Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [51]
“Then he hasn’t accepted it yet?”
“No.”
Police commission work felt inconsequential to Pulitzer. He was giving his entire effort to sustaining the Westliche Post and supporting the Greeley campaign. Working every day from eight in the morning to midnight, he seamlessly switched from editor to campaigner, sometimes making no distinction between the roles.
As fall approached, Pulitzer began traveling for the ticket. In an era when speeches were considered beneath the candidates’ dignity, others made passionate campaign speeches on their behalf. In September Pulitzer was on the stump almost full-time. By one count, he delivered sixty speeches to German audiences in Indiana and Ohio. His campaign trail crossed the path of Simon Wolf, a prominent Jewish lawyer from Washington, D.C., who was campaigning for Grant’s reelection. Wolf sat in a hotel reading the newspaper after completing a campaign speech in the same town where Pulitzer was speaking on behalf of Greeley. Two men came into the hotel, sat down near Wolf, and ordered drinks. “Did you ever hear such German as that man Pulitzer got off? Nobody could understand him,” said one man to the other.
“Naturally,” said Wolf. “Pulitzer had spoken over their heads and they were disgusted with his culture. When I met Pulitzer that same evening, I told him, and we had a laugh at his expense.”
The campaign produced a surprising dividend for Pulitzer. “Some of the proprietors of the Westliche Post,” he said, “became nervous, wanted to retire, thought the paper was ruined by the Greeley campaign.” They approached him to see if he would like to buy into the paper. Pulitzer was the most valuable member of their staff and had toiled for them for five years. Before newspapers became big businesses, journalists dreamed of owning at least part of a newspaper. There was no money to be made in writing for a paper, only in owning one.
The potential changes in the ownership of the Westliche Post were soon a subject of gossip among St. Louis Republicans. The rumors reached the Missouri Democrat, whose editors dispatched a reporter to follow up on them. “Schurz was said to be disgusted with the course of the paper, and Plate, the senior member of the firm, anxious to buy the other proprietors out,” reported the Democrat.
“What’s the news?” asked Pulitzer when the reporter climbed the last flights of stairs leading into the Westliche Post editorial rooms.
“I don’t know; I hear there is trouble in the Post office.”
“How?” replied Pulitzer, smiling at the visitor from a desk stacked high with paper.
“Well, there are rumors on the street that there is trouble in the office between Mr. Plate and Mr. Schurz and Preetorius; that he wants to buy them out, or have them buy him out.”
“Whoever heard of such a damned thing?” said Pulitzer, laughing and leaning back in his chair.
“Then it’s not true?”
“No. It’s a lie, it’s a damned lie. Why, it’s so absurd.”
At best, Pulitzer was being disingenuous. As in his previous dealings with reporters, Pulitzer was willing to misinform if it was to his advantage. He was not ready to make public that twenty-four hours earlier he had signed a note payable to Preetorius. It provided Pulitzer with $4,500 in credit at an interest rate of 8 percent, 2 percent lower than the rate common at the time for such loans. Pulitzer was in the process of signing other, similar notes. With these funds he bought a stake in the paper on, in his words, “very liberal terms.”
“They thought I was necessary to the paper,” he said. “They probably would have done the same thing to any other man who worked sixteen hours a day, as I did through that campaign.”
Within a week, he was an owner. By late September 1872, Pulitzer was referring to the Westliche Post as “our newspaper” in a letter to Schurz. Thus seven years after reading his first copy of the Westliche Post in hopes of finding employment in St. Louis, Pulitzer was an American newspaper publisher.
While Pulitzer’s stock rose, Greeley’s and Brown’s sank. The prospect of victory was becoming increasingly dim.