The medal is most artistic in design, and very precious, as it is an award for distinguished public service by a high court of public opinion.
—NEW YORK TIMES PUBLISHER ARTHUR S. OCHS TO THE PULITZER ADVISORY BOARD, JULY 8, 1920
With the Pulitzer Prizes now signifying the pinnacle of excellence in both journalism and the arts—and celebrating their centennial in 2016—it is hard to imagine Columbia University struggling to get the awards off the ground. Yet unheralded and overshadowed by world war, the selection of the first winners was barely noticed in 1917. Two months earlier, President Woodrow Wilson had declared war on Germany. And even the Pulitzer advisory board members did not seem much interested in the awarding of the first prizes. Only four of the ten board members joined Columbia president Butler in the school’s Low Library for the May 24 selections.
Not that the jurors had given them many nominees to consider. The jurors for the non-journalism categories, who had been chosen from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and who included literary lights from Yale and Harvard universities, made only a few recommendations. And the board voted no award at all for a novel or a drama that first year. For the American History Prize, the winner was not even an American but the French ambassador, Jean Jules Jusserand, for his book With Americans of Past and Present Days. A Biography Prize was voted for Julia Ward Howe, written by the daughters of the lyricist of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
In the journalism categories, small juries of Columbia faculty members had been set up, with Journalism Dean Talcott Williams serving on each. It isn’t clear whether jurors simply lacked energy for the job or just found the prior year’s journalism unworthy. But they forwarded only two works for consideration—and none at all for public service. The two nominations that the jurors did send to the board reflected both the wartime environment and their own eastern backgrounds. From the
New York Tribune there was an anti-German editorial published on the anniversary of the sinking of the
Lusitania, and from the
New York World there was a series of dispatches by Herbert Bayard Swope titled “Inside the German Empire.”
As Pulitzer Prize historian John Hohenberg put it: “The Advisory Board, concluding that first rather desultory session on the prizes, quietly voted the recommendations of all the juries.” That meant no recipient for the Public Service Prize that first year. For the few literature and journalism prizes that were awarded, Columbia adopted a deliberate policy of restraint and barely promoted them. For the most part, only newspapers that won them said anything about the prizes.
In a strange way, Columbia’s early low-key approach to the Pulitzer Prizes may have helped establish them for the long term. The prizes provoked little criticism, and there was certainly no hint of their being cheapened by excessive touting. As Hohenberg wrote, “Outside the garish spotlight of public cynosure, and relatively free of critical inspection, the system for determining the awards was molded into a reasonably efficient operation.” In later years, as word began to get out about quality journalism being recognized, the board’s secrecy about the process added to the intrigue.
It would not be until the 1920s that the journalism prizes began to attract significant attention and draw larger numbers of nominations. By then they were benefiting from their association with great early literary winners like Eugene O’Neill, Booth Tarkington, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Edna Ferber, Sinclair Lewis, and Thornton Wilder.
1 It was just what Joseph Pulitzer had wanted.
The Times at War
By failing to select a public service winner in 1917, the advisory board had stumbled in the inaugural Pulitzer award process. But as the board left its infancy and stepped haltingly into its second year—another one clouded by the war in Europe—it made a choice for its first gold medal that could not have been more propitious, either for the recipient or for the Pulitzer Public Service Prize itself.
While there are no board minutes available to prove it, those first members must have engaged in serious debate about just what Joseph Pulitzer had meant by newspaper public service. Was the award intended to honor a series of stories? Or could a campaign of some sort—or perhaps even a philosophy expressed through a public-spirited style of coverage—qualify as a “disinterested and meritorious” contribution to society? After all, hadn’t Pulitzer himself served the public by using his paper to allow Lady Liberty to raise her lamp over New York Harbor?
In 1918, the advisory board cast a vote for a winner that reflected both fine reporting and a new philosophy of coverage. In selecting the New York Times, the Pulitzers also happened to acknowledge one of the day’s meteoric newspaper success stories. The award, in fact, may well have been meant to recognize the international reporting phenomenon that the Times had become since the war in Europe started, and even before. The paper had changed the nature of overseas newspaper reporting.
Joseph Pulitzer himself had been sharply at odds with Adolph S. Ochs in Ochs’s first years after buying the struggling nine-thousand-circulation Times in 1896. Ochs rapidly remade it into a daily that would appeal to the thinking person, just as Pulitzer had successfully played to passions and to fascination with public crusades. Editorially the World called the Times a creature of the trusts and Ochs the “keeper of the deficit.” Meanwhile the Times opposed both Pulitzer and Hearst for practicing “freak journalism” as they beat the drum for war with Spain.
Ochs had worked wonders with the
Times, not only building circulation to more than one hundred thousand copies in eight years but also hiring extraordinary journalists who saw balanced, in-depth coverage of a range of topics as the desperate need of a growing class of sophisticated New Yorkers. Surreptitiously, Pulitzer joined them. In the thaw that Pulitzer initiated with some rival publishers after the yellow journalism period ended, Pulitzer invited Ochs for a visit to his Chatwold residence in Bar Harbor, writing: “You may not know that I have the
Times sent to me abroad when the
World is forbidden and that most of my news I really receive from your paper.”
2With good reason. A 1951 corporate history by celebrated
Times reporter Meyer Berger noted that “Ochs had a genius for picking men of stature as aides, and he gave their talents free rein, in the newsroom or in the counting room.” One such choice was managing editor Carr Van Anda, an Ohioan who joined the
Times in 1904 from the
Sun and immediately began to give meaning to Ochs’s new slogan, “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” Berger wrote: “There may have been somewhere in newspaper history a more perfect publisher-managing editor team than the Ochs-Van Anda set-up, but none comes to mind.” Both loved science, especially new discoveries, and both believed a wide swath of New Yorkers hungered for their new approach. “There were many in the trade, and out of it, who preferred garnished fact and the literary touch—the journalistic cocktail—to the news that Van Anda served straight. They found the
Times stuffy and elephantine in pace, even if it was complete, and honest.” Those readers had plenty of alternatives at the
World, the
Herald, the
Sun, the
American, the
Press, and others. “The years were to prove that the Ochs and Van Anda formula was best for the long haul, that an intelligent reading public bought newspapers—strange as it seemed to some—to read the news,” according to Berger.
3When it came to covering science, the paper not only excelled but also used technology for its own purposes. A decade before the war, Ochs’s Times had carried the “First Wireless Press Message Across the Atlantic,” as the paper’s own headline proclaimed on October 18, 1907. The technology gave the Times an edge over the competition for years, especially in wartime.
There were stumbles. But what history later exposed as one editorial blunder offers a fascinating insight into the Times and into the era before the war. A piece of Times lore has its roots in a June 1908 interview that correspondent William Bayard Hale conducted with Kaiser Wilhelm II on the imperial yacht Hohenzollern off the coast of Norway. It was six years before European hostilities were to begin and the German leader’s thoughts were largely unknown. But in a two-hour diatribe, he told Hale that blond, Protestant Anglo-Teutons from northern Europe were destined to rule the world. “It is a mistaken idea that Christianity has no countenance for war. We are Christians by reason of forcible conversion,” he said to Hale. “The Bible is full of good fighting—jolly good fights.”
The reporter, who hadn’t dared take notes, madly assembled a long memorandum. Afraid to send it by cablegram, Hale told his editors: “Result so startling that I hesitate to report it without censorship of Berlin.” When they finally saw it, Ochs and a collection of
Times editors that included Van Anda and Charles Miller considered it potentially world-shaking. For the sake of national interest, though, they decided that Hale should go to Washington and show it to President Theodore Roosevelt. Calling it “astonishing stuff,” Roosevelt said it should not be run. “I don’t believe the emperor wanted this stuff published,” he told Hale. “If he did, he’s a goose.” Roosevelt had no power to block the
Times. But Ochs, agreeing that this particular news was
not fit to print, locked it in his private safe. There the memo stayed, incredibly, for thirty years, coming out only in an article appearing in the
Times Magazine in 1939. There it was cited to compare the Kaiser’s ranting to that of the German leader of the time, Adolf Hitler.
4If the
Times ever regretted the decision not to give the world an early peek at the Kaiser’s warmongering there wasn’t much time for second-guessing. Soon it was telling readers of impending war in four-column headlines like this, from July of 1914:
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AUSTRIA BREAKS WITH SERVIA;
KING PETER MOVES HIS CAPITAL;
RUSSIA IS MOBILIZING HER ARMY;
BERLIN AND PARIS MOBS FOR WAR
Three years later, on April 3, 1917, above the full text of President Wilson’s address to the nation in six columns, another headline appeared in the familiar eight-column banner format:
PRESIDENT CALLS FOR WAR DECLARATION,
STRONGER NAVY, NEW ARMY OF 500,000 MEN
FULL CO-OPERATION WITH GERMANY’S FOES
That headline was surely on the minds of the five advisory board members as they assembled at Columbia for the first Pulitzer Prize decision in May 1917. Meeting again the
next May, though, that
Times war declaration story and others that followed it were certainly part of the deliberations that led the board to awarding the 1918 gold medal to the New York newspaper.
One way Van Anda had made the Times unique was by using the paper’s established edge in cable to saturate readers with dispatches, giving them the ability to judge for themselves what diplomats and leaders were saying in Europe even as Times reporters covered the same ground in their balanced way. Ochs freely bankrolled it. The Times figured that it spent $15,000 per week for cable use alone, for example, more than Ochs’s predecessors had spent on foreign coverage altogether.
Did the coverage formula work for the Times, other than winning for it the first Pulitzer Public Service Prize? Its circulation skyrocketed during the war to 323,000 with annual advertising linage—2.2 million lines when Ochs bought the paper—surging to 23.4 million lines.
Van Anda’s legend would continue to grow. In 1919, the Times copyrighted a story stemming from a meeting of astronomers in London, discussing findings from a May 29 solar eclipse that proved a little-known scientist’s theory that starlight did not travel to earth in a straight line but instead curved around the sun. The Times thus introduced Americans to Albert Einstein.
A later Van Anda–Einstein story involved the editor’s reading of one of the physicist’s lectures at Princeton. “It came at a time when relativity was only understood by Dr. Einstein and by the Deity,” according to a fellow professor who told the tale. “Dr. Einstein had already lost even the professorial mathematicians who were here to hear him, but the Times called me before going to press to ask whether there was not some mistake in the figures…. Mr. Van Anda thought one of the equations was wrong.” The professor checked, found that the Times had accurately presented what Einstein had said, and decided to check back with Einstein himself. When Einstein was consulted he was astonished. He scanned the notes and nodded. He said, “Yes, Mr. Van Anda is right. I made a mistake in transcribing the equation on the blackboard.”
FIGURE 10.1 The New York Times of April 3, 1917, was already printing full texts of documents, such as President Wilson’s declaration of war. Source: Copyright © 1917, The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.
FIGURE 10.2 Carr Van Anda, managing editor of the New York Times when it won the first Pulitzer Gold Medal. Source: From the Times photo archives. Copyright © 1912, The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.
It was also Van Anda who “went feverish over an Egyptian King who had slept some 3,500 years and restored him and his times with great fidelity and journalistic art.” What had fascinated the editor, of course, was archaeologist Howard Carter’s November 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb. The original 250-word Associated Press story was all but ignored by the rest of the press. But Van Anda lined up an exclusive relationship through the
Times of London to give his
New York Times rights to the story. Its front-page article pointing out the “incomparably magnificent and wondrously beautiful” throne, among other things, helped start a national King Tut craze.
6The decision to forego that first gold medal in 1917 eliminated a potential problem for the Pulitzer board: no medal yet existed, nor had it even been designed. Columbia president Butler commissioned sculptor Daniel Chester French to design a Pulitzer medal in the fall of 1918, paying him $1,000. At the time, French was best known for his Minute Man statue in Lexington, Massachusetts, created in 1875 when the sculptor was twenty-five. (His statuary masterpiece, the seated Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial on Washington’s Mall, would not be dedicated until 1922.) But he had also designed a series of impressive commemorative medals. Today his nine medals are considered classics of the form, although by far the best known is the Joseph Pulitzer Medal. French worked with apprentice Augustus Lukeman on the medal, initialing it with DCF/AL just behind the left foot of the printer on the reverse.
Originally there was no printer. Butler had ordered the likeness of Benjamin Franklin on one side—French apparently chose to base his Franklin profile on a bust by Jean-Antoine Houdon—and a simple inscription on the other: “For the Most Disinterested and Meritorious Public Service Rendered By Any American Newspaper During the Year….” But as they made their clay mock-ups, French and Lukeman thought the reverse too plain. French wrote to Butler that “interest would be increased by introducing an early press with a figure of a printer at work. I hope you may think so.” The Columbia administrator called it “a little touch which is quite a stroke of genius.”
7 (In early designs the printer wore a shirt and printer’s cap, although the final medal has him bare-chested with his shirt draped across the far end of the press.)
The first medal, not minted until the year after the announcement of the
Times’s Public Service Prize, took even longer to make the seventy-block trip from Columbia to Times Square. The
Times’s files show that publisher Arthur Ochs acknowledged its receipt by hand delivery on July 8, 1920, with a two-paragraph letter that noted its “artistic design.”
8An even more surprising delay may be the twenty-six years it took for a second gold medal to find its way to Times Square. The
Times would not win another Public Service Prize until the
next world war, in 1944. In other areas, though, the paper became a Pulitzer-winning machine—capturing thirteen prizes during that span.
1918—The
New York Times for its public service in publishing in full so many official reports, documents and speeches by European statesmen relating to the progress and conduct of the war.
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In Defense of “Americanism”
If board members chose the Times in 1918 for its objective and thorough presentation of the combatants’ original documents, their 1919 choice reflected quite a different approach to wartime coverage. Indeed, the board unanimously voted to give the gold medal to a newspaper that had engaged in a long struggle to oppose “Germanism in America.” That effort had included blocking the teaching of German-language courses, opposing anti-war legislators like Senator Robert La Follette, and defending the reputation of its state, Wisconsin, against detractors who claimed that anti-war sentiment there emanated from its heavy German-American population.
The paper was the Milwaukee Journal, edited by Lucas Nieman, whose next seventeen years at the paper would be dedicated to keeping the news free of special interests—in an era when partisan advocacy was a feature of many other papers. Nieman would later become the benefactor of Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation.
The jurors, again Columbia professors, made their nomination “tentatively” until they could conduct “investigations to confirm or disprove our present impression as to the risk and effectiveness of this service, pending the result of which we do not feel able to make a positive recommendation.”
10 That is how the jury system was working back then.
A spokesman for the board, the AP’s Melville Stone, explained why it honored the Milwaukee paper, remarking that “in a city where the German element has long prided itself on its preponderating influence, the Journal courageously attacked such members of that element as put Germany above America.” President William Howard Taft was among those congratulating the paper on its award.
According to a 1982 history of the
Milwaukee Journal: “Privately, Nieman and his staff were jubilant,” creating a slogan for the paper: “First by Merit.” More jubilation grew from the paper’s achieving both record advertising linage and circulation after the prize. A
Journal editorial said: “Wisconsin, which has been so misrepresented and so maligned and so misunderstood, is awarded the Pulitzer Medal for its patriotism in the Great War.”
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1919—The
Milwaukee Journal for its strong and courageous campaign for Americanism in a constituency where foreign elements made such a policy hazardous from a business point of view.
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