Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [287]
Not an eyebrow: Liberal Republicans also failed to recognize the threat to Black Americans. Grosvenor referred to the “phantom of a Ku-Klux excitement” and Brown said, “The Ku Klux Klan has been magnified a hundredfold in order to furnish capital for the hungry carpetbaggers that infest the South.” (ChTr, 4/22/1871, 2; Peterson, Freedom and Franchise, 201.)
After Sedalia, it: Versailles Weekly Gazette, 10/14/1874, 3; Warrensburg Standard, October 9, 1874, 2; Kansas City Journal of Commerce, 10/16/1874. Pulitzer’s nose, ridiculed by the reporter, became an object of admiration among his supporters. One reader of the Sedalia Daily Democrat complained of criticism about Pulitzer’s nose. Claiming it had “perfect Grecian symmetry,” the letter writer said he would prefer to have “one like Pulitzer’s than a dozen such purple-hued smellers” as that found on the face of a particular critic. (SeDe, 10/16/1874, 2.)
The highlighting of: MoDe, 9/20/1872, 2; Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 14. It was reported that when Pulitzer and Keppler used to while away the hours at cafés in St. Louis, Keppler would end the evening with the comment, “Well, Joey, there’s only one thing left to do. I’ll go back to the office and draw your nose.” (DCS JP, 2–3).
The nose became: The nose, according to the historian Sander Gilman, became “the central [locus] of difference in seeing the Jew” Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 169–193.
From Knob Noster: Boonville Advertiser, 10/16/1874, 2; Boonville Weekly Eagle, 10/23/1874, 3.
A few weeks: WP, 1/27/1875.
CHAPTER 9: FOUNDING FATHER
On the evening: ChTr, 2/22/1875.
Hesing’s words were: JP to Governor Hardin, 1/14/1875, Folder 15402, Charles Hardin Papers, MSA.
With his political fortunes: MoRe, 3/10/1875, 5. Actually, Pulitzer was wrong. The only recorded monument to Eads in St. Louis is a medallion on a pedestal in Forest Park. Eads’s bridge, however, was designated a national monument and still stands.
Leaving the committee: DCS-JP, 87.
By the 1870s: Wharton, Old New York, 240.
Two of the: “When others abandoned a cause as hopeless, when the last ray had been extinguished, then it was that Bowman would clench his hand, bring all the devious methods of his intellect to bear, and ultimately triumph over his enemies.” ChTr, 10/22/1883, 1.
After setting down: MoRe, 3/23/1875, 8.
“Just returning from”: The press in St. Louis got wise to Pulitzer’s dishonesty. By 1879, one reporter referred to this habit as “old tactics that have puzzled many a news-gatherer.” (GlDe, 8/19/1879, 5.)
The paper was correct: Hutchins also offered misinformation at the trial. Speaking of Pulitzer’s appointment to the police board, he said, “I know that Joseph Pulitzer was, to my surprise, appointed police commissioner, without any agency of mine and without my knowledge that he was an applicant.” As the two worked closely on Liberal Republican affairs and spent time together with Charles Johnson, who helped Pulitzer get the seat on the commission, Hutchins’s testimony was hardly credible. But Bowman did not challenge it. Testimony was published in MoRe, 3/12/1875, 8.
The seats in the courtroom: MoDe, 3/24/75, 2; MoRe, 3/24/1875, 1; GlDe, 3/24/1875, 4.
“Not for everybody”: Two weeks later, Bowman sued Hutchins for libel, for comments about the trial published in the Dispatch, a struggling afternoon newspaper that Hutchins ran in addition to the St. Louis Times.
Hard feelings put aside: NYT, 3/29/1875, 7.
In early May: SeDe, 5/6/1875, 1; Isidor Loeb, Introduction, Missouri Constitutional Convention, Vol. 1, 60–67; biographical account of the personnel of the convention by Floyd C. Shoemaker, Missouri Constitutional Convention, Vol. 1; Gary Kremmer, “Life in Post-Civil War Missouri” presented at Arrow Rock, Missouri, on 9/17/2000.
At age twenty-eight: The style of hat Pulitzer wore is a later variation of the slouch, known as an Antietam, with a higher, flatter crown.
Pulitzer had done: Loeb and Shoemaker, Debates of the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1875, Vol. 1, 245, 249.