Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [65]
As the summer heat settled down on Jefferson City, the delegates worked day in and day out on crafting a new, acceptable constitution. They began their day at eight in the morning and sat until six-thirty in the evening. After a break for dinner, they met in committees, often until ten or eleven at night. “Really it is the hardest working body I ever saw,” one of Pulitzer’s friends wrote home.
Pulitzer’s style as a delegate was unchanged from when he had been a legislator. He was uninterested in the structure and form of the proposed state government. Instead he stuck to his far more parochial aim of freeing St. Louis, the city, from county rule and from state interference. The rural delegates resented St. Louis’s insistence on unique consideration in the constitution. But Pulitzer and his old friend Brockmeyer argued that the city deserved preferential treatment because it held a quarter of the state’s population and provided half of the state’s revenue. A special committee was created to consider St. Louis’s demands.
Behind closed doors, the committee struggled to produce a consensus that could win the delegates’ support. Pulitzer was excluded from its work. Instead, he resorted to being a gadfly on the floor, never letting the issue rest. For instance, when other delegates worried about setting an unusual and difficult precedent by caving in to the city’s demands, Pulitzer applied his rhetorical weapon of choice—sarcasm. Precedent, he said, is “the feeble expression of a feeble mind, lacking the inherent ability to express original views that is compelled to seek refuge in a still feebler vestige of ancient, decayed precedents.”
In the end the committee produced a compromise that would allow St. Louis to separate from county jurisdiction, permanently delineate its city limits, and create its own autonomous governing institutions. The following year, the “great divorce” was mediated by the city and county governments. The city, as Pulitzer and other reformers had hoped, gained independence. St. Louis became the first American city to enact a home rule charter, and the achievement was widely hailed as the nation began to look for innovative ways to govern its burgeoning metropolises. But Pulitzer and other advocates did not foresee that their well-intentioned remedy would eventually cripple St. Louis. Barred from annexing land and facing severe constitutional restrictions on raising taxes, the city would, over time, become impoverished, deserted by its wealthier citizens, and transformed into a destitute urban core surrounded by a wealthy county.
As the convention neared its end, a short-lived debate arose on freedom of the press. A delegate wanted to expand the legal safeguards for newspapers against libel suits. He modeled his amendment on an existing clause in Pennsylvania’s recently adopted constitution. Under its provisions, both public and private individuals would have to convince a jury that the offending article had been maliciously or negligently published.
Pulitzer was only one of three delegates to speak about the proposal. Years before he would become a publisher besieged with libel suits, he delivered his earliest public view on freedom of the press. Pulitzer said that he, like the author of the amendment, had worked in newspapers. “I, sir, stand with a guilty conscience ready to admit that the law under which I contributed some little activity perhaps in that branch of the profession should in my opinion be rather strengthened than weakened. I am sorry to say it, ready to confess that perhaps I have been myself guilty of slandering and libeling persons, not maliciously, certainly not.”
Under the proposed plan, he said, it would be impossible to convict any proprietor of a newspaper, because proprietors so rarely have anything to do with the content of newspapers. Rather, a newspaper is assembled by editors and reporters. “In other words those who own newspapers scarcely ever make them.” For evidence he pointed to the newspapers of St. Louis. “The leading