Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [60]
Like many whites, Pulitzer was indifferent to the plight of black Americans. There was little in his own experience to relate to their oppression. As a Jew in Hungary, he had experienced hardly any discrimination. He had joined the Civil War late, had remained cocooned in a platoon of non-English-speaking recruits, and was not exposed to the abolitionists’ antebellum propaganda or to their triumphant rhetoric at the conclusion of the war. The worst injustice he had endured as a civilian was being the butt of anti-Semitic humor, but it had not thwarted his efforts at landing a job, finding housing, or making friends.
After Sedalia, it was on to Versailles, Warrensburg, and Knob Noster. A Republican newspaper reporter was on hand to chronicle Pulitzer’s visit to the small town of Knob Noster. Casting Pulitzer as a pretentious Bourbon Democrat aghast at the provincialism of rural Missouri, the reporter spun a humorous, sarcastic tale. Like his cartoonist brethren, the reporter highlighted Pulitzer’s nose from the start, describing Pulitzer’s arrival at the train station and his discovery that the town had no hotels. “The look of surprise and indignation that overspread his nasal protuberance was fearful to contemplate,” wrote the reporter.
The highlighting of Pulitzer’s nose—three times in the article—was more than a humorous jab to score partisan points. Like the caricatures by Pulitzer’s friend Keppler, these depictions were a minimally disguised way to let readers know that the subject was Jewish. Just as readers of Tom Sawyer knew when Jim said, “She tole me to go an’ git dis water,” that the speaker was black, newspaper readers knew that a person with a “nasal protuberance” was a Hebrew.
The nose became a common symbol because many of the traditional markers that societies favored to distinguish Jews had fallen into disuse by the late nineteenth century. For instance, the notion that Jews could be distinguished by their “swarthy skin” had gone by the wayside when it had become widely accepted that color—with the obvious exception of “coloreds”—could be modified over time by migration and other factors. Instead, an emerging generation of social scientists obsessed with racial classification turned to the “Jew nose.” They studied the “nostrility” of the Jew and connected the characteristics of the “Jewish, or Hawknose” with their view of Jews as shrewd and capable of turning an insight into profit. They determined that the “Jew nose” became even more evident in the children of mixed marriages. Thus even a Jew who gave up his or her cultural accouterments retained a marker still visible a generation later.
From Knob Noster, Pulitzer turned back toward St. Louis. One of the last stops of the speech-a-day statewide tour was in Boonville. The visit offered a wonderful window into the era’s partisan press. The Boonville Advertiser, the Democratic paper, referred to Pulitzer as “the eloquent German orator” and told readers he had “delivered an able and logical speech [and] was listened to with marked attention.” The Republican Boonville Weekly Eagle saw things differently: “The general impression was that he had more nose than eloquence. The fact was at once palpable, but we did not like to seize it,” said the paper, adding italics for its readers insufficiently witty to pick up on the editor’s humor.
Pulitzer’s speeches were coherent, well organized, carefully composed, and weighty. It had been only a decade since his arrival in the United States as a teenager unable to speak more than a word or two of English. Now twenty-seven