[In the 1930s] the Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism became an intrinsic part of the profession in the United States. If they were not perfect, they were at least respected. Their permanence was not questioned.
—JOHN HOHENBERG, PULITZER PRIZE ADMINISTRATOR AND SECRETARY, 1954–1976
Almost on cue in October of 1929, the bubble burst for the Roaring Twenties. Still, it took Americans a while to shake the notion that Charles Ponzi might have been right—that maybe everybody could get rich quick, magically, and without effort. In the 1930s, the Great Depression and the graft and crime that accompanied it provided the backdrop for much of the newspaper public service that the Pulitzer Prizes honored.
While the Pulitzer advisory board was eager to name winners in all the journalism prize categories, it sent a signal in 1930 that only top-notch entries deserved the gold medal. The board turned down all five jury selections without explaining its reasons and voted to give no gold medal at all that year. The three Columbia faculty member jurors had considered nineteen entries before unanimously recommending Maine’s Portland Evening News for “its successful campaign against the exploitation of hydro-electric power from the State of Maine”—coverage that showed “unusual courage and independence.” The other four were the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the New York Telegram for unearthing city scandals, the Detroit News for promoting a reforestation project, and the Cleveland Press for a war on machine politics.
The advisory board gave no Pulitzer for editorial writing either. It saved all its journalism plaudits for reporting, where it again acknowledged the global coverage of the
New York Times. Technology was a factor, as it had been in the 1918 Public Service Prize. The reporting winner was Russell D. Owen for reports on Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s Antarctic exploration. The reporter had submitted his reports by radio transmission.
The next year was a sad one for Ralph and Joseph Pulitzer. In February, the New York World folded after years of losses and was merged into what became Scripps-Howard’s World-Telegram. Ralph continued on the Pulitzer board as chairman (JP II would take over after Ralph’s death in 1939). With the disappearance of the New York paper, concerns about Pulitzer Prizes for Pulitzer papers diminished. In the 1930s through the early 1950s, however, the Post-Dispatch became an even greater Pulitzer-winning force than the World had been, especially in the public service category.
Standing Up to Mob Rule
After honoring three cases of local watchdog journalism from 1931 to 1933—the work of the
Atlanta Constitution, the
Indianapolis News, and the
New York World-Telegram—the Pulitzer board faced a tough choice in 1934. The jury, considering twenty-three nominations for the gold medal, offered the board a mixed recommendation that proposed no single winner.
1 In what seemed a peculiar proposal, two jurors recommended that the gold medal recognize the press as a whole, while a third juror opined that no entry was worthy of the prize.
Board members, unmoved by both arguments, dug into the entries on their own and found a winner in Oregon’s 4,440-circulation Medford Mail Tribune. The Mail Tribune had courageously challenged a local demagogue who had used mob tactics—and his own newspaper—to try to overturn the town’s government. In the end, he had sought to protect his power base by killing a local constable.
Llewellyn A. Banks, a wealthy orchard owner and alleged bootlegger who had moved from California in the 1920s, formed around him a group of extremist supporters to help him control local officials, including the Jackson County sheriff. The miseries of the Depression created a fertile environment for Banks to incite rebellion against the town government. In 1929 he had bought a newspaper, the
Medford News. In the next few years he published invented charges about a “gang” that had “fattened at the public purse for fifteen years.” Starting an organization of local ruffians he called the Good Government Congress, Banks used his newspaper and meetings of the group to push the area toward martial law, threatening existing officials with horsewhipping or hanging.
As the community became more divided, the Mail Tribune publisher Robert W. Ruhl challenged Banks, warning that the Good Government Congress was aiming to spark a local revolt. After a February election in which a close vote threatened to unseat Banks’s choice for sheriff, the ballot boxes were stolen and Banks was charged with the theft. While state police issued a warrant for his arrest, Banks boasted that he would kill any arresting officer. On March 16, he made good on the promise. As constable George Prescott stood outside their door with his warrant talking with Banks’s wife, Banks shot him through the heart with a hunting rifle.
The day after the killing, Ruhl began his editorial titled “The Challenge Is Accepted!” this way:
Do the people of Jackson County want more innocent officers shot down in cold blood behind the skirts of some woman?
Do they want continued lawlessness, continued pillaging of court houses, and burning of ballots?
Do they want this reign of terror followed by another, until this community is reduced to a shambles and advertised far and wide as a place where crime is encouraged, sedition lauded, and murder condoned?
If they do, then that is precisely what they are going to have. All they need to do now is to lie down and take it.
2
Banks was eventually sentenced to a life term for murder, and some of his associates went to jail. In nominating his paper for the gold medal, Ruhl wrote that “the show is over, the play is played out! But it was a close call!”
3Inside the Advisory Board
Why was the Pulitzer board left by jurors to identify this story on its own? The jurors—the
Philadelphia Public Ledger editor Charles Munro Morrison, the
New York Times Sunday editor Lester Markel, and Columbia dean Carl Ackerman—became embroiled in a debate about President Franklin Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration, the New Deal effort to get business on track by setting wage and other standards for industry. Publishers across the United States sought a waiver from NRA guidelines, contending that applying government standards to newspapers violated the First Amendment. Of course, a waiver would also mean that publishers could pay workers less.
A group of editors and publishers had nominated America’s newspaper publishers in general for the Public Service Prize for standing up to the president. Morrison and Ackerman agreed in their jury majority report, saying that “the ‘most disinterested and meritorious public service’ rendered in 1933 was not by any single newspaper, but by the press as a whole in safe-guarding the freedom of the press in a national emergency.” The report suggested that “the Gold Medal be placed in the permanent custody of
Editor & Publisher” and circulated among members of various press associations. Some journalists did not quite see the emergency that concerned the two jurors and the publishers. A strong dissent came from Markel, who questioned “the advisability—and, more, the propriety—of that award.” He also opposed those who argued that no medal be awarded.
4Through a communication from Ralph Pulitzer to his brother Joseph, it is possible to enter the board’s inner sanctum at Columbia that year. JP II, who was not able to attend the 1934 board meeting, insisted on a full accounting of the proceedings. He got it in a May 2 letter from his sibling, the board chairman. Ralph’s reply detailed the reasoning of the board in rejecting the jury recommendation and in selecting the Mail Tribune. His letter sheds light on the selection process of that time and demonstrates the strong commitment the Pulitzer sons felt to the original goals their father had in establishing the prize, particularly the gold medal. It was clear that in their minds, giving the Public Service Prize to a group of publishers was not appropriate. Ralph wrote:
At the meeting I first stated my personal objections (1) that it departed from J.P.’s terms in giving it not to a newspaper but to a group of newspapers; (2) that it departed from those terms since they stated it was to be for a disinterested service, and the fight of the papers could not be called a disinterested service, whether one believed in it or not; (3) that although I was fully aware that many of the men who fought for the freedom of the press clause were actuated solely by patriotic or unselfish motives I was equally aware that many were actuated by motives the very reverse, and that I thought under these conditions if the press pinned a medal on itself it would become a laughing stock.
I then asked each of the members to state their own personal objections which they did, and without any discussion it was decided not to bestow the gold medal as recommended by the majority report of the sub-committee which was to leave the medal un-bestowed this year.
5
However, the board also “overwhelmingly” voted to reject Markel’s proposed withholding of the prize. As entries were then considered one by one, Ralph first favored the New Orleans Picayune for its fight against the crooked populist governor of Louisiana, Huey Long. Then another board member brought up the Mail Tribune “as having rendered a remarkably courageous public service in fighting a powerful and dangerous bootlegger who had come into that town from California and introduced criminal practices.” Ralph Pulitzer’s letter continued:
At the risk of his life, the editor made a fight against this man and his gang and finally succeeded in having him sent to prison and the gang dispersed.
The point was made that a service of this kind in such a small town as Medford involved much more danger and courage than in a city like New Orleans. I was won over to this point of view and the Board unanimously voted for the Medford Mail Tribune.
In many ways, newspaper readers may have understood the Depression best as a series of local stories about a national and global economic issue. In addition to the New Orleans and Medford papers, other journals nominated for the Public Service Prize helped settle strikes in New Jersey, fought labor union crime in Cleveland, exposed sweat shops in Pittsburgh and Scranton, showed up bankruptcy process irregularities in Wilkes-Barre, and described the life of the unemployed in California.
The Pulitzer advisory board was not happy with the 1934 jurors. It asked future jurors to list three to five examples in public service and the other classifications without making recommendations of their own. The board would do the selecting.
6
1934—The
Medford (Ore.)
Mail Tribune for its campaign against unscrupulous politicians in Jackson County, Oregon.
7
A Dust Bowl Primer
Public service jurors called it a tie in 1938. After looking at thirty-three public service entries, they picked two to forward to the board “because both campaigns deal with extremely important matters and because both newspapers used great versatility and tenaciousness over a long period of time.” One nominee was the San Francisco News for fighting vice and police graft. The other was North Dakota’s Bismarck Tribune for a series called “Self Help in the Dust Bowl.” The advisory board, however, saw the Dust Bowl project as something special for the age.
It was the work of publisher and editor George D. Mann, who died before the paper entered it for the Pulitzer. Managing editor Kenneth W. Simons took over as editor. He described the entry as an attempt “to aid the people of the Great Plains to restore prosperity and to forever abandon dependence upon relief systems, public or private.” It said the project was aimed at eight million farmers victimized by the Dust Bowl.
The Tribune’s Pulitzer entry summarized the agricultural history of the Dust Bowl, helping readers understand what had befallen them:
The northern great plains have been semi-arid for untold centuries.
Drouth cycles were known and prepared for by the Indians, long before the careless and avaricious white man settled here. The evidence of aridity was here for all to see…. White settlement commenced in 1870 despite warnings that agricultural practices of Iowa, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania were not adaptable in the northwest….
Through all the years the few men who could see the cumulative effects of blind land management were ignored when they uttered warnings of future disaster. The ground was fertile. The rains fell. Crop prices made more and more wheat farming profitable.
Then came 1929. A drouth cycle commenced. Sixty years of solid exhaustion, sixty years of unscientific farming, began to take their toll. Farmers failed. Business failed. The regional economy tottered on the brink of destruction.
The Dust Bowl forced 130,000 families to flee the region, the stories said. But the Tribune’s coverage told the story “of the courageous people who have remained there to fight out their battle, one of the greatest in the history of our country.”
The program it promoted involved having farmers stop single-crop planting, restore grass in place of grain on the ranges, replenish natural water reservoirs, and reforest areas cut for crop planting and purposes. Overall the philosophy “substituted the doctrine of self-help for that of government bounty,” a drive that the paper said had won “partial acceptance.” The paper produced sixty-nine editorials to go with its news coverage.
The series also covered the success stories of farmers who had used enlightened cultivation techniques and it celebrated the strengths of the Midwestern farmers who chose to hold their ground in the Dust Bowl. On July 22, it began:
If there is any dominant trait that marks the people of western North Dakota apart from their brothers in other regions it is tenacity.
Here on the northern great plains the tenacious Indian made his last great stand against an overwhelming wave of whites who coveted the soil where the buffalo grew fat.
Here the tenacious ranchers who first settled the country struggled to keep open a range against a flood of peoples with plows who yearned for the free soil that Uncle Sam unwisely opened to farming.
Here the tenacious farmers have clung to their homesteads against implacable drouth and hordes of insects.
All of them—Indian, rancher and farmer—allowed that tenacity to blind them to facts that might have kept them individually and as a class from the brink of destruction to which they were at last inexorably drawn.
Various community and government programs were adopted to support the
Tribune recommendations.
8The Tribune, now owned by Lee Enterprises, keeps the gold medal in a vault but has its Pulitzer Prize certificate on display in the newsroom and in the publisher’s office. The honor for the paper’s Dust Bowl coverage was an early statement by the board about the major public service that environmental reporting can perform. Decades later, environmental journalism would be a staple of the Pulitzer Prizes.
1938—The
Bismarck (N.D.)
Tribune for its news reports and editorials entitled “Self Help in the Dust Bowl.”
9
Flunking History
While its war coverage was again superb in the 1940s, the
New York Times won its second gold medal by focusing on a home front issue: deficiencies in the teaching of American history. The idea for the project came from publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s wife, Iphegene Ochs Sulzberger.
10 A former history student at Barnard College, she feared that a test of what American young people really knew about U.S. history would turn up a poor result. Her hope was that exposing the level of the problem would lead to a drive to improve teaching requirements.
The survey was planned by distinguished Columbia history professors Hugh Russell Fraser and Allan Nevins and coordinated by the Times education writer Benjamin Fine. Among its more shocking results was that 30 percent of the students questioned did not know that Woodrow Wilson was president of the United States during World War I. In the middle of another war, the story took on a new significance because of what it said about how little Americans knew about their country.
Fine’s April 4, 1943, story was headlined “Ignorance of U.S. History Shown by College Freshmen: Survey of 7,000 Students in 36 Institutions Discloses Vast Fund of Misinformation On Many Basic Facts.” The Times’s nomination letter for the 1944 prize noted that a number of colleges had introduced American history after the article ran and that the states of Illinois and Pennsylvania had passed the first requirements for U.S. history to be taught.
There had been plenty of controversy over the story. Four days after the series ran, the
Times carried a story saying that the
Harvard Crimson student newspaper had called the test “one of the greatest hoaxes in American history.” According to the
Crimson, many students answered the questions facetiously while the
Times took their responses seriously. The
Times stood by the story and so did the Pulitzer advisory board. The Pulitzers had received thirty-two nominations in public service and the jury had pointed out several favorites—with the
New York Times history study not among them—but the board took its own course in selecting the
Times’s work.
11
1944—The
New York Times for its survey of the teaching of American History.
12
Back to the “Society Page”
On the home front, World War II impacted American journalism in many ways. Men who left their newspapers during the war often came back to the newsroom battle-hardened. They had a new military model for getting journalism jobs done, with mission-oriented teams that answered to higher authority. In some newsrooms, that military model already existed. In others, reporters turned to team investigations for the first time.
In another major shift in newsroom demographics, the war’s end displaced thousands of other qualified reporters: women. Many had finally gotten a chance in the 1940s to do serious newspaper journalism. Some were forced to go back to the “women’s page” or the “society page.” It would not be a long-term exit. Women would stream back into hard news reporting in the 1950s and 1960s and begin winning their share of Pulitzers, including gold medals for their papers.