Pulitzer Prize Boners

A Pulitzer Prize once went to a pint-sized reporter who was small enough to crawl into a cave and interview Floyd Collins. Five Detroit Free Pressmen won the prize for reporting an American Legion parade. Ambidextrous Reuben Maury earned his Pulitzer for his "power to in fluence public opinion": a self-confessed hireling, he used to write isolationist editorials for the New York Daily News, interventionist editorials for Collier's.

Just how much is a Pulitzer Prize worth, anyway? Last week, as the judges got set to study the 1948 awards, two newspapermen took the case to the jury.

Carroll Binder, chief editorial writer of the Minneapolis Tribune, writing in the American Mercury, declared that "possession of a Pulitzer Prize does not guarantee that the holder is among the best [newspapermen]. Nor is the lack of a Pulitzer Prize evidence that a veteran newspaperman is not among the most capable or fearless." Binder put the blame for bad choices on the 13-man Pulitzer advisory board, mostly publishing executives of big newspapers. (The board meets annually at the April convention of the American Newspaper Publishers Association.)

Eight for Seven. The real trouble is logrolling, said Newsman Binder. In 1947, seven of the nine journalism prizes went to newspapers or wire services represented on the board. The New York Times has won 20 Pulitzers since 1918 -- eight of them in the seven years since the Times's twice-Pulitzered Arthur Krock joined the board. The Associated Press has won eleven Pulitzers, the United Press none.

Says Binder: "The U.P. is so convinced that it cannot get a prize while [A.P. Boss Kent] Cooper is a member of the advisory board that it refuses to submit [any more stories]."

Writing in the magazine '48, able Journalist Kenneth Stewart agrees that there have been "many stupid, many dull, many reactionary and many ridiculously belated awards." Among the newsmen who get prizes from Stewart and Binder (but never got Pulitzers): Heywood Broun, Raymond Clapper, Webb Miller, H. L. Mencken, A. T. Steele, Dorothy Thompson.

Stewart believes that the villain of the piece is Dean Carl Ackerman of the Pulitzer-endowed Columbia School of Journalism, which gives the awards. He calls Ackerman "an academic apologist for the A.N.P.A., which is business-minded . . . and suspicious of change."

Ignore the Experts. Even worse than the news awards, Stewart thinks, are the Pulitzers for arts & letters. The Pulitzer board appoints "expert jurymen" to advise it on these prizes, but frequently ignores their recommendations. Some Pulitzer-scorned novelists: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passes, William Faulkner. Concludes Stewart: "The awards have rarely erred in the direction of courage and unconventionality, and only occasionally in the direction of fine taste."

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