Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [74]
Disgusted, Pulitzer left Washington for St. Louis. A week after the inauguration, he admitted the fight was over. “We may have lost much as American citizens, but we have lost little as partisans,” he wrote. “It is only four years. We have not been defeated, but defrauded.”
The loss stung. Pulitzer understood that politics, though exhilarating, could include defeats, but each path he took came to the same conclusion. As a Republican, he had lost his office. As an insurgent reformer, he had joined a movement that went nowhere. And, now after crossing a political Rubicon by changing his affiliation to a party whose victory seemed inevitable, the result was unchanged. It was not hard to conclude that politics, like journalism, seemed to be a dead end.
In St. Louis Pulitzer took up residence again at the Southern Hotel. This time he took two rooms on the fifth floor. When the six-story Ohio sandstone hotel opened in 1865, to great fanfare, the local press had invoked the image of the Egyptian pyramids. The Southern Hotel was still among the nation’s largest, occupying most of a block and capable of accommodating 700 guests.
On April 10, Pulitzer celebrated his thirtieth birthday at a friend’s house with Hutchins and others. At midnight, he returned to the Southern, walked through the office past the night clerk, and rode the elevator to his rooms, where he promptly went to bed. A little over an hour later, muffled noises awoke him. He thought he heard the word “fire” but concluded that the voices were coming from the street and that the fire was elsewhere, so he turned over to go back to sleep again. “Suddenly I heard women’s shrieks, seemingly in the hotel,” Pulitzer said. He jumped from his bed, lit the gas lamp, and looked at his watch. It was one-thirty in the morning.
In his nightshirt, Pulitzer dashed into the hall. It was filled with smoke. He took the stairs down to the fourth floor, where he found two frantic women. “I tried to pacify them and took them to the parlor floor,” he said. “The ladies were en negligée and I took them to a room of a lady on that floor who gave them apparel.” Then, foolishly, Pulitzer ran back upstairs to his own room. There he donned his pants, which contained his wallet, and put on a vest. When he exited his room, the smoke had become so dense that the gaslights no longer illuminated the halls. Yet Pulitzer turned back one more time, to retrieve his eyeglasses, thinking they might help. As he at last descended the stairs, he saw that almost every floor was engulfed in flames.
The fire engines arrived at the hotel a few minutes after Pulitzer reached the street. Red flames burst from first- and second-story windows, and smoke poured from every opening in the building. Guests continued to spill onto the street, but it became obvious to rescuers that many remained inside. “First one window and another in rapid succession were violently raised, heads of men, women, and children were seen everywhere, and a wild cry for help filled the air,” said a reporter who arrived on the scene.
As the firemen raised ladders into position, they urged the trapped guests to remain calm. But it soon became apparent that the ladders could not reach above the fourth floor. Panicked guests began climbing down on knotted sheets. One man slid from the sixth floor on tied sheets, only to realize when he got to the end of his makeshift rope that he was still 120 feet above the ground. With flames leaping about him, he jumped. “He was immediately picked up and carried into an adjoining saloon, and lived long enough to say that his name was J. F. Stevens, when he expired,” the reporter said. “Two other faces soon appeared at the window from which he had jumped, but the flame and smoke closed them from view almost instantly, and left no doubt of the awful fate that befell them.”
By dawn nothing remained of the hotel. Firemen hosed down the embers as the search for bodies began. In all, twenty-one people died in the fire. On April 16, a coroner’s inquest was begun. A jury was