Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [52]
Pulitzer’s forecast and Schurz’s nightmare turned out to be true. On Election Day, Greeley and Brown carried only six states: Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Tennessee, Texas, and Missouri. The ticket could manage only a slim victory in the state where the movement began. Democrats carried the day in other states’ races. Even St. Louis, city and county, returned to the Democratic fold.
For two years Pulitzer had dutifully served the Liberal Republican cause, renouncing the Republican Party, where he had begun his political life. His break had been a principled one over fundamental political differences. Pulitzer believed in the Liberal Republican Party’s precepts and had tied his political fortunes to the party’s success. Greeley’s ignominious defeat not only killed the party, but politically stranded Pulitzer as a man without a party in the partisan world of nineteenth-century America.
Chapter Eight
POLITICS AND PRINCIPLE
The crushing defeat of the Liberal Republican movement imperiled Pulitzer’s tenuous hold on his patronage post. His one-year term on the St. Louis police commission was set to expire in February, leaving his reappointment in the hands of the newly elected governor, the first Democrat in Missouri’s executive mansion since before the Civil War. Although Governor Silas Woodson knew that he partially owed his election to Liberal Republicans, he had little interest in retaining any Republicans—Liberal or other—in state offices.
Pulitzer mounted a campaign to remain on the commission. Keeping the job would allow him to retain a small foothold in politics and continue earning easy money. Governor Woodson hadn’t even been sworn in before Pulitzer’s loyalists took action. His friend James Broadhead, an unwavering Democrat who had been both a Unionist and a defender of slavery, was among the first to tell Woodson that Pulitzer had high standing in St. Louis, had done a good job, and represented the important German interests in the city. Others joined in. Newspaper editors, such as those at the St. Louis Dispatch and St. Louis Times, and city officeholders, including the city council president and city registrar, also wrote in support of Pulitzer.
Pulitzer turned for help to Hutchins and Johnson, who now had considerable political influence. For them, the election of 1872 had been munificent. Hutchins won a seat in the House and Johnson was elected as Woodson’s lieutenant governor. With friends like these, Pulitzer’s case for reappointment looked strong. The governor, however, didn’t show his hand. Pulitzer may have had allies in high places, but he still had strong enemies, particularly among politicians in St. Louis County who had not forgotten his efforts to depose them and deny them the pecuniary rewards of their work.
Word leaked from the governor’s office that Woodson was preparing to send his selections to the state senate on Monday afternoon, January 20, 1873. Hutchins feared that Pulitzer’s name would not appear on the list and pleaded on behalf of his man. “If undecided to make the appointment requested by Lt. Governor Johnson and myself,” Hutchins wrote Woodson, “do me the favor to hold it in abeyance until I can see you.”
Monday came and went without any appointments coming down from the governor’s office. A silence worthy of the Vatican descended. For several weeks Pulitzer’s supporters continued their campaign, framing the issue around complex ethnic politics. “The Germans of this city ought to be represented on the Police Board not for nativistical reasons but so as to make sure that not only Irish Policemen are sent into German districts,” wrote one man. But this approach was