Columbia University approved plans to award the first Pulitzer Prizes on this date in 1912, one year after the death of Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian-born Jewish journalist and newspaper publisher who left a $2 million bequest to establish the Prize and the Columbia School of Journalism. Pulitzer had arrived penniless in the U.S. in 1864 and joined the Union Army right off the boat. He became a reporter (nicknamed “Joey the Jew”) who showed inexhaustible energy for work. In 1872, Pulitzer purchased a share in the Westliche Post for $3,000, which he sold for a profit a year later. Pulitzer then bought the St. Louis Dispatch and the St. Louis Post and merged them into a paper that is still St. Louis’ daily today. The Post-Dispatch and Pulitzer’s New York World became major voices for the Democratic Party and “enemies” of big business and political graft. The World was fiercely competitive with William Randolph Hearst’s reactionary New York Journal, a competition that transformed daily newspapers into mass- circulation vehicles filled with news, entertainment, sports, cartoons, and, of course, advertising.
“A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will in time produce a people as base as itself.” —Joseph Pulitzer