Penny Thoughts: The Legacy of Joseph Pulitzer

Most of us are only familiar with the name Joseph Pulitzer when we hear someone has been awarded a coveted honor called “The Pulitzer Prize,” but other than the name of the award we know little of its namesake.

The award is granted to people who have achieved in American journalism, poetry, literature, history, music, drama and photography. It was established by Pulitzer’s endowment to Columbia University in 1917. With the same endowment the Columbia School of Journalism was founded.

Pulitzer’s trek to a vaunted position in national journalism was a testament to the spirit and atmosphere of America after the Civil War and on into the 20th Century. Pulitzer was a Hungarian immigrant who came to America in 1864 as a recruit by Union armies to serve in the Civil War. As an historical note, it has been established that nearly 800,000 German-Hungarians were recruited by the Union armies for the same purpose.

Pulitzer’s assent to the position of a noted and prominent figure in American journalism reaffirms the concept of the “American Dream” and to the fact of meritocracy as a fundamental principle of American success. He landed in St. Louis after the war and was so far at the end of his funds, he sold his fancy, white hand kerchief for 75 cents just to have enough money to eat.

Without belaboring the point, Pulitzer began as a humble reporter. His abilities allowed him to rise to the position where he was able to purchase the St. Louis Post and the St. Louis Dispatch in 1878. He merged the two into the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which remains today as St. Louis’ daily newspaper.

I have for a very long time been fascinated with Pulitzer and what he has contributed to the landscape of our Nation. As many of us lament the plight of the so-called “main-stream media” today, I harken to some of Pulitzer’s quotations. He was active in politics in his younger years having been elected to the Missouri legislature as a Republican, but he later became disenchanted with the Liberal Republican Party which dissolved shortly after the failed campaign of Horace Greeley.

Still, it is more the messages of his quotations which I believe have great importance for today’s media. Now, I encourage any strong debate so long as the participants agree to disagree and leave with friendship intact after the verbal sparing ends. So, I offer some of Joseph Pulitzer’s quotations here as a platform for those of us who are witnessing the polarization of our contemporary American citizenry. My hope is that Pulitzer’s words will spur the media denizens to take them to heart and apply them in a very real sense to their approaches to our political scenario today.

The following is a listing of my favorite quotations from Joseph Pulitzer.

– “Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together.”
– “A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself.”
– “The power to mould (sic) the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.”
– “We are a democracy, and there is only one way to get a democracy on its feet in the matter of its individual, its social, its municipal, its State, its National conduct, and that is by keeping the public informed about what is going on. There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy. Get these things out in the open, describe them, attack them, ridicule them in the press, and sooner or later public opinion will sweep them away.”

If you would, I invite you to read through these gems from Joseph Pulitzer and apply them where you believe they best apply. But if you take a good, hard look at the third quotation above, you might have a sense of where some of our so-called “reporters” are bound to take us today.

And I implore you to remember some of them when you might hear the phrase “Pulitzer Prize” in the future.