Joseph Pulitzer

“ Joseph Pulitzer bought the World and instituted a totally new system of newspaper conduct.
His advent into New York journalism was called an "irruption," and it was resented not only by the other newspapers, but even more by a large proportion of the conservative public.
In its fundamental principle, Mr. Pulitzer's revolutionary method was based upon an idea identical with that suggested by Mr. John Bigelow when he told me there were too many newspapers for the educated class. Mr. Pulitzer undertook to make a newspaper, not for the educated class, but for all sorts and conditions of men. ”

“ Pulitzer was that when he was in a bad mood it was the worst possible policy to offer no resistance to his pressure. It was part of his nature to go forward in any direction until he encountered an obstacle. When he reached one he paused before making up his mind whether he would go through it or round it. The further he went the more interested he became, his purpose always being to discover a boundary, whether of your knowledge, of your patience, of your memory, or of your nervous endurance.
He never respected a man who did not at some point stand up and resist him. ”

“ I replied. "You advertised for an intelligent man; and this is simply where my intelligence commences to show itself. An intelligent man couldn't live as long as I have in the United States without hearing a good deal about Joseph Pulitzer; and, after all, the country isn't absolutely overrun with blind millionaires."
At the close of the interview I was told that I would be reported upon. In the meantime would I kindly send in a written account of the interview, in the fullest possible detail, as a test of my memory, sense of accuracy, and literary style. ”

“ The Post-Dispatch (evening, 1851) is a consolidation made in 1878 by its proprietor Joseph Pulitzer. Pulitzer’s first newspaper experience was in 1868 as a reporter on the Westliche Post (morning, 1857) of St Louis, which has an evening edition, the Anzeiger, a Sunday edition, Mississippi Blaetter, and a semi-weekly and weekly edition, Anzeiger des Westens. Carl Schurz was editor of the Westliche Post in 1867. Another German newspaper in St Louis is Amerika (morning; 1872) . ”

“ Don C. Seitz’s book is not a satisfactory biography, but it is readable and it engenders thought and reflection. It neither reveals nor suggests the mystery and secret of a dominant [Pg 199] personality. He calls Joseph Pulitzer the Liberator of Journalism. For many years he was called the Libertine of Journalism, and worse than that. He deserves the one as richly as he deserved the other, no more so. The biographer, like the witness in court, should state facts, not conclusions. Joseph Pulitzer was an unusual man and he had an extraordinary career. ”

“ In one of these Horace White, formerly editor of the Evening Post of New York, spoke highly of the practical utility of the Britannica. Joseph Pulitzer, of the New York World, shortly before his death wrote: “I want to thank you for the intellectual pleasure I enjoyed this winter in examining this extraordinary production. I have already distributed a dozen sets in America as presents among editors and my children. [He afterwards ordered six more sets.] The work is a liberal education.” ”

“ He always drove himself to the last ounce of his endurance, and it was only when his condition indicated an imminent collapse that he would consent to drop everything except light reading, and to spend a few days out at sea without calling anywhere for letters, papers, or cables.
It was during this, our last, cruise in the Mediterranean that I discovered that Mr. Pulitzer was one of the best and most fascinating talkers I had ever heard. Once in a while, when he was feeling cheerful after a good night's rest and a pleasant day's reading, he monopolized the conversation at lunch or dinner. ”

“ Joseph Pulitzer, proprietor of the New York World, once acted as stoker on a Mississippi steamboat. When a young man, Cyrus Field was a clerk in a New England store. George W. Childs was an errand boy for a bookseller at $4 a month. Andrew Carnegie began work in a Pittsburg telegraph office at $3 a week. C. P. Huntington sold butter and eggs for what he could get a pound or dozen. Whitelaw Reid was once a correspondent of a newspaper in Cincinnati at $5 per week. Adam Forepaugh was once a butcher in Philadelphia. ”

“ Extraordinary energy and executive ability and a Napoleonic faculty of perceiving and utilizing the talents of others, are the qualities upon which the journalist and publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, has built his reputation and his fortune. He was born in Buda-Pesth, Hungary, April 10, 1847, and, after receiving a classical education in his native city, came to the United States at the age of sixteen. For two years he served as a private soldier in the Federal Army, and, afterward, failing to gain a foothold in New York city, he went to St. ”

“ That The World’s attitude on public questions is guided by these instructions of Joseph Pulitzer is generally agreed by the reading public. Its editorial policy is one of intelligent liberalism. It would seek for the evils of democracy a cure in more democracy. It would welcome the widest opportunity for change and experiment in fitting popular government to new conditions, while setting its face like a flint against revolution by force and the subversive doctrines of anarchy. ”

“ Pulitzer would spend an hour before we left the table in giving us a picture of some exciting crisis in English politics, the high lights picked out in pregnant phrases of characterization, in brilliant epitome of the facts, in spontaneous epigram, and illustrative anecdote. Whether he spoke of the Holland House circle, of the genius of Cromwell, of Napoleon's campaigns, or sought to point a moral from the lives of Bismarck, Metternich, Louis XI, or Kossuth, every sentence was marked by the same penetrating analysis, the same facility of expression, the same clearness of thought. ”

“ His career is another illustration of the saying that truth is stranger than fiction.
II
Joseph Pulitzer and I came together familiarly at the Liberal Republican Convention, which met at Cincinnati in 1872—the convocation of cranks, as it was called—and nominated Horace Greeley for President. He was a delegate from Missouri. Subsequent events threw us much together. He began his English newspaper experience after a kind of apprenticeship on a German daily with Stilson Hutchins, another interesting character of those days. ”

“ Hearst sat down in New York he had one ambition, and—so [Pg 181] far as he allowed any one to see his secret thoughts—one ambition only. He would publish a newspaper which would beat the World.
MR. JOSEPH PULITZER.
Editor and Proprietor of the New York World.
[Pg 182] He began operations by annexing the pick of the staff of the World. Journalists in the United States sit by no means so tightly in their chairs as they do in this country. The Americans are a restless race. ”

“ Pulitzer would either sit in the library and dictate letters and cablegrams, or he would have the news gone over in detail, or, if the state of his health forbade the mental exertion involved in the intense concentration with which he absorbed what was read to him from the papers, he would go for a ride, accompanied by a groom and by one of the secretaries. When he went to Europe he usually sent over in advance some horses from his own stable, as he was very fond of riding and could not trust himself on a strange horse. ”

“ Charles H. Jones, when editor of the Post-Dispatch, once criticized Mr. Sam Kennard for something, and forthwith Barr, Nugent, Crawford, Scruggs, Vandervoort and Barney, and the other big dealers withdrew their patronage in order to prevent his making the sum of money each year prescribed in his contract with Joseph Pulitzer as the sine qua non to his retention of his place. They drove him out of journalism finally. You've got to stand in with all this gang, or go to the wall. The only person who gets anything from them is the person who will do their work. ”

“ At times Mr. Pulitzer did not feel well enough to take this concentrated mental food, and turned for relief to novels, plays and light literature; at times, when he was feeling unusually well, he occupied himself for several days in succession with matters concerning The World—in dictating editorials, letters of criticism, instruction and inquiry, or in considering the endless problems relating to policy, business management, personnel, and the soaring price of white paper. ”

“ EDITORS Memoirs of an Editor, by Edward P. Mitchell.
Twice Thirty, by Edward W. Bok.
The River of Life, by J. St. Loe Strachey.
Joseph Pulitzer, His Life and Letters, by Don C. Seitz.
Editors and publishers of powerful newspapers have unique opportunity to make their lives interesting. Many of them do. Some of them, like Henry Watterson, Wickham Steed and Georges Clémenceau write about their experiences, when they no longer take the world’s pulse, shape public opinion and re-order society. Their memoirs and lives are of the most entertaining of all biographic literature ”

“ The “journalism that does things” doesn’t do anything any more except to try and teach its men to write articles the way the Sun has been printing them since 1868. In a chart of new journalism the largest, blackest418 X-mark would show where the body of new journalism, slain by public taste, lies buried forever.
The New York World, once the most ingenious exponent of yellow journalism, has become as conservative as the Sun was in the days when Joseph Pulitzer worked for Dana. ”

“ Pulitzer by name, for he was a notable personage in the place and was well known by sight.
When accosted in this manner, Mr. Pulitzer always showed signs of extreme nervousness. He would stamp his foot, raise the clenched fist of his disengaged arm menacingly, and cry, "My God! What's this? What's this? Tell him to go away. I won't tolerate this intrusion. Tell him I'll have him arrested."
More than once I had to push a man off the promenade and make faces at him embodying all that was possible by such means in the way of threats to do him bodily injury. ”

“ It can scarcely fail to be interesting to learn about such a man. Mr. Seitz with the instinct and experience of the expert journalist, gives the information in the first chapter, which he entitles “Characteristics.” He moulds the clay, then animates it. As he hurls virtues into the receptive mass, he calls out their names loudly; as the limitations and defects steal in, he whispers or remains silent. Joseph Pulitzer had a genius for journalism and he was saturated with belief in liberty, equality, and opportunity ”

“ Sometimes even these gentlemen were summoned to New York, to Bar Harbor, to Wiesbaden, or to Mentone, according to circumstances. I have met several of them, and they all agree in saying that the hardest work they ever did in their lives was to keep pace with Mr. Pulitzer while they were running the gauntlet of his judgment.
There are few men highly placed on The World to-day who have not been through such an ordeal. I doubt if any man was ever served by a staff whose individual ability, temper, resources and limitations were so minutely known to their employer. ”

“ As I have said elsewhere, J. P. got practically all the important articles from every paper of consequence in the United States. If he read an editorial which impressed him, possibly from a Chicago or a San Francisco paper, he put it on one side and told Pollard, who read all this kind of material to him, to watch the clippings from that paper and to pick out any other editorials which he could identify as the work of the same man. ”

“ Pulitzer.
"My God!" he cried, "I would not have believed it possible that any one could show such a complete ignorance of American character, of the high sense of duty which in the main animates American journalism, of the foundations of integrity on which almost every successful paper in the United States has been founded. You do not know what it costs me to try and keep The World up to a high standard of accuracy—the money, the time, the thought, the praise, the blame, the constant watchfulness.
"I do not say that The World never makes a mistake in its news column ”

“ Within a year the Civil War ended, and Pulitzer found himself, in common with hundreds of thousands of others, out of employment at a time when employment was most difficult to secure. At this time he was so poor that he was turned away from French's Hotel for lack of fifty cents with which to pay for his bed. In less than twenty years he bought French's Hotel, pulled it down, and erected in its place the Pulitzer Building, at that time one of the largest business buildings in New York, where he housed The World. ”

“ Pulitzer had discovered just what he wanted to know—how much I could see in a given time, and how much of it I could remember with a fair degree of accuracy. It was simply the game of the jewels which Lurgan Sahib played with Kim, against a different background but with much the same object.
In the foregoing description of Mr. Pulitzer's daily life it has been made abundantly clear that his secretaries were worked to the limit of their endurance. It remains to add that Mr. Pulitzer never made a demand upon us which was greater than the demand he made upon himself. ”

“ Pulitzer enjoyed more than having a face described to him, whether of a living person or of a portrait, and as our table-talk was often about men and women of distinction or notoriety, dead or living, any one of us might be called upon at any time to portray feature by feature some person whose name had been mentioned. ”

“ Often when the appointed moment came to stop walking Mr. Pulitzer felt able to go on, and he would then either say frankly, "Let's have fifteen minutes more," or he would achieve the same end by reopening the discussion as to just how long he had walked, and keep on walking until he began to feel tired, when he would say: "I dare say you are quite right, well, now we will sit down and go over the papers."
The question of where Mr. Pulitzer was to sit on deck was not a simple one to decide. He always wanted as much air as he could get ”