Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [80]
On a spring day, Samuel Bowles, the son of the late publisher of the Springfield Republican, paused for lunch while visiting Washington. As he looked around the restaurant, he saw Pulitzer lunching with the prominent suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker. She was in the capital in hopes of advancing the passage of a constitutional amendment. Sitting at a table near the door of the restaurant, Pulitzer and Hooker attracted attention. “The two,” said Bowles, “were engaged in animated conversation, no doubt discussing the merits of the Sixteenth Amendment, and the intellectual sparks were pretty surely flying, for they do not agree.”
Indeed, Pulitzer was not a supporter of women’s suffrage. When he first confronted the issue as a state legislator in 1870, he seemed somewhat sympathetic. The lawmakers were considering putting a women’s suffrage amendment on a statewide ballot. Before the measure failed, Pulitzer urged that women of all races over twenty-one years old be permitted to cast ballots that would be tallied separately and would not affect the outcome of the vote. But four years later, at the constitutional convention, Pulitzer lined up with opponents of women’s suffrage. In fact, he was quite dismissive, suggesting that those who supported it did so only “out of sheer gallantry and courtesy.” He even opposed permitting widows and unmarried women over twenty-one who paid school taxes to vote in school elections.
Tunstall’s Dear John letter left Pulitzer with only one option, which he pursued with vigor. “If you knew,” Pulitzer wrote to Kate Davis, “how much I thought of you these last days and how the thought of you creeps in and connects with every contemplation and plan about the present and future, you would believe it.
“I cannot help saying that I am not worthy of such love, I am too cold and selfish, I know,” he continued describing himself truthfully in words that might eventually haunt Davis. By his own admission, Pulitzer was driven by speculative impulses. Until now, his life had unfolded as an undirected but singular pursuit of his own goals, with no care for others. “Still I am not without honor, and that alone would compel me to strive to become worthy of you, worthy of your faith and love, worthy of a better and finer future.
“There now,” he wrote, “you have my first love letter.”
Pulitzer longed not just for stability, professionally and otherwise, but also for affection and companionship. The deaths in his family led him to think of himself as an orphan, and his competitive relationship with Albert, his only surviving sibling, kept the two apart. Pulitzer frankly described his life to Davis in melancholy terms, a life void of purpose, love, and a home. “I am impatient to turn over a new leaf and start a new life—one of which home must be the foundation, affection, ambition and occupation the corner stones, and you, my dear, my inseparable companion.”
They planned a June wedding in Washington. As the date neared, Pulitzer gave Davis many reasons to reconsider. He vacillated on their plans for a honeymoon in Europe. One moment he wanted to rearrange the departure date so as to travel with his actor friend John McCullough, who was appearing at the National Theater. Next, when Pulitzer heard of a newspaper for sale, he broached the idea that they shouldn’t go overseas after all.
“You can now see yourself what an utterly inconsistent, uncertain and inconsistent chap I am,” he wrote to Davis. He said he could not make up his mind even as to where they would settle. “Funny situation, isn’t it? As if to give you a foretaste of the future, you are met by difficulties even before