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Is Hofstadter's "The Age of Reform" Still Considered a Classic?

If you ever glance through the most influential history books of all time; you’re most likely to come across books like, Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s, “The Age of Jackson,”  “The Guns of August” By Barbara W. Tuchman, and  "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany,"  by William L. Shirer, among other canons of history.

All of these books are considered, by many, vital and enduring classics.

Another monumental book undoubtedly is “The Age of Reform,” Richard Hofstadter’s 1955 Pulitzer-Prize winning book and its pioneering examination of American history from the Populist Movement of the 1890s through the Progressive Era to the New Deal of the 1930s.

As I observed “The Age of Reform’’ popping up like a toaster on a number of political classics of all time, I wondered whether Hofstadter’s opus withstood the passage of time 64 years after it first hit the bookstores?

I also wondered what exactly makes a classic?

So, I put that very question to some scholars.

According to Lawrence Cahoone, Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, and author of “Cultural Revolutions: Reason versus Culture in Philosophy, Politics, and Jihad,”  “a "classic" piece of nonfiction is one that had a large and lasting positive impact (positive meaning, its impact is due to people learning from it and agreeing with it). And that means people in the field ought to read it to be well educated in the field. “

“But that does not mean it is right,” Cahoone went on to explain. “I can regard something as a classic and still think it was wrong or misguided. Indeed, if you admit there are "classics" which disagree with each other, you have to accept that.”

Eric Foner, Professor of History at Columbia University, observed that “some of the most influential books are influential precisely because so many people were inspired to refute them. In writing history refutation is often the highest form of flattery. “

Foner additionally tells me that much of “The Age of Reform” has been seriously questioned and indeed refuted by recent scholars. Still, it is well worth reading,” Foner said. “It’s a classic and students should understand why it made so large an impact and what they can learn from it about history and writing.”

In 1985, 35 years after it was published, historian Alan Brinkley considered "The Age of Reform" the most influential book ever published on the history of twentieth-century America. “

Richard Hofstadter at his desk.

Photo Credit: Sam Falk/The New York Times

***

In his Pulitzer-Prize winning book, Hofstadter re-examined Populism, a 19^th century term that is often attributed to the liberal reform tradition of the 1890s.

Populism is generally defined as the “people,” (a morally good force) in riot with “the elite” (corrupt, greedy, and self-serving). It represented the promotion of democracy.

The Populist Movement, in U.S. history, was a coalition of agrarian reformers in the Middle West and South in revolt against the Democratic and Republican leaders for ignoring their interests. They suffered from economic hardship due to falling prices, crop failures, and lack of credit institutions.

So frustrated by the lack of progress, Populists challenged the federal government to help alleviate economic depressions, regulate banks and corporations, and help farmers who were being crushed from economic chaos.

In breaking with his contemporaries, Hofstadter, a Columbia University historian, blistered liberals and their purportedly idealistic reforms by revealing a number of unbecoming traits, including their nativism, jingoism, and anti-Semitism.

Previously, Populists and Progressives of the late 19th and early 20^th centuries were heralded by most historians for ushering in a number of progressive reforms; among them, the secret ballot, direct elections of U.S. senators, and amendments in electoral laws promoting suffrage for women.

These reforms were put in place, history tells us, to combat the corrupt monopolies of the late 19^th century, including the regulation of transportation, finance, utilities, and corporations.

According to Hofstadter, these reforms sprang from resentment from the rural population (“urbanized against their will”) who lost ground to the more socially democratic and multicultural interests of the country. The two groups erupted into a cultural bonfire.

Many of these reforms were hailed as “the rebirth of American democracy.”

Not until “The Age of Reform’’ was published, however, were many of these democratic reforms of the Populists and Progressives put under close scrutiny by Hofstadter.

No book, according to Hofstadter, investigated the anti-Semitism of the rural population.

Stripped to its core, Hofstadter recognized hostility by Populists to the foreign “ideologies” of immigrants who poured through the U.S. in record numbers in the last half of the 19^th century and early 20^th centuries. Yankee Protestants, from Hofstadter’s vantage point, resented the rising status of the Jews, Poles, and Irish, ethnic groups who didn’t fall in line with the social conservatism of the “old Wasp elites.”

The decline of rural America, in other words, awoke a smoldering anti-Semitism within the farming class. Hofstadter’s analysis, in another break from his contemporaries, was taking a hard look at American politics through the prism of culture, not in economic terms.

The Columba University historian inveighed against native-born citizens seeking to define what it meant to be an American on their terms, while condemning supposedly foreign challenges to the nation’s values and institutions.

Shortly after its publication, historian Norman Pollack harshly challenged Hofstadter’s arguments in “The Age of Reform,” which he thought obscured the truly humane character of the movement and denied Populism "its traditional place as a democratic social force.”

Another, C. Vann Woodward, a  Pulitzer-Prize winning American historian who wrote extensively about the American South and race relations in the 20^th century took issue with Hofstadter for singling out Populists for their nativism and anti-Semitism, when such traits were shared by elite eastern intellectuals and nation’s urban underprivileged.

64 years after its publication, “The Age of Reform” continues to have its strong supporters, especially in the Donald Trump era.

Harold Bloom, an American literary critic and Professor of Humanities at Yale University, contends that “now that we are all of us in the Age of Trump, I think we have to regard Hofstadter as having been prescient. Populism, whether here or abroad, is anything but a democratic social force. It has become Fascistic. Let us tell the truth. We are now under a Fascistic government. I do not think that I would call the Hofstadter book a classic. It is not a great work. “

Lizabeth Cohen, Professor of American Studies at Harvard University, echoes Harold Bloom’s sentiments.

 “Trump’s victory,” Cohen observes, “surely would not have surprised Hofstadter. After all, he tracked extremist revolt in the Heartland of America from the Populists of the 1890s to the anti-urban nativists of the 1920s to the McCarthyites and other anti-communists in the 1950s to the Goldwater Campaigners of 1964.”

Cohen, furthermore, points out that Hofstadter predicted the impact of media celebrity on politics when he wrote in 1964: “The growth of the mass media of communication and their use in politics have brought politics closer to the people than ever before and have made politics a form of entertainment in which the spectators feel themselves involved. Thus, it has become, more than ever before, an arena into which private emotions and personal problems can be readily projected.”

Critics of Hofstadter think his radical politics sprang from his transition from Marxism in the early 1930s, which over time, developed into hostility against “populistic democracy.”

Hofstadter joined the Communist Party in 1938; but was so disheartened with the Moscow show trials, that he quit the party four months later.

Conservative columnist George F. Will once described Hofstadter as a liberal intellectual who “dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders.” 

Hofstadter was born on August 6, 1916, in Buffalo, New York. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Poland, his mother an American-born Protestant who died when he was ten. He lived at 1125 Park Avenue in NYC.

Not all scholars consider “The Age of Reform” a classic.

Paul E. Peterson, Professor of Government at Harvard University, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, said that “when I first read it in graduate school, I thought it did not understand country folk I came to know when running a campaign in rural Minnesota. The people were mainly interested in the weather, the prices for their crops, and any government subsidies they might persuade the federal government to give them. The book appealed to the folks on the eastern seaboard. I never assigned it [to my class].” “Never believe a blurb on the back of a book,” Peterson advised me.

In addition to Populists and Progressives, “The Age of Reform,” examines FDR’s New Deal, which is viewed by the author as the only true political reform movement which was motivated not by the cultural ethos of the nation, emblematic of the Populist Movement, but motivated by sheer economic necessity. The New Deal, according to Hofstadter, "added a social-democratic tinge that had never before been present in American reform movements."

Because of the New Deal, Hofstadter argued, liberals would in the future be less concerned with “entrepreneurial,” reform and increasingly more committed to social legislation (social security, unemployment insurance, wages and hours, and housing).

Hofstadter maintained that the New Deal “represented the triumph of economic emergency and human needs over inherited notions and inhibitions."

Joseph A. McCartin, a historian of the U.S. labor movement and 20th century U.S. social and political history at Georgetown University, strongly believes the Age of Reform is “indeed a classic work of U.S. political history.  Hofstadter brilliantly synthesized historical scholarship and he analyzed American political developments during a crucial period in such a compelling way that the book continues to attract readers more than a half-century after he wrote it.”

“I think it is safe to say’’ McCartin went on to tell me, “that most historians of populism in the years since Hofstadter have thought that he had overplayed the extent to which anti-Semitism infected the populist movement and its followers.”

But McCartin was just as quick to point out that “just as his keen awareness of the post-WWII Red Scare and McCarthyism caused Hofstadter to see some illiberal forerunners among the populists, events in our time have served as a warning to present day historians that there has perhaps been a greater persistence of illiberal, tribal, and anti-Semitic tendencies in our culture than we might have hoped or assumed.”

In addition to winning a Pulitzer Prize for “The Age of Reform,” Hofstadter was the recipient of yet another Pulitzer in 1964 for “ Anti-intellectualism in American Life,’’ in which he traced the social movements that altered the role of intellect in American society. He published 13 books, a number of them bestsellers.

The celebrated American historian and public intellectual died in 1970 [Obituary] from leukemia. He was 54.

 

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

September 8, 2019

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who Belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Journalists?

While scanning my Twitter feed, a picture of Mount Rushmore, sculpture in the Black Hills in Keystone, South Dakota popped up.

Mount Rushmore, of course, features 60-foot sculptures of the heads of four United States presidents: George Washington (1732–1799), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), and Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865).

This got me to thinking, what if there was a Mount Rushmore for journalists? Which individuals would best represent the very best of American journalism?

So, I checked in with some prominent journalists to ask who they would put on Mount Rushmore, high above the dense forests and pristine streams of South Dakota.

Before getting to their personal preferences, I listed the four individuals who I thought best represented the "growth, development and preservation'' of American journalism, along with brief biographical sketches.

• Adolph S Ochs

When newspaper publisher and Cincinnati, Ohio native, Adolph Simon Ochs, age 36, bought the New York Times in 1896, he took over a publication whose circulation had plunged to 9,000 readers; with outstanding obligations of $300,000, while losing $1,000 a day.  In addition, it had a number of competitors to contend with.

Unlike other New York City dailies that were blatantly partisan, Ochs insisted his paper concentrate on objective reporting, and steer away from the sensational reporting involving murders, macabre crimes, and the “if it bleeds it leads,” mentality practiced by its chief competitors. He also reduced the price of the newspaper. As a way of consolidating its editorial independence, the Times refused advertising dollars and contracts from governments.

The New York Times under Ochs’ stewardship became the first national "newspaper of record." From 1896 to 1935 daily circulation increased dramatically, so much so that by the 1920s, the newspaper had nearly 800,000 readers.

Ochs was additionally instrumental in keeping his paper up to date with all the latest technology, giving the paper a fresh new look.

Descendants of Ochs still reside over the Times to this day and he will be glad to know his newspaper is still a powerful and influential news source in the 21^st century with a daily circulation of well over one million subscribers. The Times, moreover, have won 94 Pulitzer Prizes, a record seven in 2002 alone.

• Dorothy Thompson

International correspondent and political commentator, Dorothy Thompson, was known to many as the “First Lady of American Journalism”.

Before moving to New York City and launching her journalism career in 1917, she was a fierce Suffragist soon after graduating from Syracuse College in 1914.

During World War I, she became a foreign correspondent, first reporting from Vienna, then was named bureau chief in Berlin during the 1920s for the New York Evening Post.

She was one of the first American correspondents to warn of the terror Adolf Hitler would unleash on Europe. She wrote that the "National Socialist Revolution in Germany would prove to be the most world disturbing event of the century and perhaps of many centuries."

Thompson was back on American soil in 1936; and soon unveiled her widely read "On the Record" syndicated column which ran in the New York Herald Tribune and more than 150 other newspapers from 1936-1958.

Time Magazine ran a cover story on her on June 12, 1939, and described her and Eleanor Roosevelt as being “two of the most influential women in the country.”

• David Broder

David Broder, the "Dean of the Press Corps'' as he was dubbed, covered 11 U.S. Presidents in his famed reporting career, beginning with the Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“The high priest of political journalism “(another of his affectionate nicknames), first landed at the Washington Post in 1966. Previously, he reported for The New York Times, Washington Star and Congressional Quarterly.  He was one of the most prominent political scribes in the nation's capital, who cultivated, according to those who knew him best, some of the most authoritative and wide-ranging sources, from little known precinct officials to senior members of the U.S. Congress. Broder traveled more than 100,000 miles a year on his political beat.

Dan Balz, Chief correspondent covering national politics, the presidency and Congress for the Washington Post, once wrote that Broder "knew the details of everything but never lost sight of the big picture. In an era in which political reporting has become more and more focused on minutiae,'' Balz explained, "he kept his focus where it belonged — on the events and forces that move ordinary Americans and shape history.”

Mr. Broder was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in May 1973 for distinguished commentary, for explaining the importance of the Watergate scandal in a "clear, compelling way."

In a 1990 survey by Washingtonian Magazine, opinion-page editors of the largest 200 newspapers rated Broder as "Best Reporter," "Hardest Working" and "Least Ideological" among 123 columnists.

• Jimmy Breslin

Jimmy Breslin, who began his newspaper career as a sportswriter for the New York Herald Tribune, soon segued into a brash street-wise city reporter and columnist, who didn't write about the rich and famous--but rather--gave voice to the down and out raging through the city, the infamous, marginalized, the unscrupulous, and the deadbeats of society.

Writer Pete Hamill once said of Breslin, "I think he believes that it is his responsibility to let the voiceless have a voice. He's definitely not interested in interviewing [then U.S. Secretary of State] George Shultz."

In 1970, Breslin was viciously attacked by American mobster Paul Vario, who was later portrayed by actor Paul Sorvino in the Martin Scorsese film Goodfellas. 

After the Herald Tribune folded, Breslin wrote for the New York Post from 1968-69; then the New York Daily News, from 1978-88, before landing at Newsday in 1988, where he stayed until writing his final column (as a staff member) on November 2, 2004.

The Queens native won a Pulitzer in 1986, when he was with the New York Daily News for a series of columns which "consistently championed ordinary citizens." In an interview, he said he wasn't surprised he won a Pulitzer, but was surprised " he hadn't won at least five Pulitzer's by now."

Some of Breslin's most noteworthy columns, include: interviewing the $3.01 gravedigger, Clifton Pollard, at John F. Kennedy's funeral; and in 1977, covering David Berkowitiz, the infamous "Son of Sam" who was terrorizing the New York City streets. Berkowitz began writing personal letters to Breslin.

Breslin, along with writers Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, and others, have often been credited with being the early pioneers who ushered in "New Journalism," that is, a new breed of gifted writers who reported on the social and cultural earthquakes of the 1960s and '70s in newspaper and magazine journalism that read like compelling fiction.

Outside of the newsroom, Breslin wrote a number of books, including: "Can't Anybody Here Play this Game." (about the hapless 1962 New York Mets), "World Without End, Amen: A Novel" "Table Money," the biography "Damon Runyon: A Life," and "I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me," a memoir about his 1994 brain surgery.

Responses from Journalists on Who Should Be Included on the Mount Rushmore of Journalists?

• ) 1.) Horace Greeley 2.) Walter Lippmann 3.) James Reston 4.) Murray Kempton,

—Sam Tanenhaus, American historian, biographer, journalist, and former New York Times Book Editor. He currently is a writer for Prospect, a monthly British general interest magazine.

 

• ) 1.) Ralph McGill would be up there. 2.) H. L. Mencken 3.) Mike Royko.... Still thinking...."

—Bob Ryan, Sports columnist emeritus for the Boston Globe.

 

• ) 1.) Murray Kempton 2.) Nina Bernstein. 3.) Tom Robbins.

 —Jim Dwyer, reporter and columnist for The New York Times

 

• 1.) Don Graham) 2.) James Reston 3.) Katharine Graham 4.) Ben Bradlee  5.) Neil Sheehan 6.) Bob Woodward

—David Ignatius, associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post. 

 

• "I might add Otis Chandler "

—Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times

 

• ) 1.) William Allen White 2.) Edward R. Murrow 3.) Lincoln Steffens 4.) Dorothy Thompson

—George Vecsey, New York Times sports columnist

 

• ) 1.) Ben Bradlee  2.) Abe Rosenthal 3.) Murray Kempton 4.) Mary McGrory

—Warren Hoge, former New York Times reporter and currently vice president for external relations at the International Peace Institute, a New York-based think tank.

 

• ) 1.) Meyer Berger 2.) Edward R Murrow 3.) David Halberstam 4.) Thomas Nast

—Doug Clifton, former executive editor of The Miami Herald and Cleveland Plain Dealer

 

• "I’d be happy with Katharine Graham up there solo"

—Anne Kornblut, a Pulitzer Prize–winning recipient at the Washington Post, currently serving as director of strategic communications for Facebook.

 

• ) 1.) Murray Kempton 2.) A.J. Liebling 3.) I. F. Stone 4.) Edward R. Murrow 5.) Ida B. Wells, 6.) James Gordon Bennett 7.) Don Hewitt 8.) Adolph Ochs

—Sam Roberts, Urban Affairs Correspondent for The New York Times

 

• ) 1.) Ida Tarbell  2.) Carol Loomis 3.) Bob Woodward

—Clifton Leaf, Editor for Fortune Magazine

 

• 1.) Max Frankel ) Ben Bradlee 3.) Kay Graham

—Norman Ornstein, political scientist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

 

• ) 1.) Bob Woodward (and Carl Bernstein) 2.) Mike Royko  3.) Jimmy Breslin 4.) Katharine Graham /Adolph Ochs “in owner wing.”

—Dave Hyde, award-winning sports columnist for the South Florida Sun Sentinel newspaper, the main daily newspaper of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

 

             —Bill Lucey

            [email protected]

            October 4, 2018

For One Brief Shining Moment: The Melding of the Imperial Historian with the Camelot President

President Kennedy and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. in the Oval Office of the White House, July 26, 1962.

Source: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

***

Historian Richard Aldous presents a remarkably well-balanced and informative, biography of one of the preeminent historians of the modern age, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

At the young age of 28, the Ohio born historian won a Pulitzer Prize in history for the “Age of Jackson,” still considered a classic today, in capturing not so much the biographical nuances of the seventh President of the United States, Andrew Jackson, but the Jacksonian democracy that permeated the era with its progression of classical liberalism.

Despite his multi-faceted intellectual endeavors, Schlesinger is best known for being President Kennedy’s court historian.

It was a perfect marriage.

Both appeared to be cut from the same cloth, both with overbearing fathers, both Harvard educated, both with best selling books at a young age, and both immersed in rocky marriages.

Schlesinger, of course, would go on to write “A Thousand Days’’ his personal recollections of the short-lived White House years of John F. Kennedy. The book won a Pulitzer Prize for biography or autobiography.

Throughout Professor Aldous’s well researched, superbly written biography, you get the sense that over the years, Schlesinger regretted becoming too connected to the Kennedy’s. It was John F. Kennedy, after all, who pulled him away from his professorship at Harvard, a position he loved and absolutely hated giving up. And it was Ethel Kennedy, who prodded him to write a biography on Bobby Kennedy, which he did in “Robert Kennedy and His Times.”

Schlesinger did go on to produce some widely read political narratives, including the “Imperial Presidency,” and “Cycles of American History,” among others.

Still, you wonder what revolutionary works this prestigious American historian, social critic, and public intellectual would have produced had he not been so tightly connected to the Kennedy’s and cultivating the Kennedy mystique.

--Bill Lucey
January 22, 2018 

[email protected]

Online Archive of Pulitzer Prize Citations for 2017

Jim Morin/Miami Herald Cartoon

 

Despite circulation at U.S. newspapers dwindling at an accelerated clip, and editorial staffs continuing to absorb painful staff cuts, it is encouraging to know there remains spectacular journalism (and talented, hard-working journalists) being performed at both large and small U.S. daily newsrooms.

The Pulitzer Board Administrator, Mike Pride, announced the winners of the 2017 Pulitzer Prizes in the World Room at Columbia University in New York, N.Y. on Monday at approximately 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

The New York Times, widely regarded as the “national newspaper of record,” earned three Pulitzers, bringing their grand total of Pulitzer’s to 122, more than any other news competitor.

The Times won in International Reporting. The Times international staff (Andrew Higgins, Andrew Kramer, Neil MacFarquhar, Eric Lipton, Jo Becker, David Sanger, Eric Schmitt, Scott Shane, Steven Erlanger, Mike McIntire and Barry Meier) were recognized for their extensive reporting on Vladimir Putin and his efforts to augment Russia’s presence on the world stage through assassinations, online harassment and the planting of incriminating evidence on opponents.

The international team were additionally recognized for the reporting on how Russian cyberpower invaded the U.S.

C. J. Chivers of The New York Times, won a Pulitzer for Distinguished Feature Writing, in chronicling a Marine's painful postwar descent into violence and his struggles to adjust to life after war.

The New York Times third Pulitzer was for Breaking News Photography. Freelance photographer Daniel Berehulak earned his second Pulitzer, for "powerful storytelling through images published in The New York Times, showing the callous disregard for human life" of President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal campaign in the Philippines. 

Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold (pictured above ) won for National Reporting for his remarkable work, in exposing Donald Trump’s philanthropy, casting serious doubt on Mr. Trump's repeated claims during the bruising presidential campaign, just how generous he really was toward charities.

The Pulitzer for Public Service went to the New York Daily News and ProPublica, largely through the efforts of Daily News reporter Sarah Ryley (pictured above), who chronicled widespread abuse of eviction rules by the police to oust hundreds of people (through the use of a nuisance abatement law), most of them poor minorities. 

The Miami Herald won two Pulitzers on Monday, their 21st and 22nd awarded to the Herald since 1951, and its first Pulitzer medal for public service. The Herald has come away with more Pulitzers than any other newspaper in the Southeast.

The Herald (comprised of an international consortium of McClatchy and Miami Herald investigative journalists) won for Explanatory Reporting in exposing the hidden infrastructure and global scale of an offshore tax haven.

Jim Morin (shown above) of the Miami Herald also won for Editorial Cartooning for what the Pulitzer Board described as "cartoons that delivered sharp perspectives through flawless artistry, biting prose and crisp wit."

For Breaking News, the staff of East Bay Times (Oakland, CA) were recognized for their pioneering reporting of a fire that broke out in a warehouse (Ghost Ship) in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland, California, killing 36, the deadliest in the history of Oakland. 

Journalism's top prize for Investigative Reporting went to Eric Eyre (on left) of the Charleston Gazette-Mail for his shocking reporting of the opioid crisis in small-town West Virginia. Eyre's investigation found that, "over six years, drug wholesalers dumped 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills onto the state while 1,728 West Virginians fatally overdosed on those two painkillers." 

For Local Reporting, the Pulitzer went to the Salt Lake Tribune staff (shown above) for a series of disturbing reports, revealing "the perverse, punitive and cruel treatment given to sexual assault victims at Brigham Young University, one of Utah’s most powerful institutions."

The Pulitzer was the second for Utah's largest daily newspaper.

Feature Photography went to E. Jason Wambsgans  (shown above) of the Chicago Tribune for his “tender portraits” of a child shooting victim, and the struggles of his mother, hoping to put his life back together. 

Other winners include:

Editorial Writing: Art Cullen for editorials "fueled by tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing that successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa." 

Criticism: Hilton Als of the New Yorker for his original stage dramas within a vastly changing global context, especially when writing about gender, sexuality and race.

Distinguished Commentary: Peggy Noonan for connecting readers to the shared virtues of Americans during one of the nation’s most divisive and anti-establishment political campaigns in U.S. history. 

There are 21 Pulitzer categories. In 20 of those categories the winners receive a $10,000 cash award and a certificate. Only the winner in the Public Service category of the Journalism competition is awarded a gold medal.

A Pulitzer Prize is considered the highest national honor for outstanding achievement in print journalism, literature, and musical composition. The Prizes were established by Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian-American journalist and newspaper publisher, who left a gift of $500,000 to Columbia University upon his death in 1911. A portion of his endowment helped establish the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City.

Recipients are chosen by an independent Pulitzer Prize Board appointed by Columbia University. The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded on June 4, 1917.

-- Bill Lucey

[email protected]

April 11, 2017