Joseph Pulitzer

Joseph Pulitzer: The Immigrant Who Invented the Modern Newspaper

He arrived in St. Louis by freight train with nothing, and sold the one thing he owned, a handkerchief, for seventy-five cents. Thirty years later he controlled the largest newspaper in the United States, had raised the money for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty from schoolchildren and shopkeepers, and had been indicted for libelling a sitting president. The man who ended up funding American journalism's highest honour spent his working life being accused of debasing the trade.

Mako to Boston Harbor

Pulitzer Jozsef was born on 10 April 1847 in Mako, in the Kingdom of Hungary, into a Jewish merchant family; his father Fulop was among the town's foremost traders and moved the household to Pest when Joseph was six so the boys could be properly schooled. Fulop died in 1858, the business collapsed, and the family fell into poverty. The teenager tried to sell himself as a soldier and was rejected by the Austrian Army, the French Foreign Legion and the British Army before recruiters in Hamburg signed him in 1864 to fight for the Union. He landed in Boston Harbor at seventeen, speaking no English, and enlisted in the 1st New York Cavalry on 30 September 1864 for a $200 bounty. He rode under Sheridan through the Appomattox campaign, Dinwiddie Court House, Five Forks, Sailor's Creek, and was mustered out on 5 June 1865. His regiment was mostly German immigrants, so he learned almost no English in the army.

The Mercantile Library

In St. Louis he lasted two days as a mule hostler and was fired as a waiter for spilling beer on a customer. He spent his free hours in the St. Louis Mercantile Library learning English and playing chess, where his aggressive game caught the eye of Carl Schurz. He was naturalised on 6 March 1867, admitted to the bar in 1868 despite broken English and a shabby appearance, and found his actual vocation as a reporter for the German-language *Westliche Post*, rising to managing editor with an ownership stake.

Politics came first. Nominated as a Republican for the Missouri legislature on 14 December 1869, three years under the legal age of twenty-five, he won 209 to 147 and took his seat. He voted for the Fifteenth Amendment and went after the corrupt St. Louis County Court, which nearly killed him: on 27 January 1870 a Captain Edward Augustine called him a damned liar at Schmidt's Hotel, Pulitzer fetched a four-barrelled pistol, and in the struggle two shots went off, one into Augustine's knee. He bolted to the Liberal Republicans with Schurz in 1870 and to the Democrats by 1874, arguing successfully for St. Louis home rule at that year's constitutional convention.

The Post-Dispatch

On 9 December 1878 he bought the moribund *St. Louis Dispatch* and merged it with John Dillon's *Post* three days later. He built the *Post-Dispatch* on crime, human interest, sensation and populist crusades, and the numbers followed: under 4,000 circulation at the merger, 4,984 by the end of 1879, 8,740 a year later, 22,300 by September 1882. He paid the highest wages in the city and crushed attempts to unionise. Then, in October 1882, his managing editor John Cockerill shot dead the lawyer Alonzo Slayback in the newspaper's office after calling him a coward in print. The killing was a national sensation and permanently soured Pulitzer's standing in St. Louis.

The World

In April 1883 he went to New York, ostensibly for a European holiday, in fact to buy the *New York World* from Jay Gould, who had acquired it as a throw-in on a railroad deal. Pulitzer paid $346,000 and kept absolute freedom over staffing. Circulation was 15,000 when he took over; it doubled to 39,000 in three months and eventually reached 600,000, the largest in the country. He wanted copy that was "brief, breezy and briggity," and explained the doctrine plainly: "The American people want something terse, forcible, picturesque, striking, something that will arrest their attention, enlist their sympathy, arouse their indignation, stimulate their imagination, convince their reason, and awaken their conscience." He filled the paper with illustration, advertising, crusades and entertainment, hired Nellie Bly in 1887, ran the *Yellow Kid* from 1895 as one of the first colour Sunday strips, and built the World Building in 1890 with a triple-height arch and a dome he specified himself.

His single most audacious act was civic. In 1885 the *World* opened a national subscription for the Statue of Liberty's pedestal, promising to print the name of every donor however small the gift. It raised over $100,000 in three months and got the pedestal built, an early instance of mass crowdfunding.

Congress, Hearst, and Roosevelt

Elected to the House from New York's ninth district in 1884, he entered office on 4 March 1885 and resigned on 10 April 1886, having decided the *World* was both more powerful and more enjoyable than Congress. He had already thrown the paper behind Grover Cleveland, who carried New York by a tenth of a percentage point, and had begun a lifelong war with a young assemblyman named Theodore Roosevelt, whom he branded a "reform fraud." In 1895 William Randolph Hearst bought the *New York Journal* and the circulation war that gave yellow journalism its name began, waged most viciously over Cuba and the Spanish-American War. The rivalry's cheapest cost was borne by the child hawkers whose pay both men cut, triggering the newsboys' strike of 1899. Its finest hour came in 1909, when the *World* exposed an illegal $40,000,000 American payment to the French Panama Canal Company. Pulitzer was indicted for libelling Roosevelt and J.P. Morgan; the courts threw both indictments out.

Blind Proprietor

By then he was blind, depressed and so acutely sensitive to noise that he ran the paper from soundproofed rooms in a Stanford White palazzo on East 73rd Street, a yacht, a winter house on Jekyll Island and a summer retreat at Bar Harbor. He installed Frank Cobb as editor in 1904 and, after resisting him, came to respect his independence. He died on 29 October 1911, aged sixty-four, aboard his yacht in Charleston Harbor, while his secretary read to him about Louis XI of France. His last words were German: "Leise, ganz leise." Softly, quite softly.

Why Joseph Is Called a Genius

The faculty in question is not literary or intellectual but structural: he understood, before anyone else in America, that a newspaper could be simultaneously a mass-market entertainment and an instrument of civic power, and that the first paid for the second. Nobody had combined crime coverage, comic strips, consumer advertising and sustained investigative crusading in a single product; Pulitzer did, and every popular newspaper since is a variation on his template. The Statue of Liberty campaign is the purest demonstration, converting a hundred thousand small readers into a hundred thousand small donors by promising each of them their name in print. The counter-case is that the same instinct produced yellow journalism, that his circulation war with Hearst inflamed a war and impoverished the children who sold his papers, and that the sensationalism was not an unfortunate byproduct but the engine. His own most quoted line about the trade is corrosive: "I suppose it is because every reporter is a hope, and every editor is a disappointment." He also concealed his Jewish origins from his wife's Episcopalian family until after the wedding, and his talent for the crusade was never entirely separable from his talent for the vendetta, as Theodore Roosevelt could attest. He was a genius of form, not of conscience, and he spent the last decades of his life trying to endow the conscience retrospectively.

Legacy

He first offered Columbia money for a school of journalism in 1892 and was refused; a later president accepted, and his will left the university $2,000,000. The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism opened in 1912, and Columbia awarded the first Pulitzer Prizes in 1917. They now cover literature, poetry, history, drama and music as well as reporting, and they are the reason a Hungarian cavalry recruit who sold his handkerchief for seventy-five cents is a household adjective.