Spring Sweepstakes

If history is any guide, most of the front pages of the U.S. press will bloom next week with the same story: a rundown of winners in that annual spring sweepstakes, the Pulitzer Prize awards.

And if past practice can be relied on, journalism's eight prizewinners, in what is essentially a journalism contest, will rate the least mention and the fewest headlines.

Their names, and their achievements, will trail far behind those of the "most distinguished" novelist, historian, biographer, poet and dramatist of the year.

There are good reasons. Winners in the literary classifications are usually figures of some public prominence, and the Pulitzer choices frequently produce lively disputes. Scarcely anyone besides Josephine Johnson, the author of a sensitive but minor novel entitled Now in November, could understand why Miss Johnson won the 1935 fiction prize in a year that also saw publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra. Ernest Hemingway had to wait until 1953 to win his first Pulitzer, with The Old Man and the Sea, having previously missed with two American classics (The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms). Some of the Pulitzer drama prizes so enraged Broadway critics, e.g., in 1935 Zoe Akins' The Old Maid beat out Robert Sherwood's The Petrified Forest, that New York drama critics set up an award of their own, and the whole thing became a joke.

Mass Anointment. By contrast, journalism's Pulitzer Prize winners and contenders are often men and women whose names lack public currency. In 1954 Mrs. Walter M. Schau, a San Anselmo, Calif., housewife, copped the news photography award because she happened to be quick with a camera when a truck ran off the road right near her. Sometimes the prize achievements, however praiseworthy, have a fleeting and parochial flavor. All Watsonville, Calif., must have buzzed in 1955 when the local Register-Pajaronian revealed shenanigans in the district attorney's office. Chances are that even in Watsonville--not to mention Watson Crossroads, N.C.--interest waned long before the Register-Pajaronian won the Pulitzer public service award the next spring.

Today, national journalism contests abound in such numbers--roughly 200--that even newsmen require a form sheet.

None of the others carry the cachet of the Pulitzer prizes, but even the Pulitzer with eight winners in journalism alone--and only one in each of the other categories--tends to suggest a mass anointment technique in which the accomplishments of the winners stand in some danger of losing distinction.

Ritual & Injunction. The Pulitzer prizes immortalize the name, but scarcely the intent, of Joseph Pulitzer, a crusading 19th century journalist who founded the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, introduced comic strips and sensational headlines (LOVE AND CIGARETTES CRAZED HIM) in his New York World, and willed $2.000,000 to Columbia University. All but $500,000 of the bequest was earmarked for the establishment of a journalism school. Pulitzer reserved the smaller sum for the annual prize contest* that bears his name.

In the years since -- the first Pulitzer prizes were awarded in 1917 -- Columbia has tended to ritualize the application of Joseph Pulitzer's will. Among other awards. Pulitzer wanted prizes to go to the best annual history of the press and to "the best and most suggestive paper on the future development and improvement of the School of Journalism." But the Advisory Board has ignored these injunctions--no doubt for want of entries.

No False Modesty. The ritual begins on Feb. 1 of each year. By then, the Advisory Board--twelve newspaper executives appointed to four-year, unsalaried terms in office, the president of Columbia and a secretary--has reaped a lavish harvest of entries (more than 720 this year).

So dependable is the unsolicited supply that the Board has only once deemed it necessary to uncover journalistic merit on its own; in 1937 it gave a prize to the New York Times's Anne O'Hare McCormick--who had not bothered to submit her articles on Pope Pius XI.

To ease the lot of the Pulitzer juries, the entrants rarely hide behind false modesty. "It is impossible to estimate the proverbial blood, sweat and tears which went into this undertaking," said the Scranton Tribune in 1959, submitting the work of Tribune Reporter J. Harold Brislin, whose stories helped send ten union leaders to jail. "The most remarkable mission in postwar journalistic history," read the blurb on the 1956 entry of the Hearst Task Force which had gone to Russia and interviewed Khrushchev and missed the big story of the year, the downfall of Premier Georgy Malenkov. The Pulitzer Advisory Board, which handed Hearst & Co. the international reporting award, presumably agreed with the blurb.

Hornblowing. Because entries are limited almost exclusively to hornblowers, the Pulitzer journalism prizes have turned into something resembling a popularity contest. One metropolitan daily submits entries in all eight categories every year.

After the Chicago Daily News won the public service award in 1957 by exposing the peccadilloes of Illinois State Auditor Orville Hodge, three Chicago newspapers took credit: the News for winning, the competing Sun-Times for suggesting the News as a Pulitzer contestant--and the Chicago Tribune for staying out of the contest yet another year. (The Trib has never entered it.) In 1954 the Advisory Board, tipped by a friendly publisher, suggested to a New England daily that its coverage of a recent storm merited entry.

The paper's managing editor disagreed, said his staff had done a "lousy job." The Advisory Board has come under criticism on several counts. One is favoritism, or at least finding excellence in the same places. The New York Times has won 27 prizes, Pulitzer's own Post-Dispatch twelve--including three of the five public service awards from 1948-52--and the Associated Press 14 (against only three for United Press International, the competing U.S. wire service). Some of the awards have praised journalistic achievements of dubious value, e.g., the Detroit Free Press's 1931 coverage by five reporters of an American Legion parade ("They came hour after hour, a part of the force which barged out in '17 when folly took the world by the hand and led it out on a sanguinary holiday to fill the meadows of France with dead").

A Sense of Service. Such criticism does not disturb John Hohenberg, 56, the Advisory Board's secretary and a 32-year veteran of New York newspapering (World, Journal-American, Post}. "The principal impact of the Pulitzer prizes on American journalism," says Hohenberg, 'has been to develop within the American newspaper a sense of public service." Chances are that despite the impact of the Pulitzer prizes, journalism's sense of public service has always been there. The prizes were founded in an era when such journalistic crusaders as Lincoln Steffens and Joseph Pulitzer himself loomed larger than life. But the globe has shrunk since then, and journalism's job has expanded.

The local accomplishments of a crusading reporter take on limited importance when matched against a newspaper's efforts at interpreting the world's more important problems. Main Street is no longer isolated from Moscow. Journalism's inevitable growth over the passing years has reduced most categories of the Pulitzer prizes to a spring bonus by which newspapers are rewarded for merely doing a minor part of journalism's job.

* The meritorious public service award, which goes to a newspaper; local reporting under deadline; local reporting not under deadline; national and international reporting; editorial writing; editorial cartooning; and news photography. A gold medal is the public service award; $1,000 goes to the winning journalists.

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