Pulitzer’s Gold: A Century of Public Service Journalism, revised and updated edition

Somehow, some time, every Arkansan is going to have to be counted. We are going to have to decide what kind of people we are—whether we obey the law only when we approve of it, or whether we obey it no matter how distasteful we may find it. And this, finally, is the only issue before the people of Arkansas.

—ARKANSAS GAZETTE EDITOR HARRY S. ASHMORE, SEPTEMBER 9, 1957

As the Pulitzer board searched for its public service medalist each year, the goal was to find the very best story—not to go out of its way to achieve a broad mix of winning news organizations. Had variety been the aim, of course, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch likely wouldn’t have been a five-time recipient in so short a span. Likewise, board members were not looking to honor a diversity of story types that might be viewed as ideal from the standpoint of posterity. With as many as a half-dozen suggestions placed before them by each jury, they had enough to do just selecting the year’s strongest candidate.

But as the nation’s editors continued to tackle the topics that gripped the communities around them in the postwar years, the Public Service Prize winners did indeed manage to touch on many of the major themes of the age. Papers that exposed the grit of corruption and graft got their share of honors, recognizing that important duty of the watchdog press. Other selections in the 1950s and 1960s, though, began to reveal a new stew of compelling social issues—from school integration to legislative reform to drugs, sex, and the environment.

By 1950 the number of journalism categories had increased to seven, with the old reporting award being broken by the Pulitzer board into local, national, and international divisions. Cartooning had its own prize, as did photography. During the next two decades, in an expansion to eleven prizes, the board chose some unwieldy category names, such as local investigative specialized reporting (later called investigative reporting). Photography was divided into spot news and feature photography.

In the enlarged deck of awards, the gold medal sometimes began to take on the look of a “wild card”—with the board seeming to use the designation to mark what it considered to be simply the best newspaper effort of the year. Increasingly, though, the members began to see the public service award as a way to honor the special case of a news organization that reached across the classic Pulitzer Prize divisions, or perhaps that said something totally new to benefit the community. As always, though, the role of the press in dealing with racial issues was kept in focus.

A Klan Reprise—and Finale

In 1953, the Whiteville News Reporter and the Tabor City Tribune got special attention because they were the first weeklies to win “the coveted Meritorious Public Service awards,” as Editor and Publisher magazine called them. (It was another case of two newspapers winning in the same year for writing independently about similar topics.) But far more important was the evil that they successfully attacked: a North Carolina rejuvenation of the Ku Klux Klan.

Over the course of the papers’ campaigns, more than a hundred Klan members, including Imperial Wizard Thomas L. Hamilton, had been convicted of various crimes because of what the Whiteville and Tabor City papers wrote. The newspapers, whose editors were personal friends, were only twenty miles from each other and were close to the boundary with South Carolina, the state where Klan activity was most vicious. KKK terrorism, including beatings of both blacks and whites by night riders, had spread in 1950 and 1951.¹

The fears in the community were sometimes matched by fears in the newsroom. “I would be lying if I said I haven’t been afraid,” the News Reporter editor Willard Cole said to Editor and Publisher, “but the mission of a newspaper editor is to voice convictions, not to exhibit his own misgivings.” Cole, who earlier had worked at the Winston-Salem Journal, kept three guns because of threats he had received. As the two newspapers attacked the violence, county, state, and federal agents moved in. When the prizes were awarded in May 1953, Cole called the North Carolina Klan “as dead as a door nail.”²

Cole’s wife, a teacher, also got some credit for finding a way to break through the silence among frightened victims that had hampered investigators and reporters alike. “She listened to children gossiping at school and learned of three beatings,” the Associated Press reported in its coverage of the Pulitzers. “The information was relayed via Cole to the authorities who pried the information out of the reluctant victims.”

The Tribune editor W. Horace Carter also admitted being terrified for his wife and two young children as cars drove past his home at night. At one point, his four-year-old son asked him, “The Klan gonna come and get you, daddy?”

1953—The Whiteville (N.C.) News Reporter and Tabor City (N.C.) Tribune for their successful campaign against the Ku Klux Klan, waged on their own doorstep at the risk of economic loss and personal danger, culminating in the conviction of over one hundred Klansmen and an end to terrorism in their communities.³

“Alicia’s Toy” No More

The New York suburbs gave rise to a new kind of journalism in the 1940s. Publisher Alicia Patterson had begun molding Newsday into both a community voice and an enemy of corruption, especially the labor rackets.

Being taken as a serious publisher had not been easy. She was the great-granddaughter of the Chicago Tribune owner Joseph Medill and the daughter of Joseph Medill Patterson, founder of the New York Daily News and benefactor of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. But ever since buying Long Island’s Garden City–based paper in 1940, Alicia Patterson had had to live down the sexist notion that Newsday was just “Alicia’s toy.”⁴

FIGURE 14.1 Newsday publisher Alicia Patterson, who bought the Long Island, New York, paper in 1940, examines her first press. Source: Photo courtesy of Newsday.

The story that carried Newsday to its first Pulitzer Prize—and a new sense of pride—was inspired by managing editor Alan Hathway. He had assigned reporter Helen Dudar, among others, to investigate Nassau County construction trades labor czar William DeKoning Sr. While individual names are not generally associated with Public Service Prizes, Dudar may be the first woman journalist involved with winning one. But bylines did not show her role. The editors, feeling that by naming reporters they might expose them to retribution from the individuals they were writing about, kept her name off her stories.⁵

Dudar had started at Newsday as an advice columnist while she attended classes at Columbia. She displayed special skill in crafting complex stories, although her role in the DeKoning investigation was to follow Hathway’s instructions closely. As early as 1950, Dudar and other staffers found a nest of wrongdoing involving an area trotting racetrack where DeKoning also was involved. The paper kept up the pressure. Along the way, a number of its news tips came from New York City Anti-Crime Commission investigator Bob Greene.⁶ Eventually DeKoning went to prison for extortion—and Greene jumped to Newsday as a reporter. The state investigation turned the Newsday stories into convictions. It was the work of Governor Thomas E. Dewey, who had so narrowly lost the presidential election to Harry Truman in 1948.

Newsday’s victory over the labor boss was all the sweeter because some New York City papers had knocked their new rival as a “soggy suburban”⁷—and largely ignored the DeKoning story. The New York World-Telegram played down the Pulitzer news that year, and for what it did run it ordered up an article “belittling Newsday and saying that the Pulitzer Prize committee was crazy for not giving it to the Telegram.” That assessment came from a reliable source: Fred Cook, the unfortunate World-Telegram reporter who was ordered to write the derogatory story. “I had to do it. I sure did hate it,” he said. “It was buried in the paper somewhere. It was a disgusting performance.”⁸

In a statement after the prize was announced, Patterson credited Hathway, who “spent more hours, more effort, more energy on the story than any other Newsday member. It was he who was cited by David Holman, DeKoning’s attorney, as the man most responsible for DeKoning’s downfall.”⁹

Newsday’s greatest successes in the public service arena were ahead of it, however. The successes would be largely of Bob Greene’s making. In ten years, Greene would become a legend in investigative team reporting.

1954—Newsday, Garden City, N.Y., for its exposé of New York State’s race track scandals and labor racketeering, which led to the extortion indictment, guilty plea and imprisonment of William C. DeKoning, Sr., New York labor racketeer.¹⁰

Leadership in Little Rock

Despite the inspirational work of the Arkansas Gazette in leading its community through the Little Rock school desegregation crisis of 1957, there is still an aura of sadness in looking back at that time. The most dramatic element of its coverage sprang from the September 2 decision by Governor Orval E. Faubus to call out the National Guard and state police to surround Little Rock Central High School, preventing fifteen black students from registering for classes. The front page soon carried pictures of black students being turned away from the schoolhouse door with white students taunting them. Then came the violence.

Editor Harry S. Ashmore and the Gazette had spent more than a year trying to avert such a collision. They had worked closely with the governor, whom the paper had helped elect. The Gazette had promoted a “ten-year plan for desegregation”—one opposed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as too slow. But that plan, the Gazette contended, was within the spirit of the “deliberate speed” that the Supreme Court had sought in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Days before September 2, Governor Faubus had said he would keep his word and would not intervene to prevent black children from enrolling. That had led the Gazette’s Ashmore to editorialize optimistically on September 1. Headlined “A Time of Testing,” the editorial said the paper was confident “that the citizens of Little Rock will demonstrate on Tuesday for the world to see that we are a law-abiding people.”¹¹ When Faubus called out the Guard, though, all bets were off.

“Little Rock was actually a progressive city whose citizens were headed off at the pass by the governor,” says Gene Roberts, who covered civil rights for the New York Times and later took the Philadelphia Inquirer to greatness as the editor. There in Arkansas, “you had a civil rights conflagration at a time when there was progressive civil rights leadership at the paper. Other places, papers were mediocre, and part of the problem, rather than the solution.”¹²

The Gazette had dutifully been publishing both pro-segregation and anti-segregation views in its news column. A story that was part of its Pulitzer Prize submission, for example, was headlined “Petition Adopted at ‘Mothers League’ Meeting Asks Faubus to Prevent Integration of School.” The unbylined story said: “The petition was approved by a standing vote of most of the 250 men and women present at the second meeting of the League…. It heard impassioned pleas from several segregationists, including one from Texas, to fight the integration of Little Rock Central High School.”

FIGURE 14.2 The Arkansas Gazette of September 4, 1957, showed Little Rock in crisis and featured an editorial by Harry Ashmore. Source: Reprinted by permission of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, © 1957.

But racist opinions could not stand up to the eloquence of Ashmore’s reasoned editorials. On September 4 he wrote one headlined “The Crisis Mr. Faubus Made.” It began:

Little Rock arose yesterday to gaze upon the incredible spectacle of an empty high school surrounded by National Guard troops called out by Governor Faubus to protect life and property against a mob that never materialized.

Mr. Faubus says he based this extraordinary action on reports of impending violence. Dozens of local reporters and national correspondents worked through the day yesterday without verifying the few facts the governor offered to explain why his appraisal was so different from that of local officials—who have asked for no such action…. On Monday night he called out the National Guard and made it a national problem.

It is one he must now live with, and the rest of us must suffer under. If Mr. Faubus in fact has no intention of defying federal authority now is the time for him to call a halt to the resistance which is preventing the carrying out of a duly entered court order. And certainly he should do so before his own actions become the cause of the violence he so professes to fear.¹³

Public service jurors gave the board a choice among the Gazette coverage and a wide range of other entries, including several old-time political graft stories and the New York Journal American’s coverage of a “mad bomber” in the city.¹⁴ The board recognized, though, what an extraordinary statement the Gazette had made in its reporting of the desegregation crisis.

Roberts observes that this was the only Pulitzer gold medal awarded to a southern newspaper during desegregation in the region, making the joint recognition for the newspaper and Ashmore—in public service and editorial writing—all the more significant in journalism history. “I personally think that the so-called southern liberal editors during this period collectively made it the brightest era for editorial writing ever in America,” says Roberts, whose book The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, co-written with Hank Klibanoff, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for History.¹⁵

Some Gazette readers did what they could to dim the moment, however. Despite the paper’s “fearless and completely objective news coverage”—and, in fact, because of it—the Gazette suffered a subscriber boycott and pressure from advertisers. During 1957, circulation fell to 83,000 from 100,000. Later it would be forced into a merger with its rival paper to become the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.¹⁶

1958—The Arkansas Gazette, Little Rock, for demonstrating the highest qualities of civic leadership, journalistic responsibility and moral courage in the face of great public tension during the school integration crisis of 1957. The newspaper’s fearless and completely objective news coverage, plus its reasoned and moderate policy, did much to restore calmness and order to an overwrought community, reflecting great credit on its editors and its management.¹⁷

Speaking Above a Whisper

Like many newly hired women reporters of the 1950s, Lois Wille had found herself on fluffy “women’s page” or “society page” assignments after getting a journalism degree and joining the Chicago Daily News in 1956. Starting as assistant to the fashion editor, she eventually got her wish to move over to the city desk. But at first it wasn’t much better. She was one of the “our girl” reporters—getting her picture in the paper “powdering my nose in a flight suit” after she flew with the Navy’s Blue Angels, for example. Soon, however, she began making her own breaks. In 1959, she hid in a laundry truck to get close to Nikita Khrushchev on the Soviet premier’s 1959 tour through the Midwest. She got her interview.¹⁸

By 1961 Wille was covering poverty and public aid issues and latched onto one issue that at first was a hard sell with city editor Maurice “Ritz” Fischer. The public health agencies in the area “all had a policy of not giving out any information about birth control to indigent women—much less services,” she says. The need for birth control services was discussed often among public health workers, “but it was never written about”—especially in heavily Catholic, conservative Chicago. “Ritz had given me a free hand to explore the issues,” but this one seemed to sit on his desk without a decision. Then Fischer went on leave for some surgery and his assistant, Robert Rose, took over. “Rose was fearless,” Wille recalls, “and he thought it would just be a hoot anyway to work on this story while Ritz was gone.”

FIGURE 14.4 The Chicago Daily News reporter Lois Wille in 1962. Source: Used by permission of Lois Wille.

The story she prepared was balanced, examining the economic and social reasons advanced by proponents who claimed that offering the services would “reduce the rolls of those who receive public aid and rely on public funds for medical care.” They also argued “that those Chicago families who can least afford to provide for children are reproducing at high rates, thus contributing to delinquency and other social ills,” according to the Pulitzer Prize entry by the paper. On the other side, birth control was “considered immoral by a large number of taxpayers.”

The Daily News said: “Behind closed doors of conference rooms, in private gatherings of social workers, among clergy of various denominations, these issues were debated and discussed over and over again. But in whispers.” Wille did not whisper. After intensive research and interviewing in which people had to be persuaded to speak for the record, she pulled together the cases and the arguments she needed. At that point, the Pulitzer entry letter said, “a disheartening problem thrust itself into the picture. The Catholic laymen and clergy she talked with gave her little sermons on why The Daily News should forget the whole thing.” Indeed, the Church would not even offer a comment on the controversy.

City editor Fischer, now back at his desk, took it seriously that the Church was not planning to participate in the series. He arranged several meetings with Catholic leaders. And at one point, without Wille’s knowledge, he even passed her story to a Church leader of his acquaintance, Monsignor John J. Egan. “I figured, This could not be good,” Wille recalls, although, “back then I wasn’t as appalled as I might be today.” Father Egan, though, was one of the most progressive of priests in Chicago. He suggested some changes but also made sure that the Church would offer a detailed statement of the Catholic position to appear in the articles.

The eloquence of her writing—and of the people she got to speak to her—gave the series special power. In one story, Wille began:

On a hot Saturday morning in August, Mrs. Sandra Allmon, 26, walked into Newberry Settlement Houses just off Maxwell St., waited in line with about 100 other women and poured out her story:

“I asked about it at County Hospital when my youngest was born, and everybody shut up like a clam.

“I’ve got seven now, I told the doctor. And he said, ‘Well, you’re healthy enough for seven more.’”

“I have to credit Ritz,” says Wille. “When he came back from his surgery he pushed it forward.”

Still, the reporter also found herself assigned to write her own Pulitzer Prize nomination letter early the next year, something she remembers dashing off before she and her husband left for a vacation in the Mediterranean. When someone asked her if she expected to win, Wille laughed, “Don’t be silly; this is just something I have to do. It’s routine.” And she believed it.

After a day of touring Egypt she was told that several cables had arrived for her, “I thought someone had died,” she recalls. “Why else would we be getting cables?” Her husband came running down from the cable office. “You’ve won!”

Wille was to champion the hiring of women reporters at the Daily News until the paper closed in 1978. She then became the editorial page editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, leaving that paper when Rupert Murdoch bought it in 1984 and moving to the Tribune. She won her own Pulitzer for editorial writing at the Tribune in 1989.

1963—Chicago Daily News for calling public attention to the issue of providing birth control services in the public health programs in its area.¹⁹

Highway Robbery

A February 1963 telephone tip to the St. Petersburg Times Tallahassee bureau chief Martin Waldron suggested that fiscal controls over turnpike-related spending were abysmal. Huge amounts of public monies were being wasted. The call kicked off a six-month investigation of fraud in the state turnpike authority.

The authority had been created during the 1950s to operate more than 100 miles of toll roads from Miami and Fort Pierce, and in 1960 Governor Farris Bryant supervised the sale of $157 million in new bonds for an extension that would make the whole road more than 260 miles long. But the system was rife with waste and abuse.

Waldron’s team included reporters Jack Nease, Don Meiklejohn, and John Gardner, and they were supported by editorial writer Warren Pierce and photographer Johnnie Evans. The team leader was a fearless but somewhat happy-go-lucky character, as associates described him. And to the serious business of investigating, Waldron introduced lighter moments. One was his decision—with the help of Meiklejohn and the Times accountants—to test just how much two people would have to eat to run up one of the huge meal tabs that turnpike authority employees were submitting.

In the “time capsules” that many of these long-ago Pulitzer-winning efforts represent, today’s inflated dollars sometimes make the amounts of money seem laughable. This case is a prime example. The outrageous-looking meal tabs for two ran to $30—at a time when half as much could buy an elegant two-person dinner, complete with drinks and generous tip. Waldron and Meiklejohn picked Pierre’s Restaurant and Lounge in Miami for their experiment. As Waldron later told it, the job was grueling, requiring the two to start with several martinis and whisky sours, followed by a Caesar salad, double sirloin, and cherries jubilee, and topped off with two brandies. When they failed initially, managing only a $23.10 bill, they stepped up the effort.²⁰

“Another glass of brandy will cost what?” Waldron asked the waiter, only to be told that it would add just $1.10 more. After figuring a $5 tip, they did not mange to hit $30 until they bought the glass that their beverages came in—for $1—proof positive that the turnpike officials had been taking advantage of the lax oversight.

As a result of the paper’s stories, the state legislature created a bond review board to regulate bond issues and a state audit was ordered, where previously the authority’s own auditors had been in charge. Turnpike authority chairman John Hammer resigned, there was a full investigation, and members of the authority were stripped of their unlimited expense account privileges. It was the first Pulitzer Prize for the paper, which became the Tampa Bay Times in 2012.²¹

1964—The St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times for its aggressive investigation of the Florida Turnpike Authority which disclosed widespread illegal acts and resulted in a major reorganization of the State’s road construction program.²²

Zoned Out in California

Like many investigations that lead to gold medals, the Los Angeles Times’s successful probe into the sleazy side of city government grew over several years. In 1966, Metro editor William F. Thomas had received a telephone tip about abuses by city officials. “It was a zoning story, and a hell of a good one,” said Thomas, who died in 2014.²³ Officials were taking bribes to make zoning changes, especially for the corners where the city’s many gas stations were located. Property owners paying the bribes were profiting from the increase in values that resulted.

“I didn’t want to form an investigative team,” recalled the editor, who had a low opinion of reporters who called themselves investigators rather than journalists. “So I gave the calls to George Reasons, who had been an education writer. I told him not to be a policeman, or I’d pull him off. He did become a policeman, but he listened to reason.”²⁴

At the same time, Thomas listened to Reasons. When the reporter said he needed help with the expanding assignment, the Metro editor created a team with reporters Art Berman, Gene Blake, Robert L. Jackson, and Ed Meagher.

A barrier had to be surmounted before any rooting out of corruption could be done, though: the Times’s lawyer. As Bill Thomas was rising in the editing ranks at the Metro section, he saw the attorney blocking good work time after time. “I refused to send my stories up to him because they’d get killed if they had any hint of possible legal action,” Thomas said. “This was a very careful newspaper. It didn’t take any chances.” At one point, however, the Times named a new general counsel, and arrangements were made for the paper to be represented if necessary by a trial attorney with the big firm of Gibson, Dunn, and Krutcher.

Thomas recalled his apprehension when he first attempted to get one of the tough zoning stories past an attorney in this new system the Times had created. When the editor handed the piece over for a reading, the lawyer started chuckling. “And I’m thinking, He’s going to shoot this down,” according to Thomas. But then, going point by point down the pages, “he started saying, ‘We can win that…. We can win that….’”

While the relationship eased the way for the stories by Reasons and others to appear, Thomas was not sure what impact the work would have. “They really didn’t seem to be blockbusters,” he said, “but they were really hard-work stories.” Many of the abuses were extremely small, with some officials taking bribes of as little as $2,000. “That always amazed me,” he said. “Why in the hell would they risk it for that much? Why wouldn’t they hold out for ten thousand dollars?” Eventually he figured it out. The local politicians thought it was something everyone was doing and that this protected them from exposure. “And for two thousand dollars, maybe you wouldn’t have such a guilt feeling.”

The guilt feelings would come, however, courtesy of the Times articles. Incrementally, the stories “just kept unfolding, and then you’d run into a roadblock,” Thomas said. Then “finally you figured you had enough to do a series.” Taken together, the small exclusive painted the picture of a corrupt administration.

Three harbor commissioners were convicted of bribery in 1968, a $12 million city contract for a world trade center was canceled, and in recreation and parks two commissioners resigned and a golf course contract was canceled. The Times editor Nick Williams wrote in his Pulitzer Prize entry letter, “There can be no doubt that without the disclosures made over the past two years by The Los Angeles Times none of the above reforms, indictments and changes in the Los Angeles City government would have taken place.”²⁵

Looking back, even Thomas sounded amazed at how rapidly the Times was able to create such a reporting powerhouse in the 1960s. “The Times came out of nowhere—one of the ten worst, as Time magazine supposedly said—and in a period of ten years it became among the top three and stayed there.” Thomas largely credited publisher Otis Chandler and editor Nick Williams, who Thomas would soon replace. They in turn credited Thomas. By the time Thomas retired as editor in 1989 the Times had won twelve Pulitzers, including another gold medal in 1984.

1969—The Los Angeles Times for its exposé of wrongdoing within the Los Angeles City Government Commissions, resulting in resignations or criminal convictions of certain members, as well as widespread reforms.²⁶