Japan: Her Vast Undertakings and World Expansion (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Japan: Her Vast Undertakings and World Expan...)
Excerpt from Japan: Her Vast Undertakings and World Expansion
Mr. Seibold also made a study Of the more intimate features of Japanese life which are embraced in a series of sketches in this volume.
The purpose of the new york herald in sending Mr. Seibold to the Far East was to inform the people of the United States on Far Eastern conditions existing on the eve of the Conference on the Limitation Of Armaments and for the discussion Of Pacific and Far Eastern affairs which assembled in Washington on November 12 on the invitation of the President of the United States.
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Louis Seibold was an American journalist, the winner of Pulitzer Prize (1921).
Background
He was born on October 10, 1863 in Washington, District of Columbia, United States, the eldest of five children (four sons and a daughter) of Louis Philip Seibold and Josephine Burrows (Dawson) Seibold. His mother was a Virginian of Scotch-Irish and English descent; his father, born in Maryland, came of a German Roman Catholic family. A Union officer during the Civil War, he afterward served for many years on the District of Columbia police force and in 1896 founded a customhouse brokerage firm.
Education
He attended Washington public schools.
Career
After studies young Seibold embarked on a newspaper career. He began on the Washington Post as an office boy and was made a reporter in 1886. Three years later he went west to cover the Ute Indian war in Colorado and stayed to work on newspapers in Denver, St. Louis, Chicago, San Francisco, and Pendleton, Oregon.
About 1894 he joined the New York World of Joseph Pulitzer, where he was to spend most of his working life. The World sent him to cover the fighting in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. In May 1902 he was the first reporter to reach Martinique after the great eruption of Mount Pelee.
Seibold evidently left the World briefly in 1902, but by 1905 was back as the newspaper's statehouse correspondent in Albany. That year he scored a celebrated coup when the state attorney general slipped him, over the weekend, a still secret official report confirming many muckraking charges of corrupt practices in the insurance industry. By setting stenographers to work around the clock, Seibold was able to copy it and get it back by 6 A. M. Monday; the World printed it on July 11, 1905. Pulitzer, who had been following a mild editorial policy on the insurance question, reacted by firing Seibold, but soon relented and sent him back to Albany.
Seibold also covered national politics, attending every national party convention from 1896 to 1920 and gaining exclusive interviews with two presidents, Taft and Wilson. After war broke out in Europe in 1914, he briefly displayed his old skill as a war correspondent. When, the following year, the American government chose to leak the "Albert papers, " inadvertently left on a New York elevated train by a German diplomat, Seibold was the chosen recipient. The resulting revelations of German intrigue, published on August 15, 1915, led to the recall of the German ambassador.
After heading the World's Washington bureau in 1916 and 1917, he accompanied Wilson on his tour of Europe at the end of World War I. He was with Wilson at Versailles and on the cross-country campaign for the League of Nations during which the President collapsed. In June 1920 Wilson's secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty, and Mrs. Wilson chose Seibold to conduct an interview designed to show that Wilson had recovered. Although the interview won Seibold a Pulitzer Prize, it was clear by the end of the 1920 campaign either that Seibold had exaggerated the President's recovery or that Wilson's health had subsequently deteriorated sharply.
Among Seibold's postwar topics were the workings of national prohibition and the rise of the Non-Partisan League in the agrarian Midwest; he wrote series on both subjects that were collected in book form. In the spring of 1921 Seibold moved from the World to the New York Herald, for which he wrote extensively on Japan, and later to the New York Evening Post. In his last active years he apparently did free-lance work.
Louis Seibold died of congestive heart failure at the age of eighty-one at the home of his brother George in Washington, District of Columbia.
Achievements
Louis Seibold spent most of his career with the New York World, during that time he covered many important stories, such as the eruption of Mount Pelée, coverage of the Spanish–American War, but most notably, he won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for his 1920 interview with Woodrow Wilson, which was later proved to be fabricated. While working in New York Evening Post and New York Herald he covered the topics of Japan, workings of national prohibition and the rise of the Non-Partisan League in the agrarian Midwest and collected in his famous books: Japan: Her Vast Undertakings and World Expansion, North American Review.
(Excerpt from Japan: Her Vast Undertakings and World Expan...)
Politics
Seibold was close to President Wilson, and gained a reputation as a launcher of the President's trial balloons.
Personality
Of his personal traits, not much is remembered beyond the fact that he never learned to use a typewriter, preferring to dictate his stories while puffing on a cigarette.
Quotes from others about the person
One of the publisher's aides observed, he stood "head and shoulders above the other correspondents keen, clear, accurate. "
Connections
His wife, Jennie L. Hopkins of Illinois, whom he had married on April 6, 1891, died before 1930; their only child, Martin, met an accidental death in 1918.
