The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism

9. St. Louis

9 St. Louis On May , , a legion of bedraggled unemployed workers, making their way across the country to petition Congress, set up camp on a small wooded strip of land known as Goose Island in the Mississippi River, near Quincy, Illinois. Led by self-styled General Charles Thomas Kelley, a typographer from the San Francisco Chronicle, the , men had left California two months earlier as one of the divisions in an army of unemployed industrial workers known as Coxey’s Army. They were marching in protest on Washington after losing their jobs in the  depression. The Goose Island contingent, the largest group, had been renamed Kelley’s Navy since taking to the river in rafts after railroad officials had barred them from reboarding trains in Des Moines. The flotilla of leaky rafts, built from donated supplies, had barely made it this far, according to writer Jack London, who was a teenager among their ranks. ‘‘Here the raft idea was abandoned, the boats being joined together in groups of four and decked over,’’ he wrote. Quincy citizens generously donated clothes and money. The rebuilt fleet, now with masts holding great white sails, was soon ready to continue its journey.1 Needless to say, the prospect of this fleet descending on gentile St. Louis down river was not going unnoticed. The editors of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had already published one dispatch from the front and now decided to send a reporter to probe the intent of the navy. On hand for the assignment was Chapin. He had just resurfaced in the world of journalism after convalescing for more than a year in Colorado. Having recovered from his second bout with his ‘‘tubercular throat,’’ Chapin was returning to the East in , when he stopped off in St. Louis and encountered Florence White, who had been with Pulitzer since  and was now manager of the Post-Dispatch. The paper was, of course, the birthplace of Pulitzer’s publishing fortunes. In , having already earned his stripes as a reporter, elected official, and publisher, Pulitzer bought the Dispatch at a sheriff ’s sale and merged it with the Evening Post, whose owner wisely decided that merging was better than competing with the aggressive young newcomer. At first, the newspaper was delivered by wheelbarrow to a few hundred readers . Soon, however, its owner’s indomitable crusading editorial spirit and the paper’s revealing exposés on prostitution, gambling, monopoly practices, and mud streets made the Post-Dispatch the city’s dominant newspaper and one of the nation’s best known. ‘‘The Post-Dispatch is a marvel of journalistic success and may be justly regarded as one of the best evening papers in the country,’’ concluded historian Thomas Scharf in . An evangelist of ‘‘new journalism,’’ Pulitzer gave his editors free reign to offer readers a daily array of the city’s best tales of sex, murder, violence , and lynchings. Within a few years, his presses might well have been printing money, considering the profit they generated, and Pulitzer left to invade New York, where his St. Louis formula worked like alchemy with the moribund World he bought in a fire sale from Jay Gould.2 White knew of Chapin—the staffs of the World and the PostDispatch were keenly aware of each other, and reporters often moved from one paper to the other—and he offered Chapin a position. It would be different from any previous job, thought Chapin. He had always worked for morning papers, which demanded long night hours and eliminated any semblance of home life. ‘‘To one recovering from a long spell of sickness it looked attractive,’’ said Chapin, ‘‘so I hung my coat on a peg and went to work.’’3 Even though he was new to the Post-Dispatch, Chapin was a natural choice to go north to report on the protesters. He was probably more familiar with Kelley’s group than anyone else on the staff. A few months prior they had traversed Colorado and had several run-ins with railroad authorities. On the other hand,  St. Louis  The Rose Man of Sing Sing Chapin’s tour of duty with the Missouri Pacific Railroad line apparently did not prejudice him against the protesters. Chapin arrived at the Goose Island encampment the morning after the army reached it. Kelley was not there. Instead Chapin found him at the courthouse, where he was endeavoring to spring...