidson in the East. There was none. Instead he chose to take a business trip to Denver. Had Davidson been more forthcoming, Pulitzer said, his decision might have been different. “Well, there is hope yet. I’ll be back in less than fourteen days and, if upon my return, I find a less mysterious and more detailed epistle I’ll go right on to Boston.”
In the end, however, Davidson remained in the East and Pulitzer in St. Louis. The philosopher had abandoned Pulitzer, as he had abandoned other young men everywhere he went. But in this case, Davidson left behind a pupil whose unschooled intelligence had been polished into a studied intellect. It had been an emotionally wrenching passage for Pulitzer. Except for the letters he would write to women he later courted, there is no other existing Pulitzer correspondence so wrought with feelings. His friendship with Davidson was the deepest that he would have with anyone else except his wife. For unlike Davidson, Pulitzer would marry and father children.
Chapter Four
POLITICS AND JOURNALISM
Politics and journalism were two sides of the same coin when Pulitzer joined the staff of the Westliche Post. Out-of-work politicians became newspaper editors, and successful editors became elected politicians. Most newspapers remained financially tied to political patrons, and often their political origins were reflected in their names, such as the Missouri Republican and Missouri Democrat.* Even the few new independent newspapers made it an all-consuming task to cover politics. Politics was the lifeblood of journalism. “Every newspaper man, if not a politician, took an interest therein,” said Pulitzer’s friend Charles Johnson. By coming to work for the city’s most widely circulated German newspaper, Pulitzer stepped into the world of Republican politics.
Germans in St. Louis were ardent Republicans, a loyalty that grew from their devotion to abolition. Radical Republicans—those members of the party who favored more punitive Reconstruction measures, the destruction of Confederate sympathies, and protection of freed slaves—were in control of Missouri. They conducted politics as they had the war, with a kind of scorched earth approach. Opposing Radical rule was futile.
The keystone of Republican dominance of Missouri was a punitive constitution adopted at the end of the war. During the early years of Reconstruction, Missouri Radicals went farther than those in any other state in creating a system of registration, tests, and oaths to keep former rebels and their sympathizers from the ballot box and civic life. Missourians could not vote, become teachers, lawyers, or even ministers without stating in writing that they had never favored or supported the Confederacy. Thousands were disenfranchised on the basis of a definition of disloyalty so vague as to include men whose distant cousins might have fought on the wrong side of the war.
Republicans feared that they would lose their grip on power without the constitution’s loyalty provisions. But though these provisions squelched Democratic opposition, a threat was growing from within the party. The more moderate members wanted to restore suffrage to all white voters and feared that the long-run interest of the party was in danger if the restrictions weren’t lifted. Among the Germans, this wing was led by Preetorius and Schurz, who was settling