#422 Joseph Pulitzer

**David** (0:00)
Joseph Pulitzer is better known today for the prize that bears his name than his contributions to history. That's a shame. In the 19th 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 20th 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 tycoon 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 his 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.
That is an excerpt from a book that I recently re-read and the one I'm going to talk about today, which is Pulitzer, A Life in Politics, Print, and Power, and it was written by James McGrath Morris. And I wanted to start there because I think the framing of putting Pulitzer alongside of these other robber barons is really important and really anchors the immensity of his accomplishment. And if you take into account where he started, his life story is both one of the most inspiring life stories you can read about, but also if you think of the second half of his life, he goes blind at the apex of his power. He's in like his early 40s when he goes completely blind, goes for another 20 years, and descends almost into madness. So it is both one of the most inspiring life stories, but also this cautionary tale. I want to jump into the fact that he was born in Hungary, and by the time he's 17 years old, he's had to endure the death of his father and seven out of his eight siblings. Pulitzer's father is going to die of tuberculosis when he's 47 years old.
But while he was alive, his father was a very successful merchant, and he insisted on hiring tutors to educate his children. And in this story, we see two of Pulitzer's personality traits that are with him forever. The first one being he's incredibly industrious and loved to read and to learn, but he had to select what he was learning, and two, he had a furious temper. He was a difficult pupil and displayed a volcanic temper. Joseph once chased a tutor out of the window when the tutor made the mistake of insisting on teaching mathematics rather than entertaining the youth with war stories from history. Joseph didn't take well to formal instruction, but he did love the pleasures of reading.
Their house was filled with books. Joseph favored works of history and biography.
And a short while later, his father is going to die, and this plunges the family into poverty. Only 47 years old and at the peak of his business success, he had contracted tuberculosis. Joseph understood more fully the extent of the calamity. He had been nine, listen to what he had experienced when he was a kid. He had been nine when his older brother died, ten when his younger brothers and sister died, eleven when his father died, and thirteen at the death of his last sister. The deaths of his family led to an obsession with his health that would remain with him until the end of his life. Every element, no matter how small, was accompanied by an underlying fear that he was dying.
His father's death created a financial nightmare. It was only a matter of time before the enterprise went bankrupt. Within six months, their property was seized by authorities for failure to pay taxes. The family limped along. Years later, Pulitzer conveyed the toll from the deaths. He described himself as a poor orphan who had never even enjoyed as much of a luxury as a father.
So at 17 years old, Pulitzer escapes to America and this is how. His only path forward is to risk his life fighting in the American Civil War. Events in the United States presented him with another opportunity. The American Civil War was in its third year. Soldiers were dying at a rate of 13,000 a month, and the government had instituted a draft to meet the insatiable demand for more men. To meet the quota, a group of wealthy Bostonians looked eastward for able bodies. They wagered that there were thousands of young men in Europe who would join the American military provided their passage could be paid. This scheme became Pulitzer's escape route. And there's just a great description of Pulitzer at this point in his life. Pulitzer had no money, so his options were limited. It was not military life that Pulitzer sought, but the escape that it offered. So the deal is we will pay to get you to America. You'll fight for us. If you survive, we'll give you a little money after the war ends.