#‘he was so cruel to his children. unspeakably cruel.’ so true james mcgrath morris

[transitofmercury]

Sometimes I see posts about how underused the rest of Pulitzer’s family is in the Newsies fandom considering that they’re also Katherine’s family and I know way too much about the Pulitzer family so when I see people start chiming in with like sorta incorrect information in the reblogs it (ridiculously) annoys me. I should probably just make a proper information post at this point.

Like for example, Pulitzer didn’t really favour his sons all that much? Beyond the ways sons were just inherently favoured in inheritance back then, at least. I’m not saying he was some kind of massive proto-feminist but this idea of him as this simplistic stereotype of a patriarchal 19th century father that I see is also pretty wrong. Edith and Constance were kind of just ignored but his favourite child was actually his eldest daughter, Lucille, so it wasn’t like he just generally didn’t care about his daughters. And she seems to have been his favourite because she was capable of meeting the very high expectations he had for all of his children, which the others just couldn’t really manage. That didn’t stop him from being horrible to her, though - there’s this anecdote about her having this minor surgery and everyone being worried about her and he gets angry that they’re paying more attention to her than to him. I also don’t think he would’ve opposed Lucille going onto higher education, if she lived long enough and wanted to, considering he created a scholarship for young women in her name after she died. Also, I think there’s reasonable evidence that his least favourite kid was his middle son, Joseph II.

I’m veering into making an actual information post at this point and I don’t have time to do that right now, but if I had to describe the Pulitzer family to a person who doesn’t know much about them in a single sentence? The original Succession in a pretty literal sense.