Film Review/Ed Rampell

Citizen Pulitzer: Patron Saint of the Oppressed

Richard F. Outcault’s immensely popular Sunday comic strip, “The Yellow Kid,” about a youngster from the wrong side of the tracks, ran from 1895 to 1898 in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. It’s been described as “... a turn-of-the-century theater of the city, in which class and racial tensions of the new urban, consumerist environment were acted out by a mischievous group of New York City kids from the wrong side of the tracks.”

As a President with tyrannical tendencies attacks journalists as “enemies of the people,” and members of the press, including the Washington Post’s Jamal Khashoggi are being assassinated, a cinematic cycle is emerging in defense of the Fourth Estate.

The documentary Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists, chronicling the celebrated New York City columnists who stood up for the ordinary guy and gal, premiered on HBO on January 28. Mike Wallace is Here, a doc about the hard-hitting 60 Minutes interrogator, screened at 2019’s Sundance Film Festival. Johnny Depp is now filming Minamata, a biopic about former WWII war photographer W. Eugene Smith who, on assignment for Life Magazine, returned to Japan to shoot shattering images of coastal residents ravaged by mercury poisoning and corporate greed. The trend has even spread to the stage, with the revival of Italian playwright Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist, which stresses the importance of a free press, by Tim Robbins’ The Actors’ Gang theatre in Los Angeles.

The latest film touting the value of the free press is Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People, narrated by BlacKkKlansman co-star Adam Driver. Besides upholding the patrimony of print publishing at a critical time, Voice defends the heritage of America’s immigrants — who are, like journalists, targets of the Trump regime. And as crimes motivated by anti-Semitism are on the rise in Trump’s USA, Oren Rudavsky’s biopic reminds us of the Jewish contribution to America.

Joseph Pulitzer was born a member of the oppressed Jewish community in 1847 in Makó, Hungary, near the Romanian border. His uncles fought in the 1848 revolutions that swept Europe and imbued their nephew with a freedom fighting ethos. (Joseph’s father died when he was only 11 and seven of his eight siblings also succumbed to a variety of ailments.)

According to Voice, the future patron saint of ink-stained wretches migrated to America in a startling way. Because so many sons of rich Americans legally paid fees to avoid conscription, U.S. recruiters sought out able-bodied men in Europe to join the military during the Civil War. After serving in the Lincoln Cavalry, Pulitzer went West and settled in St. Louis, Missouri, which had a sizable contingent of European immigrants.

That is also where he embarked on a career in journalism.

Voice uses original and archival footage, photos, and interviews, as well as re-enactments. Liev Schreiber — who played the Boston Globe’s editor-in-chief in the 2015 film Spotlight, which won Best Picture — gives voice to Pulitzer in an Eastern European accent, apparently speaking words the journalistic icon had written. Schreiber, who also stars as the brawling fixer on Showtime’s Ray Donovan series, is a fitting choice for the pugilistic publisher who stood up for the oppressed (especially the immigrant masses) and stuck it to the elite.

After working in the German language press, Pulitzer acquired the St. Louis Dispatch and eventually moved east, taking over the New York World, where he set out to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Pulitzer was the scourge of the robber barons who took advantage of the unregulated capitalism of late 19th century America, and the crusading publisher went after sweatshop owners, rich tax dodgers, and others.

In one famous case, investigative reporter Nellie Bly had herself committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on what is now Roosevelt Island, between Manhattan and Queens, for a 1887 New York World expose of the horrendous conditions there. In the movie, the saner Bly acts, the madder institutional authorities think she is.

Pulitzer’s papers could have a sensationalistic, tabloidy tilt. In 1889, Bly was dispatched on an around-the-world journey to replicate Phileas Fogg’s globetrotting in Jules Verne’s 1873 sci fi novel, Around the World in Eighty Days. Voice also recounts how Pulitzer helped put the Statue of Liberty on a pedestal — literally.

France’s gift to America in the 1880s lacked a platform to mount it on. And so Pulitzer—himself one of the “huddled masses” who crossed the Atlantic to pursue the American Dream — turned to his New York World readers to raise the money. The paper published the name of every individual who gave at least one penny for this cause, and in this way raised more than $100,000. After it was built, the Statue of Liberty and the 20-story golden-domed New York World Building skyscraper were the two most recognizable landmarks for immigrants arriving in New York Harbor.

Voice’s visual flair is largely due to Pulitzer’s pictorial panache. He creatively grasped that the newspaper is an ocular medium, and in the days before photos regularly appeared in newspapers filled out his pages with drawn illustrations, political cartoons, and comic strips. Starting in 1895, the World began running Richard F. Outcault’s immensely popular Sunday comic strip, “The Yellow Kid,” about slum dweller Mickey Dugan, a resident of New York’s Hogan’s Alley. The term “yellow journalism” — referring to sensationalistic, profit-driven reporting — was derived from this strip.

Pulitzer came to regret the newspaper war he became embroiled in with rival publisher William Randolph Hearst (forever immortalized in Orson Welles’ 1941 classic, Citizen Kane) and his New York Journal. Their circulation battles during the Spanish-American War period inflamed public opinion with inaccurate reporting that was usually anathema to Pulitzer.

Voice does not flinch from depicting Pulitzer’s other contradictions and flaws. Despite having fought for the Union cause, the Eastern European immigrant married a Southerner who was actually related to Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy’s traitorous president. The friend of the people also amassed a fortune, becoming a member of the class he frequently excoriated with barrels of ink.

Yet no matter how rich he became, the Jewish Pulitzer remained an outsider. As America became an imperial power, the newspaper baron took on President Teddy Roosevelt, opposing the Panama Canal project from an anti-corruption, anti-colonialism stance. Enraged, Roosevelt pushed libel charges against Pulitzer, who prevailed in a 1911 Supreme Court decision that upheld freedom of the press. Arguably Pulitzer’s finest moment, this battle between a President and a free press was a precursor of Tricky Dick versus the Washington Post for its “Pentagon Papers” and Watergate exposes and, more contemporaneously, of Trump versus virtually any media outlet that does not sing his praises.

Pulitzer was also a philanthropist who betrothed millions to found the Columbia School of Journalism and establish the Pulitzer Prizes. Unfortunately, the 85-minute Voice gives short shrift to these prizes; this section could easily and appropriately have been expanded to showcase the kind of “for the people” journalism that Pulitzer championed.

But Voice nonetheless stands out in the vanguard of contemporary films extolling the virtues of the free press speech, along with the 1976 Watergate drama All the President’s Men, the 2014 Gary Webb thriller Kill the Messenger, and 2015’s Spotlight, about sexual abuse in the church. These pictures remind us that although presidents may not like it, journalism is the only public profession protected by the Bill of Rights—and that the public’s right to know is an essential ingredient for democracy.

Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People opened March 1 in New York and March 8 in Los Angeles and airs April 12 on PBS’s American Masters series.

Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States and he co-authored The Hawaii Movie and Television Book, now in its third edition. This first appeared at Progressive.org.

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2019

Populist.com