history
by Reg Reynolds
Joseph Pulitzer
Gibraltar was Safe Haven for Pulitzer Prize Man Joseph Pulitzer was on a cruise to Portugal aboard his luxury yacht Liberty when a medical crisis brought him to Gibraltar.
The fabulously wealthy and famous publisher had never been of good health and had just been diagnosed with whooping cough when one of his employees on Liberty came down with a case of smallpox. The year was 1909 and smallpox was curable but still extremely deadly, fortunately Gibraltar was close by and
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the medical personnel on the Rock had considerable experience with the various diseases, including smallpox, which plagued the world at the time. Pulitzer ordered his captain to sail Liberty into Gibraltar harbour where she was met by health officials and placed in quarantine. Wil-
liam Paterson, a Scot and Pulitzer’s newly hired secretary was the poor chap who had contracted smallpox. He was taken to a Gibraltar hospital, where he eventually recovered. The Liberty was fumigated and everyone aboard was given a smallpox vaccination. From Gibraltar the Liberty, without the recovering Paterson, sailed to Marseille where Pulitzer disembarked and caught a train to Aix-Lex-Bains to recuperate from the whooping cough; once clear of the disease, he returned to the now comparatively germ-free yacht. The emergency stop brought about by the smallpox infection was Pulitzer’s second visit to Gibraltar. In 1892 he was holidaying at Nice on the French Riviera when, on a whim, he chartered the steam yacht Semiramis to take him, his wife Kate and some companions to Barcelona and along the coast to Gibraltar. Unfortunately Mrs. Pulitzer quickly realised she was not meant to be a sailor and disembarked at the first port of call.. Brian Denis writes in his book Pulitzer: A Life, “This was the start of their frequent separations, with Pulitzer at sea and Kate with the family at their homes in America or on European vacations. “Leaving Kate behind in France, Pulitzer and the rest of his party continued on to Tunis to visit the ruins of ancient Carthage before sailing through a tremendous storm to Greece. Though there was a telegraph office in a small coastal town there, Pulitzer resisted sending his normal barrage of questions and instructions to his staff in New York. Having proved himself a better sailor than Kate, and finding shipboard life more tranquil than city life, he cabled New York agreeing to buy a yacht formerly owned by the duke of Sutherland. Being among the top one percent of affluent Americans, he easily managed the asking price of a hundred thousand dollars and named it Romola, after a favourite George Eliot novel. Back on the Semiramis, he resumed his Mediterranean trip from port to port for almost four months.” Joseph Pulitzer was born in Mako, Hungary in 1847 to Jewish parents — grain merchant Philip Pulitzer and his wife Elize (nee) Berger. Young Pulitzer aspired to a career in the military but was turned down by the Austro-Hungarian army because he was weakly and had poor eyesight. Disillusioned he emigrated to America in 1864 and went on to fight on the Union side in the American Civil War. After the war Pulitzer settled in St. Louis and took a job as a reporter on a German language newspaper. He joined the Republican Party and was elected to the Missouri State Assembly in 1869. An ambitious man with an eye for prevailing politics, in 1872 Pulitzer switched to the Democratic party and purchased his first newspaper which he soon sold for a substantial profit. In 1879 he bought the St. Louis Dispatch and the St. Louis Post and merged the papers into the St. Louis Post-Dispatch which to this day is still that city’s leading newspaper. It was through the Post-Dispatch that Pulitzer developed his reputation as a fighter for the common man and grew to be a competitor of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. In 1883 Pulitzer bought the New York World and through his leadership increased the circulation from 15,000 to 600,000 a day. One of his innovations was to print the first newspaper comic — The Yellow Kid by Richard F. Outcault
GIBRALTAR MAGAZINE • FEBRUARY 2009
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