Fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties . . . always remain devoted to the public welfare . . . never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.
—From the "Platform," the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Most newspapers have some such resounding principles either engraved on their buildings or printed in their pages. But at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (circ. 391,890), the "Platform" is not only embedded in the walls and run every day on the editorial page; it is so deeply implanted in the minds of every staffer that it has made the P-D the leading crusading newspaper in the U.S. By standing on the Platform he drafted for his heirs, the P-D's late great founder, Joseph Pulitzer, brought on 17 libel suits in the first three years of the paper's life (but paid only $50 in damages), and John A. Cockerill, his managing editor, shot dead a gun-toting critic who invaded the city room and called the staff a "gang of blackmailers" (the police ruled self-defense).
"Boiled down." says Joseph Pulitzer II, son and namesake of the founder and publisher-president of the PD, "the Platform simply means printing an honest newspaper." This week the paper celebrated its 75th anniversary in typical P-D style by looking far beyond the boundaries of Missouri. Instead of citywide fanfare, dinners and speechmaking, it put out a fat anniversary supplement, The Second American Revolution, with 33 articles on the American scene by everybody from former President Harry Truman, Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter to Poet W. H. Auden, Playwright Robert Sherwood and Cartoonist Al Capp. Included was a message from President Eisenhower, congratulating the P-D for its "most striking . . . resolve 'never to be satisfied with merely printing the news.' "
Five-Time Winner. Dissatisfaction with "merely printing the news" has brought the P-D and its staffers eleven Pulitzer Prizes. Even though the prizes were started in 1917 under the will of the P-D's founder, few newspapermen ever complain that favoritism is involved, since the paper's determined crusading makes it a more logical candidate for the prizes than other papers (Publisher Pulitzer stays out of the discussion when the P-D is a candidate). P-D men have won prizes for everything from forcing a corrupt federal judge to resign and the exposure of the Teapot Dome scandals by the late Paul Y. Anderson to a series on the Depression '30s by the late Charles G. Ross, who became President Truman's press secretary after leaving the PD. The paper itself has won five "meritorious public service" Pulitzers: for exposing wholesale padding of vote registration lists in St. Louis elections (1937), its campaign to rid the city of smoke (1941), an investigation of the Centralia mine disaster (1948), rooting out newspapermen on the Illinois state payroll (1950), and exposing corruption in the Bureau of Internal Revenue (1952).