Pulitzer Prize Luncheon Remarks 2005

Low Library, Columbia University – May 23, 2005

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

“A Republic of Letters”

Newsprint has an oddly consoling effect on me. When I was growing up in eastern West Virginia in the fifties, my father worked two jobs to provide for his family, and, eventually, to put his two boys through college. Daddy would go to work at the paper mill at 6:30 in the morning, and work until the Mill Whistle blew at 3:30 p.m., which signaled both the end of his shift and the close of our school day. We would have our evening meal at 4:00 p.m., and then my Dad would head off to his second job, as a janitor at the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company. My brother and I would do our homework until Daddy came home, and then we’d all watch TV, while Daddy, fully reclined in his well-worn Lazy Boy, would read the day’s newspaper, cover-to-cover, column by column. (And, then, like a rich dessert following a sumptuous meal, he would do the Crossword Puzzle, savoring the very best for last.)

Newspapers – in our case, the daily Cumberland, Maryland, Evening Times and the weekly Piedmont, West Virginia, Herald – connote solidity and stability for me, yielding a wealth of associations far greater than the quality that those rural newspapers might otherwise justify. I have been addicted to newsprint ever since, which is one of the many reasons that I love London, where I have all of its several newspapers delivered to my hotel room each morning, along with my breakfast tea.

I always presumed that everybody else in Piedmont was enjoying the same evening ritual, noting that my Dad’s buddies from the paper mill subscribed to the Baltimore Sun, impressively thicker than the Times or the Herald, until I learned that they weren’t reading the Sun at all, except to gain access to the pari-mutuel handle – the total amount of money bet at the horse races or the total number of shares sold on the New York Stock Exchange the day before, the middle three digits of which were used to provide the Daily Lottery Number! Some contact with newsprint, I decided upon considerable reflection, was better than none.

The hearth-like warmth kindled by my image of my Daddy’s evening rituals no doubt led me into journalism. I wrote my first column at the age of 12, an account of the Little League games, published each week between the middle of June and the middle of August in the Piedmont Herald. When I outgrew the Little League, I wrote a “Trivia” column for the Herald during my senior year of high school, while serving as the co-editor of our high school newspaper, The Scribbler.

I ended up at Yale as an undergraduate, where the Yale Daily News was served with breakfast. Perhaps because we were sort of “first generation” – the first relatively large group of African Americans admitted to Yale in the late sixties, thanks to affirmative action – our fellow black students and I saw ourselves as pioneers of sorts, trail-blazing our way into Yale’s most exclusive organizations and, yes, even its secret societies. Of these, we believed that none was more important than The Yale Daily News, through which we could register our presence at Yale, literally on a daily basis. After all, the story went, John F. Kennedy himself had read The Harvard Crimson each morning with his coffee, along with a whole slew of other newspapers. And while we were not foolish enough to think that Richard Nixon would care to digest the rantings and ravings of “effete, impudent snobs,” perhaps one of his speech writers just might stumble across one of our sentences or two. And so, each year, one of my classmates would write a regular opinion column, predictably entitled “Black and Blue,” a pun on one of Mother Yale’s nicknames, and a reflection of our sometimes desperate attempts to remind our mentors and our peers that Yale had, indeed, changed, but not nearly enough.

I wrote one of these columns, a guest column suggested by one of the editors so that I could share my experiences living in Africa during our equivalent of junior year abroad. I wrote about living in a village in central Tanzania, working in an Anglican Mission Hospital, doing battle with Australian missionary medics who saw me, with my two-foot high Afro, as a fugitive Black Panther, and whom I thought were condescending toward their African patients at best, and born-again racists at their worst. If I hadn’t been able to convert them from their unconscious ways at our mission hospital back on the Continent, I could continue the argument – one side, at least – back home at Yale. If I hadn’t had my way, at least I could have my say.

One day, at the beginning of a large lecture class taught by the great American historian, John Morton Blum, I heard him ask, to my astonishment, if Mr. Gates was in the room? Sheepishly, I raised my hand, presuming the worst about a late assignment or an inadequate mid-term research paper.

“Nice column today,” he called out, in front of two hundred of my fellow Yalies, all desperate to please our mentor. When Linda Darling, whose perfectly coiffed, cotton candy like Afro I had been fixated upon all semester, turned toward me and smiled, I knew that there were great rewards, indeed, hidden in this world of journalism! I hurried home to write my next column, but not before asking Linda to go out with me on a date. ”You could become a scholar,” Mr. Blum, now my advisor, told me mid-way through my senior year, “or you could be a journalist.”

But isn’t one superior to the other, I asked, as if he were implying that my scholarly work might not be worthy of his respect. “Journalism at its best,” he said, “can be even more important than scholarship,” he continued. “Like the writing of Anthony Lewis at the Times, or E. J. Kahn, at The New Yorker.”

Journalism and scholarship have been my twin loves since that time, inextricably intertwined from the beginning of my career. The day after I received a fellowship to study English Literature at Cambridge, I wrote to Anthony Lewis in London and asked for an internship. When he responded that he didn’t use interns, I turned to Murray Gart, Chief of Correspondents at Time Magazine, and sent him my columns, citing the precedent of Strobe Talbott, a Rhodes Scholar who had worked at Time’s London bureau. Somehow, I got the job. Half of each year, I studied at Cambridge, and the other half of the year I worked in London for Time, enjoying both worlds equally, wondering how in the world I continue to do both for the rest of my career.

*****

The Pulitzer Prize is remarkable among prizes for several reasons, not least among them its equal recognition of excellence in the arts and letters, on one hand, and excellence in journalism, on the other. This linkage of journalism with the arts and letters was Joseph Pulitzer’s attempt to close the era of “yellow journalism,” at which he and his rival William Randolph Hearst, had excelled in the boisterous war of words between 1896 and 1898 that led to the Spanish-American War. Journalism, in other words, was in a crisis, a crisis to which Pulitzer knew that he had contributed. And he sought to make amends by creating a school of journalism at an Ivy League University, along with a prize that would be so prestigious and so lucrative that it would serve as an annual public reminder that journalism was an art among the arts, and not a craft devoted to the irresponsible ends of crass manipulation and petty commerce.

Joseph Pulitzer, as much as any person in the profession, was keenly aware of the power of the press to shape public opinion, for good or for ill, and having seen it at its worst, he longed to reshape it and its public image, forcing it to aspire to achieve the best of its enormous potential. “Elevate” is the word that leaps out at us from his Will: “I am deeply interested in the progress and elevation of journalism,” he wrote, “regarding it as a noble profession, and of unequal importance for its influence upon the minds and morals of the people.”

Pulitzer had seen, at close hand, the naked, raw power of words to manipulate public opinion – indeed, he was what anthropologists call a participant-observer – and, to his credit, he both recoiled at its excesses, and sought to reform an entire profession by linking it inextricably to the great Western humanistic tradition through this single gesture of a Prize. It would be a prize, as he put it, that would encourage journalists “to acquire the highest moral and intellectual training.” And if Columbia tampered in any significant way with his design, he threatened, he would move both the School and the Prize…to arch rival Harvard! (Watch out, Lee! Now you know why I am here!)

Pulitzer sought nothing less than to bury the image of the yellow journalist by making the profession a calling as noble as that of the artist, the creative writer, the scholar, “attracting to this profession young men of character and ability,” as he put it. Pulitzer knew how painful words could be, and how sordid journalism could be, having been stereotyped variously himself as being “too Jewish” (he was called “Joey the Jew” on the streets of St. Louis) and of not being Jewish enough (his rival, Charles Anderson Dana, publisher of The Sun, called him “the Jew who had denied his race and religion” in an attempt to alienate Jewish readers from subscribing to his newspaper, The World.) All of that had to, and could, change, he wrote in a remarkable essay in The North American Review in 1904:

“Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and the courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mold the future of the Republic,” he concluded prophetically, “will be in the hands of journalists of future generations.”

We frequently read today that journalism is in a crisis. It must be true because the journalists tell us so. The New York Times reported recently that “public confidence in the media continues to wane.” Forty-five percent of all Americans, according to the Pew Research Center, “believe little or nothing of what they read in their daily newspapers,” the Times continued. Twenty-one percent of the Times’ readers claim to believe “all or most” of what they read in its pages, while fourteen percent believe “almost nothing.” And the Times, to its credit, has responded aggressively to this crisis of confidence by embarking upon an ambitious “campaign,” as Executive Editor Bill Keller put it, “to secure our accuracy, fairness and accountability.”

But is the crisis to do with the actual practice of journalism, or how it’s perceived? When we read Balzac’s great novel, Lost Illusions, we get a sense of how utterly corrupt journalism used to be. Lucien Chardon, the ambitious writer, is urged by a brotherhood of noble, if impoverished, talents to resist the siren call. “You would be so carried away by the sense of power, of being able to exercise the right of life and death over works of intellect, that in two months you would be a journalist,” his friend D’Arthez tells him. “And to be a journalist is to be a dictator in the republic of letters….” Another friend tells him: “Journalism is a hell, a sink of iniquity, lies, and betrayals that no one can pass through, or emerge from uncorrupted, unless they are protected, like Dante, by Virgil’s sacred laurel.”

When we consider those sentiments, quite historically accurate, I might add, and when we recall the sort of journalism that virtually generated the Spanish-American War, we begin to realize that we are actually in something of a journalistic golden age.

Yet, you’d barely know it from way in which the so-called “mainstream media” has become a whipping boy for pundits who base their case on information they have, naturally, gathered from the mainstream media. No journalist these days feels like a dictator in a Republic of Letters, although it is all too possible to feel like a political prisoner of one. I won’t even try to instance the myriad examples of this tendency. On the one hand, the news media has been accused of credulously acquiescing to official misinformation ­- and I can recall a time when “yellow cake” made you think of Duncan Hines. On the other, the current White House spokesmen would like to pretend that one flawed sentence in a single Newsweek item about Guantanamo is what has damaged America’s image in the world: never mind the plenitude of undisputed reports about abuses there. Journalism, as the old line has it, is the first draft of history; there are and will be typos, misspellings, sins of omission and commission.

Yet the fact is that, from any real historical perspective, this first draft is probably arriving at our doorsteps in as good a shape as it has ever been in. Meanwhile, as television network news becomes more and more desperately ratings -driven and under-funded, the press becomes all the more important in achieving the Republic of Letters about which Joseph Pulitzer dreamed and that the Pulitzer Prize embodies. Literary Studies, my own field of scholarship, weathered its crisis of objectivity – surviving “deconstruction,” with its bizarre and sometimes irresponsible demands that we suspend making judgments at all because our values were bound by place and time – when it came to recognize that the fact that the truth was elusive did not make the pursuit of truth a less worthy aspiration. And the media will have to do this as well. The stories and narratives that journalists coin from the raw material of incidents and events are the stories and narratives that produce a common sense of citizenship, and that’s true on both the national and the regional level, whether you’re talking about the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post or – well, the Piedmont Herald.

The Pulitzer Prize is the sole prize given in America that has become a metaphor. A “Pulitzer Prize winning author” is a phrase that's something like a Homeric epithet, and to become one is to have ascended to an American pleiad, an aristocracy of excellence. Each of you gathered here today emerged for especial commendation among hundreds of competitors in your respective categories. You are, in the opinion of a scrupulously tough and judicious board, which I have the pleasure of representing this afternoon, the best in show. This might not be “Virgil’s sacred laurel,” but it is the Prize that symbolizes the highest reaches of that Republic of Letters. On behalf of the Pulitzer Board, we welcome you into the ranks of some of our country’s greatest writers, reporters, and thinkers, and we hail you for a job superbly well done.