• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2445 0

Pulitzer proposed that journalists receive training on a par with that given to lawyers and doctors. He decided he was prepared to give Columbia University as much as $2 million—a gift almost three times the size of the institution’s annual operating budget—if it was willing to create and run a journalism school. Pulitzer then added that his gift should also be used to award annual prizes to working journalists, newspapers, or writers, for achievement, excellence, and public service. This money would eventually create what became known as the Pulitzer prizes, perhaps the most highly recognized and coveted award except for those created by Alfred Nobel the previous year.

Although his idea for journalism prizes may have seemed like an afterthought to the officials at Columbia, Pulitzer had long used the technique to motivate his own reporters. As early as 1887, reporters on the World competed for annual monetary awards in a number of categories such as best news story and best writing. Editors were not excluded. Pulitzer held competitions for best headline and best copyediting, as well.

Pulitzer selected Columbia for his munificence because of its location in the capital of newspaper publishing and because it already had a School of Mines. (“Why not also have a School of Journalism,” he said.) But if Columbia seemed uninterested, Pulitzer said he would try Yale.

“My own ideas are positive enough about the general scheme, the general provisions and the general object, but when it comes to the vital details of a working plan I am quite at sea,” he continued. “I cannot help thinking that there is no profession in which every student of the United States has a more direct interest, or which represents, for good or for evil, the moral forces and moral sense of a nation.”

Pulitzer assigned Hosmer to work secretly on the plan. He wanted it ready by his fifty-sixth birthday on April 10, 1903. For the first time since making a success of the World, Pulitzer felt the thrill of engaging in work that could outlast him. The journalism school, with its accompanying prizes for journalists from all over the country, represented an immense hope. “I don’t believe I have ever done anything that will give the children and their children a better name, and that—after all—is something,” he later wrote to Kate.

On the train heading south on this January day, Seitz held the finished proposal in his hands. It stipulated that Pulitzer would provide Columbia with the $2 million in three installments. In return, the university would construct a building, invest the money, and use the income to pay salaries for the instructors and award the annual prizes. Before Seitz had a chance to take it all in, Pulitzer had groped his way down the hall of the train and was at his door.

“You don’t think much of it,” he said.

“I do not,” replied Seitz.

“Well, what should I do? I want to do something.”

“Endow the World. Make it foolproof.”

“I am going to do something for it, in giving it a new building.”

Ignoring Seitz’s opinion after asking for it, as he often did, Pulitzer instructed Hosmer to approach Columbia and Harvard universities with the idea, without revealing who was backing it. At Columbia, President Nicholas Murray Butler, who had taken over from Low, certainly knew whose money was being offered. By summer, he had won the trustees’ approval. When the agreement was signed, it was backdated to April 10, Pulitzer’s birthday.

On Jekyll Island the following winter, Pulitzer devoted a part of each day to listening while one of his secretaries read aloud from the World. This was, by now, a well-rehearsed ritual. Pulitzer was extraordinarily attentive. A seasoned secretary knew enough to carefully read the World, as well as other newspapers, before the appointed time and to be prepared to describe the layout, size of type, and illustrations used in each story. What Pulitzer heard during one of these readings made him erupt in anger.

On Sunday, February 22, the World published an article about Katherine Mackay, a socially prominent New Yorker. It