Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [46]
For the first few months, Pulitzer diligently attended the biweekly meetings of the commission. He was asked to look into the police force’s effectiveness at coping with gambling—a rising problem in the city. But the duties of police commissioner were not high in his mind. Rather, politics took first place. Grosvenor put Pulitzer on the road and he spent most of February and March in the East, drumming up support for the national convention.
As the Cincinnati convention neared, Pulitzer continued promoting the governor’s presidential candidacy. “Brown has…given Joseph an office to reward his service for an anti-patronage candidate, and the rewarded one is faithful,” the Missouri Democrat snidely reported. But Pulitzer’s partners were acting coy about whom they supported, particularly Schurz, who still harbored resentment at Brown’s postelection behavior.
There were four viable candidates for the Liberal Republican nomination aside from Brown: Charles Francis Adams, a former congressman and diplomat who was the son of President John Quincy Adams; Supreme Court Justice David Davis, appointed by Lincoln and known for having written the opinion in a landmark civil liberties case; Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, who alternately was a Democrat and a Republican but while a Republican broke with his party and voted against the conviction of President Johnson during the impeachment; and Horace Greeley, the aging, famous editor of the New York Tribune. This last candidate had the virtue of unquestioned integrity, especially in contrast to Grant, but he was seen as somewhat of a screwball who supported temperance and women’s rights and dabbled in a decidedly un-American European import, socialism.
On an April evening, Pulitzer and Stilson Hutchins went to Johnson’s house to work on plans to secure the nomination for Brown. When Hutchins went home, Johnson and Pulitzer moved to Brown’s house, where they worked until two in the morning. “He is very confident of getting the nomination at Cincinnati,” Johnson wrote of Brown that night in his diary. “He fears Adams of Massachusetts. Schurz is playing shy. Nobody knows how he stands.”
Pulitzer and Grosvenor left town by train on April 24 to arrive in advance of most delegates. Reporters from around the country were heading the same way. On the leg from Chicago, Pulitzer sat with William A. Croffut, the managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. “This tall, rawboned youth was twenty-four years old,” Croffut recalled, “had a nose like Julius Caesar, had already acquired a picturesque history.”
Reaching Cincinnati in the early morning of April 25, Pulitzer and Grosvenor immediately repaired to the St. James Hotel, where they set up their political headquarters. “They kept their camp fires burning from dawn until after midnight,” said one Chicago reporter. The St. James was the center of press attention. In particular, reporters sought out the Missourians, who had one of the largest state delegations and were considered the progenitors of the rebellion. “Considering themselves the parents of the Liberal movement,” noted the Chicago reporter, “the delegation labored under the delusion that their points could be easily carried.”
The press was intensely interested in the convention. Only once before had Cincinnati been the host of a national political convention: in 1856, contentious Democrats had taken seventeen ballots to nominate James Buchanan for president. There was similar potential for drama at the Liberal Republicans’ convention, as no candidate had enough votes to win the nomination.