Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [31]
Bringing with them a carnival atmosphere, the legislators packed Schmidt’s Hotel and caused its bartenders to stock extra supplies. Although Pulitzer would take his meals there, he avoided Schmidt’s pricey rooms. Instead, he chose to room with his friend Anthony Ittner, who had also been elected as a state legislator. The pair obtained lodgings in a boardinghouse, nicknamed the “German Diet” because of the preponderance of German legislators who favored the place.
On January 5, 1870, as the legislature opened for business, Pulitzer took his oath of office, swearing, for the second time in a month, to uphold the state’s constitution but meanwhile violating its minimum age for service in the legislature. For one born in Europe, state legislatures were a marvel of American democracy beyond compare. Each state had its own semi-sovereign government with a legislature in session, on average, eighty-seven days a year. Almost every law of significance—criminal, social, or economic—was made by state legislatures. It would be another half century before the federal government would begin to assume its modern dominant role in governance.
In Jefferson City, and in fourteen other state capitals that month, lawyers, doctors, farmers, merchants, businessmen, and even newspapermen gathered to make the laws of the land. It was exhilarating, and Pulitzer was eager to join in. On his first day, he offered two resolutions, one dealing with printing the governor’s annual message in German, the other a routine measure for printing copies of the House rules for use by members.
Pulitzer’s fellow Radical Republicans controlled the legislature and had one of their own in the governor’s seat. Having disenfranchised some 60,000 citizens with the loyalty oath, the Radicals were at the apex of their power. But political fissures were growing among the ranks of the party. Republican rule was an unnatural state of affairs in a state with strong and deep Democratic Party roots. As in other border states, Republicans had neither a popular base nor public support.
Suffrage was the dominant and most divisive issue before the lawmakers. The governor urged them to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment, giving black American men the right to vote, and to similarly amend the state constitution. But he startled many in his own party by suggesting it was time to lift voting restrictions on Democrats. Although it was only a vague promise, it gave voice to a central issue facing Republicans. How much longer could they deny taxpaying, law-abiding white voters the franchise?
Pulitzer, like a growing number of Republicans, felt that the party had to respond to constituents’ demands if it wanted to take permanent root in the state. Five years after the end of the war, a considerable amount of reconciliation had already taken place in Missouri, and the hatred engendered by the conflict was greatly diminished. The animus toward former rebels seemed particularly hard to justify if former slaves were to be given the vote.
The state’s constitution, passed during the first years of Reconstruction, specified that the legislature would be constitutionally free to begin tampering with its onerous voting restrictions in 1871. But many Republicans were unwilling to wait. They feared entering the fall campaign with only a promise to do something about lifting the restrictions later. The growing consensus among the moderates was to submit to voters that fall a constitutional amendment which would enfranchise all adult males.
From the start, Pulitzer was in the moderates’ camp. On his first full day, he proposed a roll-call vote to help defeat a measure aimed at stemming a slight expansion of suffrage. There was no question in his mind that the right to vote must be given to all men, regardless of their participation in the war or the color