1922 Encyclopædia Britannica/Pulitzer, Joseph

PULITZER, JOSEPH (1847-1911), American editor and newspaper proprietor, was born in Budapest, Hungary, April 10 1847. He came to America in 1864, entered the Union Army, and served to the end of the Civil War. In 1868 he became a reporter on the Westliche Post, a German newspaper in St. Louis, and in 1871 managing editor and part owner. In 1869 he was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives; in 1872 was a delegate to the Liberal Republican National Convention which nominated Horace Greeley for president; and in 1874 was a member of the Missouri Constitutional Convention. In 1876-7, during the Hayes-Tilden controversy, he was in Washington, D.C., as correspondent for the New York Sun. In 1878 he purchased the St. Louis Evening Dispatch and Evening Post, combining them as Post-Dispatch. In 1880 he was a delegate to the National Democratic Convention. In 1883 he bought from Jay Gould the New York World (see 19.569), which fearlessly attacked political corruption. In 1884 he was elected Democratic member of Congress from the state of New York, but resigned after serving a few months. In 1896 he allied himself with the “Gold” Democrats and opposed the nomination of William Jennings Bryan. During his later years he was blind and spent much of his time cruising about the world in his yacht, but to the end continued to direct his New York paper. He died on board his yacht in Charleston harbour, S.C., Oct. 29 1911. Interested in improving the profession of journalism, he worked out a plan for establishing a school for training journalists. In 1903 he set aside $1,000,000 for establishing a school of journalism at Columbia University. His own idea as to the object of such a school is set forth in an article, “The College of Journalism,” contributed to the North American Review for May 1904. In Sept. 1912 the School of Journalism of Columbia was opened. He left $500,000 each to the New York Philharmonic Society and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

His son, Ralph Pulitzer (b. 1879), succeeded him in control of his newspaper properties. He married (1905) Miss Frederica Vanderbilt Webb of New York City.