The Chief
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There was no answer from his father.
In February of 1885, the Harvard faculty, noting that Will had still not made up the deficiencies in his course work, voted to keep him on probation until the end of the year. Will responded, not by doing any more schoolwork, but by taking on a major role as Pretzel, the German valet in the Hasty Pudding’s spring production of “Joan of Arc, or the Old Maid of New Orleans.”21
In mid-March, still having heard nothing from his father, he sent him a telegram, in care of Alfred A. Wheeler, George Hearst’s chief assistant, asking for permission to leave Harvard a year early—as his mother had earlier suggested—to help out at the Examiner. Will did not write his father directly because he had learned, from bitter experience, that such requests disappeared unanswered. Wheeler, as Will had expected, got an immediate answer: “Gave your father yesterday the ... telegram you had sent expressing a desire to come here and ‘go to work.’ I asked him what he replied and he said ‘Tell him to stand in like a man and stick to his studies to the end.’” Wheeler could not help but add that he agreed with George entirely. He too urged Will to stay at Harvard “for your own sake, if not to gratify the hopes and wishes which you know are dearest to your mother’s heart....I am perfectly aware how entirely within your powers the attainment of that degree is. If there had been any fair division of your time between amusement and study, I am certain nobody at Harvard would have found the taking of his degree an easier matter than yourself.”22
On March 31, the Harvard faculty voted that “Hearst, Junior ... be informed that probation will be closed at the end of the year, unless the Faculty expressly vote otherwise.”23 The next day, Will left Cambridge with sixty members of the Hasty Pudding Club to spend his Easter break in New York City performing “Joan of Arc” at the University Club. Phoebe was concerned with the way he looked and wrote him so from her New York hotel the day after he returned to Cambridge. There was no longer any anger in her voice. She was transformed back into the doting mother worrying herself sick about her boy:
“My darling boy, I am so very lonely since you went away and my thoughts are constantly with you. I hope you can write to me tomorrow if only a few lines.... I hope you had a comfortable journey and began work in earnest and on time the following morning.” She had sent his cutaway coat to the tailors to have a button put on and would forward it with his laundry as soon as it was ready. “If you come down again soon have your clothes packed in time to get in night dress, etc., that you really need. Be sure to send ‘Charley’ [his pet alligator, who had died] to be embalmed. He will decay and cause illness if left in the house. Don’t fail to see Dr. Oliver [Will’s physician and a prominent member of the Cambridge community] and tell him the whole history of our troubles. Let me know about your bills and if you come down in two weeks you shall have the money, or if not it shall be sent. I keep feeling anxious about how badly you were looking. You were out every night and nearly all night too, before you came here and then up late while here. Do take care of your health. Life is not worth living if one has ill health and there is time enough to ‘have fun’ and it will be more fun if you take it gradually. This is not a lecture dear, only a loving reminder that I am anxious for you to have all that is best in life, in the best way.”24
Although her letter to Will was without recrimination, Phoebe was becoming increasingly vexed by the men in her life. As she wrote Janet Peck, Orrin Peck’s sister and one of her confidantes, she wanted desperately “to pack up and go over to Munich and stay at least one year, though there does not seem to be much prospect of my being able to go.... After Will finishes college in June ’86, it may be that we can take a trip. This will depend upon circumstances.” To protect herself from the realization that her boy was now beyond her control, she emphasized his devotion to his mother: “Will comes down every two weeks and stays from Saturday morning until Monday morning. The Dean of the College gives him permission to do this. He spent his Easter vacation here and enjoyed it very much and it was a comfort to have him with me for he is more thoughtful than ever before in his life.”25
What Phoebe refused to admit to her friend was her fear that her son, like his father before him, had been swallowed up by a male culture defined by deceit, bad habits, and poor manners. George had promised but failed to join her in New York. Will, after agreeing to celebrate his birthday with her in New York, had not only failed to show up, but had not even had the decency to telegram her not to expect him. Chastised for his lack of consideration of the woman who loved him most in this world, he jokingly spun out a convoluted story about closed telegraph offices and a thesis of 150 pages and reassured her that she had no cause to worry about his missing his birthday celebration: “The boys who are thoroughly alive to the importance of this occasion are going to give me a small dinner at the club and I assure you that I will not get ‘full’ nor will I in any other way injure my constitution, damage my reputation, or stain my immaculate record.”26
His junior year ended almost as it had begun. While he passed Forensics with a 74%, Natural History 8 with a 64%, and made up his sophomore themes, he failed Natural History 18 with a 40% and did not sit for his final examinations in Political Economy 3, History 13, or Chemistry 1.27
At term’s end, Will left Cambridge to spend the summer in San Francisco. In late August, he received a letter from J. Rathbone, a classmate, who had heard a rumor that he had been expelled and wanted him to know that “little tears” had been shed on his behalf. Tongue in cheek, Rathbone wrote of his dismay “that the college has failed to appreciate your ability to guide the youths in the college to a higher standard—morally and otherwise. If any such action has been taken it is a dear shame and I should be most proud and happy to say as much to that August body of blockheads.”28
Will returned to Cambridge in the fall, though he knew that he would not be permitted to register. In early October, he reported tersely to his parents in San Francisco that he had been “requested not to return. Saw the President, said if I went to a good climate and studied with a competent instructor, I should probably be allowed to pass my examinations in June. Shall I engage instructor? What salary are you willing to pay?”29
Phoebe responded by return telegram. “Have the Faculty met and made final decision?” She already knew the answer, as the rest of her telegram made clear. “Can you study in New York or where best to go? Willing to pay salary that is right for best instruction. Shall I go east?”30
Phoebe and George did what they could to get their son back in Harvard’s good graces. George packed and shipped—at great expense—a four-hundred-pound gift box of mining specimens for Harvard’s chemistry laboratory. Phoebe contacted Dr. Oliver, who on the Hearsts’ behalf met with the Dean. “The Faculty wish to get William away from this class as they think his influence is bad,” Oliver reported after his meeting. “The Dean says he was repeatedly warned and told he must do differently but the warning was without effect. He did not consider William a ‘mauvais sujih,’ [a bad lot] but a young man who was heedless, thoughtless in certain ways and thoroughly indifferent to his college studies and consequently a bad example to his class-mates.” Dr. Oliver reassured Phoebe, as best he could, that the Dean thought Will to be “morally all right.” He was being expelled for academic failures exacerbated by “heedlessness.” The Dean suggested that Will take a leave of absence and, if the president and the faculty agreed, return to Harvard a year later and graduate in 1887.31
Phoebe, who had returned to a rented house in San Francisco for the summer and early fall, packed her bags immediately and departed for New York City. Her initial interview with Will confirmed her suspicions that he had been unfairly picked on. She was outraged, she wrote George, to find out that when their boy “went to see the Dean, he was obliged to wait until that stern individual was ready to look up and speak to him. The Dean then said, ‘You here again...’ He would not give Will any encouragement and evidently wanted to get rid of him.” Fortunately, President Eliot
was “very kind” and suggested to Will that he leave Cambridge for “New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore and secure a competent Tutor and prepare for the final examinations next June.”
Phoebe was prepared to let Will stay in Cambridge to work with a tutor, but warned George that he must cooperate by cutting off the boy’s magnificent allowance:
If he continues to spend too much money and neglect study it will not be my fault and you can take the blame upon yourself. I will not be held responsible when you go on giving him the means to do just as he pleases....If he is to have $250 per month, I can tell you that he will not study much....It is only throwing temptation in his way, for he will come to New York and meet the fellows and have dinners and go on in a way that will surely bring us sorrow. He informed me today that he should come here for the short vacation at Thanksgiving and the long one during the holidays. I remarked that he had been enjoying one long vacation all of his life.... I am willing to do anything that may be best for Will but it is discouraging to have him utterly indifferent and thinking only of his own pleasures.32
Phoebe could not quite make up her mind whether her boy was an innocent led astray by his Harvard companions or a ringleader in their escapades. Whatever the case, she determined to separate him from the “boys” who kept him from his studies. “The fellows will not let him alone,” she complained to George in late October. She decided that the only way to get him to study was to remove him from Cambridge to New York because “there are no college men here and not likely to be for some time.”
Will agreed to do as she requested and moved into Phoebe’s suite at the Brunswick:
The last three days he has done splendidly. At ten o’clock goes to bed, gets up promptly at eight, exercises with dumb bells for half an hour, breakfasts at nine, goes out to walk, comes in and commences to study at ten. We lunch alone, he goes out and walks for another hour, then studies until six. In the evening we both go out for a short walk or “drive.” Then read or write until ten ... We have agreed to go to the theatre only on Saturday evenings ... If I can possibly induce him to continue in this way, he will do twice the work that would be done at College and he will improve in health.33
In November, Phoebe traveled to Cambridge to see President Charles Eliot who was “extremely kind and agreeable, asked numerous questions and made some suggestions.” Even with his dismal academic performance, Harvard was still not ready to send Will Hearst away. She returned to New York, filled with hope once again, only to have it dashed when Will, after insisting that he be allowed to bring three of his Harvard friends to New York City for the horse show, spent five full days carousing with them instead of studying. “During that time,” she wrote George in San Francisco, “he spent two hundred dollars and the bills for their rooms and restaurant charges were sent to me ... It was simply outrageous ... For a day or two after they left Will could not settle down to do much and he looked badly. Late hours and dissipation affect him. Of course I don’t know how much he drank, but I do know he was not intoxicated at all, nor even funny as they call it, but even the amount he must have drank did him no good. Theatres, horse show, late suppers and women, consumed the two hundred dollars quickly.”34
Persuaded that Will would never be able to get past the distractions of New York nightlife, Phoebe took him to Baltimore to look for lodgings, then to Washington, D.C., where they rented a house and waited for George to join them. Senator John Miller, who had been elected to the Senate in 1884 by the Republican majority in the California state senate, was dying. Since vacant seats were filled by the governor, who was a Democrat, it was widely believed that George Hearst would be named to replace him. Will wrote his father at some length, forgetting for the moment that he had just been expelled from Harvard:
We have decided to spend the winter in Washington, not only because the climate there is delightful and very conducive to mental exertion, but because I will have there opportunities of hearing the debates in Congress, familiarizing myself with legislative methods of procedure, and thus at once assisting my present college studies and preparing the way for a brilliant entree into the political arena, some time in the future. My three ambitions, as you know, are law, politics and journalism, and under favorable circumstances it might be possible to combine all three. And so while you are serving your country from the Senator’s bench, the pride and support of your declining years will be expanding himself so as to be able to wear gracefully the mantle that will one day fall upon him, and not be completely hidden by its ample folds. In fact, we may one day read in the papers that “The Honorable Geo. Hearst, having served twelve years as Senator of the United States is about to retire from public life. The loss of such an ardent advocate of their rights will be greatly deplored by the people throughout the Union, but they will be partially compensated by the knowledge that his son has just been elected to Congress and has devoted himself to the cause which the elder Hearst has so nobly upheld.”
To prepare for this eventuality, Will had been “on the lookout for a suitable residence for the Senator and Congressman that are to be.” The house he had chosen was especially desirable because it was both imposing and unassuming:
Imposing, that it may seem to appreciate the importance of its position in sheltering two such immortals, and unassuming as if it were at the same [time] sensible of the views of the occupants towards the people.... Moreover, it possesses still another attraction. It is surrounded on all sides by land belonging to us and this gives the impression that we might have built a larger house had we so desired but that with true democratic humility we had limited ourselves to the existing modest structure.35
Though he was ostensibly prepping to take final examinations at Harvard, Will was in fact spending his days—his evenings were devoted to the theater—studying the newspaper industry, in preparation for his return to San Francisco to take over his father’s newspaper. His text was Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.
Pulitzer, a Hungarian immigrant, had come to the United States during the Civil War, volunteered for the Union Army, served for a year, then gone to St. Louis, where he became a reporter for Carl Schurz’s German-language daily, the Westliche Post. He bought the St. Louis Evening Post at a bankruptcy auction in 1878 and merged it with the Dispatch. By 1881, the paper was the leading evening paper in St. Louis and was turning a healthy profit. But Pulitzer, still only in his middle thirties, was restless. His child, Ralph, suffered from bad asthma; his wife was regularly snubbed by the city’s elite because her husband’s newspaper was too vulgar and too radical; and Pulitzer himself suffered from nervous exhaustion and failing eyesight. When, in 1882, his brilliant managing editor and chief editorial writer, John Cockerill, shot and killed Alonzo Slayback, a local attorney with whom the paper had been trading insults, Pulitzer had had enough. Though Cockerill was never indicted for murder—he claimed that he had shot Slayback in self-defense—the scandal had a disastrous effect on the newspaper, which lost not only its editor, but a good number of subscribers.36
Pulitzer had long dreamed of leaving St. Louis and moving to New York where he could “speak to a nation” instead of a Midwest city. In 1883, while Hearst was in his freshman year at Harvard, Pulitzer bought the New York World from financier Jay Gould for $346,000, hardly a bargain for a paper with a circulation of about 11,000. Pulitzer knew what he was doing. New York City had a huge and growing working-class and immigrant population which was virtually ignored by the city’s other dailies. Pulitzer intended to put out a morning newspaper for them.
As a successful immigrant entrepreneur who had worked his way up the social ladder, Pulitzer understood, as perhaps no other publisher of daily papers, that working people wanted to be educated and entertained, not condescended to or uplifted. With more and more men and women born into the working classes now moving into white-collar positions, class boundaries were less distinct than they had ever been, especially in cities like New York (and San Francisco) where most wage earners did not work in lar
ge factories.
To draw readers from both sides of the line that separated white and blue collar work, to appeal to working people who identified with their class and those who aspired to climb out of it, Pulitzer adopted the same strategies as other cultural entrepreneurs. He established an urban institution which, like the department store, the vaudeville theater, and the amusement park, transcended traditional categories of class, ethnicity, occupation, and neighborhood to appeal to an inclusive, rather than an exclusive urban population. His newspaper had no obvious class markings; it was meant to be read by urban residents on both sides of the middle-class divide.
There was at the time no such paper in the city. The Sun had become much too respectable and long-winded, even dull; the Daily News, a Tammany penny paper not to be confused with the 1920s tabloid was too plebeian; the Tribune was too conservative and too closely associated with the Republican party; the Herald, at three cents, was priced too high for daily consumption; the Times and Evening Post were impossibly dull.