Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [42]
Any concern about looming political fratricide was soon forgotten because Brown, Schurz, and Grosvenor all had a common enemy—Grant. Besides, a more serious blow to Liberal Republicans’ harmony now came from the owners of the Missouri Democrat. For mysterious and suspicious reasons, they had fallen back into the ranks of Grant Republicans and fired Grosvenor. “Much as I had been warned that they would go back and throw me overboard as a journalist,” Grosvenor wrote to Schurz, “I did not believe they would dare to do either, or be mean enough to do the latter.”
In 1870, the loss of the Missouri Democrat would have been fatal to the cause. But in 1871, editors such as Horace White at the Chicago Tribune, Samuel Bowles at the Springfield Republican, Murat Halstead at the Cincinnati Commercial, and Henry Watterson at the Louisville Courier-Journal were spreading the gospel.
The growing movement thrilled Pulitzer, but he had a more mundane concern. The previous year, he had boosted his income considerably with his service in the state legislature. The election opened a fountain-head of patronage posts and Pulitzer sought one in the legislature. State Senator Louis Benecke, a Democrat who had worked with Pulitzer in the fall campaign, hired Pulitzer as a clerk for the committee on banks and corporations, which he chaired. For a second year in a row, Pulitzer spent the winter months in the capital.
When the legislative session ended in March 1871, Pulitzer returned full-time to St. Louis and his work at the Westliche Post. The presidential election was still more than a year away, yet the excitement generated by Missouri’s Republican rebellion infected Pulitzer’s friends, most of whom were working for the cause. Optimism ran high. “And why may not the campaign of 1870 in Missouri, be reenacted in the nation?” asked Brown.
Since being fired from the Missouri Democrat, Grosvenor was spending all his time directing the affairs of the ad hoc Liberal Republican organization. Schurz, though still holding out hope of taking back the party from Grant stalwarts, was increasingly identified in the national press as the movement’s leader. And Preetorius was overseeing a barrage of editorials intended to rally Germans to the cause. Working at the Westliche Post put Pulitzer at the center of this growing political movement, though in the shadows of its better-known leaders.
But that too was changing. A few months later, when the magazine Every Saturday commissioned the artist Alfred Waudran to produce a full page of engravings featuring the faces of about four dozen “of the foremost St. Louisans,” he included, along with his depictions of Schurz, Hutchins, and Grosvenor, one of Pulitzer. A profile view accenting Pulitzer’s protruding chin and nose, the drawing shows a clean-shaven Pulitzer sporting small wire-rim glasses.
As the summer and fall of 1871 passed, Pulitzer divided his days between working for the Westliche Post and promoting the Liberal Republican cause with Grosvenor. The Radicals, eager to extinguish the Liberal Republican committee, set a trap. They invited all Republican leaders to an October meeting in St. Louis in order to issue a joint call for a state convention in January.
Members of the State Republican Committee voted to accept the call, but Pulitzer and Grosvenor worked to organize a “no” vote by the Liberals. Accusations immediately flew that the two were violating party rules by using proxies wrongly. “Under the ill-famed leadership of Joe Pulitzer and Bill Grosvenor, Liberals bolted from that resolution, and filled up its deficit by proxies of very dubious authority,” reported the Missouri Staats-Zeitung.
Pulitzer’s patron, State Senator Benecke, offered advice on countering the charge. “I desire to inform you,” Benecke wrote to Pulitzer on October 26, “that the various lies reported in the Missouri Democrat in reference to yourself and the action of the Committee should be ‘nailed’ which could easily be done by publishing