Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [59]
But Pulitzer had none of those allegiances and was unwilling to beg forgiveness from leaders whom he perceived as having defiled democracy’s temple. He was now a Democrat.
The Missouri Democratic Party embraced its new member. In October, Pulitzer was dispatched on a statewide canvass for the Democratic ticket, beginning in Sedalia, a new but rapidly growing town on the Missouri Pacific rail line in the western part of the state. The town’s paper, stalwartly Democratic, hailed his conversion and promoted him as a new star in the party. “Wherever Mr. Pulitzer speaks,” it reported, “the people crowd to hear him, and those who hear him become convinced of the truth he so eloquently utters.”
In his speech, which lasted close to an hour, Pulitzer explained his conversion. “The war with bullets was over. But it left us a legacy, a war with ballots,” Pulitzer began. “The enemies of the country are no longer in the South. They are in Washington.” In this struggle, Pulitzer said, he was volunteering to fight “as the same humble private as which in the last war I stood on the side of the Union,” thereby answering the obligatory question of whose side one had favored, still a hurdle for many aspiring Democratic politicians.
The enemy in this new conflict is “the great army of office-holders, carpet-baggers, monopolists, protectionists and all those selfish people interested naturally in alliance with the ‘powers that be,’” Pulitzer told the crowd at Sedalia. Across the nation they are easy to identify because they run under the Republican banner, but not so in Missouri, where reform has had the upper hand and the Republicans have gone into hiding, he said. “And so in this State alone do we enjoy the spectacle of seeing the Grant party turn with band and baggage, postmaster, gaugers, assessors, disfranchisers, colored brothers and all, into ‘people,’ and hear how lustily they cry for reform! Reform!”
Like the James boys, highway robbers who wore masks, the People’s Party was the Republican Party in disguise, Pulitzer said. To prove his point, he exhaustively compared the new party’s platform with that of previous Republican Party platforms. “They say it is a party of reform, and we see as the most officious reformers, the most notorious postmasters, Federal office holders and corrupt demagogues in the state.” Pulitzer lumped both Schurz and Grosvenor, mentioning them by name, in with the forces of Grant and corruption, though he studiously avoided accusing either one directly of wrongdoing.
As at a revival, Pulitzer washed himself of the sin of having been a Republican. “I confess that coming fresh from the army not much more than a boy, for a very short time, I have myself belonged to the party of proscription.” But his sin, he insisted, was not as great as that of the party, because when he served in the legislature he had campaigned for elimination of the disenfranchisement provisions. Opponents claimed that this action would drive out Union men and re-enslave the Negroes or, worse, massacre them. “Well, these rebels have now voted for four years, and show me the first Union man who has been disturbed, show me one Negro who has been molested on account of his Union sentiments! The only Negro who has been molested that I know of in the whole state was a fellow in St. Louis County who ravished a poor girl. And he was only lynched. Not by rebels, however, but by honest Germans and strong Union men.”
Not an eyebrow would have been raised at Pulitzer’s approbation of a lynching. Between 50 and 100 lynchings took place each year, and almost always