63 Facts About Joseph Pulitzer

1.

Joseph Pulitzer was a Hungarian-American politician and newspaper publisher of the St Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World.

2.

Joseph Pulitzer became a leading national figure in the Democratic Party and was elected congressman from New York.

3.

Pulitzer's name is best known for the Pulitzer Prizes established in 1917 as a result of his endowment to Columbia University.

4.

Joseph Pulitzer founded the Columbia School of Journalism by his philanthropic bequest; it opened in 1912.

5.

Joseph Pulitzer's father was a respected businessman, regarded as the second of the "foremost merchants" of Mako.

6.

Joseph Pulitzer moved his family to Pest, where he had the children educated by private tutors, and taught French and German.

7.

Joseph Pulitzer attempted to enlist in various European armies for work before emigrating to the United States.

8.

Joseph Pulitzer tried to join the military but was rejected by the Austrian Army, he then tried to join the French Foreign Legion to fight in Mexico but was similarly rejected, and then the British Army where he was rejected.

9.

Joseph Pulitzer was finally recruited in Hamburg, Germany, to fight for the Union in the American Civil War in August 1864.

10.

Joseph Pulitzer was paid $200 to enlist in the Lincoln Cavalry on September 30,1864.

11.

Joseph Pulitzer was a part of Sheridan's troopers, in the 1st New York Cavalry Regiment in Company L, joining the regiment in Virginia in November 1864, and fighting in the Appomattox Campaign, before being mustered out on June 5,1865.

12.

Joseph Pulitzer moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, for the whaling industry, but found it was too boring for him.

13.

Joseph Pulitzer decided to travel by "side-door Pullman" to St Louis, Missouri.

14.

Joseph Pulitzer sold his one possession, a white handkerchief, for 75 cents.

15.

Joseph Pulitzer worked as a waiter at Tony Faust, a famous restaurant on Fifth Street.

16.

Joseph Pulitzer spent his free time at the St Louis Mercantile Library on the corner of Fifth and Locust, studying English and reading voraciously.

17.

Joseph Pulitzer made a lifelong friend there in the librarian Udo Brachvogel.

18.

Joseph Pulitzer often played in the library's chess room, where Carl Schurz noticed his aggressive style.

19.

Joseph Pulitzer greatly admired the German-born Schurz, an emblem of the success attainable by a foreign-born citizen through his own energies and skills.

20.

In 1868, Joseph Pulitzer was admitted to the bar, but his broken English and odd appearance kept clients away.

21.

Joseph Pulitzer struggled with the execution of minor papers and the collecting of debts.

22.

On March 6,1867, Joseph Pulitzer became a naturalized American citizen.

23.

Joseph Pulitzer's work was to record the railroad land deeds in the twelve counties in southwest Missouri where the railroad planned to build a line.

24.

Joseph Pulitzer was nicknamed "Joey the German" or "Joey the Jew".

25.

Joseph Pulitzer joined the Philosophical Society and frequented a German bookstore where many intellectuals hung out.

26.

On December 14,1869, Joseph Pulitzer attended the Republican meeting at the St Louis Turnhalle on Tenth Street, where party leaders needed a candidate to fill a vacancy in the state legislature.

27.

Joseph Pulitzer organized street meetings, called personally on the voters, and exhibited such sincerity along with his oddities that he had pumped a half-amused excitement into a campaign that was normally lethargic.

28.

Joseph Pulitzer's age was not made an issue and he was seated as a state representative in Jefferson City at the session beginning January 5,1870.

29.

Joseph Pulitzer eventually became its managing editor, and obtained a proprietary interest.

30.

In May 1872, Joseph Pulitzer was a delegate to the Cincinnati convention of the Liberal Republican Party, which nominated New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley for the presidency with Gratz Brown as his running mate.

31.

Joseph Pulitzer met Greeley's assistant and campaign manager Whitelaw Reid, who would become Pulitzer's journalistic adversary.

32.

In 1874, Joseph Pulitzer promoted a reform movement christened the People's Party, which united the Grange with dissident Republicans.

33.

However, Joseph Pulitzer was disappointed with the party's tepid stances on the issues and mediocre ticket, led by gentleman farmer William Gentry.

34.

Joseph Pulitzer returned to St Louis and endorsed the Democratic ticket.

35.

Joseph Pulitzer campaigned for the Democratic ticket throughout the state and published a damaging rumor that Gentry had sold a slave.

36.

Joseph Pulitzer served as a delegate to the 1874 Missouri Constitutional Convention representing St Louis, arguing successfully for true home rule for the city.

37.

On December 9,1878, Joseph Pulitzer bought the moribund St Louis Dispatch and merged it with John Dillon's St Louis Post, forming the St Louis Post and Dispatch on December 12.

38.

Joseph Pulitzer bought two new presses and increased staff pay to the highest in the city, though he crushed an attempt to unionize.

39.

In 1880, Joseph Pulitzer made a second run for public office, this time for United States Representative from Missouri's second district.

40.

Joseph Pulitzer replaced him with John Dillon, former owner of the Post and unlike Joseph Pulitzer and Cockerill, a well-respected, conservative native of the city.

41.

The World immediately gained 6,000 readers in its first two weeks under Joseph Pulitzer and had more than doubled its circulation to 39,000 within three months.

42.

Joseph Pulitzer dictated several aspects of the design, including the building's triple-height main entrance arch, dome, and rounded corner at Park Row and Frankfort Street.

43.

When Joseph Pulitzer purchased the World, New York City, though overwhelmingly Democratic, did not have a major Democratic newspaper.

44.

Joseph Pulitzer attacked young Republican Assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt as a "reform fraud," beginning a long and heated rivalry with the future President.

45.

In 1884, Joseph Pulitzer was elected to the US House of Representatives from New York's ninth district as a Democrat and entered office on March 4,1885.

46.

Joseph Pulitzer was a member of the Committee on Commerce.

47.

However, Joseph Pulitzer soon determined that his position at the World was both more powerful and more enjoyable than Congress.

48.

Joseph Pulitzer began to spend less and less time in Washington, and ultimately resigned on April 10,1886, after little over a year in office.

49.

Joseph Pulitzer continued to manage the paper from his New York mansion, his winter retreat at the Jekyll Island Club on Jekyll Island, Georgia, and his summer vacation retreat in Bar Harbor, Maine.

50.

When Joseph Pulitzer's son took over administrative responsibility in 1907, Joseph Pulitzer wrote a carefully worded resignation.

51.

Joseph Pulitzer was insulted but slowly began to respect Cobb's editorials and independent spirit.

52.

In May 1908, Cobb and Joseph Pulitzer met to outline plans for a consistent editorial policy but it wavered on occasion.

53.

Joseph Pulitzer sent him on a six-week tour of Europe to restore his spirit.

54.

In 1878 at the age of 31, Joseph Pulitzer married Katherine "Kate" Davis, a woman of high social standing from Georgetown, District of Columbia.

55.

Joseph Pulitzer was five years younger than Pulitzer, from an Episcopal family, and rumored to be a distant relative of Jefferson Davis.

56.

On December 31,1897, their older daughter, Lucille Irma Joseph Pulitzer, died at the age of 17 from typhoid fever.

57.

Joseph Pulitzer's thoughtful seated portrait by John Singer Sargent is at the Columbia School of Journalism that he endowed.

58.

The family continued to be involved in the operation of the St Louis paper for several generations until April 1995, when Joseph Pulitzer IV resigned from the paper in a management dispute.

59.

Joseph Pulitzer's daughter Elkhanah Pulitzer is an opera director.

60.

For six months during 1908, Pulitzer was attended to by his personal physician C Louis Leipoldt aboard his yacht Liberty.

61.

On October 29,1911, Joseph Pulitzer listened to his German secretary read aloud about King Louis XI of France.

62.

Joseph Pulitzer's body was returned to New York for services and interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx.

63.

In 1892, Joseph Pulitzer offered Columbia University's president, Seth Low, money to set up the world's first school of journalism.