Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [73]
As a member of the Washington press corps, Pulitzer watched the comings and goings at the Capitol, interviewed members of the Senate, and kept an ear open to the conversations of the city’s politicos. His first dispatches to the Sun appeared just after Christmas. They were a marvel of optimism. “There will be no war,” he began. “The woman that hesitates is lost. The Republican confederates hesitated. They will lose.”
By this point, both the House and the Senate had appointed special committees to devise a means of resolving the election. Pulitzer believed that the outcome rested in the hands of nine Republican senators. “My answer, based upon close observation, direct information, and personal conversation with the members of the Senate, is that these nine will be found on the right side when they are really needed,” Pulitzer reported.
Dana permitted Pulitzer a byline, a rare privilege in that era; and, considering that the Sun was only a four-page paper, the space devoted to his dispatches gave Pulitzer considerable prominence. For the first two weeks of January 1877, Pulitzer continued to predict a victory for Tilden. Pulitzer’s reasoning was not without foundation. By the end of January, the House and Senate had passed, with strong Democratic support, a bill creating the Electoral Commission, whose job it would be to resolve the election, presumably in Tilden’s favor.
Pulitzer did not limit his advocacy of Tilden to the pages of the Sun. On January 8, 1877, he joined his friend Watterson at a mass meeting at Ford’s Theater under the auspices of the Tilden-Hendricks Reform Club. Though the flyers had promised that prominent members of Congress would attend, the two most recognizable speakers turned out to be Watterson and Pulitzer. Watterson offered a fiery denunciation of the Republicans’ efforts to thwart Tilden’s election. He declared that 100,000 unarmed citizens would descend on the capital on February 14. The announcement startled many Democrats, who had heard of no plans for any demonstration. Pulitzer followed Watterson’s lead and delivered a harangue that even a sympathetic newspaper called “incendiary and revolutionary.” Pulitzer said he was “ready to bare his breast to the bullets of the tyrant, and rush headlong upon his glittering steel.”
Pulitzer’s intemperate speech troubled Dana. Pulitzer’s dispatches disappeared from the pages of the Sun for the remainder of the month. It was not until February 10 that Pulitzer resumed his articles. By then, it was becoming clear Tilden’s cause was lost. The Electoral Commission was going to side with the Republicans because a tactical mistake had resulted in giving the deciding vote on the fifteen-member panel to a Republican. “When the work of the returning boards of South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida was finally completed,” Pulitzer wrote, “and these states given to Mr. Hayes, wresting the fruits of success from the party to whom they have seemed to belong, by a bare majority of one, the chagrin of the Democratic Party was deep seated and bitter to the last degree.”
On March 2, the wrangling came to an end. Congress awarded the presidency to Hayes. Democrats accepted the result because a tacit deal had been made whereby their acquiescence would be rewarded with a withdrawal of federal troops from the South. In fact, after assuming office, Hayes removed the remaining federal forces from southern state capitals, and Reconstruction came to an effective end. The Democrats lost the White House, but for southern Democrats, their second rebellion against the national government—this one nonviolent—was a success. Dana could not accept the defeat. For the next four years, his paper referred to