Pulitzer, Joseph

Pulitzer, Joseph (1847–1911), journalist.Born in Hungary, Pulitzer immigrated to America in 1864 and joined the Union army. Rootless after the Civil War, he went to St. Louis, Missouri, and became a reporter for a German newspaper. Following the failure in 1872 of the Liberal Republican movement he had actively supported, he became a Democrat. After buying and selling several bankrupt newspapers at a profit, Pulitzer in 1878 acquired the St. Louis Dispatch, merged it with the Post, and turned the Post‐Dispatch into a profitable newspaper with a formula of sensationalism and attacks on municipal corruption. With its profits he bought the floundering New York World in 1883.

The World quickly became a morning leader, attacking political corruption and the aristocracy of wealth. Such coverage, supplemented with cartoons, pictures, headlines, and crime news, appealed to New York City's growing immigrant population. In 1887, Pulitzer added a more sensational evening edition. He “retired” that year because of poor health and failing eyesight but continued to offer daily criticism and suggestions from his vacation retreats and yachts. The World’s sensationalism, especially its Cuban coverage, reached a peak in 1896–1898 during a circulation war with William Randolph Hearst's Journal. Pulitzer's paper grew more responsible after the Spanish‐American War, opposing imperialism and supporting reforms favored by the Democratic party. The World opposed Tammany Hall, New York City's corrupt Democratic organization, and Pulitzer bolted the party in 1896 in opposition to William Jennings Bryan and the free silver movement. In 1908, the World was sued for libel by the government for its exposés of corruption in Theodore Roosevelt's acquisition of the Panama Canal Zone, but in 1911, in an important First Amendment case, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court's dismissal of the indictment.

Pulitzer's sons proved unable to keep the World profitable after his death, and in 1931 it was sold to the Scripps‐Howard group. Before Pulitzer's death he gave two million dollars to Columbia University to establish a school of journalism and the Pulitzer Prizes.
See also Gilded Age; Urbanization.

Bibliography

W.A. Swanberg , Pulitzer, 1967.

James L. Crouthamel