Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [81]
A week before the wedding Pulitzer dashed off to New York, again in pursuit of a newspaper. “Prospects look quite favorable for a consummation of a bargain,” he wrote, without identifying the prospect—probably the New York Mail, which was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. He admitted that he knew his fiancée was upset by his absence on the eve of their wedding. “It is an important opportunity, perhaps a fortune, and you ought not to expect me to neglect it.
“I must have business to occupy my mind and heart,” Pulitzer continued, “you do the latter. Occupation will do the former,” in an accurate forecast of the years that lay ahead. “Make all arrangements, complete every preparation upon the assumption that I will be with you on Monday for that important ceremony, thereafter to stay with you forever.”
The ceremony actually didn’t take place until Wednesday, June 19, 1878. At eight o’clock in the evening, Pulitzer and Davis stood at an altar before a congregation of 100 in the Church of the Epiphany, on G Street in Washington, the church to which the Davis family had belonged almost since its inception in 1842. Theirs was a parish of the powerful and wealthy. In the 1870s, the capital’s elite had a choice of four Episcopal churches. The Church of the Epiphany and St. John’s were the only two in the mostly residential portions of downtown surrounding the White House. But while the latter served as a house of worship for presidents, the former was larger, more elegant, and more desirable.
Prior to the Civil War, the congregants of the Church of the Epiphany had strong sympathies toward the South. Among their ranks was Kate Davis’s distant cousin Jefferson Davis. Those members of the lost cause who had returned to Washington since the war also came back to the church. Sitting on the bride’s side of the aisle were Senator Lamar of Mississippi, who knew Pulitzer from Hutchins’s salon; Senator John Brown Gordon of Georgia, a lieutenant general in the Confederate army; and Representative John Ezekiel Ellis of Louisiana, a Confederate veteran who had been a prisoner of war.
There were former Confederates on the groom’s side also: two Missouri Democrats now in Congress. They were joined by other politicians with whom Pulitzer had become friends in a decade of electoral work. In all, one-third of Missouri’s congressional delegation was in attendance, along with friends such as Hutchins and the bridge builder James Eads.
The newlyweds, whose union the politicians, publishers, judges, and notables had come to celebrate, were a study in contrast. The bride was refined, delicate, and graceful. “A more gentle or lovely bride was never led to the altar than she,” wrote Hutchins for the front page of the Washington Post the next morning. Her betrothed towered over her with angular awkwardness. When they knelt before the altar, Pulitzer was gripped with anxiety about his shoes. His feet were larger than normal, and the soles of his shoes had been chalked with his room number by the hotel staff, who polished them overnight. “I thought with dismay that the people in the back of me would think that I wore No. 17 shoes.”
The Reverend John H. Chew pronounced the couple man and wife, and the Hungarian Jew entered the ranks of one of Washington’s most established Episcopal congregations. A union with Davis, unlike one with Tunstall, offered considerable benefits. Her family, her pedigree, and her religion completed Pulitzer’s metamorphosis. Success, power, and wealth in the United States had only one place of worship, the Episcopal church. Appropriately, the three-paneled stained-glass window above the altar depicted Epiphany, the moment when Jews and Gentiles came together before Christ.
In the fourteen years since his arrival on the shores of the United States, Pulitzer had been a carriage driver, waiter, steamador, journalist, politician, and lawyer. He had shed most traces of