Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [87]
Pulitzer’s antics gained him a second day of front-page coverage in the morning papers. At the Globe-Democrat, McCullagh greeted Pulitzer’s return to journalism in St. Louis with a warmhearted editorial. As a statesman, Pulitzer had not been very successful, he said. “What he failed to accomplish with an eloquent tongue, he may yet achieve with a brilliant pen. If the world was made no better by Mr. Pulitzer as an orator, it will, we trust, be made wiser by Mr. Pulitzer as an editor.”
Buying the St. Louis Dispatch was easy compared with the next hurdle Pulitzer faced. His cash would last only a few weeks; and unlike the Staats-Zeitung, the Dispatch had no salable assets with which he could turn a quick profit. Rather, Pulitzer’s only option was to find new readers and do it quickly.
St. Louisans already had two other English-language afternoon newspapers: the Evening Star and the Evening Post. Unlike the morning newspapers, neither of these was well established. The Star had started publishing only a few days earlier, but it had strong financial backing. It counted prominently among its investors Thomas Allen, a railroad magnate and aspiring politician, whose children Albert had tutored one summer. He was sinking money in it, in the hope of having a paper to support his planned bid for the U.S. Senate.
The Evening Post, which had been launched eleven months earlier, had the lion’s share of readers. Its publisher, Dillon, who looked like a patrician and wore a handlebar mustache, was about Pulitzer’s age, was also an experienced journalist, and had similar political leanings. Otherwise the two men were very different. Dillon had been born into one of the leading families of St. Louis. His father was an Irish immigrant merchant who made a considerable sum in real estate. In 1861, the younger Dillon went to Harvard, rather than to war, and returned home an urbane and well-read gentleman. He won the hand of a daughter of one of the French families who founded St. Louis, and the couple spent a two-year honeymoon in Rome—the same years when Pulitzer was struggling to get a foothold in St. Louis.
Their honeymoon ended when Dillon’s father died. The engineer James Eads had been appointed executor of the estate, and Dillon discovered that much of his inheritance was tied up in Eads’s chancy bridge project. To protect his investment, he became secretary-treasurer of the Illinois–St. Louis Bridge Company. Five years later, when the family’s financial affairs were secure, Dillon sought an escape from the dull work. McCullagh offered him a job on the Globe-Democrat. Under the guidance of the venerable editor, Dillon developed into an editorial writer of some distinction. His thoughtful writing was graceful and refined. He was soon a well-known figure in St. Louis journalism. In 1878, Dillon decided the time had come to establish his own newspaper. His wife, Blanche, supplied the necessary funds.
Dillon’s Evening Post was an odd amalgam of his own refined, lofty writing style and McCullagh’s muscular journalism. Its coverage of society news appealed to the city’s elite but did not lure the potentially large audience for an afternoon paper. This was of some comfort to Pulitzer as he took the helm of the dead-in-the-water Dispatch. On one flank he faced a new, untested afternoon paper, the Star; and on the other the more established paper, the Post, stalled in its search for readers. There was bound to be an opportunity for the Dispatch.
Although the flagging fortunes of the three evening papers discouraged