The St. Louis Post DIspatch from the 1910's does seem especially funny. Do you know if there was a particular editor or something responsible for that?
I agree! I have no idea why they’re so funny, I’ve tried to figure out who the chief editor was but I haven’t had much luck yet!
I really do try to get away from the St Louis Post-Dispatch, but even when I do a site-wide search for something (there’s 4600 newspapers on this website for goodness sake!), they’re in the top results with something crazy that I can’t help posting..
I’ve figured it out, guys! Unfortunately there’s a lot of information about his father (no surprise there), as well as his son, Joseph Pulitzer III.. but I can find almost nothing about our guy, Joseph Pulitzer II. It’s also a little difficult because after his father’s death in 1911 he dropped the Jr, or II, and went by Joseph Pulitzer, which was his father’s name as well. Here’s what I could find…
His father, a Hungarian Jew, purchased the failed St Louis Dispatch in 1879 and merged it with the competing paper The Evening Post. In 1882 the paper came to national attention when the managing editor, John Cockerill, shot and killed James Col. Alonzo Slayback, close friend of a congressional nominee named James Broadhead. The men had sparred over Cockerill’s reportings of Broadhead and Broadhead’s subsequent unkind words about Cockerill and the paper. Cockerill claimed self defense, and wasn’t indicted, but there was much public backlash and Pulitzer Sr., who supported his editors actions, distanced himself from St Louis and the paper from that time. He visited Europe shortly after and on his return purchased the New York World.
Pulitzer and his New York rival, the younger William Randolph Hearst (owner of the New York Journal) competed with more and more outlandish and sensational headlines from 1895 to 1898. The New York World and the New York Journal became the epitome of yellow journalism in this period, although by the early 1900s both would tone down considerably, especially after Hearst received tremendous backlash when his columnist Ambrose Bierce (author of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge) implied President McKinley might be assassinated (which he subsequently was). It was suggested that the killer had been goaded to the act by what he read in the New York Journal. By this time Pulitzer’s health was beginning to fail, he had diabetes and other health issues that left him partially blind and extremely irritable and a bit unstable in his moods. He resigned from his papers in 1907. The Pulitzer Prize was created in 1917 from money he had left to Columbia University.
Anyway, sorry for the digression - on to the editor we’ve been wondering about: the 21 year old Joseph Pulitzer II, Pulitzer’s son, was sent to work on the St Louis Post-Dispatch in 1906. He had been a rather wild youth, kicked out of his prep school and Harvard for his behavior, and taken off the staff of the New York World for his inability to show up on time (or at all).
Somehow, after move to St Louis and his marriage he began to settle down and really dedicated himself to the paper. He wrote to his father that “After all I am not a drunkard; I am not a degenerate; I am not a gambler, and I am not a rounder — and in these four respects I am superior at least to the average millionaire’s son.”
(Although, Hearst visited the St Louis Post-Dispatch in November 1906 to ask for a retraction of something written about himself - which turned out to be written in an entirely different paper. He apologized for his mistake, and was about to leave when he met with Pulitzer II entering the office, who told Hearst he didn’t appreciate what Hearst had written about his father. He asked Hearst if “he had uttered them deliberately and meaning they should be believed”, and Hearst replied that he “usually meant what he said”, whereupon Pulitzer II punched him in the face. I have a feeling his father wasn’t too upset by this.)
After his father’s death in 1911 he was not only the paper’s editor but also it’s publisher.
He remained the paper’s editor in chief for 43 years, running the paper with integrity, and when he died in 1955, his son Joseph Pulitzer III (who had joined the paper in 1936) took on the role until 1989. Pulitzer IIII and V also worked for the paper, the latter retiring in 1995 after management disputes.
