2010 Pulitzer Prize luncheon remarks - David M. Kennedy

Low Library, Columbia University – May 24, 2010

David M. Kennedy

Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus, Stanford University
Co-chair, The Pulitzer Prize Board

Good afternoon. I’m David Kennedy. My day job is teaching history at Stanford University. I’m here today as the co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, along with my colleague, Amanda Bennett, whom you will meet shortly. We both welcome you to this luncheon and this award ceremony.

We are here today to celebrate excellence – excellence in letters, and music, and several domains of the journalistic enterprise.

In my line of work we believe that everything has a history. Excellence – or, more precisely, reflections on the nature of excellence – has a very rich history. So do the Pulitzer Prizes.

The Prizes owe their origin, of course, to Joseph Pulitzer, the legendary publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World. Pulitzer’s was an all-American biography if ever there was one -- an “Only in America” story worthy of the late Harry Golden. He was born in Hungary to a Jewish father and Roman Catholic mother, and later married an American Episcopalian. He arrived in the United States in 1864 at the age of 17, speaking virtually no English. He served in the Lincoln Cavalry in the Civil War, and went on to become a titanic Gilded-Age figure who left a deep and durable imprint on American journalism and American culture more generally.

The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in 1917, 13 years after Pulitzer’s death. They were then and remain today unique in embracing the arts as well as the press. There were originally four awards in letters -- for Biography, Fiction, History, and Drama – and three awards in journalism -- for Public Service, Reporting, and Editorial Writing. Over the decades three categories in letters and arts have been added: Poetry in 1922, Music in 1943, and General Non-Fiction in 1962. The journalism categories have proved considerably more fissile: there are now fourteen journalism Prizes, and journalists – most of them senior editors and publishers -- occupy the majority of the seventeen seats on the Pulitzer Board.

In each of the twenty-one Prize categories, the Board receives nominations from juries, typically comprising three to seven members, selected on the basis of their expertise and their reputations for good judgment and fidelity to the highest standards of quality. The jurors submit three nominations in each category. They are under strict instructions, enforced by the Pulitzer Administrator, the redoubtable and ever-vigilant Sig Gissler, not to rank-order their submissions. The practical effect of this procedure is that the members of the Board annually spend every discretionary moment from December to April immersed in 63 of the very best works in letters, the arts, and journalism that American society has to offer.

I’ll return in a moment to the effect that assignment has had on me over the past eight years of my service on the Board.

Like the Prizes, the question of excellence also has a history. In the American context, one of the first persons to reflect on the subject, as early as the 1830s, was Alexis de Tocqueville. In his monumental work, Democracy in America, Tocqueville made some trenchant observations about what he called the “Literary Characteristics of Democratic Times.” He was not sanguine about the prospects for excellence of any kind in a society in which, as he described it, a “general mediocrity” defined the character of culture, a society where “ranks are … intermingled…knowledge and power are both infinitely subdivided …[and] scattered on every side….” From this “motley multitude” he expected little if any distinguished work. American literature, he predicted, “can never present … an aspect of order, regularity, science, and art; its form, on the contrary, will ordinarily be slighted, sometimes despised. Style will frequently be fantastic, incorrect, over-burdened, and loose, almost always vehement and bold…. [T]here will be more wit than erudition… and literary performances will bear marks of an untutored and rude vigor of thought…. The object of authors will be to astonish rather than to please, and to stir passions more than to charm the taste.”

What’s more, Tocqueville believed that the pervasively commercial character of American society would “introduce a trading spirit into literature,” which would breed a class of authors whom the reading public would reward with riches but not with respect. Such a society would “ensure the sale of books that [many read but that] nobody much esteems.”

As for the press, Tocqueville admired the journalism he encountered in Andrew Jackson’s America, not least for its ubiquity and its sheer energy. “In America there is scarcely a hamlet that has not its newspaper,” he noted, and “the number of periodical … publications in the United States is almost incredibly large.” But, compared with his native France, still struggling to emerge from its monarchical and feudal past, he was puzzled that in democratic America, especially with respect to political reporting, “the press is not less destructive in its principles … than in France, and it displays the same violence without the same reasons for indignation.”

Joseph Pulitzer may or may not have read Tocqueville, but with the Prizes established in his name, he surely aimed to nurture and recognize the very best literary, artistic, and journalistic achievements. He arguably aimed to offset what Tocqueville and others have seen as the natural tendencies of American culture toward vulgarity and sensationalism. He would have been proud to see the admirable consequences of his effort in the work we recognize today.

We live in a society notoriously suspicious of elites and elitism, and often healthily so – but I see no reason to be apologetic on this occasion about congratulating you for having done your very best, and for having now been anointed into the Pulitzer elite.

Which brings me back once again to excellence, and its history.

It’s a long history, stretching back to the ancients. They thought a lot about excellence. For Aristotle, excellence constituted the very essence of a life well-lived. “Happiness,” he said “is activity in accordance with excellence,” a sentiment from which President John F. Kennedy drew when he described the satisfactions of the presidency as “the full use of your powers along lines of excellence.”

Another Greek, Hesiod, even more ancient than Aristotle, a poet who is also recognized as a father of economics, struck a more down-to-earth note when he wrote that “in front of excellence the immortal gods have put sweat, and long and steep is the way to it…” John Locke later echoed that thought when he said that “all excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.”

So excellence is rare, difficult to achieve, but also a source of much happiness. On that calculus, today you should all feel distinguished, exhausted -- and downright giddy. You have a right to be. In a society that is sometimes heedless about quality, you have perspired your way to achieving something of lasting importance, and the satisfaction you feel on this occasion is richly deserved.

I promised to say something about the effect on me of engaging with your work – and here I speak especially to the journalists. For each of the last eight years I have emerged from my marathon reading of the journalism entries with two distinct feelings: First, that the Fourth Estate, for all its current tribulations, is in robust good health, capable still of doing work of the finest caliber. All you ink-stained wretches and key-board jockeys continue to be the guardians of the public’s right to know, and conscientious stewards of the fate of this Republic. Second, after reading all your stories about corruption, bribery, malfeasance, deception, neglect, dishonesty, hypocrisy, incompetence, turpitude, profligacy, chicanery, and venality, it’s a wonder to me how this Republic survives at all.

A final thought. Homer, in the Odyssey says that “the fame of excellence will never perish.” That’s the Greek way of saying that we now know the first line of your obituary.

Congratulations once more, and now let me hand it over to my colleague, Amanda Bennett.