Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [90]
Years before, when he worked at the Westliche Post, Pulitzer had gained attention with his crusading reporting, exposing corruption in the county government and exhorting readers to action. Now, with an entire newspaper at his disposal, he went at it again, but this time he selected a larger target. He took aim at the oligarchs who controlled the city’s economic life. “The trouble in St. Louis is not with either our masses or merchants or middle classes,” Pulitzer wrote, “but those whose wealth would seem to make it their own interest to lead in every measure of enterprise, but who do not lead, nor even sometimes follow.”
He was on to something. Like many other cities of the era, St. Louis had long been under the control of a wealthy, privileged elite. This was not really a matter of corruption and graft, although those, too, certainly existed. Rather, a cabal, comprising many of the descendants of early settlers, ruthlessly safeguarded its own economic interests. City laws ensured that only a select group obtained lucrative business monopolies or provided such public services as streetcar lines and gaslights. By the middle of the 1870s, a growing number of merchants, professionals, and small businessmen chafed under the economic restrictions and monopolistic behavior of this elite. A newspaper that espoused their cause would find a ready audience.
In January 1879 the St. Louis Gas-Light Company quietly sought to regain its financial stranglehold on its customers. For years, this monopoly had forced St. Louisans to pay the highest rates in the nation for heat and light, making a staggering 73 percent profit. But this profitable arrangement was shattered when a court sided with a plan to cancel the gas company’s exclusive franchise. Under the pretense of offering a compromise plan, the company promised to pay all the city’s legal fees from the lengthy court fight if the city council restored the monopoly. If not for Pulitzer, the plan might have worked.
Like an editorial Paul Revere, Pulitzer sounded the alarm. “This is no compromise,” he roared from the pages of his paper. “Hands Off! No surrender to the monopoly.” The proposal, he said, reminded him of an old tale about a white man and an Indian dividing a buzzard and a turkey. “Whichever way the proposition is turned, it is the same—the city gets the buzzard, the Gas Company all the turkey.” This first volley was followed by another the next day. “The most objectionable feature of this business is that its only possibility of success depends upon bribery,” Pulitzer said. “Yes, we write it deliberately, bribery.” Lawyers who had previously sold the city’s residents into monopolistic bondage were willing to do it again, he continued. “This is an open and unblushing bid to bribe the lawyers of the city by the payment of large fees.”
Every day for the next two weeks, Pulitzer shoehorned into the paper articles that detailed the monopolistic practices of the gas company and featured poignant interviews with victimized customers. The flurry of articles, as well as the continuous stream of editorials—appearing, as they usually did, under the banner headline NO COMPROMISE! NO COMPROMISE! NO COMPROMISE!—caught the city’s attention. None of the other English-speaking newspapers joined the campaign, and certainly not The Republican, whose editor, William Hyde, was a mouthpiece for the oligarchs.
As the campaign ground on, the paper began to sound like a one-note composition. Pulitzer needed another campaign that would goad the oligarchs and attract readers. His staff obliged him by obtaining copies of the tax returns of the city’s richest residents. Kept in the assessor’s office, the returns were public documents, but they cast an embarrassing hue when published in a newspaper for all to see. Under the headline TAX DODGING: WHOLESALE PERJURY AS