Pulitzer Prizes come and Pulitzer Prizes go, but today is Pulitzer’s Birthday! Joseph Pulitzer was born April 10, 1847 in Hungary, which was a monarchy at the time. As a boy he would have been known as Pulitzer Jozsef, because that’s the customary name order in Hungarian. His father was a successful businessman, and was able to retire when Jozsef was just 6. But he died five years later, and the family’s finances collapsed.
When Joseph was old enough, he tried to enlist in the army — in fact, he tried to enlist in several different armies, but he kept getting rejected. Oddly enough, when he went to Hamburg, Germany, to try again in 1864, he was recruited — by the Union army in the US, to fight in the US Civil War. He was given passage to Boston, but once he arrived he discovered that the recruiters, who were independent contractors, were keeping the enlistment bonus that was supposed to go to him. So he walked out, went to New York, enlisted again (for real this time) and he got the $200 bonus.
Pulitzer fought in a cavalry regiment in 1864 and 1865, and was mustered out when the war ended. Although he’d been in the US for more than a year, he hadn’t learned much English. He was fluent in Hungarian, German, and French, and since most of the men in his regiment were German, that had worked out fine. He went back to New York, then got a job in the whaling industry. He didn’t like it, and quit. He was homeless for a while, and arrived in St. Louis by stowing away in a boxcar on a train. St. Louis struck him as a good location; it was full of folks who spoke German. He got a job tending a team of mules, but didn’t like that either, and quit. That was a pattern for Pulitzer — he quit most of the jobs he ever had because, as he admitted, they were “boring” or too much trouble.
He spent many hours at the St. Louis library, and taught himself enough to become a lawyer in 1868. He still wasn’t fluent in English, though, and couldn’t attract any clients. So he took a job as a newspaper reporter. That didn’t last either, and when he heard a man talking loudly about good-paying jobs on a sugar plantation just down the river, he signed up. He and a group of others each paid $5 for passage on a steamboat. It sailed 30 miles down the river, docked in the middle of nowhere, and the job seekers were ushered off the boat. There wasn’t any plantation, and there weren’t any jobs; the whole thing had been a scam. Pulitzer made the most of it by writing about his experience, and when the Westliche Post newspaper printed it, it became his first published news story. They also hired him as a reporter.
This time, Pulitzer was successful in a job, and started moving up in the Westliche Post organization. He also became a US Citizen, and began to get involved in local politics. He was elected to the state legislature when he was just 22 (everybody apparently ignored that, since the rule was you had to be at least 25). He also became the managing editor of the Westliche Post, and earned an ownership share.
By the time he was 30 he had enough money to purchase another newspaper, the St. Louis Dispatch. He merged it with another paper and formed the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The paper focused on sensational stories, and circulation started to rise, from about 4,000 to well over 22,000.
In 1883 Pulitzer moved to New York with his family and purchased the New York World newspaper. Once again he emphasized sensational news, and circulation rocketed up, from about 15,000 to over 600,000 per day, making it the highest-circulation newspaper in the country. Pulitzer also introduced daily comics, starting with The Yellow Kid, and color printing (only for the Sunday supplement). He got back into politics and was elected to the US House of Representatives. But he found it boring compared with running his newspaper, and resigned after a year.
Pulitzer founded the School of Journalism at Columbia University, and was the prime mover in the creation of the journalism program at the University of Missouri. He never knew about the Pulitzer Prizes, though. He left millions of dollars to the Columbia University school in his will, and they used that to create the Prizes.
The US Post Office issued a Joseph Pulitzer postage stamp in 1947, and there is a Mount Pulitzer in Washington state named after him. And, of course, all those prizes. And he’s a main character in the 1992 film Newsies, as well as the 2011 Broadway production based on the film. One of his New York City mansions is still there, in Manhattan. It’s called the Joseph Pulitzer House, but it’s not open to the public — it’s a private residence for four apartments. One place you can visit is the Pulitzer Hotel in Amsterdam, Netherlands. It’s apparently a very nice hotel (five stars!), but there is a caveat. It’s not named after Joseph Pulitzer; it’s named for his grandson, Herbert, who used to own it. There’s probably a scandal in there somewhere; some journalist ought to investigate. Maybe they’d win a prize.
