Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [62]
On this trip, as well as on subsequent visits to New York in the 1870s, Pulitzer favored the Fifth Avenue Hotel between West Twenty-Third and West Twenty-Fourth streets. Completed in 1858, the six-story, marble-fronted hotel was the first to have a “vertical railroad”—or what would later be called an elevator. It became very popular after the Civil War for its luxurious rooms, each with fireplaces and private bathrooms. Deep-pile carpets with the sultry smells of anthracite and coffee in its immense public rooms, the hotel was favored for party conferences by Republicans, including Liberal Republicans when their stock was rising.
By the 1870s, however, newer hotels eclipsed the Fifth Avenue. “The hotel, for all its sober state, was no longer fashionable,” lamented Edith Wharton in her novella New Year’s Day. “No one, in my memory, had ever known anyone who went there; it was frequented by ‘politicians’ and ‘Westerners,’ two classes of citizens whom my mother’s intonation always seemed to deprive of their vote by ranking them with illiterates and criminals.”
At the Fifth Avenue Hotel one day in March, Pulitzer came across a newspaper from St. Louis. Eager to catch up on news from his city, he dived into the issue. Suddenly he spotted his name, in connection with a prominent trial. Several years before, in 1872, a group of businessmen in St. Louis had invested money to rejuvenate the aging Varieties Theater. Pulitzer’s friend Hutchins had sunk a considerable sum into the project. It soon failed, but during the ensuing fiscal and legal chaos, Hutchins expanded his investment by buying out other members’ shares, at a steep discount. His plan was to force a bankruptcy sale of the theater and its fixtures and then make a claim to the proceeds as a creditor. But other creditors and investors had outmaneuvered Hutchins. As a last resort, he sued.
Pulitzer had not been involved in any part of the business and was not accused of any wrongdoing. Yet he was swept up into the scandal because of his friendship with Hutchins. The defendants wanted to put Pulitzer on the stand because they believed he would contradict Hutchins’s claims and corroborate testimony helpful to them.
Two of the city’s most notorious and colorful attorneys, Frank J. Bowman and Britton A. Hill, who had helped Pulitzer’s defense in the shooting case four years earlier, represented the defense. The legal duo made a most unlikely pairing. Bowman was a tiny man, said to weigh only 125 pounds. He looked even more minuscule next to the 300-pound Hill. But what he lacked in size, Bowman, nicknamed the “Machiavelli of the St. Louis Bar,” made up for in bulldog-like tenacity. He was widely feared by attorneys and businessmen because he had little patience for legal ethics and took his legal battles outside the court, on more than one occasion, by challenging his opponent to a duel.
The legal machinations of the case were so complicated that only the most sophisticated lawyers could understand the particulars. But that didn’t matter. With so many prominent St. Louisans ensnared, the trial had become the city’s most popular soap opera in the spring of 1875.
The press suggested that Pulitzer was absent—hiding, in fact—in order to help his friend Hutchins.
After setting down the newspaper at his New York hotel, Pulitzer telegraphed the judge in the case. “Never heard anything of the case until just now, and stand ready to take the next train and leave for home and testify,” Pulitzer wired. “Please telegraph immediately whether there will be time enough.” No reply came, but Pulitzer decided to return anyway. He boarded a train bound for St. Louis the next night, reaching the city on March 20, 1875.
An enterprising reporter for the Missouri Republican got word that Pulitzer was back in town and sought him out. He first asked for Pulitzer at the Southern Hotel. “No, sah, not in,” said the clerk. Next he tried the Westliche