Joseph Pulitzer's first news story exposed a scam he'd fallen for himself
In late-1860s St. Louis, a young Hungarian immigrant paid a smooth-talking promoter five dollars for a promised job on a Louisiana sugar plantation. A steamboat dropped him and dozens of others thirty miles downriver and left. Joseph Pulitzer walked back, wrote up the swindle, and a German-language paper printed it, apparently his first published story.
He had arrived with almost nothing. Born in 1847 in Makó, Hungary, to a prosperous merchant, Pulitzer saw the family fall into poverty after his father died and the business collapsed. He tried to enlist in the Austrian army, the French Foreign Legion and the British army, and was turned away by all three. Recruiters in Hamburg finally signed him up for the Union side in the American Civil War. He landed in Boston in 1864 at 17 without a word of English, and since his cavalry regiment was mostly German immigrants, he learned little until the war was over.
Peace brought hard times. Broke in New York, he slept in wagons, then rode a freight car to St. Louis after selling his only possession, a white handkerchief, for 75 cents. A job tending sixteen mules lasted two days. He was fired as a waiter after dumping a tray of beer on a customer. Meanwhile he spent free hours in the Mercantile Library teaching himself English, and his aggressive chess caught the eye of Carl Schurz, co-editor of the Westliche Post, which later hired him as a reporter working sixteen-hour days.
Politics came quickly. In 1869, Republicans nominated him to fill a state legislature seat, forgetting he was 22, three years below the minimum age; he won 209 to 147 and nobody raised it. A feud with a county official ended in a hotel scuffle in which Pulitzer's pistol went off, wounding the man's knee.
Later, as owner of the New York World, he fought a circulation war with William Randolph Hearst's Journal in the 1890s that helped create sensational yellow journalism, with sales reaching a million copies a day. His will endowed Columbia University's journalism school, opened in 1912, and the Pulitzer Prizes, first given in 1917.
Source: Joseph Pulitzer
