Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [215]
“Am all broken up by Dillon,” Pulitzer telegraphed to Florence White, who had begun his working life as a cub reporter for Dillon and Pulitzer years earlier. “Wish you would attend service…specially representing me and papers.” Instead of heading west for the funeral, Pulitzer gathered up his entourage of seven employees and two servants and boarded the eastbound Celtic, leaving New York on October 31.
For an additional $394.29 above the price of a first-class ticket, the White Star line had made the usual preparations for its notoriously noise-sensitive customer. Piano playing in the bars ceased at ten o’clock in the evening rather than at eleven. A custom-made green baize door was installed to close off the hall leading to Pulitzer’s quarters. “The slamming of a door is most penetrating, it can be heard a half-mile off, especially along a straight corridor,” Pulitzer warned the ship’s owners. Portions of the deck above his room were cordoned off to redirect promenading passengers, and those who had to cross the area walked on heavy mats. “It is not a question of pleasure, luxury,” Pulitzer explained when making his demands. “It is an absolute, indispensable necessity.”
Leaving New York for Jekyll Island in January 1903, Pulitzer instructed Seitz to ride the train with him as far as Washington. When the train pulled out of the Jersey City station, Hosmer handed Seitz a sheath of papers and told him to be prepared soon to render an opinion on its contents. Settling into an isolated compartment, Seitz dived into the file. It revealed, in a sharply condensed form, an idea Pulitzer had been mulling over for years. He wanted to use his wealth, upon his death, to create a school to train journalists and endow a prize to reward excellence among working journalists.
Years before, while running the Post-Dispatch, Pulitzer had poked fun at publishers meeting in Columbia, Missouri, for wanting to create a professorship of journalism. “It is as absurd to talk of it as to talk of a professorship of matrimony, it being one of those things of which nothing can be learned by those who have never tried it.” A decade later, Pulitzer began to change his mind. He conceded that a professor of journalism might be able to teach some of the technical aspects of the trade. “Of course,” Pulitzer added, “the highest order of talent or capacity could no more be taught by a professor of journalism than could the military genius of a Hannibal, Caesar, or Bonaparte be taught in military academies.”
By the 1890s, the idea had become a central part of Pulitzer’s plan on how to use his wealth. Next to power, Pulitzer most sought respectability. Much of the public thought his profession lacked dignity. The competition with Hearst had, at least for a while, bound the two men together as purveyors of the crass, sensational, and prurient fare of Yellow Journalism. Two years earlier, for instance, Life magazine had published a drawing of Pulitzer as a bird on a perch labeled Pulitzus Nundanus, listing its characteristics as “Scavenger. Eats anything, and grows fat on filth. Vindictive and noisy, but harmless.” A school and the respect that might come with it would go a long way toward ennobling the profession and its most famous member.
While he was at rest in Europe, Pulitzer shared his thoughts with others. One in particular was his friend Seth Low, president of what was then called Columbia College in New York. In 1892, Pulitzer’s scheme was considered by Columbia’s trustees. They rejected the idea. Now, a decade later, Pulitzer resurrected the plan as he contemplated the end of his life while summering at Chatwold. He revised his will and, at last, laid out his thinking about his legacy in a memo for George Hosmer, his faithful companion of many years, marking it “strictly confidential.”
“My idea is to recognize that journalism is, or ought to be, one of the great and intellectual professions,” he said. To that end,