An Adventure with a Genius: Recollections of Joseph PulitzerIreland, Alleyne
General
An Adventure with a Genius: Recollections of Joseph Pulitzer
Ireland, Alleyne
Pulitzer, Joseph, 1847-1911
On the occasions when I formed one of the party I had the opportunity of
observing that so far as the quantity and the quality of work were
concerned it was an easier task to be one of Mr. Pulitzer's secretaries
than to be one of his sons. I have never seen men put to a more severe
test of industry, concentration, and memory than were Mr. Ralph and Mr.
Joseph, Jr., while they were at Bar Harbor or on the yacht.
It is a pleasure to bear witness to the affectionate solicitude, the
patience, and the good will with which they met the exacting demands of
their father. They realized, of course, as every one who worked for J.
P. realized it, that the weight of the burden he placed upon you and the
strictness of the account to which you were called were the truest
measure of his regard.
Next to politics there was nothing which interested J. P. more than
molding and developing the people around him; and what was no more than
a strong interest when it concerned his employees became a passion when
it concerned his sons. His activities in this direction ministered alike
to his love of power and to his horror of wasted talents; they gratified
his ever-present desire to discover the boundaries of human character
and intellect, to explore the mazes of human temperament and emotion.
What you knew and what you were able to do, once you had reached a
certain standard, became secondary in his interest to what you could be
made to know and what you could be taught to do. He was never content
that a man should stand upon his record; growth and development were the
chief aims of his discipline.
His method was well illustrated in my own case. One of his earliest
injunctions to me was that I should never introduce any subject of
conversation connected, in however remote a degree, with my travels or
with my studies in relation to the government of tropical dependencies.
When, for instance, he happened to need some information about India or
the West Indies, he always directed one of the other men to find it for
him. This arrangement had, from his standpoint, the double advantage of
making the other man learn something of which he was ignorant, and of
leaving me free to work at something of which I was ignorant. Thus J. P.
killed two intellectual birds with one stone.
It was not only in regard to mental accomplishments, however, that J. P.
pursued his plan of educating everybody around him. He insisted, among
other things, that I should learn to ride, not because there was any
lack of people who could ride with him, but because by means of
application I could add a new item to the list of things I could do.
After a dozen lessons from a groom I progressed so far that, having
acquired the ability to stay more or less in the saddle while the horse
trotted, Mr. Pulitzer frequently took me riding with him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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