Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [45]
“All right, Bill. You get into the chair and call them to order,” Pulitzer instructed.
Grosvenor ascended the dais and welcomed the “vanguard in the army of reform,” eliciting a wave of enthusiastic applause. “The time has come, gentlemen,” he said. “We are here because we can be nowhere else. The Republican party still clings to abuses which no true Republican can excuse.” Charles Johnson followed Grosvenor, and stirred the crowd even further with a harangue about the Grant administration. “The word ‘carpet-baggers’ figured around hundreds of times in his speech,” McCullagh, a defender of Grant, said.
The like-minded delegates took no time to issue the call for a convention to be held in Cincinnati on May 1 and ratify the draft of a platform calling for universal suffrage and amnesty, civil service and tariff reform, and control of big business. “The times demand an uprising of honest citizens to sweep from power the men who prostitute the name of an honored party for selfish interests,” proclaimed the document that was finally adopted.
Their work complete, the delegates called on Governor Brown to address the convention. He promised that if Missouri led the fight against executive despotism and corruption, others would rally to the cause. It was a bit much for McCullagh, who simply couldn’t resist pointing out Brown’s hypocrisy to his readers. The governor, he said, had failed to give one single “instance in which Grant had made such an unfit appointment as that which has recently disgraced his own administration. I mean, of course, Pulitzer as Police Commissioner, which stands out single and alone, and challenges comparison with history or tradition.”
Grosvenor and Pulitzer were keenly aware that the fortunes of the Missouri declaration depended on successfully conveying to the nation’s press an impression of a political groundswell. To that end, they enlisted William Hyde, the managing editor and part owner of the Missouri Republican. He persuaded the Associated Press to transmit his sympathetic coverage of the meeting. The plan succeeded to a great extent, and countless newspapers described the meeting as a political prairie fire. The success of the propaganda left the anti-movement New York Times fuming: “The Missouri Democrat, through its well-known correspondent ‘Mack,’ instantly exposed the fraud, but the exaggeration had got twenty-four hours start in the head-lines of thousands of newspapers all over the land, and the truth never overtook it.” The “truth,” according to the New York Times, “was that the Convention was contemptible in numbers and more than contemptible in the political standing of its members.”
In the short span of a few days, both the good and the bad press coming from the convention closely identified Pulitzer with the movement. “Among the by-no-means unimportant factors in the great multiple of Liberalism, was and is the brilliant Pulitzer, Senator Schurz’s whimsical lieutenant on the Westliche Post, of St. Louis,” noted one newspaper. The Jefferson City convention was a triumph for the political partnership between Pulitzer and Grosvenor, one that even McCullagh was forced to concede. “Writing now a day after the whole matter has gone into history,” he said, “I cannot see a better title for it than the Bill-and-Joe Convention. What there was of it that didn’t belong to Bill was purely Joe-ical, and vice versa.”
When he got back to St. Louis, Pulitzer took his seat on the four-member police commission. One of the other members was William Patrick, the lawyer who had given Pulitzer some work during his first years in St. Louis. Providing police protection was a serious affair. The city was the fourth-largest in the United States and quite spread out. The geographic area patrolled was larger than that of any American city except for Philadelphia. As a result, St. Louis maintained a good-sized police department with a force of 432, including detectives, sergeants, and captains, and a large budget.
The police commission