On January 1st 1900, William Randolph Hearst celebrated the new century in New York City with a conflicting sense of hopefulness and a mounting feeling frustrated ambition. Hearst was well aware of the progress and accomplishments of national industry within the past twenty years. Fortune had changed rapidly for the young man kicked from Harvard College to manage one of his father’s least productive assets, The San Francisco Examiner. The newspaper was a third-rate newspaper located in tumbled down facilities that had never really intended by George Hearst to be economically competitive with its peers. Surely, the richest man in the American West, enriched with one-sixth interest in the fabled Comstock Lode and now with active silver mining and ranching interests from Utah to Mexico, had other things to do than to get ink on his hands. George had famously said of the newspaper business, “newspapers aren’t a business . . . they are a deficit.” Yet, George understood the power of publicity and enjoyed seeing his name in print, even if he had to own the newspaper that printed it. The Examiner had been little more than a broad sheet that kept his name before Californians in order to further his real ambition as a Democratic political hopeful. Unlike many of his investments during his lifetime, the Examiner had paid off. George Hearst was elected by the California legislature to become a US senator, serving from 1887 until his death in 1891. [1]
Upon taking control of The Examiner, during the first three years of his father’s senatorial term, competitor’s expected little of the supposed playboy, William Hearst, the twenty-four-year-old millionaire’s son with, apparently, nothing more than a new toy to play with. However, those that underestimated the young Hearst, soon came to realize their mistake. Finding his niche, the ball of energy and ideas that was William Hearst had with clear leadership, skillful management and armed with a bag of incentives for hard working employees, clever innovation in all facets of the business from editorial to advertising and, an understanding of the technical points of the business from lithography, print shop to newspaper boys in the street. Hearst brought together an impressive line-up of journalistic talent that included the best investigative journalists, the most popular cartoonists in the country and nationally known branded authors. Names like Thomas Nast of Harper’s Weekly, author Ambrose Bierce and Sam Moffett, editorialist and Mark Twain’s nephew. As one of Hearst’s biographers has called it, “a fantastic corps of individual talent.”[2] The result was a doubling of subscribers the first year and a 25 per cent increase year on year increase in revenue. Within the third year, Hearst had turned The Examiner into the most successful newspaper business in the country.[3]
By 1901, Hearst, now with four major newspapers, had developed a successful business approach that was tried tested and never deviated from. It had begun with his turn-around of The Examiner and continued later in New York with his competitive combat during the Spanish-American War with Joseph Pulitzer’s formidable New York World. Using his weapon, The New York Journal, another third-rate broadsheet that would only take two years to become profitable. The business model was clear across all Hearst newspapers. Stories had to be well written, not for the professional class, but for the man in the street. Bold black headlines trumpeted those stories that appealed to the demographic’s emotions. Even the most basic news stories had to be crafted to elicit mystery and intrigue. Nothing played the reader’s emotions better than the Hearst investigative serial. Hearst had learned early that stories written by his covert embedded “detective corps of journalists who had revealed corruption, criminal activity or injustice of those in government or public service were a boon to readership.[4]
This was not a ploy or a ruse for Hearst. He was well acquainted with the Tammany machine in New York politics. Regardless, there had gradually and authentically developed a populist Progressive attitude within Hearst, as his determination to run for public office as a launchpad for the highest office in the land would demonstrate. He had refined his political philosophy into popular based arguments that would appeal to “patriotism and pocketbook” of all Americans. He had taken the steps necessary to use the political machine to continue to rail against the Standard Oil and US Steel Trusts. He told everyone who would listen that it was time to abolish privilege and restore “democracy to the United States.” the career politician “swamp” of his time. In an editorial on the last day of 1899 Hearst wrote, “Government by newspaper. . . will be realized in the twentieth century,” that government by the people through popular organs” would accurately express the popular will.” [5] Hearst ended the editorial with a burst of bravado that claimed no career politician was ever as closely in touch with the people as The New York Journal. Had not The New York Journal acquired the greatest circulation of any newspaper in the world? Had not The San Francisco Examiner destroyed all competition in the West. How often had Mr. Hearst railed against the trusts of Standard Oil and US Steel? Most importantly, had not the people, through their collective voice in The New York Journal, demand that a reluctant Congress override the opinion of an indecisive President McKinley and take on a righteous crusade against Spain in Cuba 1898? Politicians, Hearst reasoned, were elected every two, four or six years. Yet, The New York Journal that had defended against plutocratic wrong, rooted out the corrupt and had in fact become the people’s voice by being “elected” by them every day, was ready to take to leadership of the coming 1902 political movement in the embodiment of the 38-year-old William Randolph Hearst.
George Hearst had said about young William years before, “I don’t understand my son. But there is one thing about my boy Bill. I have been watching him and I notice that when he wants cake, he wants cake; and he wants it now. And I notice that after a while he gets his cake.”[6] That is exactly what happened in New York City on October 2, 1902, at the Democratic Congressional Convention of the Eleventh District, where delegates meeting at the Seymour Club on Eighth Avenue unanimously nominated William Randolph Hearst for Congress. Yet, for Hearst, who was not in attendance that evening as was the custom of the time, the “cake” lay not under the Capitol Dome but at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
NOTES
[1]John K. Winkler, William Randolph Hearst: A New Appraisal (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Pub., 1955), pp.39-40.
[2]W. A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst, Biography of William Randolph Hearst (New York, NY: Scribner, 1996), pp. 41-45.
[3]Ben H. Procter, “William Randolph Hearst the Early Years, 1863-1910,” in William Randolph Hearst the Early Years, 1863-1910 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 55.
[4]Procter, p.137.
[5]John K. Winkler, W. R. Hearst: An American Phenomenon (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1928).
[6]“From Senator Hearst,” San Francisco Examiner, March 4, 1887, Morning edition, sec. Of Interest, p. 2.