Houston Southard

James Mcgrath Morris - Pulitzer

It’s only fitting on america’s birthday to review a biography of its most notorious and consequential propagandist. Or it would be if this were more review than rant.

Not to toot my family tree’s hoosier horn, but this read suspiciously like my 5x great grandfather’s life. Encroaching on semi newly developed territory, stamping your name on every reachable surface, imposing your personal and often vindictive will on others all the while.

Civil war vet. Vagrant. Journalist. Congressmen. Mogul. The man whose name is synonymous with stories lived his latter life like he was in one.

Pulitzer did what hungry men do, seeking power to correct perceived injustices that shaped into power run somewhat amuck. First order of business after buying the St. Louis Post Dispatch was dispatching what pissed him off, chiefly a jab at the ferry monopoly that denied his initial entry to the city across the Mississippi river for not having fare.

Irony is a man so obsessed with escaping the eventual and utter noise he ushered in creating sensationalist print that he lived out his last decade blinded on a sound proof ship.

We hold his name in the highest esteem, but were he born today, he’d be dragged through the streets like some would like to do to his Hungarian compatriot George Soros. When you live and what legacy you leave is important. At least it was in times when the narrative was more controllable.

Humans endure from a legacy built atop the power of narrative while we yet respond to flimsy stories as if we don’t know why. One-issue politics seems all that’s left, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s trite to talk nuance when the media doesn’t want to acknowledge any, but it’s always increasingly something to broach. Race. Politics. Religion. Sexuality. Intelligence. All spectra, all of us forgetting our sameness, lost somewhere not quite on either end.

America’s birthday celebrates colonists independence from british rule. We come from people we deride, forgetting without them, there’d be no empire to rest our laurels on, the ones providing the luxury to outthink and supplant the dark things that brought us here for something maybe a bit less bad instead. Legacy.