Pulitzer - book

Pulitzer A Life in Politics, Print, and Power, James McGrath Morris (Harper Collins, 2010)

For most of my life I have known of the Pulitzer Prize. However, I confess to being so ignorant and incurious that I had no idea until reading this biography just who Pulitzer was or why he gave out prizes. My ignorance and incuriosity sometimes appalls me. If you have an interest in biography, or if you have any interest in the history of our country during the period of roughly 1860 to 1915 you will find this book of enormous interest. I believe you would be hard-pressed to find a better example of biography. This one is well researched, well documented, well written, detailed, and extremely informative. I’m pretty certain it will be the definitive biography of Joseph Pulitzer for a long time. Like almost all American biography it is written in the standard chronological style, birth, youth, adulthood, marriage, achievements, death. This is, I believe, fine, if your main interest is history and the individual’s contributions to it. If you’re main interest is in the individual him or herself as a personality, it is probably more interesting to simply ask someone to tell you about their life, in which case you may not always get a chronological account. As Morris has been the editor of Biographer’s Craft it is not surprising this is such a fine example of the genre.

Joseph Pulitzer was born into a (secular) Jewish family in a small town not far from Pest. They were fairly well-off and had their own business and owned their own home. When Joseph was eight they moved to Pest (at that time adjacent to Buda) where they were even more successful. But when Joseph’s father died, leaving his mother to raise the family alone, they fell upon relatively difficult times. Joseph by then had grown to 6’ 1” seventeen year-old and decided to emigrate to America. As he had no means, he achieved this by agreeing to serve in the Union Army (by then, with 13,000 soldiers a day being killed the Union was recruiting in Europe and paying a bonus for those who agreed to serve). Joseph lied about his age and served for a time but managed to escape frontline duty. Upon his discharge he eventually arrived in St. Louis, working at whatever jobs he could find and haunting the library to teach himself English. Eventually he became a reporter for a German newspaper, the Westliche Post, and quickly established himself as an unusually bright and hard working reporter. More importantly, he became deeply involved in Missouri and national politics. Eventually, as his English improved and he had sufficient experience, backers and friends, he managed to buy a share in the Post. As the three owners did not get along the other two bought Pulitzer out, giving him a substantial profit. He later bought a failing German newspaper and, through a clever scheme managed to sell it at a profit. He then gambled $20,000 in a friend’s project that also brought him a significant profit.

Pulitzer’s next move was to buy a failing paper, the Evening Dispatch, which he quickly merged with another evening paper, gambling that he could increase their subscriptions quickly enough to pay off their debts, which he did. Pulitzer perceived something that newspapers up until that time did not, that ordinary working people, while only mildly interested in the comings and goings of the elite, would become vitally interested in news and problems that pertained more specifically to them. Pulitzer sold his papers for one cent and embarked upon a scheme to expose fraudulent companies, dishonest businesses, and publish at least one sensational article per day. He poked fun at his competitors. As Pulitzer was virtually impossible to work with it, was not long until his partner sold out and Pulitzer became the sole owner of the Post-Dispatch, a paper that made a consistent profit for the remainder of Pulitzer’s life and made him a wealthy man.
As Pulitzer was in the newspaper business not only to make money, but also to have power and political influence, and as he was called upon more and more to make important political speeches and engage in campaigning for Senators and Presidents, he became more and more famous. It was not long before St. Louis became too small for him and he lusted to own a paper in New York. The fortune he was accumulating from the Post-Dispatch eventually allowed him to take over the “World” in New York, which quickly became the most important and widely circulated paper in that key city, indeed in history. He used the same techniques in New York as he had in St. Louis, sensationalism, invasions of privacy, constant railing against corporations and defenses of labor and the working class. Nothing was too sacred for Pulitzer to attack and the more he did so the more his paper thrived. When William Randolph Hearst, who had imitated Pulitzer’s methods and techniques in San Francisco, also moved into New York, Pulitzer battled him for supremacy and eventually won out when Hearst was accused of encouraging the assassination of McKinley. Both papers had urged and supported the war with Spain over Cuba and in many ways shared the same views. When the circulation of both papers declined for a time Hearst and Pulitzer considered an illegal scheme to collaborate but when Hearst’s paper declined because of the McKinley rumor it became moot. Pulitzer’s greatest problem became Teddy Roosevelt whom he despised. The feeling was mutual and Roosevelt tried desperately (and somewhat illegally) to have Pulitzer thrown in jail for slander when he accused the Roosevelt administration of corruption in the building of the Panama Canal. This was a case Pulitzer eventually won and was also a most important case that established the absolute independence of newspapers from government retaliation.

There is so much more in this fine book. Pulitzer was a genuine case of “rags to riches,” although he was never truly in rags and the riches he attained were even beyond the imagination of most people. Ironically, although he made his fortune by attacking the wealthy and privileged, as he became unbelievably wealthy himself he basically joined their ranks and moved in high society and among the most powerful people in the world. Unfortunately, before he was fifty he became blind and a semi-recluse and invalid who could not stand even the slightest noise. He spent thousands upon thousands on rooms and buildings that would be essentially soundproof, and eventually had built a special 300 foot long yacht that was as soundproof as possible and spent much of his later life cruising and living in Europe, leaving his papers to be managed by others (but not without constant and unwelcome micromanagement). Before he died he endowed Columbia University to create the first School of Journalism and established the prizes for which he is now famous. During his last years he became more and more impossible, alienated himself from his wife and children, made impossible demands on his employees, and suffered from a host of ailments that made his life miserable. He depended entirely on a large staff to read to him and help manage his life. During the period when Rockefeller and Morgan and others were giants of industry, Pulitzer became the first giant of Newspaper publishing and virtually single-handedly converted newspapers into a mass media for the first time. William Randolph Hearst, who seems to get more publicity and fame, was a latecomer and even with access to his mother’s giant fortune, could not outdo Pulitzer. I must say I learned a great deal from this biography and I do not hesitate to recommend it.