January 1, 2002

IT is one of those only-in-America stories. A 17-year-old Hungarian Jew — beanpole scrawny with weak eye-sight and not a word of English — stalks out of his stepfather’s Budapest home and tries to join the French Foreign Legion. It does not want him — but Abe Lincoln does, to fight for the Union in a faraway civil war. Forty years later he is a multi-millionaire, a legend, the founding father of modern journalism. To Joseph Pulitzer goes the ultimate prize.

Extraordinary men, of course, can also be extraordinary pains in the backside. Pulitzer was that, too: a chilly father and husband, a tyrant and self-pitying ranter, a man obsessed by his newspapers, the Post-Dispatch and the New York World. He must have been lousy to work for. But still, you rather wish you had had the chance.

The fascination of Denis Brian’s meticulously researched biography comes in comparing and contrasting the journalism of 120 years ago and now. Some things are wholly different — the overt mix of newspaper ownership and personal political ambition, for instance; the Wild West feel of St Louis, a frontier city where editors could shoot complaining readers dead, and did.

But the edge and the excitement are constants, fuelled by the great god competition. Wherever papers compete you may yet sense the ghost of Pulitzer; wherever shirt sleeves are rolled up, he is there. When you survey the current, flaccid reaches of American journalism, dominated by monopoly chains anxious not to utter a cheep out of place against this “war”, you hanker for a lost age of passion and invective.

Pulitzer was sometimes wrong and occasionally wild, but he was always honest. From time to time he used his newspapers as the vehicles for his own political ambition, yet he was never a politician first. Three months stuck in Congress missing the roar of the presses was enough for him. His essential power came from what his papers reported — the corruption, the crime, the violence — and his gift lay in picking brilliant people to turn over the stones. Nelly Bly, the slip of the girl who masqueraded as a mental hospital patient to reveal the foulness behind closed doors and then raced alone round the earth in record time, would adorn any paper today. So would James Creelman, the king of resourceful war reporters, and David Ferguson, who exposed the first Equitable Life insurance scandal.

The stars did not always stay faithful to Pulitzer. Especially in his last 20 years — blind, sick, touring the Mediterranean in his yacht, but staying in touch in complex code for fear of Hearst — he could be a wearisome control freak. It is significant, though, how many of those who left him for bigger jobs and fatter salaries later returned.

The saddest thing is that the only legacy he truly cared about withered and perished without him. The sons who took over the New York World, soon stripped its assets and sold it. There was no empire built to last because Pulitzer was a newspaper actor-manager at heart, not a tycoon. He began the Columbia School of Journalism, but the tasks that absorbed him day by day were mostly as ephemeral as yesterday’s headlines.

Brian writes with energy and pace, though without great reflection, taking the boasts of the World at face value. But Pulitzer’s raw, complex personality remains elusive. He is merely amazing.— Dawn/Observer news service

 

Pulitzer: a life

By Denis Brian

John Wiley

ISBN 0471332003

448pp £22.50

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)