Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [41]
All the rhetoric, charges, countercharges, campaigning, and torchlight parades came to an end on November 8, 1870, Election Day. Brown’s victory was expected, but for Pulitzer the picture looked gloomy. “In the Fifth district Mr. Pulitzer, the Liberal Republican candidate, has the opposition of the county court and court-house ring against him, on account of his opposition to their schemes in the last legislature,” reported the morning’s edition of the Missouri Republican. “Mr. Bell is confident of being elected by a two hundred majority.”
In the morning, the extent of Brown’s victory astonished everyone. He carried the state by a huge margin. Liberal Republicans were ecstatic. The election of their man as governor and the 88 percent vote they garnered for the amendments were a rebuke to Radicalism and, in particular, to the Grant administration. It was “the most remarkable political revolution of the age,” said the New York Journal of Commerce. “Let men look to Missouri if they would learn how the political revolution of the future is to be brought about.”
In Pulitzer’s ward, for instance, Brown swamped McClurg by a three-to-one margin. But in Pulitzer’s camp, the mood was somber. The high turnout among Democrats that propelled Brown to victory spelled trouble. Pulitzer’s Democratic opponent won 991 votes to Pulitzer’s 673. The vote was a complete reversal of Pulitzer’s victory the prior year. Writing in the Westliche Post the following day, Pulitzer blamed his loss on 250 Negroes and 60 Frenchmen: “In general, the Negroes and the white McClurgites voted according to the maxim, better to see Democrats elected than the Liberals.”
The electoral truth of the matter was simple. Pulitzer had won in 1869 because the unusual political configurations had favored him. The continued legal suppression of Democratic voters, the party’s ineptitude in selecting a candidate, and the traditional low voter turnout for a special election hampered by bad weather had produced Pulitzer’s winning margin. A year later, with Democrats returning to the polls in large numbers, Pulitzer as a Republican—even a Liberal Republican—was doomed.
Pulitzer’s friend Joseph Keppler, the cartoonist, rendered a graphic interpretation of the loss. In a cartoon captioned “Too heavy a load,” Keppler drew Pulitzer and two other losing politicians on a wooden platform supported by Brown, Schurz, and Grosvenor. Brown is bending down, unable to bear the weight, and Pulitzer is falling off. The revolution in which Pulitzer had played an important role had been won, but it had left him behind.
Out of office but not out of work, Pulitzer returned to Jefferson City in the second week of January 1871 to cover Gratz Brown’s inauguration for the Westliche Post. Instead of taking a seat as a lawmaker, he watched as a reporter when Brown was escorted to the Speaker’s dais in the house chamber. “We have arrived at the close of a revolution,” Brown told the hundreds who crowded the hall. “The lingering animosities of Civil War have been supplanted by an accepted reconciliation on all sides.”
Not quite. Schurz and Grosvenor were complaining that Democrats were gaining the upper hand and that the governor, a onetime Democrat, was being excessively friendly to his former party. As far as they could see, too many jobs in the state government were going to Democrats.
Pulitzer did not share his partners’ intense hostility toward Democrats. While it was certainly true that he had lost his reelection bid to a Democrat, Pulitzer recognized that the seat he had briefly held traditionally belonged to Democrats. As a newcomer to politics, he was relatively free of the war-related party animosity, unlike Grosvenor and Schurz, who were twelve and eighteen years his senior, respectively. Democrats were among his closest friends. For instance, both Charles Johnson, who was defending him in court, and Stilson Hutchins, a newspaperman, were supporting the Liberal