Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/388

362 serving in the Legislature, he was attacked by a political grafter, and shot the man. He put his savings into the Post, and in 1871 he became managing editor of the paper. He was one of the organizers of the Liberal Republican movement in Missouri, and it was through his strategy that Carl Schurz was made Chairman of the Cincinnati Convention, which met May i, 1872, and nominated Horace Greeley for president.

Schurz refused to support Greeley, but Pulitzer stumped the West for him and made many speeches in his behalf. The political differences between himself and Schurz caused him, in 1875, to sell his interest in the Post; following this he acted as Washington correspondent for the New York Sun, returning to St. Louis in 1878 and buying the Evening Dispatch and Evening Post, which he issued as one paper.

His success with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was such that his income reached $200,000 a year. He was but thirty-six years of age, yet had a national reputation as a public speaker and editor. He was about to go abroad when the possibility of purchasing the New York World was presented to him.

In the days of his association with Carl Schurz he had been a radical and a socialist. Later he had grown more conservative, but he was still in a frame of mind to be stirred by the newspaper condition in New York, a condition epitomized by John Bigelow, one of the editors of the New York Evening Post, when he declared that there were too many newspapers for the educated class.

Pulitzer had this in mind when, in 1883, he bought the New York World, and instituted what his contemporaries and his biographer have called "a totally new system of newspaper conduct." As we have seen however, there