Albert Pulitzer: Notes on the Lesser-Known Pulitzer Brother

“Joseph and Albert Pulitzer’s success in journalism is one of the marvels of the day,” wrote Isaac Markens in an 1888 survey of prominent Jewish-Americans. “The Reconstruction of the New York World by the former and the founding of the New York Journal by the latter has, to a certain extent, revolutionized the methods formerly employed in American journalism.”

“The Messrs. Pulitzer, however,” he added, “are not to be classed among the chosen people, their father being a Hebrew and their mother a Christian lady of Vienna… this reference to the distinguished journalists has been deemed proper in order to correct a popular misapprehension.”

The passage is interesting for two reasons, the first being its estimation of Albert Pulitzer on a par with his brother Joseph as one of the visionaries who changed American journalism forever.  

Joseph Pulitzer is justifiably the most famous journalist in American history. His brother Albert is almost completely forgotten today. But perhaps he deserves more attention. Albert’s paper, the New York Morning Journal, its mass appeal to working-class people, his financial success, and the innovations he employed anticipated his brother’s more famous New York World. At the time, Albert was considered Joseph’s equal as a journalist and a businessman, even by Joseph’s staff. Norman Thwaites, an Englishman who served as one of Joseph’s , secretaries and chief lieutenants, wrote, “I venture to say that the two brothers, Joseph and Albert, had more influence upon modern journalism than any other journalists of any period.”

But Albert lacked Joseph’s crusading zeal, moral fervor, and strength of character. Both men were plagued by an army of demons, including ill health and mental instability. Joseph, with his warrior’s spirit, fought them tooth and nail, and if he could not conquer them completely, he would at least learn to hold them at bay. Albert would succumb. He would be eclipsed in every way by his brilliant brother, and fade into almost total obscurity.

Markens’s description of the brothers Pulitzer is also interesting for its inaccuracy.

During the brothers’ lifetime and for many years afterward, Markens’s version of their background —their father, Philip, was Jewish (some accounts said that he was of mixed Hungarian and Jewish ancestry) and their mother, Elize (or Louise) Berger, was an Austrian German and a Roman Catholic—was unquestioned. According to this version, Catholicism was the dominant element of their upbringing: “It would appear that Louise’s Catholicism was stronger than Philip’s Jewishness, for at one time, Albert seemed destined to enter the priesthood.”

But research by Hungarian historian Andras Csillag shows this version to be false. Documentary evidence from the archives of the Hungarian Jewish community shows that both parents were Jewish; that the male Pulitzer children were, in accordance with Jewish law and tradition, circumcised eight days following their births; that they received their early education at the Jewish elementary school in Mako; and that after the family moved to Budapest, they lived in the intensely Jewish atmosphere of the city’s Jewish quarter.

Hungary, however, was not the world of the shtetl so familiar to us from Sholem Aleichem, Fiddler on the Roof, and the photographs of Roman Vishniac and paintings of Marc Chagall. The Hungarian Jewish context was unique in Eastern Europe.

The Pulitzers, like many other Hungarian Jews from their region and class, practiced a form of Judaism called Neologism, a Hungarian analog to the Reform Judaism growing in popularity in Germany at the same time. They identified strongly with the majority Magyar culture of Hungary and like many of their coreligionists thought of themselves as “Magyars of the Mosaic faith.” They were eager to join the mainstream and participate not only in Hungary’s economic life—where they had been traditionally relegated—but in its social, cultural, political, and intellectual life as well.

They were also ardent Hungarian patriots. Two of the Pulitzer brothers’ paternal uncles, Simon and Aron, had taken up arms and fought to Hungary’s independence from the Habsburg Empire in the Revolution of 1848.  

Albert Pulitzer, like Joseph, was born in Mako, a small market town in eastern Hungary not far from the Romanian border on July 10, 1851, four years Joseph’s junior. Like Joseph, Albert also received a superb education in Budapest, and also had a flair both for the dramatic and the literary, “writing tragedies at thirteen.”  They grew up in affluence—the Pulitzers were a well-established and successful merchant family. But Philip’s death in 1858 when Joseph was 11 and Albert seven plunged the family into poverty. Both left home as adolescents.

Joseph, perhaps inspired by the ideals of the Revolution of 1848 and his uncles’ example, came to the United States in 1864 to fight for the Union during the Civil War. Afterwards, he went to heavily German St. Louis, home to a thriving Mitteleuropean cultural and intellectual scene, including several German-language newspapers.

He may still have considered himself nominally Jewish upon arriving—he had some early involvement with the Jewish community in St. Louis—but he appears to have created a half-German identity for himself which, as per the aspirations of Hungarian Jewry, allowed him to enter the overwhelmingly German mainstream of 1860’s St. Louis. He leapt headlong into the German community’s cultural life, joining German immigrant self-help organizations, German philosophical and literary societies, sang in a German men’s choir, and got his start in journalism as a reporter on one of St. Louis’s German newspapers, the Westliche Post.

Albert did not have had the same ambivalence about his Jewishness as Joseph. He freely admitted to having left Hungary because “an illiberal sentiment made either social or political progress impossible to a Jew,” and he referred to himself as “your dear Baruch,” using his Hebrew name, in letters to his mother. But he had no greater attachment to the religion than Joseph. The brothers, in the United States, while never denying their Jewishness entirely, would shed any observance of the religion or communal involvement.  

The Pulitzer brothers were an interesting study in contrasts. Unlike the tall, thin, gangling, prominently-nosed Joseph, Albert was a remarkably good-looking young man. He was as tall as his brother, but where Joseph was gaunt, Albert was well-built and muscular, with regular features, a sensuous mouth, and light brown hair. Albert was genial and easygoing, a born bon vivant, but Joseph was intense, driven, and possessed of a single-minded passion for self-improvement that wearied his employees, friends and family.

Albert followed Joseph to St. Louis in 1867 at the age of 16, and for a while boarded with him. Joseph, through his connections with St. Louis’s intellectuals and educators, secured work for his brother as a teacher of German at a girls’ school, but their comity in America was short lived.

Both brothers had a taste for luxury, but Albert had gluttonous tendencies, and according to some stories, they into a fight over Albert’s inordinate fondness for ice cream. Joseph, who disliked gluttony and greed and had a lifelong tendency to hector, subjected his brother to a sarcasm-laced, invective-laden lecture, suggesting at one point that Albert might as well kill himself.

“Excellent idea,” said Albert, who grabbed a revolver—likely Joseph’s Army revolver—and stuck the barrel in his mouth.

“Not here!” shouted Joseph—apparently less concerned about his brother’s life than about the trouble that a suicide in his room would cause him.

Albert left St. Louis soon after for Leavenworth, KS, teaching German there as well, but soon moved to Chicago where he also found work in the German-American press as a reporter on the Illinois Staats-Zeitung, becoming its telegraph editor, musical and dramatic critic, and eventually city editor. Settled on a career as a journalist, he left Chicago for New York in 1872, where he worked first for Charles Anderson Dana’s New York Sun (Joseph had also worked for the Sun as a European and Washington correspondent) and then for James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald.

Albert was an indefatigable and resourceful reporter, “[Springing] into the vortex of city life with true Hungarian vim,” said one paper. “His insistent and pushing manner, and peculiar personality, made him a success as an interviewer, and he could get access to his victims where others failed.”

Even, as it turns out, the mayor of New York. “Mr. [Albert] Pulitzer was a star reporter,” remembered one colleague. “He gained his position, so the story goes, by interviewing Mayor Oakey Hall in his bath. It was understood that Mr. Pulitzer had been told the gentleman could not see him as he was in his tub and there was no telling when he would leave it. This did not disconcert the enterprising reporter who found his way to the bathroom and through the keyhole interviewed the man in his tub. This was considered a great stroke of enterprise in the old days, and, I suppose, would be considered so to-day.”  

Albert rose to become the Herald’s Washington correspondent, and then its foreign correspondent, covering the Russo-Turkish War of 1876, but he would not be content to work for other men’s newspapers for long. Like his brother, he had an entrepreneurial spirit, boundless self-confidence, and an uncanny sense for what would appeal to readers. He founded his own paper, capitalizing it with $25,000 (according to some reports, Joseph lent him the money) and on Nov. 16, 1882, the first issue of the New York Morning Journal appeared. Tellingly, however, it appeared without anything like the high-minded statement of mission that Joseph had published in the St. Louis Dispatch on the first day it appeared under his leadership.

“Unlike his Titan-souled brother,” wrote one of his reporters, “he knew no goading passion to mold the destinies of a nation or turn the rascals out.” The Journal had no ideology and no agenda, “no axe to grind, political or financial. It nourished no enemies or vengeances. Its one aim was to be the treasure of the humble.”

Albert lacked Joseph’s ambition to protect, inform, and educate the public. The Morning Journal existed for one reason: to make Albert rich by entertaining people.

The Journal was slight in size and subject matter—a four-page, 28-column sheet which on any given day might devote four to ten columns to advertising, leaving 18 to 22 for “news.” It was bright, cheery, racy, saucy, and cheap—it sold for a penny.

Like Joseph, Albert began by simplifying its style, making it accessible to people of limited literacy. The opening paragraph always had to be “a short, ejaculatory sentence.” Nineteenth century journalists, accustomed to greater verbosity, initially chafed against the limitations of Albert’s stylistic dictates, but eventually realized the value of a short, punchy lead, and learned “how to make those explosive beginnings bright without being trite.”

The Journal  was consciously designed to appeal to the working-class masses of New York, and it did. Almost from the outset, The Morning Journal was a financial success. By 1887, its circulation was almost 250,000, enjoying the “lively and outspoken affection of the factories, the department stores, workshops, firehouses, police stations, and tenements.” It was known popularly known as “The Chambermaid’s Delight.”

Albert had put his finger on something that Joseph would later adopt and magnify: readers craved the human interest story, accounts of people like themselves.

“[The secret of the Journal’s success] is very simple,” Albert told an English interviewer in 1884. “When two years ago I was looking around New York… there were already in existence powerful, wealthy, old, established newspapers expending great sums in the collection of news... But it seemed to me that there was one field entirely unoccupied, and that was the field relating to the immeasurably small, but after all the most interesting affairs which form the greatest part of the life of every one of us. I looked at the life of the ordinary men and women of New York… and then determined to make a journal which would, as nearly as possible, correspond to the actual life of the actual man.” 

The Journal’s front page spread on the death of “Fourteenth Street Kitty,” a prostitute who had died of tuberculosis and was buried by the Florence Crittenden Mission was one such human-interest masterpiece, complete descriptions of her fellow “daughters of joy”  laying lilies on her breast and weeping as Kitty’s humble coffin was lowered into the ground. It was grudgingly admired by journalists on other papers, who called it “superior sob stuff.”

In their pursuit of human interest stories, reporters sometimes included the products of their own imaginations in the Journal’s pages. “The names on the stories might be fictitious, the addresses might be vacant lots.” For the sake of verisimilitude, “an experienced reporter could always… arrange with some policeman, public official, or quasi-official person, at the price of a little welcome publicity to ‘stand for’ his creation.”

Albert looked on the practice with a wink. “It was a canon of office etiquette that the inelegant word ‘fake’ should never be heard there.”

It wasn’t just ordinary men and women whose stories the Journal told. Albert, as adept as Joseph at spotting trends and divining popular tastes, was one of the first journalists in America to recognize the appeal of that emerging American phenomenon, the celebrity. Perhaps encouraged by Joseph’s coverage of society news in St. Louis, the Journal covered celebrities obsessively—“If Vanderbilts and Astors were absent from its columns, Albert would want to know the reason why. One of the articles of his faith was that the affairs of such personages were of passionate interest to the great unwashed.”

The Journal not only reported on celebrities. It would turn its reporters into celebrities as well. Signed news articles were a rarity in American journalism. They were the norm, however, in France, and Albert, with his European background and Continental sensibilities, quickly realized the publicity potential of the byline. Reporters who distinguished themselves during the week would have their portraits published in the Sunday edition with a short paragraph describing their exploits—another small touch that humanized the reporters to their reading public.  The importation of the French practice of the signed article worked—the public eagerly combed the paper for the latest article by their favorite writers.

And he saw the possibility in a hitherto largely untapped, but vast, potential readership.

“The great unexplored mine which I hit upon was the woman,” he said. “The average woman, as a rule, does not take much interest in the average newspaper. She does not care about politics, nor is she… interested in the discussion of economical problems… but short, crisp paragraphs treating on social subjects, bright gossip about the events of the day, piquant, personal, and yet pleasant details about people in whom everyone is interested—these appeal to the woman’s heart, and the result is that if she ever sees the Morning Journal, she will have it ever after.”

Getting women to read the journal made good business sense, as well.

“From that springs a very important commercial fact… in America, our sisters and daughters do nearly all the shopping. Advertisers therefore prefer a newspaper which women read to any other, a paper that is the favorite in the home circle,” Albert noted.

His former boss, the snobbish and waspish Charles A. Dana, derided the Journal as “a newspaper edited by fools for fools,” but there were some in the New York newspaper world who recognized what Albert was doing and praised him for it.

“The old papers were too dry, and there was nothing attractive about them,” reported a laudatory article in the trade publication The Journalist. “The Journal steered clear of that rut; the aim was to make it a clean, cheery, and breezy family paper, and so thoroughly were the plans of its founder carried out that it soon became a welcome visitor to the home, and the daily companion of the workman and the working girl as well as those in more favored station… It was a novelty in the journalistic line, and every one read and admired its fresh and original style.”

The Journalist had warm words for the paper’s proprietor as well. “Albert Pulitzer, who gave this sun to the journalistic firmament, is a man with a history which youth could study for profit,” it gushed. “His career has presented a continuous display of energy, boldness, originality, and fondness for labor.”
The Journalist had an ulterior motive to praise Albert so fulsomely.  By this time, the break between the two brothers was complete, and The Journalist’s editor, Leander Richardson, detested Joseph and never missed a chance to excoriate him vitriolically, frequently stooping to anti-Semitic insults like “Jewseph Pulitzer” and “Judas Pulitzer.” Pointedly, The Journalist’s profile of Albert did not mention Joseph in spite of the that he had been in New York for four years at the time of its publication, and made no mention of Albert’s Jewishness at all.

Perhaps galled by his brother’s success in America’s largest city, Joseph had long wanted to own a New York newspaper as well. His chance came in 1883, when the financier and railroad baron Jay Gould made known his intention to sell the New York World, which he’d acquired as part of a package deal when he’d bought one of his railroads.

Before buying the World, Joseph consulted with Albert, but the meeting devolved into “A violent discussion… as to whether New York could stand two Pulitzers.” After buying the World, Joseph raided his brother’s staff and hired away almost all the notable talent, including its city editor, Caleb Van Hamm.

It was quite likely the last time the two brothers spoke. “I am told that Albert and his brother Joseph, of the World, do not speak as they pass by,” wrote one gossip columnist in 1885.

In spite of his brother’s enmity, Albert continued to prosper. By 1889, his annual income from the Journal was estimated to be between $30,000 to $40,000. He gave free reign to his love of luxury.

 “He enjoys his money by spending the greater part of it on himself,” one contemporary account reported. His office, sumptuously decorated, was “altogether the fanciest editorial sanctum in town.”

He vacationed frequently in Paris, which he “prefer[red] to New York for pleasure, but New York to Paris for business,” and spent money “like water, wining and dining notable people in London and elsewhere, with whom he sought to ingratiate himself; and I am told that he always went abroad with a secretary or two, not only taking the best stateroom for himself, but two on either side ‘to insure privacy,’ travelling with couriers and valets, and dressing most expensively and showily.”

He also spent lavishly to indulge the carnal appetites which had so offended his brother. “He has a chef… who accompanies him in all his travels.” Albert put on weight, unlike his brother, who remained rail-thin all his life.  “Those who saw him stroll down Broadway at a leisurely gait could hardly recognize the former thin-faced, eager-eyed reporter of the Herald.”

In his success, he now resembled the Prince of Wales, with his “brown beard, portly figure, reserved but gracious bearing, a gentle and sybaritic soul, something of a dandy,” who spoke in a “suave Viennese accent with gestures of his plump white hands.”

Having nursed literary ambitions since childhood, he wrote a novel, “The Romance of Prince Eugene: An Idyll in the Time of Napoleon.” He married a famous English-born society beauty, Fanny Barnard, and had one son, Walter. The marriage was not a very happy one, however, and he and Fanny soon separated.

But by this point, Albert was having other troubles. Joseph’s World was cutting into his circulation, and that, coupled with a severe depression, forced Albert to raise the price of the Journal from one to two cents, precipitating a sharp and immediate plummet in circulation.

In 1894, Albert sold the paper to the Cincinnati newspaperman John McLean (the selling price was not made public, but it was estimated to be $1,000,000) and retired from journalism. He traveled Europe for several years and eventually settled in Vienna, the capital of the Austrian Empire of his birth. He lived off his fortune by investing the larger part of it in annuities from life insurance companies including New York Mutual and took a mistress—a Fraulein Reisch—by whom he had two other children. 

But he, like his brother, was tortured by a mysterious mental illness. Both brothers suffered from “neurasthenia,” a 19th-century catchall term for depression, neuroticism, and general anxiety. Like Joseph, he suffered severe insomnia. Always keenly attuned to the pleasures of the table, he now ate compulsively, and ballooned to over 300 lbs.

The disease tortured the brothers in different ways. Joseph became hypersensitive to sounds and smells—he could not abide cigarette smoke (although his own cigars were, according to one reminiscence, “black, cheap and horrible”) spent a fortune soundproofing his homes in New York, Lakewood, NJ, Jekyll Island, GA, and Bar Harbor, ME. He became apoplectic at the sound of someone slurping their soup, chewing audibly, or the clink of a knife upon a plate.

Albert’s neurasthenia manifested itself as an “unbearable sensitiveness to changes in temperature and light.” He secluded himself in a suite in Vienna’s Hotel Bristol and lived as a recluse aside from his personal secretary, a Count Mikorsky, and a few servants, including a woman whom he hired to read to him. After she finished a newspaper story about a man who suffered insomnia and committed suicide, he replied ironically, “Wenn ich nur Muth dazu hatte” [“If only I had the courage”].

Apparently, he summoned it up. That evening, Oct. 3, 1909, he attempted to buy poison from a pharmacy. It was widely reported that he tried to buy Prussic acid, but it was most likely cyanide, since the pharmacist, seeing that he was in a state of mental agitation, sold him harmless extract of almonds, which has the same smell and taste as cyanide. He disappeared into his rooms and locked the door.

Concerned, his personal physician, a Dr. Jakob Pollak, broken down the door and found Albert dead on the floor in his pajamas. Apparently, upon discovering the ruse, he shot himself in the head with a revolver between five and seven p.m. And there was evidence that the suicide was not impulsive: “In a chest were discovered a large number of powders and poisons, indicating that suicide had been contemplated for a long time.”

Joseph was then in Berlin with his entourage. Upon hearing the news, he dispatched Norman Thwaites, who had spent part of his childhood in Germany and was fluent in German, to Vienna with 3,000 marks—ostensibly to cover the cost of Albert’s burial.

Thwaites wrote that he “found the dead man’s suite in a terrible state of confusion.” Albert’s room had apparently been searched before Thwaites arrived—his books were scattered across the room, and his desk had been rifled. The body had already been removed, and according to Thwaites’s account, he had some initial difficulty tracking down Albert’s remains. He began his search in the Catholic section of Vienna’s Zentralfriedhoff cemetery—“The Catholics had first obtained possession of the body, but finding no evidence of any money, even for a decent funeral, they cooled off in their zeal to undertake the burial.”

Eventually, Thwaites says, “At long last, I learned that it was probable that the body had been taken to the Jewish cemetery,” since, “The Jews also had a claim, they contended, as Pulitzer was to some extent of Hebrew blood.” In the Jewish section of the cemetery, he found Albert’s body “covered with a white cloth and lying in an open box of the cheapest kind” in the mortuary. “No money having been traced, the millionaire was about to be buried as a pauper.” Thwaites, with Joseph’s money, “arranged at once for a better class of burial.” The following day, Oct. 6, “in a handsome casket covered with flowers, the unhappy man was laid to rest while a Jewish choir of male voices sang beautifully.”

At the graveside, Albert’s attorney, Max Neuda, read the funeral oration. But “at the moment of casting earth to earth, a young, red-bearded man hurried forward and cast a handful of mould upon the coffin. He claimed to be the next of kin.”

But there are reasons to be skeptical of Thwaites’s story, which raises more questions than it answers. If Pollak and Neuda, Albert’s personal physician and attorney, had been present at the scene of Albert’s death, why did Thwaites have to search to find Albert’s body—and why does he mention neither Neuda nor Pollak? Who was the red-bearded young man? Why would Joseph send Thwaites to Vienna with such an astronomical sum of money? And why would Albert have been either section of the cemetery, since, as a suicide, he was ineligible for interment in either Jewish or Catholic hallowed ground?

It is worth remembering that the Pulitzer brothers had many relatives in Vienna, including their cousin, Adam Politzer, a prominent Viennese doctor and Joseph’s lifelong correspondent. Adam knew his cousin well enough even to chide him about being too hard on his children, a liberty few would have taken with the imperious and irascible Joseph. And it was Adam who met with the attorney Neuda to review Albert’s estate and who reported back to Joseph, although he is not mentioned by Thwaites. It seems likely that Joseph’s 3000 marks was intended not only to provide for Albert’s funeral, but to bribe the Viennese religious authorities, more lax than their more orthodox colleagues in the hinterlands, into burying Albert in the cemetery proper instead of outside the walls, as was customary for suicides.

While Adam did not find any letters to Joseph or any mention of him in any of his papers, he did mention that he found “numerous love letters of extremely diverse provenance”—all of which were destroyed.

When the will was opened, the estate was found to have dwindled to $200,000 in cash. One rumor said that Albert had suffered severe financial setbacks from South African speculations. A lifetime annuity trust of $800,000 had provided him with a comfortable annual income, but at his death, the capital reverted to the insurance companies in London and Paris. He left $30,000 to his son Walter, $10,000 to his friend and attorney Neuda, and annuities of $1,250 to Fraulein Reisch and $2,500 to each of his children by her.

His American son Walter would go on to have a middling literary career. Walter worked on his uncle’s paper for a while, but he received no special treatment, and there is no evidence he ever met Joseph. He wrote a small book of aphorisms and apothegms titled Meditations of a Mean Man, some books on chess, and tried—and failed—to launch his own magazine. He would also be arrested for possession of obscene materials, and died in 1924 at the age of 46.

Perhaps Albert’s real legacy is the fate of his paper. John McLean failed to make a success of the Journal, and in 1895 sold it at a considerable loss ($400,000 according to some estimates) to a newcomer to New York from San Francisco named William Randolph Hearst. Under Hearst’s ownership, the Journal became the only serious rival to Joseph’s World, eventually eclipsing its circulation in the two papers’ great battle in the run-up to the Spanish-American War.

Albert lived to see that battle. One can’t help but wonder if he took any satisfaction in seeing his paper become a weapon in the hands of his embittered and estranged older brother’s deadliest enemy.

SOURCES:

“Albert Pulitzer -- A Suicide in Vienna.” New York Times, Oct. 5, 1909.

Csillag, Andras. Joseph Pulitzer’s Roots in Europe: A Genealogical History.

Chambers, Henry Kellett. “A Park Row Interlude: Memoir of Albert Pulitzer.” Journalism Quarterly.

“Gotham’s ‘Morning Journal’: Five Years of Newspaper Prosperity.” The Journalist, Dec. 2, 1887, Vol. VI, No. II.

The Lounger, Putnam’s Magazine.

Hamilton, Allen McLain. Confessions of an Alienist, Personal and Professional. New York: George Doran & Co., 1916.

“Highways and By-Ways,” The Epoch, Vol. 5, 1889.

Markens, Isaac. The Hebrews in America. New York: Privately printed. 1888.

Morris, James McGrath. Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print and Power. New York: Harper Collins, 2010.

“The Secret of Success in Journalism, By One Who Succeeded.” Pall Mall Budget, May 30, 1884.

Swanberg, W.A. Pulitzer. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1967.

Thwaites, Norman. Velvet and Vinegar. London: Grayson & Grayson. 1932.