The Chief

by David Nasaw

  What Will wanted was an allowance large enough to allow him to live like a gentleman. He had no intention of remaining idle forever, but neither did he plan on having to work for a living. His father had already accumulated more money than he or Phoebe or Will could ever spend. In signaling to his father that he might be interested in turning his time to politics, Will was making a safe bet for the future. Following a not uncommon career trajectory in the West, George Hearst had two years earlier returned from the digging fields to devote his fortune and remaining years to politics. It was not unreasonable to believe that he would welcome and support his son should he decide to follow in his footsteps.

  Although he had been away from politics for almost a decade and a half, George Hearst had forgotten nothing. To curry the favor of Democratic leaders whose support he needed to win the party’s nomination for governor or senator, George Hearst in October of 1880 bought the failing Evening Examiner, the only Democratic paper in San Francisco, and converted it into a morning paper. In San Francisco, as in almost every other American city in the late nineteenth century, the key to winning elections was getting out the vote. Most voters knew well before the election whom they were going to vote for—if, that is, they were going to vote. It was the task of the machines—from the boss on top to the local precinct and ward captains—to get them to the polls. To accomplish this, they needed the assistance of a daily newspaper to keep the party’s faithful informed of the candidate’s comings and goings, of upcoming rallies, of the issues, such as they were, and to remind them of the paramount importance of casting their votes.

  With a newspaper of his own—and plenty of money to throw around to the local Democratic clubs—George Hearst became a major political power. Had he been better educated or more literate, he might have taken charge of the Examiner himself, turning it into a twelve-month-a-year campaign organ for himself and his party. Instead he appointed his trusted associate and private attorney Clarence Greathouse as editor.

  The Examiner had been losing money for some time. Though Greathouse was able to build its circulation, he could not rescue it financially. When Phoebe complained that the money could be better spent elsewhere, George assured her that the paper would, in time, turn a profit: “I think the Examiner will be good property after this [and we] will get all of the patranige, [sic] so you see we have some good luck. Some people are very jelous [sic] and some talk of starting another democratic paper. I say go ahead, they will soon go. It can’t be done by talk, as we know, and but few will put up the coin. I hope the Boy will be able, as I think he will, to take charge of the paper soon after he leaves college, as it will give him more [power] than anything else.”2

  While it is clear from this letter—and from several others—that George Hearst intended or rather hoped that his son would take over the Examiner, Will Hearst would, in the years to come, insist that his decision to become a publisher had been met by adamant opposition from his father. Will declined to give his father or anyone else credit for his entrance into newspaper publishing because doing so would have diminished his portrait of himself as a self-made man. Like other children of great men, Hearst both fed off and disowned his inheritance.3

  Phoebe tried to dissuade her husband from running for office again. He would, she feared, not only make a fool of himself on the campaign stump, but impoverish the family by spending money to buy votes. As usual, Will sided with his mother and joined her in ridiculing George’s political ambitions. He agreed that George Hearst had no business wasting the family fortune on futile attempts to buy himself a senate seat. While Will admitted that he too had extravagant tastes, they were not, he wrote his mother, “half as costly nor yet as exasperating as Senatorial aspirations. A terrible disease this, and I’m told it runs in the family. Every man, in this world, has his specialty, and when a man is fortunate enough to have found it, he is foolish beyond measure to leave it for something else.... Why my father should abandon the nag which has carried him faithfully for so many years to mount the fickle animal that has thrown him once is more than I can understand. It is more than folly. It is tempting providence. If Thackeray had attempted politics his name would have been buried beneath his ashes. If Jay Gould had fostered a mania for literature, the acme of his success would probably have been a serial story in the Boys and Girls weekly.”4

  Though Will did as his mother asked and tried to talk George out of running for office, he was not entirely displeased when his father overrode his and Phoebe’s opposition. Father and son had in common a love of politics, unswerving loyalty to the Democratic party, and undying hostility to the unholy alliance of the Republicans and the railroad magnates. They were probably never closer than in the fall of 1884, when, at opposite ends of the continent, they campaigned for Grover Cleveland for the presidency.

  Just as George Hearst, with his own newspaper boosting his candidacy, was the most visible Democrat in San Francisco in the fall of 1884, so was his son, with an all but unlimited budget and a flair for the spectacular, the most recognizable Democrat at Harvard. As only 28 of the more than 200 members of Hearst’s Harvard class identified themselves as Democrats, it was almost inevitable that Will would assume a leadership role on campus. “I am campaigning very hard, and hope to carry Massachusetts for Cleveland,” he reported gleefully to his mother. “We have organized a club of forty members which includes all the democratic dudes in college and, for a fact, most of the swells are for Cleveland.... Tell pa that a few hundred to push the campaign would come in very handy.”5

  His efforts—and his father’s money—resulted in his first political triumph: a mammoth flag raising, bonfire, and parade in the center of Harvard Yard. “At eight o’clock, in response to the murmurs of the mob,” he wrote to his parents, the day after the rally, “the orator of the evening was introduced and made a few remarks on Mr. Cleveland’s honesty and ability, holding him up in contrast to Mr. Blaine [the Republican nominee]. He finished his speech by proposing three cheers for Grover and as the crowd howled in response, the band played, rockets shot up into the night and the glorious flag unfurled and waved acknowledgment.... Finally as the evening was drawing to a close a gentleman in the crowd mounted the rostrum and said that it gave him great pleasure to note the interest taken in Cleveland’s election by the young men as well as the old. That here was an example where Papa Hearst in one end of the continent and Sonny Hearst at the other were both working in the same great cause. He then proposed three cheers for Father and Son and I was quite overcome and ran away and hid so that I wouldn’t have to make a speech and this ended the flag raising.”6

  These were heady and expensive times for young Will. He had not only been taken into yet another new club, for which, he hinted, he might need a raise in his allowance “for the better enjoyment of its privileges,” but had spent a great deal of money on the Cleveland campaign and bet even more on its outcome. “If Cleveland is elected,” he wrote his mother, “I shall be a millionaire, if not I shall be a pauper.”7

  Cleveland was elected in November of 1884, but unfortunately for George Hearst California had gone Republican, which meant that a Republican would be returned to Washington. (The state legislatures, not the voters, elected their state’s senators in 1884.) Will was disappointed for his father and for himself. Directly contradicting the information he had earlier given his mother, he now instructed her to “tell papa that his political information isn’t reliable and that I have lost almost as much money on the California election as I won on the general result. And now with my customary plea. Give me one penny for bread. This is to say send me a few dollars to defray the expenses of a club life and a political campaign.”8

  Despite the jocular tone of his correspondence, Will’s interest in politics was serious. A sophomore theme written after the election displayed a grasp of national politics remarkable for a college student. Having grown up in California politics where the Republican party was owned by the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Democrats were f
or sale to his own father, Hearst had no illusions about the way political parties worked. In his sophomore theme, which was not turned in until late in the first semester of his junior year, he argued that the 1884 presidential election in which Republican Mugwumps had deserted the party rather than support James G. Blaine, a candidate they believed hopelessly corrupt, demonstrated that Independents now held “the balance of power [because] they represent the unselfish politicians of the country and are the party averse to corruption and fraud. As a consequence both parties will have to cater to the wishes of the Independents, that is to say to the wishes of the educated unprejudiced nonpartisan element of politics.” At age twenty-one, young Will was already laying out the political route he would travel twenty years later, when he ran for office on an Independent line.9

  In later years, Hearst explained in a signed article in his newspapers that he had not been asked to leave Harvard “because he was a dumb cluck ... That was only part of the reason. The rest of the reason was politics.” The Cleveland rally he had organized in the Yard had, he claimed, been so loud, so boisterous, so exuberant, and so conspicuous an occasion that “everyone saw it and heard it—and everybody complained about it. We had a great banner stretched across the street in front of Mrs. Buckman’s boarding house, where your college editor lived ... We had fireworks. The house was fired—just a little, not much; and your columnist was fired—much. There was no apparent appreciation of patriots in Harvard.”

  Cora Older, Hearst’s handpicked biographer, offered a parallel but slightly more believable version of the events leading up to his expulsion. According to Older, Will was not expelled after the Cleveland rally, but “rusticated,” or temporarily suspended. When his suspension ended, however, “he returned to Harvard the same rollicking youth. Again he majored in jokes, pranks and sociability. He was the leader of a group bent on converting Harvard into a play world. He himself seldom drank even beer, but his friends were Harvard’s merriest roysterers. More and more were their misdemeanors held to be a violation of discipline and order.” One of those pranks, which Older didn’t mention but others did, involved the delivery of customized chamber pots to his professors, each of them elaborately embossed on the inside bottom with the name of the recipient.10

  Though the stories of Hearst’s pranks at Harvard were widely reported and may, indeed, have had some truth to them, there is no evidence that Will was expelled from Harvard because of his practical jokes. On the contrary, the Harvard records indicate that he was placed on academic probation in November of his sophomore year, a full twelve months before the Cleveland rally. His problem at Harvard was not his pranks, but his failure to pay attention to his course work. His grades fell off badly in his second year. His highest mark was a 70% in Chemistry 2. He received a 61% in Rhetoric, a 66% in Political Economy 1, a mid-year grade of 57% in History, and a 60% in Professor Charles Eliot Norton’s Fine Arts course. In July, his transcript noted that he had been placed on probation for failing to “satisfactorily ... perform his work in Themes” and being absent from his Political Economy 4 examination.11

  With the headstrong confidence that would see him through future crises, Hearst returned to Harvard in the fall of 1884. Instead of lightening his course load or cutting back on his extracurricular activities, he enrolled in six courses and organized a “club” to campaign for the Democrats in the November elections. “I am so busy and am working so hard,” he wrote his mother, “that my hair is all falling out and my head is becoming as bumpy as an old potato.”12

  Phoebe knew better. In reply to Will’s letter about “working so hard,” she informed him that she had had a visit from Harold Wheeler, a family friend and president of the Harvard Club of San Francisco: “He kindly remarked that you had what was called an incentive to study this year. Of course I knew he meant that you must work or be suspended and I am very much afraid it will be the latter. You cannot realize my extreme anxiety about you. It would almost kill me if you should not go through college in a creditable manner.”13

  While Will showed no concern about his future at Harvard, Phoebe was panicked. She put the family mansion on the market and hired a suite of rooms at the Brunswick Hotel in Madison Square in New York City. Although she believed she could better supervise Will’s activities from the East Coast, her move to New York backfired. Instead of spending his weekends and vacations making up the course work he owed, Will now had a built-in excuse to leave Cambridge to visit his mother in New York.14 Either he believed that Harvard would never ask him to leave or he had decided it wasn’t worth his trouble to stay. He had, it appears, made up his mind to move to San Francisco and take over the Examiner for his father. Earlier that spring, he had asked his mother to show “Papa” the letter he had written about his success at the Lampoon “and tell him just to wait till Gene [Lent] and I get hold of the old Examiner and we’ll boom her in the same way—she needs it.”15

  Though George was not about to let his son give up on Harvard—he abhorred quitters—he was more anxious than ever to secure Will’s help on the Examiner. In a particularly self-pitying letter to Phoebe, he complained that with his boy away at college and his wife in New York, he was “quite lonsam at all times.... What is a home without a wife and baby?...At all events I want to see the Boy very much. So anxious for him to get through. The Examiner is about the hardest thing of all to no [sic] what to do with or how to do it.... Can you find out about the newspaper men?” The Examiner was in need of “a man that understands the printing business from the bottom up and all the way through, so as to be able to take full charge of the paper.... We know such a man is hard to get.... Perhaps Will can attend to it?”16

  With his father’s encouragement, Will became unpaid consultant and editor-in-waiting for the Examiner. In November of 1884, he wrote his mother that he had “made the preliminary arrangements with E. L. Thayer, President of, and chief contributor to, the Harvard Lampoon to send the Examiner a weekly letter during a year’s trip to Europe beginning next summer. Thayer, although very young, is already noted for his letters, some of which have appeared in the New York Times. He is willing to write for us at the rate of $10 a column. He is very witty in a quiet way and makes his letters very entertaining.”17 Will was already a good judge of talent. When, only a few years later, he took over the Examiner, one of his first hires was his friend “Phinny” Thayer. Though ill health forced Thayer to resign from his staff position at the Examiner, he continued to send in a weekly humor column. He is remembered today for his poem “Casey at the Bat,” which was first published in the San Francisco Examiner.

  Though Will should have been studying for his upcoming examinations and making up his incompletes, he spent the Christmas holidays of his junior year in New York, interviewing potential editors for the Examiner. Phoebe was so delighted by the interest and the “anxiety” her boy exhibited in his new task that she let him stay an extra three days instead of returning to Cambridge to catch up on his course work. “He says,” Phoebe reported to George, “it seems dreadful to stay another year in college when he might be at work doing something to help you along with all the business you have.”18

  From New York, Will wrote a long letter to his father urging him to hire Ballard Smith, who had been the assistant managing editor at the New York Herald before moving to Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, where he was managing editor. “The most striking objection to Mr. Ballard Smith is that he is very high priced. But I am convinced and I think you are that the paper must be built up and that cheap labor has been entirely ineffectual. The paper requires a head that has ability, enterprise and experience—that has all three. Let one of these factors be absent and the thing will score another failure. Naturally such a man commands a high salary and you must reconcile yourself, either to paying it or giving up the paper.... You could not even sell the paper at present so I think this is the only thing to be done. I will give you the benefit of my large head and great experience on this subject—and not charge you
a cent. Mr. Ballard Smith will state his terms and I would say, ‘Mr. Smith, I guarantee you this amount and promise you a certain interest in the paper in case you make it a glittering success. You are to have entire control of the paper, Mr. Smith, with the privilege of employing whomever you please.’”

  As if he were the self-made millionaire and George the twenty-year-old who had never worked a day in his life, Will guaranteed his father that if his advice were followed, the newspaper would “in one year ... be paying expenses. By that time I will be out of college and if I have succeeded in developing any talent for writing, I will take a minor position in the office and endeavor to learn the business.” Will closed his letter by requesting that his father keep him informed on the future of the Examiner. “I shall expect an answer to all these questions for I feel that I ought to know a little of your business by the time I get out of college which is not now far off.”19

  When three and a half weeks had passed without any response to his long list of suggestions for improving the Examiner, Will wrote again. Though his tone was softened a bit by the self-deprecating style he had begun to cultivate, it is difficult not to discern his bitterness at being ignored by his father. “I wrote you not long ago and inserted in my letter a mild request for an answer, but the answer never came. I stated a few business points that I thought might be of interest and gave you some ideas on the way to conduct your private affairs and yet you did not respond. Will you kindly take some slight notice of your only son? Will you be so good as to answer his letters and let him know that you at least appreciate his kindness in allowing you to draw upon his large experience and gigantic intellect?” Will closed his letter by asking again that he be given at once, as part of his inheritance, an income-producing property: “I shall probably graduate from college a mild inoffensive creature with a large hole in my pocket and it would be a great relief to me to know that I was possessed of something that will not slip through and leave me alone in a cold cold world. Please commit the following to memory and take one every night before going to bed.... Procure some kind of a ranch, mine, line of steam ships or something that Jack [Follansbee] and I can go into.”20