#422 Joseph Pulitzer

Joseph Pulitzer is better known today for the prize that bears his name than his contributions to history. That's 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 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 reread and the one I'm gonna talk about today, which is Pulitzer, life and politics, print, and power, and is 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 forties when he goes completely blind, lives for another twenty years, and descends almost into madness. So it is both one of the most inspiring life stories, but also this cautionary tale. I wanna 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 gonna 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 …