• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2324 0

cholera returned to St. Louis. Twice before, the disease had ravaged the city; this time its destruction was far less, though still considerable. In its fourth week as many as 140 people were dying each day. The drugstore remained open twenty-four hours a day. Joseph Nash McDowell, an eminent doctor and founder of a medical school, had an office above the drugstore. When the city turned to him for help in managing the epidemic, he reportedly hired Pulitzer to work at Arsenal Island, where the sick were quarantined and the dead were buried. The epidemic subsided after September. By November the number of reported deaths was down to four, and Pulitzer returned to work in Patrick’s office. I made an extensive search in St. Louis records for any information about Pulitzer’s service on Arsenal Island, but I failed to uncover anything.

By the spring of 1867: Pulitzer’s notary public certificate, JPII-LC; W. A. Kelsoe to Seitz, undated (written between 1913 and 1920), PDA.

Pulitzer continued working: DCS-JP, 55; AI, 221; JP to William James, 6/21/1867, 7/13/1867, Wortham James Collection, 1820–1891, folder 2211, WHMC. Surviving correspondence—which are his earliest existing letters—while routine and historically insignificant reveals that Pulitzer had begun to acquire some command of English. He may have used form letters, but the transactions could not have been completed by someone lacking understanding of the language.

After a few months: See White, The German-Language Press in America; Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 162. Schurz to Margarethe Schurz, 7/16/1867, Intimate Letters of Carl Schurz; DCS-JP, 61. Circulation figures are notoriously inaccurate in this period. But to bid for the city’s legal advertising and printing, the owners of the newspapers had to submit circulation statements signed under oath. These “official” circulation figures for 1867 were published in ChTr, 6/5/1867, 2.

Prosperous and growing: Trefousse, Schurz, 162. Seitz suggests that Pulitzer was hired through his acquaintance with Preetorius and Willich. One Associated Press dispatch from St. Louis, published at the time of Pulitzer’s death, makes mention of the connection between the paper and the immigration society: “Willich found Mr. Pulitzer’s methods of obtaining information unique, likewise his treatment of individual cases, and a word from his obtained for Pulitzer a place as a reporter on the Westliche Post, a German daily.” AP dispatch, 10/29/1911, JP-LC, Box 12.

Just how Pulitzer, with no training or experience in journalism, obtained a job as a reporter on the Westliche Post is shrouded in mystery and legend. Pulitzer knew Preetorius through the Mercantile Library. Perhaps he had also met another owner, but he probably had not met Schurz. Pulitzer is said to have credited his experience when he and forty other men were bamboozled by the dishonest employment agent promising work downriver. A reporter got wind of the tale and persuaded Pulitzer to write it up for the Westliche Post, according to Ireland. The resulting work attracted Preetorius’s eye and earned his admiration, and Pulitzer was offered a position on the paper. However, the article itself has never surfaced.

Numerous remembrances of Pulitzer at this time offer an alternative scenario, crediting chess with introducing him to men who would provide him with his first newspaper job. Unfortunately, the accounts vary considerably in consistency and reliability, often reducing the tale to one epic match. As with reports of Pulitzer’s swim in Boston harbor, it is hard to discern the actual contours of what happened. Typical of the accounts told when Pulitzer was still alive was one that appeared in the magazine Current Literature in 1909: “After performing various sorts of work he found himself one day in a restaurant looking on at a game of chess, a game in which he was said to have genius. A suggestion that he made to one of the players proved to be the little pivot on which his whole subsequent career turned. The player was Dr. Emil Preetorius, who with Carl Schurz was directing the Westliche