Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [78]
Pulitzer did not lack for friends in the capital. Anthony Ittner, who had been his roommate in Jefferson City, had been elected to the House. Hutchins hosted a popular salon in his parlors that attracted a colorful cast of characters, such as Senator Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, who drafted the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession and served in the Confederate diplomatic corps in Russia and other places; Representative James Proctor Knott, whose humor was known to laugh a bill off the floor; and Representative Samuel Sullivan “Sunset” Cox, a former foot soldier with Pulitzer in the 1872 Liberal Republican campaign. The men ate and drank late into the night while the colorful Freemason Albert Pike held the floor with folktales or black singers from a nearby church performed.
On January 12, 1878, Pulitzer attended the wedding of Udo Brachvogel (who had been his housemate in St. Louis) at the First Trinity Lutheran Church, known as the German church of Washington. In his company was a twenty-five-year-old woman, tall and slim with large dark eyes set in a pale face framed with coils of dark brown hair. “One of the belles of Washington,” proclaimed the Post. “One of the reigning belles of that city,” if an out-of-town newspaper was to be believed.
Her name was Kate Davis, and she was the youngest daughter of a family with both a Confederate and a social pedigree. Representative John B. Clark of Missouri, an old Confederate himself, had introduced her and Pulitzer to each other. Davis’s father, William Worthington Davis, came from a Virginian family distantly related to Jefferson Davis, the president of the late Confederacy. Her mother, Catherine Worthington Davis, was a distant cousin of her father’s from Baltimore, Maryland. Financially, however, the family was on a decline. William and his three brothers worked a small family farm in Tenleytown, within the city limits, with three servants who were former slaves. But to make ends meet, two of the brothers also held jobs outside the farm, and William served as a justice of the peace.
Though attractive, Davis was passing the age by which most women of her time were married. Her older sister, Clara, was about to turn thirty and no closer to the altar. For his part, Pulitzer’s charm, mesmerizing blue eyes, and simmering intensity made up for his awkward, gangly appearance. His intelligence, wit, evident ambition, and appearance of financial means worked to his advantage.
But to Davis’s parents, a match between their daughter and Pulitzer was a mixed blessing. Pulitzer had no dependable career. He did have means, having carefully husbanded the money he made from his newspaper deals, his investment with Eads, and land he owned along the south side of the newly created Forest Park in St. Louis. On the other hand, his bloodline was not likely to impress the southern landed gentry. His remaining accent betrayed his eastern European origins, and for churchgoing Episcopalians like the Davises, the issue of his religion was a concern.
Trying to hide his Jewish heritage would have been futile. Although he had stayed clear of synagogues and Jewish life in the United States, he was always immediately identified as a Jew by his friends and publicly in the press. And any illusion that he was something other would have been shattered on the wedding night, as at that time virtually only Jewish males were circumcised. Pulitzer promulgated a tale that his mother had not been Jewish but rather was Catholic. Because Judaism is a maternal religion, this claim explained his Jewish appearance but freed him from its detrimental status, particularly for a family such as the Davises.
Davis was not the only woman in Pulitzer’s life that spring.