“I want to tell you in simple English that you are a liar
and a puppy,” corrupt lobbyist Edward Augustine shouted
at a twenty-two-year-old Missouri state senator, rushing
him with brass knuckles. In their struggle a gun fired, and
Augustine was wounded. Joseph Pulitzer (April 10, 1847–
October 29, 1911) was convicted of assault with intent to
murder. His $405 fine was paid by friends. This episode
was an early indication of Pulitzer’s eagerness to take on
special interests, a trait that helped to make him one of the
architects of the modern American newspaper.
He was the oldest son of Philip Pulitzer, a Jew of Magyar descent, and Louise Berger Pulitzer, a Jew who her son
would later claim was a Catholic, to escape a Jewish identity
he saw as a lifelong liability. He was born in Makó, Hungary, but grew up in Budapest, where his father was a grain
merchant. Plagued by poor eyesight and a scrawny build,
he was rejected by the Austrian Army, the French Foreign
Legion, and the British military. A recruiter in Hamburg,
Germany signed Pulitzer to serve in the Union Army. In
September 1864, the tall, skinny, near-sighted, Germanspeaking recruit with the prominent nose arrived in New
York. Ridiculed for his appearance and inadequate English,
Pulitzer was eager to get out of the military. At war’s end he
arrived in St. Louis looking for work.
Pulitzer tended mules, loaded cargo, and was a lumberyard bookkeeper before landing a reporter’s job on
the Westliche Post, a German-language daily. The paper’s
publisher Carl Schurz was impressed by Pulitzer’s intelligence and idealism and made him the paper’s state capital
reporter. His exposés and excessive work habits earned him
the derisive nickname, “Joey, the Jew.” Pulitzer was elected
to the state senate in December 1869 as a Republican and
continued his reporting. The deal-making and corruption
of political life made a lasting impression. He strongly supported the presidential campaign of Horace Greeley as a
Liberal Republican. At twenty-five, Pulitzer became coowner and managing editor of the Post. At twenty-seven,
he became a rich man when he bought the competing Staats-Zeitung, closed the paper, and sold its Associated Press
franchise. Pulitzer thought the Republican Party “deaf and
dumb” to the needs of the poor and bolted it in 1876 to
support Democrat Samuel Tilden. Convinced Republicans
had stolen the closely fought contest, Pulitzer bought the
St. Louis Dispatch on December 9, 1878, merged it with
the Evening Post, and on December 12 brought out the first
edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, promising the paper
would follow no party line but “its own convictions” as a
sworn opponent of “all frauds and shams.”
Pulitzer began his new life with a wife. Kate Davis was
a distant cousin of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. Five of their seven children reached adulthood,
becoming heirs to a publishing empire that over 127 years
ran ninety newspapers valued in 2005 at nearly $1.5 billion.
Pulitzer’s publishing philosophy was forcefully expressed
in his first days at the Post-Dispatch. “If it is a crime to
sympathize with the struggle of the poor,” he wrote on
December 30, 1878, “we plead guilty.” In a January 10,
1879, editorial he argued that “Democracy means opposition to special privileges. Republicanism means favoritism
to corporations.” He was convinced that the exercise of
“money power” was “the great issue” before the country.
His paper published tax returns to embarrass local business
leaders who hadn’t paid their “fair share.” Insurance and
gas companies, bankers and street car monopolists were
targeted next.
Pulitzer helped push the circulation of the Post-Dispatch
from four to twenty thousand through social responsibility
and sensationalism. When a lover’s triangle erupted in murder it was sure to make the paper’s front page. Publishing
a young man’s suicide note over unrequited love received
similar front-page play. Competitors claimed Pulitzer pandered, but he said such stories were “moralizing agents.”
This criticism intensified on October 13, 1882, when Pulitzer’s editor John Cockerill shot and killed a party hack who
threatened him with a gun. Public opposition to the incident deepened Pulitzer’s determination to enter New York
journalism. He left the daily operation of the Post-Dispatch
in the hands of subordinates. On May 10, 1883, Pulitzer
bought the twenty-three-year-old New York World from
financier Jay Gould for $346,000. The World was a wreck.
Its circulation of 22,837 placed it at the back of the pack of
Lower Manhattan’s Park Row papers. “There is room in
this great and growing city,” Pulitzer wrote, “for a journal
dedicated to the cause of the people rather than the purse of
the potentates that will serve and battle for the people with
earnest sincerity.”
Pulitzer’s paper took a deep interest in the urban underclass, the living conditions of the immigrant poor, and the
rights of union people. Five million immigrants had come
to America in the decade before Pulitzer went to work in
New York and many of them had stayed in the city. When
a young boy was beaten to death at the Elmira Prison for
Boys, the World launched an investigation, humanizing the
victims of abuse by interviewing mothers “whose boys died
from the paddlings.” On June 23, 1883, the paper published
a particularly heartbreaking story of Kate Sweeny, a young
immigrant girl, who was suffocated in raw sewage that
flooded her basement apartment on Mulberry Street. “Who
killed Kate Sweeny?” the World wanted to know. “Nobody
seems to think it worth an investigation.” Pulitzer arranged
to have free blocks of ice delivered to the poor in the summer heat. The inside pages of his paper acculturated new
Americans on “hints for improving a personal appearance”
and “topics of feminine interest,” including advice on “what
walking costume milady will wear on a cool day.” Readers
responded to a paper that took an obvious interest in their
welfare. Daily circulation climbed to 56,960 in 1884 and
123,295 in 1885.
No symbol better represented the immigrant experience in America than the Statue of Liberty, and it was
the Pulitzer and the World that played an instrumental
part in bringing the statue to America. As early as 1870
it had been agreed that France would provide the statue
and Americans the base for the Goddess of Liberty, but
pedestal financing stalled. On March 16, 1885, Pulitzer
wrote that “it would be an irrevocable disgrace” if America refused to raise the $100,000 necessary to place the
225-ton statue in New York Harbor as “a symbol of our
first century of independence.” Readers were told that if
they contributed money to the pedestal their names would
appear in the World. More than 120,000 did. The statue
was dedicated on October 28, 1886, and became the symbol of the New York World masthead. Two years later a
huge stained glass window of the Statue of Liberty greeted
visitors at New York’s latest skyscraper, the golden-domed
New York World building.
In 1885, Pulitzer hired twenty-two-year-old illustrator
Richard F. Outcault to depict working class life in a series of
sketches that led to the creation of the modern color comic
strip. Outcault’s Yellow Kid was a wildly popular troublemaker who first appeared in “Hogan’s Alley” on May 5,
1895. Outcault jumped to William Randolph Hearst’s New
York Journal seventeen months later, bringing the Yellow
Kid with him, stimulating circulation wars between Pulitzer and Hearst that historians would call “yellow journalism.” Pulitzer did not invent the Sunday Supplement, but
he raised it to the level of a beloved past-time for readers who slept in on Sundays after an exhausting six-day
work week. In the pages of the Sunday World, they were
introduced to technological changes from the East and tall
tales from the West. They learned of confidence men and
sports celebrities, the latest in science and the fairest in
fashion. They read of the might of the American military
and were transported to the elegance of the Paris salon.
Reading the World became an adventure, an entertainment, a destination.
The World’s daily circulation had soared to 217,769
by September 1887 when Pulitzer helped to invent “stunt
journalism” through the undercover reporting of Elizabeth
Cochrane, who wrote under the pseudonym “Nellie Bly.”
Bly auditioned for a job at the World by getting herself
committed to an insane asylum for women on Blackwell’s
Island to see for herself what became of women there. On
October 9, Bly began her extraordinary series on “a human
rat trap” that made sane women sick by forcing them to
sit unattended for hours at a time, to choke down meals of
stale bread and rancid butter, and to accept the humiliation
and terror of freezing cold baths or to risk being beaten.
Bly’s writing in the World captured the suffering of the destitute, many of whom, unable to speak English or defend
themselves, were victimized by the state. Mobilized public
opinion forced city officials on December 18, 1887, to fire
or prosecute sadistic staff members and to spend $1 million to improve care for indigent women. On November 14, 1889, Bly left New York on her highly publicized effort to
go around the world in eighty days. More than one million
readers entered the World’s contest to predict when she
would return. Thousands gathered to greet Bly on January
25, 1890, seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes, and
fourteen seconds after she had started.
By 1892, the World’s daily circulation of 375,000 was
the largest in the nation. Pulitzer was determined to professionalize the training of journalists and began discussions in that year with Columbia University to endow
the nation’s first school of journalism. Twenty years later
Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism became a reality. Veteran publisher Frank Munsey spoke for many when
he said, “Pulitzer came to New York as a whirlwind out
of the West,” and had forever “overturned” America’s way
of doing journalism. The paper’s Sunday edition would
soon sell more than half a million copies and be distributed
nationwide. Adolph Ochs, publisher of the New York Times,
called Pulitzer’s work “a phenomenon” whose “prodigious
success” would be copied by newspapermen for years to
come. Pulitzer, however, was not to enjoy his triumph. His
health had broken in his late forties. He grew virtually
blind and developed an acute sensitivity to noise. The quietest sounds became intolerable. A famous painting by John
Singer Sargent during this period captured Pulitzer’s vacant
stare and pained expression. Eventually he was forced to
live on a private luxury yacht, the Liberty, in the peacefulness of the open sea.
Pulitzer clearly regretted the excesses he had gone to
when competing with Hearst’s Journal, beginning in 1895.
The competition reached a climax when the U.S.S. Maine
exploded in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898, killing
260 men. The incident became the pretext for the Spanish-American War. Pulitzer and Hearst attempted to outdo
each other in reporting alleged Spanish atrocities on Cuba.
World reporters claimed to have witnessed “skulls slit to
the eyes,” “ears cut off as trophies,” and “mouths gashed
to the angle of the jaw to give each face a ghastly grin.”
Women were reportedly “disrobed and slashed” by Spanish soldiers. Those who “complained had their eyes torn
out or were beheaded.” The stories stimulated circulation
for both papers and their sensationalism threatened to
become Pulitzer’s lasting legacy. Instead, his will provided
for the creation of the Pulitzer Prize to annually reward,
beginning in 1917, excellence in journalism and his sons,
Joseph Pulitzer II, Ralph, and Herbert soldiered on with
the newspapers their famous father had helped to create.
Instead of his excesses, Pulitzer is best remembered for
his indispensable role in creating the modern American
newspaper and its determination to serve the public interest. “Our Republic and its press will rise and fall together,”
Pulitzer famously said shortly before his death. “The power
to mould the future of the Republic,” he was certain, “will
be in the hands of the journalists of future generations”
who must “always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption” and “always remain devoted
to the public welfare.”
Further Reading
Baker, Nicholson, and Margaret Brentano. The World on Sunday:
Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer’s Newspaper, 1898–1911.
New York: Bulfinch Press, 2005.
Barrett, James Wyman. Joseph Pulitzer and His World. New
York: Vanguard Press, 1941.
Brain, Denis. Pulitzer: A Life. New York: John Wiley & Sons,
2001.
Juergens, George. Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966.
Seitz, Don C. Joseph Pulitzer: His Life and Letters. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1924.
Swanberg, W.A. Pulitzer. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1967.
Wilensky, Harry. The Story of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. St.
Louis: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1981.
Bruce J. Evensen