No sum too small
Pulitzer’s promise in 1885 was simple: give anything — a nickel, a dime, sixty cents — and your name would be printed in The World. More than 120,000 people took him up on it. Join the list.
What the real lists looked like
Every name, every day
The World ran its pedestal fund lists day after day, printing donors’ names and often the notes that came with their money. Wikipedia’s account of the campaign lists gifts such as 60 cents from “a young girl alone in the world”, five cents from an office boy, a dollar from children who had saved it for the circus, and $1.35 from a kindergarten class in Davenport, Iowa.
Five months, $102,000
Pulitzer relaunched the drive on March 16, 1885. By August 11 it had reached about $102,000 from roughly 120,000 donors — and around 80 percent of the money came in sums under one dollar. That’s around $3.6 million in today’s money.
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