Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [0]
A Life in Politics, Print, and Power
James McGrath Morris
To Dean M. Sagar
Don’t tell stories about me.
Keep them until I am dead.
JOSEPH PULITZER (1847–1911)
Contents
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Prologue: Havana 1909
Part I: 1847–1878
1. Hungary
2. Boots and Saddles
3. The Promised Land
4. Politics and Journalism
5. Politics and Gunpowder
6. Left Behind
7. Politics and Rebellion
8. Politics and Principle
9. Founding Father
10. Fraud and His Fraudulency
11. Nannie and Kate
Part II: 1878–1888
12. A Paper of His Own
13. Success
14. Dark Lantern
15. St. Louis Grows Small
16. The Great Theater
17. Kingmaker
18. Raising Liberty
19. A Blind Croesus
Part III: 1888–1911
20. Samson Agonistes
Photographic Insert
21. Darkness
22. Caged Eagle
23. Trouble from the West
24. Yellow
25. The Great God Success
26. Fleeing His Shadow
27. Captured for the Ages
28. Forever Unsatisfied
29. Clash of Titans
30. A Short Remaining Span
31. Softly, Very Softly
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Frontispiece illustration by William A. Rogers was originally published in Harper’s Weekly, December 29, 1901.
Author’s Note
Like Alfred Nobel, Joseph Pulitzer is better known today for the prize that bears his name than for his contribution to history. This is a shame. In the nineteenth century, when America became an industrial nation and Carnegie provided the steel, Rockefeller the oil, Morgan the money, and Vanderbilt the railroads, Joseph Pulitzer was the midwife to the birth of the modern mass media. What he accomplished was as significant in his time as the creation of television would be in the twentieth century, and it remains deeply relevant in today’s information age.
Pulitzer’s lasting achievement was to transform American journalism into a medium of mass consumption and immense influence. He accomplished this by being the first media lord to recognize the vast social changes that the industrial revolution triggered, and by harnessing all the converging elements of entertainment, technology, business, and demographics. This accomplishment alone would make him worthy of a biography.
His fascinating life, however, makes him an irresistible subject. Ted Turner-like in his innovative abilities, Teddy Roosevelt-like in his power to transform history, and Howard Hughes-like in the reclusive second half of his life as a blind man tormented by sound, Pulitzer’s tale provides all the elements of a life story that is important, timely, and compelling.
This book benefits from several fortunate and remarkable discoveries of items previously unavailable to other biographers.
Nearly a century ago, it was reported in newspapers that Pulitzer’s only living brother had written a memoir shortly before committing suicide in 1909. In 2005, I located the manuscript in the custody of his granddaughter in Paris. An extraordinarily talented sculptor of religious figures, the late Muriel Pulitzer had guarded the work all her life after her father failed to get it published as he had hoped. The memoir sheds new light on the Pulitzers’ childhood in Hungary, their separate journeys to the United States, their rise as American newspaper publishers, and the prickly relationship between them.
Another important source of material was rescued from a trash bin in St. Louis. More than twenty years ago, the contractor Pat Fogarty spotted some wooden cigar boxes in a Dumpster near a building undergoing renovation. He thought they were too nice to be thrown out, so he took them home. When he opened them he discovered they were filled with documents from the 1800s that had once belonged to Joseph Pulitzer’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He put the boxes in his basement for safekeeping, thinking someday he might be able to sell the items.
In 2008, Pat and Leslie Fogarty generously shared the contents with me. The papers turned out to be historically significant. They included the original receipts for Pulitzer’s purchase of the