• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2417 0

to “correct” the Associated Press’s coverage of the convention was a dispatch from St. Louis that appeared on 1/27/1872, 3. “The Associated Press report of the so-called Liberal Republican Convention, at Jefferson City, on the 24th, was a gross exaggeration of the importance of the whole affair,” it read in part. See Ross, The Liberal Republican Movement, 151–152, for a discussion of personal abuse and misrepresentation in the press during the 1872 campaign. The Times’s articles on Liberal Republicans were so poisonous that the paper lost much of the reputation it had gained in 1871 when it brought down Boss Tweed by publishing evidence of his corruption.

In the short span: Unidentified 1872 newspaper clipping in WG-CU, Box II; MoDe, 1/26/1872, WG-CU. Pulitzer’s public profile was sufficient that he was among the targets of a fraudulent telegram supposedly from President Grant but concocted by Grant’s opponents. Printed on the front page of the Sedalia Daily Democrat, the telegram, purportedly to the chair of the Radical Convention, read: “Return my thanks to the Republicans of Missouri for the confidence reposed in me. Will defeat the plans of Sumner and Schurz. Show this to Brown, Pulitzer and Charley Johnson.” (SeDe, 2/27/1872, 1.)

When he got back: Scharf, History of Saint Louis City and County, Vol. 1, 743–744; Morris, The Police Department of St. Louis.

The police commission: Minutes of the St. Louis Police Commission, 8/30/1872, 347–352, SLPDL.

For the first few months: Minutes, 3/5/1872, 287–290, SLPDL. Pulitzer’s association with this led to two myths about him. His biographer Seitz claimed that Pulitzer “warred with the local gambling ring,” but an anonymous biographer, who published a political tract intended on thwarting Pulitzer’s bid for the U.S. Senate, claimed that he had been on the take: Tusa, “Power, Priorities, and Political Insurgency,” 188. Pulitzer was absent from the police commission meetings for the first time on 3/30/1872 (Minutes); Brown to Grosvenor, 2/17/1782 WG-CU. Pulitzer’s March trip to the East is mentioned in MoDe, 3/13/1872, 2.

As the Cincinnati convention: MoDe, undated but weeks before the convention, Clippings files, Box II, WG-CU.

On an April evening: Johnson, undated April diary entry, WRR, 26.

Pulitzer and Grosvenor left: Croffut, An American Procession, 142. Pulitzer was actually twenty-five at the time.

Reaching Cincinnati in: Chamberlin, The Struggle of ’72, 334.

Not only did the convention put Pulitzer: King, Pulitzer’s Prize Editor, 77.

The group agreed: Henry Watterson, “The Humor and Tragedy of the Greeley Campaign,” Century Magazine, Vol. 85 (November 1912), 29–33. This account also appears in Watterson’s memoirs, but the version published by Century is of greater value because it is accompanied by letters from Horace White and Whitelaw Reid, who read and commented on it. See also NYT, 5/1/1872, 1.

On May 1: Watterson, Henry Marse: An Autobiography, Vol. 1, 242–243. Appropriately, the hall to which the delegates made their way was built over a potter’s field that had been used by the Commercial Hospital and Lunatic Asylum.

At noon, Grosvenor: The Philadelphia Inquirer erroneously reported his appointment as “Joseph Pulitzer, of Wisconsin.” Evidently Pulitzer’s fame as a warrior in the Liberal Republican cause had not yet reached the City of Brotherly Love. (Philadelphia Inquirer, 5/3/1872, 8.)

The next day: Proceedings of the Liberal Republican Convention, 9–10.

Schurz’s speech concluded: Newspaper clipping, unknown paper and undated, Box II, WG-CU.

When the bleary-eyed delegates: Lena C. Logan, “Henry Watterson and the Liberal Convention of 1872,” Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 40, No. 4 (December 1944), 335.

Watterson, who had: Watterson, “The Humor and Tragedy,” 39.

The contest narrowed: An excellent account of the convention may be found in Matthew T. Downey, “Horace Greeley and the Politicians: The Liberal Republican Convention in 1872,” Journal of American History, Vol. 53, No. 4 (March 1967), 727–750.

Despite all of: Watterson, “The Humor and