Man of Two Worlds

The highlights of Joseph Pulitzer's life are well known: his rags-to-riches rise to become publisher of two leading U.S. dailies, his championing of the underdog, his epic battles with William Randolph Hearst, his efforts to upgrade journalism by establishing the Pulitzer prizes. Now, for the first time, a biographer has filled in the gaps between the accomplishments in vast detail. The evidence mounts up in William Swanberg's Piditzer* that the famed publisher was a far more erratic and self-tortured personality than is generally realized.

Within Pulitzer, writes Swanberg, were "two warring individuals--Pulitzer the reformer and Pulitzer the salesman." On the one hand, Pulitzer's two principal newspapers--the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World--showed a zeal for news gathering and a passion for reform that changed the shape of U.S. journalism. On the other hand, Pulitzer built up circulation by pandering to the lowest public tastes.

Quick to Boil. Pulitzer's early life in Hungary, where he was born in 1847, is shrouded in obscurity. What is known is that when he left home at 17, he first tried to enlist in the army--anybody's army. But one nation after another turned him down because of his poor eyesight and frail physique. Only the Union Army, desperate for recruits in the Civil War, was willing to take him.

After his nine-month stint ended. Pulitzer moved to St. Louis. He took a reporting job with the German-language Westliche Post and made it his business to expose graft wherever he could find it. At 22 he was elected to the state house of representatives--although his political career was damaged when in a burst of rage he shot a local politician in the leg. Pulitzer paid his $100 fine and went back to journalism. At 31, he bought the bankrupt St. Louis Dispatch, merged it three days later with the smaller Post. He shocked St. Louis by lambasting its leading families for undervaluing property in order to avoid taxes. He accused gas and insurance companies of fraudulent practices. "The crusade," writes Swanberg, "was simply the Pulitzer personality expressed in print."

That personality got the Post-Dispatch in trouble. An outraged citizen who felt that he had been insulted by a P-D crusade stormed into the newspaper office, threatened Editor John Cockerill and was shot dead for his trouble.

Although Cockerill escaped indictment, St. Louis turned against Pulitzer and his crusades; the paper's circulation slumped badly. Pulitzer decided to put the paper in the hands of a respected local citizen and leave town with his wife Kate.

A Walk down the Bowery. He headed for New York City, where he soon bought the money-losing World from Financier Jay Gould for $346,000. "Gentlemen," Pulitzer told his new staff, "heretofore you have all been living in the parlor and taking baths every day. Now you are all walking down the Bowery." The World started championing the workingman and the newly arrived immigrants. It was a surefire formula. In three months, circulation doubled to 40,000. Within three years, the World was the biggest paper in New York and one of the two or three most important in the nation.

To drive his competitors to the wall, Pulitzer brought out an evening World, engaged in a vicious name-calling contest with the Sun's editor, Charles Dana, who ridiculed Pulitzer's isolation from his fellow Jews and his strange refusal even to discuss Jews in his paper. Capitalizing on the World's new-found power, Pulitzer supported Grover Cleveland for President in 1884 and contributed substantially to his victory over Republican James G. Elaine. It was the World that publicized the offhand remark of a Blaine supporter that the Democratic Party was based on "rum, Romanism and rebellion"--a few illchosen words that cost Blaine New York State. In the Cleveland sweep, Pulitzer himself was elected to Congress from Manhattan, though he resigned after a few months because he felt he could not handle two jobs.

At 40, and at the height of his power, Pulitzer was struck by almost total blindness. His blindness, in fact, was the culmination of a truly staggering list of afflictions: asthma, insomnia, dyspepsia, diabetes, rheumatism. And behind all these, says Swanberg, lay a deep-seated psychosis that history has tended to gloss over. Pulitzer, says his biographer, was a manic-depressive. He swung from "extremes of mood, from the warmest kindness to something near ruthlessness." He became obsessed with noise; he secluded himself in a room known as the Vault, which was sealed from the rest of the house by double walls and triple-glazed windows. The passageway to the Vault rested on ball bearings so that the floor would not creak.

Going Yellow. The World reflected its owner's oscillations of mood. In 1895, when war with Britain was threatened because of a boundary dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana, the World calmed the jingoists by stressing U.S. ties to Britain. But when the Cubans rebelled against Spain in the 1890s, Pulitzer went to the other extreme. Worried by William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, which had slavishly imitated the World, Pulitzer tried to outdo Hearst at atrocity stories and arousing the public.

Both the Journal and the World made heavy circulation gains with their warmongering, but the yellow journalism that they originated became an expensive drain from which they never really recovered. After the war, Pulitzer spent his remaining years aboard his yacht or on the French Riviera. After his death in 1911, the World enjoyed a brief renaissance under Herbert Bayard Swope, but in 1931 the World papers in New York were sold to Scripps-How-ard. Ultimately, it was the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that carried on the Pulitzer tradition under his son and now his grandson. But other than its name, there is not much that links today's conscientious, world-minded Post-Dispatch with the vivid sensationalism and jingoism of its complex founder.

* Swanberg's biography Citizen Hearst was nominated for a prize by the Pulitzer Advisory Board in 1961, then rejected by the Columbia board of trustees because Hearst did not qualify as an example of "unselfish ser vice to the people." Swanberg may not face that same problem with Pulitzer.

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