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a jubilant return to Indianapolis, where he had campaigned in vain for Greeley four years earlier. This time he was convinced that he was traveling on behalf of a winning ticket. The Republican convention’s nomination of Rutherford Hayes, whose main attribute was his inoffensiveness, only increased Democratic optimism. “The hosts of reform are marching to victory all over the state, and the days of Grantism and Mortonism are doomed,” prophesied the Democratic Indianapolis Sentinel. The euphoric sense of an approaching Democratic triumph infected thousands of party stalwarts. On Saturday night, September 2, they marched to the Grand Hotel to escort Pulitzer to the hall where he was to give his address. The main thoroughfare teemed with Democrats bearing torches. “As far as the eye could reach out Delaware Street, the lights were seen until they blended in one almost on the horizon,” reported the Sentinel.

When Pulitzer and his entourage reached the hall, only a few seats remained empty. As the rambunctious audience quieted, Pulitzer began by describing the suppression of the political meeting in Germany he had witnessed a few months earlier. “Such is liberty in Europe!” exclaimed Pulitzer, “I, too, though but a stranger there, felt the outrage; but greater than my indignation at that moment was my pride in knowing that I, too, was an American, a free man in whose country no peaceable meeting could be dispersed at the bidding of the police.”

However, he continued, his pride in his American freedoms had been damaged by the actions of Republicans. In the decade since he had become an American, he had seen a president impeached in an act of “reckless partisanship” the South given up to “public plunder like so much conquered booty” a reconstruction act turn masters into “political slaves” and slaves into “masters” the election of a president who had never “read the Constitution,” with a “servile Senate at his feet” a “self-confessed thief” in the cabinet; and political appointees consorting with “notorious thieves.” At the heart of his complaint was that the Republican Party—the party founded on a belief in equality—“gave up principles for power,” said Pulitzer. “I saw laws and Constitution trampled upon, and crime and corruption flourish.”

For more than an hour, Pulitzer’s attacks on his former political party enthralled his decidedly partisan audience. Although he was still called a “German orator” and his command of English had been long in coming, he now displayed the erudition inspired by Davidson and acquired at the Mercantile Library. The speech was well organized, with broad themes supported by clever use of examples, possessed an effective cadence, built on alliterative lines, and marshaled such linguistic force that it both inspired converts and won grudging respect from the opposition. The Indianapolis Sentinel reproduced his speech in full, and it was quoted in newspapers as far away as Texas.

Fresh from his triumph in Indianapolis, Pulitzer dashed around the state, speaking at a dozen smaller venues. He took time to stop in Cincinnati and visit with John Cockerill, whom he had met at the Liberal Republican Convention. As in 1872, Pulitzer and Cockerill were on the same side politically, but now only one of them commanded a newspaper. It wasn’t Pulitzer. Cockerill had risen to become managing editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, a Democratic paper, and was using every part of his seven-column editorial page to boost Tilden’s candidacy, accusing the Republicans of illicit use of money and power.

In mid-September, Pulitzer dropped off the campaign trail for two days of rest in St. Louis. From his room at the Southern Hotel, he sent an exultant letter to the famous journalist George Alfred Townsend, another veteran of Greeley’s campaign. “My success was probably as astonishing to myself as it was to others. If you looked at the Western papers you probably saw how undeservedly well I was treated.” The false humility of the letter was betrayed by his real objective in writing. Pulitzer wanted Townsend to publish a