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8. Reporting on the Roaring
- University of Missouri Press
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Reporting on the Roaring The Jazz Age had had a wild youth and a heady middle age . . . the most expensive orgy in history . . . . It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls. —F. Scott Fitzgerald ghe Pulitzer Prizes for journalism entered the new decade like a child prodigy in that period of early, awkward adolescence. As an institution it had its brilliant moments—certainly, one was the choice of the New York Times for the Gold Medal—but it was still quite immature. Again, no award was voted in the Public Service category for . (The board would skip the category in and , too.) But the board took one step that was to have great long-term significance for the prize process, adding thirty-fiveyear -old St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor Joseph Pulitzer II to its ranks. Together, Ralph Pulitzer and his idealistic younger brother would infuse the prizes with their father’s principles, as well as with the benefactor’s ambition for the prizes to become a major part of the national scene. Public service stories that displayed real courage in the telling would get extra attention from the board with these New York and St. Louis newspaper executives in the room. So would any coverage that brought about significant benefits to society. J.P. II, especially, launched a flurry of personal correspondence with other board members before each meeting, encouraging nominations and seeking their thoughts about how the Pulitzer Prizes in general were doing. He was frustrated by the lack of entries from newspapers around the country, and hated for the board to have to pass over a category for want of good candidates. The board started to take its job seriously. More members showed up to select prize winners, and they began strenuously debating those nominations that were forwarded from the Columbia journalism faculty members. Frequently, the board reversed the jury recommendations. Further, the board began to see that if it found a truly exemplary work to honor —particularly with a Public Service Medal—it could provide a much-needed model of excellence for the industry, and could also boost the image of the Pulitzers themselves.This was an important development, coming at a time when the prizes still had almost no public image at all. The number of entries began to grow slowly , often because jurors and editors brought to the table candidates that they had read themselves during the prior year. The time when newspapers clamored to nominate their own best work was still in the future. Meanwhile, as the war began to fade as a dominant story, front pages reflected the emergence of disturbing social problems: the tenacity of racial hatred and the flourishing of political graft and corruption. Battling these evils would become central for Pulitzer board members selecting the Gold Medal winner. A Story for the Jazz Age The national mood also was undergoing a swift, if not altogether clear, transformation as the s began to roar. For many people, the former idealism about the turn-of-the-century world veered toward cynicism. A strange, frantic selfindulgence took hold. After the horrors visited on the battlefields of Europe, immediate gratification made more sense to some than did sacrifice. But it was also a time filled with paradox. Newspapers often saw themselves as standard-bearers for old national ideals, even as they began to reflect the new era’s hedonism in their pages. There could not have been a better newspaper story for the Jazz Age—or one that grew more powerfully from the anything-goes spirit infecting America—than the story that the Pulitzer board cited in its Public Service award. For once, the board had a real choice in the category. Meeting in early April, a jury of three Columbia journalism professors offered the board two possibilities. One nomination was for the New York Evening Post, which had brought attention to “the shortcomings of the Government work for the relief and rehabilitation of the soldiers of the World War,” according to John W. Cunliffe, the new director of Columbia’s journalism school, and the leader of each of the juries. It was, the jury had noted, a project benefiting “a great number of deserving men to whom the country owed a debt that was being neglected.” The stories had been written by Harold Littledale, who had won a Reporting Pulitzer in . Indeed, the jury [54.224...