Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [61]
A few weeks after the tour, Pulitzer’s gubernatorial candidate was swept into office. Had Pulitzer stood for office as a Democrat, he might have also returned to the state legislature. As it was, the election offered him a chance to relaunch his political career. By a very narrow margin (283 votes out of 222,315), voters called for a constitutional convention. Pulitzer threw his hat into the ring and joined the campaign for the sixty-eight delegate seats. On January 26, 1875, his friends James Broadhead the lawyer and Henry Brockmeyer the philosopher were among those selected by the voters. And, to Pulitzer’s joy, the voters had picked him as well. His old paper, the Westliche Post, angry at his conversion to the Democracy, greeted his election with derision. It said Pulitzer was as ill-suited to draft a constitution as a hedgehog was to shave one’s face.
Chapter Nine
FOUNDING FATHER
On the evening of February 21, 1875, Pulitzer and Joseph McCullagh, of the St. Louis Globe, caught up with A. C. Hesing, the publisher of Illinois Staats-Zeitung in a hall of the elegant Southern Hotel of St. Louis, where Pulitzer now lodged. The publisher, a Republican leader of such power in Chicago that he was called “Boss Hesing,” was the most sought-after man that night, according to McCullagh. “As he stood, sat or walked in the corridors of the Southern, last night, there was no minute when he was not either talking or listening to some party or other, anxious to look at him, stand by his side and hear him talk.”
McCullagh wanted to interview Hesing for an article. Pulitzer had a more pressing personal need. Although they were members of opposing parties, Pulitzer wanted Hesing’s take on the changing political landscape. It had been only a few months since Pulitzer had converted to the Democratic Party, and he was still seeking confirmation that he had made the right decision. He got it from Hesing.
“Everything is getting more and more Democratic day by day,” Hesing said.
What will happen to those Republicans who supported Greeley and Brown in 1872? McCullagh asked.
“Probably fuse with the true Democratic Party,” Hesing said. “I know they will in my state, and in many others. There’s no doubt but that they are thoroughly and eternally disgusted with the present Radical Administration.”
“And Carl Schurz?”
“Well, I tell you what I think,” said Hesing, who was not only a fellow Republican but a German like Schurz. “I don’t think so very much of Schurz either as a journalist or politician.”
Hesing’s words were comforting. Pulitzer had been wise to throw his lot in with Democrats and had also made a timely end to his allegiance with his mentor Schurz. For their part, Democrats were thrilled to have Pulitzer. He had toiled in their successful effort to retain the governor’s mansion, and they worked to make him feel welcome.
With his political fortunes on the rise, Pulitzer’s fiscal affairs also took a turn upward. James Eads’s scheme for dredging the Mississippi delta, in which Pulitzer had invested $20,000, was a triumph. The payoff gave Pulitzer enough money to live for a number of years. He could concentrate on politics without any concern for finding work. Pulitzer expressed his gratitude to Eads by joining dozens of other prominent St. Louisans in the parlor (No. 5) of the Southern Hotel to plan a banquet in Eads’s honor. The first to speak was Pulitzer himself. “Twenty years from now,” he said, “we will have Eads Places, Eads Avenues, and, I hope, Eads monuments.”
Leaving the committee of citizens to do its work, Pulitzer headed east a few days later on the first of what would be half a dozen trips to New York that year. He had in mind breaking into journalism in New York. But, unlike his brother Albert, he didn’t want to work for someone else’s paper; he wanted to use his capital