Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [57]
In the spring of 1874, James B. Eads, one of the nation’s best-known engineers, was putting the final touches on his massive stone-and-steel bridge across the Mississippi. When completed, it would be the longest arch bridge in the world and would connect St. Louis to eastern train traffic for the first time—to the horror of the Wiggins family, whose ferry had brought Pulitzer across the river nine years earlier.
Eads was now looking south to an even riskier engineering challenge. He had proposed to the federal government to deepen the key channel that led from the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico. If he succeeded, the government would pay him between $1 million and $2 million. But under the terms, if Eads failed the entire cost of the attempt would rest with him.
Pulitzer confessed that he knew little about “jetties” but had great faith in Eads, whom he had known for five years. He took $20,000 of his capital and invested it in Eads’s scheme, knowing, as Eads warned, that the “payments by the government depended wholly upon our securing deep water, and that if the jetties failed to secure the specified depths you would lose your investment.”
After turning the money over to Eads, Pulitzer returned to his study of law and took on the air of a gentleman of leisure. He purchased a horse and every morning rode in the company of friends; he also took rooms on the elegant street where Schurz lived. Charles Balmer, a composer of some note who had conducted the music at President Lincoln’s funeral in Springfield, Illinois, also lived on this street. He had five unmarried daughters, whom Pulitzer called the “five nightingales.” The Balmer house held a musical salon that Pulitzer, often in the company of the poet Eugene Field, would attend.
“The front door would open and in one of them would stride, like it or not orating from some Shakespeare play,” recalled Lillian Balmer, one of the five nightingales. A feast of potato herring salad, sauerbraten, beer, and wine would be set out, and soon the room would be full of music and singing, with the father on the piano and one of the daughters on the violin. Pulitzer was intrigued by Bertha Balmer, who was the more stately and intellectual of the daughters and had a fine soprano voice. But even though they were frequently left alone, nothing came of his advances.
Financial freedom also permitted Pulitzer to indulge his passion for music, “the denial of which from mere poverty and the necessity of earning my livelihood was for many years the greatest of my regrets,” Pulitzer said. For those with money, St. Louis offered concerts, operas, theater, and social galas. At a charity ball, the French artist Edward Jump captured Pulitzer dancing. Taller than all the other tailcoat-clad men, Pulitzer is dapper, with a new mustache and goatee, wearing pince-nez, and dancing with an unidentified woman only as tall as his shoulders. Pulitzer even joined a theater production at the Germania Club. He took the part of Mephistopheles, with a St. Louis belle, widely noted for her beauty, playing Faust’s love Gretchen.
Finally feeling prepared, Pulitzer stood successfully for the bar in late June. With the coming of fall, Pulitzer’s interest, as always, turned to the oncoming elections. By 1874, Liberal Republicans had begun a slow drift back into the ranks of the Republican Party after their ignominious defeat in 1872. For Democrats, such as Johnson, there was no shame in returning to the fold of the party, because the Liberal Republican movement had helped restore its health. But for Pulitzer, Schurz, Preetorius, and Grosvenor, no one was welcoming