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The Fighting Immigrant Title: Pulitzer: A Life Author: Denis Brian ISBN: 0-471-33200-3 chapter 1 The Fighting Immigrant 1864–1869 17 to 22 years old eventeen-year-old Joseph Pulitzer couldn’t take it anymore. He adored his S mother, but got into so many fierce arguments with his stepfather that he was desperate to leave home. A military career seemed a way of escape. He was prepared, as it turned out, to fight for almost any country that would accept him. Joseph was born in Mako, Hungary, on April 10, 1847, the eldest son of Hungarian Jews. His father, Philip, a prosperous grain merchant, retired in 1853 and moved with his family to Budapest, where Joseph and his younger brother, Albert, were educated in private schools and by a tutor who taught them French and German. When Joseph was eleven his father died of heart disease, and a few years later his beloved mother, Louise, married Max Blau, a businessman—the man Joseph had grown to hate. The scrawny, almost six-foot-three-inch tall, high-strung teenager looked as martial as a beanpole. Yet he hoped to follow in the footsteps of two of his maternal uncles, officers in the Austrian Army. But when the Austrian Army rejected him for his weak eyesight and emaciated appearance, he was unde- terred. He traveled to Paris to join the French Foreign Legion for service in Mexico. When the French declined his offer, he crossed the Channel to En- gland, where he volunteered to serve with the British forces in India. Again, fail- ure. Bitterly disappointed, he reluctantly headed for home, stopping en route in Hamburg, Germany. And there he met his destiny. Shortly before, in America in the summer of 1863, U.S. President Abra- ham Lincoln, his country torn by civil war, his army depleted by casualties, dis- ease, and desertions, had planned to turn stalemate into checkmate by a mass attack against the Confederacy. Lincoln intended to bolster his weakened army by drafting three hundred thousand men from New York City alone. But many 5 6 Pulitzer of the eligible males there were recent Irish and German immigrants who lived in squalor and didn’t give a damn who won the war. In resisting the draft, they looted and torched draft-office buildings and prevented firemen from dousing the flames. Motley groups of policemen and convalescing soldiers were sent to quell the riot. They had orders to take no prisoners and kill every man who had a club. But they were overwhelmed by the mob: beaten, stabbed, kicked to death, or shot with their own muskets. Sur- vivors retreated in panic from a barrage of bricks, stones, and dead animals. Responding to anguished cries to save the city, the army hurried thousands of battle-scarred Union troops with field guns and howitzers to take back con- trol of Manhattan’s streets. For men who refused to join the army, the rioters proved fierce fighters: some two thousand died, and about ten thousand were wounded. After this tragic fiasco, Union Army agents looked for urgently needed recruits in less dangerous territory, especially Europe, under the guise of encouraging emigration. Languishing in Hamburg after his failed missions to join any of three armies, Pulitzer met one of the Union recruiting agents. Assured that he could ride a horse and fire a gun, the agent put the unlikely recruit aboard a Boston- bound ship. The gangling, nearsighted youngster soon showed his spirit and audacity by jumping ship in Boston Harbor, swimming ashore through almost freezing water, and taking a train to New York. There he collected the three-hundred- dollar bounty for enlisting—which otherwise would have gone to the agent he’d outsmarted. But when Pulitzer arrived at Remount Camp, Pleasant Val- ley, Maryland, on November 12, 1864, the captain in charge took one jaun- diced glance at him and, according to biographer Don Carlos Seitz, who pre- sumably got it from Pulitzer himself, yelled, “Take that . little . away from here! I don’t want him in my company!” He stayed, despite the frigid reception, and spent the rest of the war in L Company of the First New York Lincoln Cavalry. Taking their cue from the captain, fellow soldiers ridiculed his appearance, inadequate English, and guttural accent, although many of them were of German origin. Some took his name (pronounced Pull-it-sir) as an invitation to grab his large nose. When a sergeant tried it, Pulitzer struck him hard—the only injury he inflicted in the war. Saved from a court-martial for striking a superior by an officer who admired his prowess at chess, he took part in minor skirmishes on horseback against the enemy at Antioch, Liberty Mills, Waynesborough, and Beaverdam Flat, ending the war in the comparatively peaceful Shenandoah Valley as a Major Richard Hinton’s orderly. After Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s surrender, Pulitzer rode with his regiment for the victory parade in Washington on May 23, 1865, his view of General William Tecumseh Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton The Fighting Immigrant 7 taking the salute completely blocked by the men riding their horses so close beside him that they bruised his knees. What now? Certainly not a military career. Competition for jobs among Civil War veterans was desperate. In Manhat- tan, a city of astonishing contrasts, about fifteen thousand panhandlers worked the streets, some hiring deformed babies to raise their take. A district known as Five Points on the Lower East Side, crammed with desperately poor immi- grants, depraved criminals, and prostitutes, scared even the police away. Nearby was another world, a booming, war-fueled Wall Street, mansions, flour- ishing businesses, and affluent individuals window-shopping on Broadway. Realizing he stood less chance of emulating them than of joining the Hell’s Kitchen crowd, which welcomed army veterans, Pulitzer, a good sailor, fol- lowed a tip and traveled to New Bedford, Massachusetts, to apply for a deck- hand’s job on a whaler. But the whaling industry had not recovered from its destruction by Confederate cruisers, and the only ship’s captain seeking a crew turned him down. Despite the odds against him, he returned to New York City, where Irish immigrants had a lock on jobs for waiters, laborers, longshoremen, and other employment requiring some English. Though—thanks to his successful grain- merchant father, Philip—Pulitzer had been well educated by tutors and was fluent in German, French, and Hungarian, his English was all but incoherent. Unable to pay to rent a room, he was reduced to sleeping in the streets in his frayed army uniform and scuffed shoes, some nights on a bench in City Hall Park. With his last few cents he walked into the luxurious French’s Hotel for a morale-raising shoeshine. But a porter thought he might offend the snooty clientele and told him to beat it. (Pulitzer’s life often resembled a fable. Twenty-three years later he bought that same French’s Hotel, had it demol- ished, and replaced it with the tallest building in the city—a two-million-dollar golden-domed skyscraper to house his newspaper offices.) Having his topcoat stolen was the last straw: he decided to check out and head for St. Louis, Missouri. Some joker had advised him that unlike Manhat- tan, crowded with German immigrants after the same nonexistent jobs, there weren’t any Germans in St. Louis. Pulitzer also liked the idea that in a German- free environment he would have to learn English fast—or starve. Unaware that he’d been fooled—St. Louis had a huge German popula- tion—he sold his only capital, a silk handkerchief, for seventy-five cents to buy food for the long journey. Then he took a train west, as a stowaway, arriving on the night of October 10, 1865, at East St. Louis, across the river from St. Louis. (The railroad bridge to reach St. Louis was not completed until 1874.) He got off the train, broke, tired, and shivering with cold. A downpour of sleety rain soaked him to the skin. But he hardly noticed it. For him the shim- mering lights in the distance, barely visible through the curtain of rain across 8 Pulitzer the Mississippi River, were not just the lights of a city but of a promised land. Attracted by the voices of deckhands on a ferryboat and puzzled to hear them speaking German, Pulitzer walked to the riverbank and asked how to get across without paying. He was lucky. Their fireman had just quit. Could the young man fire a boiler? “In my condition I was willing to say anything and do anything,” he recalled. One deckhand “put a shovel in my hand and told me to throw some coal on the fire. I opened the fire box door and a blast of fiery hot air struck me in the face. At the same time a blast of cold driven rain struck me in the back. I was roasting in front and freezing in the back. But I stuck to the job and shov- eled coal as hard as I could.” The captain resented his limited and awkward English, bullied him, and worked him to exhaustion. After a few days the harsh talk escalated into a vio- lent quarrel, and Pulitzer walked off the boat for good—into St. Louis. He later told his biographer Seitz, “I still have a painful recollection of firing that ferry- boat with its blasts of hot air on my face, and the rain and snow beating down on my back.” After renting a room, he headed for the nearest library, where he read in the want ads of a local German-language newspaper, Westliche Post, that an army barracks needed a caretaker for sixteen mules, pay to include free meals.
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