Joseph Pulitzer (10 April 1847-29 October 1911) was a member of the US House of Representatives (D-NY 9) from 4 March 1885 to 10 April 1886 (succeeding John Hardy and preceding Samuel S. Cox) and the publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World.
Biography[]
Joseph Pulitzer was born in Mako, Hungary in 1847, and he came from a Jewish family. He was educated in Pest before failing to join the Austrian Army, the French Foreign Legion, and the British Army, after which he emigrated to the United States and joined the 1st New York Cavalry Regiment during the American Civil War. Pulitzer served in a regiment composed largely of German immigrants, and he fought in the Appomattox campaign. After the war, he became a whaler in New Bedford, Massachusetts and a waiter and lawyer in St. Louis, where he mingled with the German community, including Carl Schurz. He became an American citizen in 1867 and joined Schurz's Republican Party, serving as a Republican state representative in 1870. He followed Schurz into the Liberal Republican Party, but his views on low tariffs and limited federal powers led him to become a Democratic campaigner, even as Schurz returned to the Republican fold. Pulitzer bought the moribund St. Louis Dispatch in 1878 and merged it with the St. Louis Post to form the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, championing the common man and making use of exposes and populist, sensationalist journalism. Pulitzer was rivals with the Bourbon Democrat William Hyde of the Missouri Republican, and his attacks on Republican-backed candidate James Broadhead's law partner Alonzo Slayback led to Slayback storming the Post-Dispatch offices and being shot by the Post-Dispatch's editor John Cockerill, turning conservative Democrats against Pulitzer. Pulitzer was forced to relocate to New York City, where he bought the New York World and settled in Gramercy Park. Pulitzer built the New York World Building on Lower Manhattan's "Newspaper Row", and he exposed a corruption scandal involving the US government and the Panama Canal Company in 1909. The World became overwhelmingly-Democratic New York's first major Democratic newspaper, and he befriended Samuel J. Tilden, Abram Hewitt, and William C. Whitney at the Manhattan Club and backed Grover Cleveland's presidential bids while attacking Theodore Roosevelt as a "reform fraud." He went on to serve in the US House of Representatives from 1885 to 1886, and he resigned to focus on his journalism; he championed the placing of the Statue of Liberty in New York City. Pulitzer later warred with William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and Charles A. Dana's New York Sun, and Dana and The Journalist publisher Leander Richardson launched anti-Semitic attacks against Pulitzer. Pulitzer died in 1911.