Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [99]
Pulitzer’s vision of himself as the party’s leader in Missouri did not sit well with William Hyde, editor of the Missouri Republican. That paper, managed from an elegant five-story building with Renaissance-style ornamentation, had long been the acknowledged party sheet. Over time, however, its support of the city’s oligarchs had left many Democrats out in the cold, especially those in the middle class. They were gravitating to the Post-Dispatch, creating a political and economic competition between Pulitzer and Hyde.
Despite the enmity between the two men, both Hyde and Pulitzer sat on a committee assigned to lure the 1880 Democratic national convention back to St. Louis, where it had been held four years earlier. Pulitzer conveniently missed the committee’s trip to the Washington meeting where it lost out to Cincinnati. Upon returning to St. Louis, Hyde discovered that Pulitzer had published a telegram suggesting that the committee failed because its members spent their time drinking in Washington’s bars. If Hyde’s anger was not sufficiently stoked by this, a cheeky poem continuing the paper’s abuse of him appeared in the five o’clock edition of the March 1 Post-Dispatch.
At six that evening, with—as one reporter described it—anger coursing though his veins “like a mountain-fed stream in the early spring,” Hyde left a friend’s office and headed down Olive Street to his newspaper. Meanwhile, Pulitzer exited Maranesi’s candy store, where he had bought a supply of caramel, and was strolling to Willie Gray’s bookstore for a copy of Harper’s Weekly. At the corner of Olive and Fourth streets, the editors came face-to-face.
“Now damn you, I’ve got you at last,” said Hyde. He swung his fist at Pulitzer, but managed only a glancing blow to the right eye, knocking Pulitzer’s glasses off. Blinded, Pulitzer returned the punch with equal ineffectiveness. He then grabbed Hyde by his tie and shirt and wrestled him to the ground. The two scuffled until bystanders pulled them apart in the nick of time. Pulitzer had managed to reach under his heavy overcoat and had withdrawn a pistol from his hip pocket. Before he could get a shot off, one of the men knocked the gun away. A decade after the shooting in Jefferson City, Pulitzer was still taking aim at St. Louis’s pols.
Pulitzer was shaken. He couldn’t see without his spectacles. In the darkness and cold, he let himself be led to a nearby cigar store. As he stepped away, he yelled in Hyde’s direction, “You cow! Anybody could do that.” Hyde imperiously dusted himself off, and with an escort of two men retreated to a doorway next to Ettling’s barbershop, where he received the congratulations of friends.
The election of 1880 lacked any major issues. The economy had recovered from the doldrums of the 1870s, Reconstruction was a dead issue, and the clamor for civil service reform had faded. The partisans of the time were glad to concoct disputes, but the supposed issues were little more than proxies for regional and factional differences. When it came to the ballot, the nation was still divided by the Mason-Dixon Line.
Early in the race for the Democratic nomination, Tilden was the leading contender. Pulitzer was adamantly against Tilden because he was still angry about the New Yorker’s acquiescence in the 1877 bargain that gave the presidency to Hayes. As early as February 1879, Pulitzer argued against the rising tide for Tilden. “It seems absurd that Mr. Tilden should ask a vindication in the shape of the Presidency, when his own inexcusable conduct alone made the success of the electoral crime possible.” Pulitzer flirted briefly with other potential candidates, but soon lost interest in them.
With only a month remaining before the selection process began, Pulitzer was still without a man. He feared that if he couldn’t find a strong candidate, the party would go back to Tilden. Pulitzer decided to try