Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [26]
For good reason. Although Pulitzer cut a strange figure among the reporters, there was nothing lacking in the stories he churned out for the Westliche Post. In addition to writing an endless stream of local news, the bread and butter of the business, Pulitzer wrote pithy, cogent stories on St. Louis politics in an inimitable style that stood out from the more classical, restrained German used by Preetorius and others. “We all soon learned to appreciate and make the most of his extraordinary capacity for news gathering,” admitted a reporter for the competing Republican. “He was an able reporter—trenchant with the pen,” Johnson said, “fearless in attacking wrong or corruption, and at times bitter and acrimonious in his assaults.”
As Pulitzer mastered English, though he still spoke it with a heavy accent, he widened his social circle, and Johnson became one of his best friends outside the German community. The thirty-year-old Johnson, nine years Pulitzer’s senior, liked reporters, having worked in the printing trade and published a small newspaper as a teenager. After serving a term as city attorney, he had been appointed state attorney for St. Louis in 1866.
Although Johnson admired his young friend’s aggressive reporting, others were less enthusiastic. It worried the city councilor Anthony Ittner, another man with whom Pulitzer made friends in the course of covering politics. Like Johnson, Ittner was about a decade older than Pulitzer. He had been in St. Louis since he was seven, had built up his bricklaying trade, and was now running his own brickyard. Ittner believed Pulitzer went too far in the tone of his articles and in his arguments with others, and that he was devoid of fear. “It was not an uncommon thing for him to use language in a heated controversy or dispute that went beyond the limit,” Ittner said. “In fact, I cautioned him that he must become more conservative and forbearing for fear that he might someday meet a person like himself and then there would be trouble.”
In Pulitzer’s eyes, the villain of his new world was the notoriously corrupt county government. St. Louis County was probably no worse a den of political iniquity than most burgeoning urban areas in the years following the Civil War. Here, as in other cities, businessmen, party leaders, politicians, and, in many cases, newspaper publishers developed a web of financially beneficial relationships. Businessmen obtained lucrative contracts, party leaders gained favors for their troops of loyal followers, and politicians won elected office and enhanced their earnings. Newspapers weren’t exempt from wrongdoing, either. Publishers who favored those in power were awarded legal advertisements, printing contracts, and sometimes even cash payments.
In the summer of 1869 the county government’s excesses were all too visible during the construction of a new insane asylum. It was an irresistible topic for Pulitzer’s caustic pen. Five stories tall, with a cupola, the asylum had been built at a cost of $700,000, nearly twice the original estimate. Everything about the project had the odor of corruption. For instance, when the construction firm that had been engaged to drill a well failed to strike water at a reasonable depth, it just continued merrily drilling down. The resulting hole, 3,850 feet deep, still without water, became the second-deepest shaft in the world and an object of local ridicule when Pulitzer dubbed it the “well of fools.”
Pulitzer tenaciously reported on each step of the county’s handling of the project. One day he discovered that county politicians were going to erase a financial mistake made by some lawyers. During the construction of the asylum, these attorneys had acted as guarantors to a brick supplier.