17: Amy Archer’s Pulitzer
In 1847 in the town of Makó in what is now Hungary, a child named József Pulitzer was born. At the age of 18 he moved to the United States, fought in the Civil War, and rechristened himself Joseph. After the war he moved to St Louis, where after performing various odd jobs and determining that he was too scrawny for manual labor, got a job at a newspaper, where he gained a reputation as an excellent reporter. By 1878 he used some shrewd investments to purchase the St. Louis Post and the St. Louis Dispatch, merging them into a single paper. By 1883 profits were good enough from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he was able to purchase the New York World newspaper. Over the course of the next ten years he increased its circulation from 15,000 to 600,000, turning the New York World into the biggest newspaper in the United States. In 1892 he offered a substantial gift to Columbia University to start a journalism school there. When he died in 1911, Columbia received a further endowment from him in his will, which ultimately led in part to the creation of a prize for excellence in journalism being awarded by the University in Pulitzer’s name.
These days there are multiple prizes awarded in Pulitzer’s name, most of them journalism based.There are prizes for Best Breaking News, Best Investigative Story, Best Explanatory Story, Best Local News, Best International News, Best Feature, and Best Editorial, in addition to other prizes for photography, literature, and music. Winning a Pulitzer is recognized among us civilians as the mark from authority of excellence in the journalistic field, as the Nobels are in science, the Oscars in film, the Tonys in theater, and the Grammys in music.
There is however no hullabaloo about the Pulitzers. Even someone relatively uninformed about film may have heard that Green Book (2018) won an oscar and that there was some controversy around it, or that the 2015 musical Hamilton was kind of a big deal and probably won at least one Tony award (it won 11). The Pulitzers have no televised awards show for the people who care to watch and then tell the winners to everyone who didn’t care to sit through the show. In the general consciousness it is simply known that at some point in the year Pulitzers are given and that’s enough. If pressed most people could name a Nobel winner, an Oscar winner, a Tony winner, or a Grammy winner. Maybe one in ten people could tell you that Woodward & Bernstein won a Pulitzer for their coverage of the Watergate scandal*. On its face this makes a good deal of sense. Journalism is inherently ephemeral. A newspaper ages about as well as an unrefrigerated fish, losing its import as the very news that it seeks to report becomes supplanted by the next week’s, day’s, or even hour’s news. The very word “news” says it all. Once it’s not new anymore, it stops being news and becomes something to wrap fried fish in. Journalism therefore is rarely something one goes back into the archives for. While we recognize that Rebecca (1940) or Bridge On The River Kwai (1957) remain compelling watches decades after their releases, no one’s going to spend an evening cracking open a vintage issue of the New York Times to read the initial coverage of the release of the Pentagon Papers.
Without having a larger sense of who’s winning Pulitzers and who isn’t, it’s tough to know what to make of the Pulitzers as a whole. We know for example that the Oscars can get things very right sometimes, giving the best picture nod to gems that have stood the test of time like Midnight Cowboy (1969), One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1974) or No Country For Old Men (2009). It is also well known that they can get things profoundly wrong at times, giving Crash (2005) the win over Brokeback Mountain (2005); Driving Miss Daisy (1989) won while Do The Right Thing (1989) wasn’t even nominated, and of course, the greatest sleight of all; The English Patient (1996) won over Fargo (1996). It’s also known that the Grammy awards are largely a joke. Mumford & Sons beat Frank Ocean in 2013 when Channel Orange was clearly the best album that had been released that decade; the inaugural Heavy Metal grammy was given to Jethro Tull over Metallica, and over the same rough career length as bandleaders Henry Mancini won 20 Grammys to James Brown’s 3. Announcing that one won a grammy certainly speaks to being able to move a lot of units, but not necessarily to the objective quality of one’s work relative to one’s peers.
Amy Archer won a Pulitzer. It’s referenced 3 times in The Hudsucker Proxy, and confusingly is simultaneously a joke of how much she harps on it and how forgettable it is, strangely appropriate for how well known the Pulitzers are and how little their prizes in journalism are remembered. As Amy is introduced two unnamed reporters comment “Five bucks says she mentions her Pulitzer” “Again? You’re on”, prompting a comic beat as she exits the room without mentioning her pulitzer. As the one reporter hands over his $5 she returns to the room to tag her line with “I’ll stake my Pulitzer on it!”, causing the one reporter to snag his Lincoln back. Amy apparently talks about her prize constantly to her fellow reporters, and yet not a few scenes later she proudly announces over the phone to the Argus’s chief “If working at the Argus doesn’t make me an expert my name isn’t Amy Archer and I never won the Pulitzer Prize”, and a beat later as she responds defeatedly to his unheard question “In 1957… my series on the reunited triplets… well come on down and I’ll show it to you, hammerhead!” as she snags her prize from her desk drawer to slam it on the desk.
While Amy annoys her coworkers by constantly mentioning her Pulitzer, her boss apparently can’t remember that one of his workers has won the highest prize in journalism. Lastly, as the malevolent sign painter Aloysius finds a story on Amy’s Pulitzer win with a photograph, confirming that Amy Smith the receptionist and Amy Archer the reporter are one and the same person, showing that at least at one place and time the Argus leadership cared about their reporter’s prize.
What though does having a Pulitzer say about Amy’s reporting ability and quality? It certainly makes her noteworthy, but what kind of company does she keep as a Pulitzer winner in the late 1950s? The common refrain of journalism and its import is that it’s the “first draft of history”. In retrospect, were the events we now consider historically important of the late 50s rewarded by Pulitzers in the 1950s. In the light of retrospect, the three most important events of the late 50s in America are the beginnings of school integration following the supreme court decision Brown Vs Board of Education and the continuing civil rights struggle associated with it, the launch of Sputnik and the beginning of the space age, and the beginning of US military involvement in Vietnam. Two of the Pulitzer winning reporting of the late 50s touches on Brown & civil rights: the 1958 Public Service Pulitzer given to the Arkansas Gazette on their coverage of school integration and the Little Rock 5, following the 1957 Editorial Pulitzer given to Edward Boone of the Tuscaloosa News for the editorial “What A Price For Peace”, casting shame upon the civic leadership for caving to the local mobs in the face of Autherine Lucy attempting to become the first black student of the University of Alabama. Only one dealt with Vietnam: a strikingly prescient editorial cartoon win in 1955 for Daniel Fitzpatrick of the St Louis Post-Dispatch titled “But Would Another Mistake Help” I will let speak for itself:
No Pulitzers were given over space. The majority of the wins seem to deal with stories of local governmental corruption and labor relations, which while doubtless important in their times do not stand up as notable in the greater historical context. Given that Amy’s Pulitzer is apparently about a series of reunited triplets, it’s much more likely that her prize is one of those given about a story that seems notable in its time but may not necessarily stand up to the scrutiny of history, much like Lauren K Soth of the Des Moines Register and Tribune’s editorial win for 1956, for "If the Russians Want More Meat...", inviting a farm delegation from the Soviet Union to visit Iowa**.
Amy’s Pulitzer win is probably not terribly important in the grand scheme of things, but there’s nothing that says she couldn’t have won for her 1959 story about the corruption and downfall of Sidney J Mussburger in the aftermath of the death of Waring Hudsucker, but we’ll need to let the fanfiction writers write that story.
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*while this is accurate in spirit, it is not in point of fact. The prize for Watergate reporting went to the Washington Post organization as a whole, and while Woodward & Bernstein did the heavy lifting in the reporting of that story, no prize officially bears their name.
** The editorial can be read in full here and I cannot think of anything more profoundly evocative of midwestern pride and gumption than a reporter reading a soviet speech and saying “well shucks they should come to Iowa then” https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/If_the_Russians_Want_More_Meat...