Few Flinch

[...] Some of my critics have called my scheme "visionary." If i be so I can at least plead that it is a vision I have cherished long, thought upon deeply and followed persistently. Twelve years ago I submitted the idea to President Low of Columbia, when it was declined. I have ever since continued to perfect and organize the scheme in my mind, until it is now accepted. In examining the criticisms and misgivings I have endeavored to do so without prejudice, anxious only to find the truth. I admit that the difficulties are many, but after weighing them all impartially I am more firmly convinced than ever of the ultimate success of the idea. Before the century closes schools of journalism will be generally accepted as a feature of specialized higher education, like schools of law or of medicine.

And now for our critics and objectors: MUST A JOURNALIST BE "BORN?" They object, the critics and cavillers, that a "newspaper man" must depend solely upon natural aptitud, or, in the common phrase, that he must be "born, not made."

Perhaps the critics can name some great editor, born full winged like Mercury, the messenger of the gods? I know of none. The only position that occurs to me which a man in our Republic can successfully fill by the simple fact of birth is that of an idiot. [...]

[...] They object that moral courage cannot be taught. Very true. I admit that it is the hardest thing in the world to teach. But may we not be encouraged by the reflection that physical courage is taught? It is not to be supposed that every young man who enters West Point or Annapolis, Brienne, St. Cyr or Sandhurst is a born hero. Yet the student at any of these schools is so drilled, hammered and braced in the direction of courage that by the time he graduates it is morally certain that when he takes his men under fire for the first time he will not flinch. Pride and the spirit of emulation can make masses of men do what even a hero would not venture to do alone. 

Is it likely that Napoleon himself would have charged in solitary grandeur across the bridge at Lodi if there had been no one to see him do it? Or would Pickett's brigade at Gettysburg have gone forward to destruction if every man in it had not been lifted out of himself by the feeling that he and his comrades were all doing a heroic thing together?a thing in which he simply could not do less than the rest ?

If such things can be done for physical courage, why not for moral courage? If the mind can be taught to expose the body fearlessly to wounds and death, cannot the soul be taught to cling to its convictions against temptation, prejudice, obloquy and persecution? Moral courage is developed by experience and by teaching. Every successful exercise of it makes the next easier.[...]

Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.

Joseph Pulitzer - The College of Journalism.

in The North American Review, Vol. 178, No. 570 (May, 1904), pp. 641-680