Speculations on Joseph Pulitzer Gadfly and mystery man.

Palmer, James

When he died in 1911, Joseph Pulitzer was one of the most famous men in America. The owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World was revered and reviled in equal measure. He was the scourge of the corrupt politicians and moneyed oligarchs who controlled Gilded Age America.

Laborers named children after him; the wealthy vilified him. He appeared on a three-cent stamp. Theodore Roosevelt tried to incarcerate him He was a champion of the freedom of the press and an ardent practitioner of yellow journalism. He remains in the public eye as the creator of the most prestigious awards in American journalism and cultural life.

Yet in spite of his incalculable influence on the American media and public discourse, he is still one of the most mysterious of our national heroes. His overpowering intellect defies easy analysis, and his baffling psychological ailments defy diagnosis. The conflicting and often contradictory elements of his character render him as frustrating to the historian as he is fascinating. Maniacally secretive in his later years, he became obsessive about his privacy and shunned publicity.

Invariably, his biographies pay only cursory attention to his Eastern European background and jump to 1865, when the gangling 18-year-old Pulitzer, recently discharged from the U.S. Army--a recruiter whom he encountered in Hamburg, Germany, signed him up to tight for the Union in the Civil War--arrived in St. Louis. The reader is given the impression that, having thrown off the shackles of the Old World for the freedoms of the New, he came to America as a tabula rasa.

Although Pulitzer's life was indeed a uniquely American phenomenon, he was indelibly marked by his origins, including the small market town of Mako, Hungary, where he was born in 1847. This has greater significance than the attention heretofore paid to it would indicate.

His Jewish heritage

Joseph Pulitzer never expressed any religious views and appears to have been a confirmed skeptic. One must consider him not from an American perspective, but from that out of which he came: Eastern European Jewish culture and history.

Until recently, historians took for granted the standard account of Pulitzer's ancestry: His mother, Louise (or Elize) Berger, was a Roman Catholic Austro-German, and his father, Philip Pulitzer, was of mixed Hungarian and Jewish antecedents. Early biographers, all of whom knew Pulitzer personally, are unanimous on this account of his origins, indicating that they heard it from Pulitzer himself.

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However, recent research based on Hungarian-Jewish archival documents has established that both his parents were fully Jewish; that in accordance with Jewish law, he was circumcised eight days after his birth; and that he received a traditional Jewish upbringing. His older brother, Louis (or Lajos) attended Mako's cheder (Jewish primary school) until the family moved to Budapest, and there is no reason to think that Joseph's education differed.

Why did Pulitzer allow this false pedigree to stand? The answer is slightly more complicated than simple avoidance of anti-Semitism and may be found in the events of his Hungarian-Jewish childhood.

Pulitzer was born on the eve of the revolutions of 1848. The progressive journalist Louis Kossuth led the uprising in Hungary. A willingness to fight for the cause of Hungarian freedom was enough to guarantee an invitation to Hungary's many ethnic minorities, including its Jews.

Hungary's Jews responded by becoming fervent Hungarian patriots, taking Magyar names and claiming Hungarian as their mother tongue. Some went so far as to concoct fictitious genealogies tracing their presence in Hungary to Roman antiquity. Hungarian-Jewish aspirations for citizenship dated back nearly a century, and given the chance to enjoy full participation in Hungary's civic, social, and cultural life, they overwhelmingly supported Kossuth.

Joseph's uncles, Simon and Aron Pulitzer, joined the Hungarian National Guard and fought in the uprising; his father, a grain merchant, supplied foodstuffs to the revolutionary forces. Growing up as a Jew in Hungary in the aftermath of the 1848 uprisings affected young Joseph deeply.

Hungary's defeat by the combined Austrian and Russian armies did not dampen the Hungarian Jews' dreams of Hungarian citizenship. The community suffered heavy collective fines, many Jews were imprisoned, and the Kossuth government's emancipation of the Jews was revoked. It would not be restored until 1867.

To St. Louis with radical ideas

Pulitzer's childhood, then, was colored by two ideas: to escape the ghetto and participate in the life of the nation; and the necessity of defending civil liberties. Although both ideas were fully formed when he left Hungary, they were amplified by those he would encounter among the German intelligentsia of St. Louis, a hotbed of political radicals who fled Europe after the revolutions of 1848 failed. Pulitzer's involvement with the St. Louis Philosophical Society--a group of mainly German and German-American intellectuals whose primary focus was Hegelian philosophy--is a crucial but little-known phase of his intellectual development.

The Philosophical Society created a peculiarly American variant of Hegelianism.

No ivory-tower intellectuals, they applied Hegel's philosophy to a broad spectrum of activist pursuits: law, education, politics, and, in Pulitzer's case, journalism.

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American Hegelianism, with its emphasis on positive action, galvanized Pulitzer and provided him with a philosophical rationale for leaving the confines of Jewish life and plunging into the mainstream.

Since St. Louis's mainstream in 1865 was overwhelmingly German, it is easy to see why the young Pulitzer assumed a partially German identity. Leaping headlong into the cultural life of the city, he joined German cultural and political organizations. Tellingly, these affiliations disappeared when he left St. Louis for New York, where the mainstream was not German.

Another facet of Pulitzer's mindset at the time was his hero worship. He idolized the brilliant, eccentric Henry Conrad Brokmeyer, the Philosophical Society's co-founder and later lieutenant governor of Missouri, even to copying Brokmeyer's mannerisms and speech.

But Brokmeyer was not the first hero Pulitzer mimicked. Louis Kossuth's mother was Austro-; and his father was of mixed Hungarian and Sloyak antecedents--a pedigree eerily reminiscent of that described by Pulitzer's first biographers. It seems likely that the young Pulitzer adapted his own pedigree to more closely resemble Kossuth's.

Jewish connections

Many of Pulitzer's closest friends and associates in St. Louis were Jewish. He was also a friend and political ally of Carl Schurz and Emil Preetorius, owners of Der Westliche Post, the German-language newspaper at which Pulitzer began his journalistic career.

The most important of Pulitzer's associations with his fellow Jewish St. Louisans, however, concerns his purchase of the St. Louis Dispatch (later the St. Louis Post-Dispatch). The moribund Dis patch, bankrupt and saddled with $30,000 in debts, was sold at auction on Dec. 9, 1878, to satisfy its creditors.

Pulitzer bought the paper through a proxy, Simon J. "Sam" Arnold, who, like Pulitzer, was Jewish and a Civil War veteran. Arnold worked as a clerk in the office of another prominent Jewish St. Louisan, Meyer Rosenblatt, collector of revenue for the city of St. Louis. Pulitzer was close-mouthed about the acquisition. When a Globe-Democrat reporter confronted Pulitzer with the news that Arnold had admitted to buying the paper for him, Pulitzer replied only, "Did he? Generous man."

Pulitzer's attitude at the time toward his own Jewishness seems to have been an easygoing if noncommittal acceptance of it. Even after he left St. Louis, the connection with the Jewish community remained. Rabbi Samuel Sale of Congregation Shaare Emeth was invited to speak at Pulitzer's 60th birthday dinner in St. Louis, where he described Pulitzer in vividly Jewish terms, comparing him to biblical and Talmudic figures. And nearly 30 years after Pulitzer's death, Rabbi Ferdinand Isserman of St. Louis's Temple Israel spoke of Pulitzer with almost familial pride in a radio sermon.

Pulitzer may still have considered himself nominally Jewish in St. Louis, but the reticence about Jews and Judaism of his later years begins to resemble a deliberate suppression.

After acquiring The New York World and moving to New York, Pulitzer's attitude toward all things Jewish underwent a significant change. According to W.A. Swanberg's biography of the newspaper magnate, Pulitzer became "so abnormally sensitive that any slur struck him like a whiplash," in marked contrast to the equanimity he had displayed in St. Louis.

In Pulitzer's family, the topic was so taboo that Joseph Pulitzer II learned of his ancestry only after encountering anti-Semitic abuse at boarding school. His mother assured him that his heritage was nothing to be ashamed of, but forbade mentioning the incidents to his father. Swanberg wrote: "...He tended to recoil from racial or religious discussions [and] asked his companions never to discuss Jews or Judaism."

Pulitzer did not sever all Jewish connections. He contributed $5,000 toward relief for Russian Jewish refugees and signed an exclusive cable agreement, not with William Randolph Hearst's Examiner, but with the San Francisco Chronicle, which was owned by the Dutch-Jewish De Young family. The exclusive agreement led Hearst to refer to The New York World as a "nasty, unscrupulous damned sheet because of the Jew who owns it, that I despise but which is too powerful for us to insult."

Labeled an apostate

The irascible Pulitzer had scant interest in social climbing, but his wife was very interested in New York society. The former Kate Davis was from an old, wealthy Virginia Episcopalian family and was a distant cousin of Jefferson Davis. She spent lavishly to build and maintain a properly aristocratic Gilded Age household and cultivated a social circle that included Vanderbilts, Choates, Depews, and Fishes. Her children attended prestigious schools (all three sons went to Harvard) and made socially advantageous marriages. The Pulitzers were added to the Social Register in 1891, a distinction pointedly denied to Jews.

Pulitzer may, for Kate's sake, have allowed the fanciful version of his origins to become the official one. But his attitude may also have been affected by the harsh reception he received from his journalistic colleagues, most notably Charles Anderson Dana of the New York Sun. As the World gradually eclipsed the Sun, Dana's attitude toward Pulitzer went from guardedly friendly to vicious. He excoriated Pulitzer in paroxysms of blisteringly anti-Semitic rhetoric that make for painful reading today--"Jewseph Pulitzer" and "Judas Pulitzer" were among the milder of the epithets Pulitzer received.

Dana also painted Pulitzer as an apostate Jew who had foresworn Judaism for selfish reasons: "The Jews of New York have no reason to be ashamed of Judas Pulitzer if he has denied his race and religion. The shame rests exclusively upon himself. His face is repulsive, not because the physiognomy is Hebraic, but because it is Pulitzeresque ... cunning, malice, falsehood, treachery, dishonestly, greed, and venal self-abasement have stamped their unmistakable traits ... no art can eradicate them."

This accusation was calculated to estrange the World from its Jewish readers, who appreciated the World's progressive editorial stance. In part, it worked. While Pulitzer's Jewish readership remained loyal, the Hebrew Standard, in a piece repeatedly reprinted in the Sun, wrote of Pulitzer:

"He happens to be of Jewish extraction, which he denies, however, for some reason or other, possibly as an impediment to certain ambitious designs of his. He is a Jew who does not want to be a Jew. And the peculiarity of it is that this unholy ambition of the said editor to lord it over the people and dictate to them who they should elect and who not, will probably be laid at the door of the Jews, who he has denied, and who have never been anxious to count him as their own.... The man who will deny his race and religion for the sake of ambition, social standing, or whatever motive, will betray his political friends, will betray his party, if his aspiration is served thereby."

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Jewish characteristics

Pulitzer was not a practicing Jew--he observed no holidays, practiced no rituals, and kept no dietary laws. There is no record of his ever even entering a synagogue after immigrating to America.

If, however, we define Jewishness as a set of cultural qualities or traits characteristic of Jewish ethnicity, we will find much to assist our understanding of Joseph Pulitzer. His most prominent characteristics--his prodigious memory and his uncanny ability to discern connections--provide a striking example of the effect of Eastern European Jewish culture on him.

Pulitzer's reverence for memory bordered on the religious. He said: "Memory is the highest faculty of the human mind. What becomes of all your reading, all your observation, your experience, study, investigations, discussions if you have no memory?"

Pulitzer's mind worked like that of a Talmudic scholar. After losing his sight, he kept a corps of secretaries busy constantly reading to him a never-ending stream of information culled from newspapers and weeklies, in addition to works of history, art, literature, biography, economics, music, the drama, and current politics.

Pulitzer's Eastern European Jewish background was evident in his attitude toward the great and powerful: the elected officials--including sitting presidents--whom he hectored, the oligarchs whom he hounded. He respected intelligence and ambition greatly, prestige and persons not at all.

Centuries of persecution, having given Eastern European Jews good reason to look askance at temporal authority, inculcated in them a healthy disrespect for it. There was little of the awe for monarchs and aristocrats among Eastern European Jews that there was among Gentiles. The fleeting authority of wealth or position was unworthy of respect.

Moreover, the equality of all men before God is a central tenet of Judaism. Even the authority of the learned men who led Eastern European Jewish communities could be questioned. Pulitzer disdained all temporal authority, including his own. He respected employees who disagreed with him and allowed them liberties--such as indulging in profanity-laced shouting matches with him or referring to him as J.P. or "The Old Man." Only Eastern European Jewry's wry and irreverent view of temporal authority could have spawned such an inveterate and unrelenting gadfly as Joseph Pulitzer.

Sympathy for the poor

His personal sympathies and editorial stance invariably sided with the proletariat, and he was an early champion of racial equality. He was the most notable--and audible--liberal of his day. "Always fight for progress and reform; never tolerate injustice or corruption; always fight demagogues of all parties; always oppose privileged classes and public plunder; never lack sympathy for the poor," he exhorted his editors. "Never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."

His views, so contrary to those of his Gilded Age non-Jewish peers, make perfect sense within his Jewish context. As a result of Judaism's emphasis on social justice, along with the Jewish persecution in Europe, Jewish Americans have, traditionally, been a solidly liberal bloc. Pulitzer was influenced by the former as a child in cheder. His family had experienced the latter firsthand.

Pulitzer revolutionized American journalism by appealing to the masses. He simplified his papers' style, making it comprehensible to the laborer of little education; he added lavish illustrations; he printed stories that readers would identify with. In this, he resembles less his contemporaries in American journalism than he does the Jewish movie moguls of a later generation who, by creating entertainment that appealed to the masses, built the American cinema and thus played a major role in shaping America's vision of itself.

Perhaps, however, the most telling badge of Pulitzer's Jewishness was his indefatigable commitment to the cause of liberty. Pulitzer attacked privilege and corruption because they threatened to undermine the freedoms that America, for all its shortcomings, had extended to him and millions like him who had known oppression and persecution in the Old World. Hungary had taught Pulitzer the fragility of liberty.

Joseph Pulitzer was a Jew who sought to embrace the mainstream of his adopted land and to act on a wider stage than the confines of nineteenth-century Jewish life allowed. He did not flee Judaism so much as transcend it. Paradoxically, it was his Eastern European Jewish background that enabled him to do so. Being Jewish gave Pulitzer those characteristics and abilities that set him apart from his contemporaries; it informed his motivations and actions throughout the course of his life.

James Palmer works as director of communications for Boys Hope, Gifts Hope, a national non-profit agency based in St. Louis. He holds an M.A. from the University of Pittsburgh in Russian Studies with an emphasis on Russian-Jewish history and literature.

Excerpted text and photos used with permission of the Missouri History Museum, which published the full version of this article in its 2008 Gateway magazine, Volume 28.