The Chief

by David Nasaw

  At age twenty-four, Hearst had developed a ruthless, scheming side to him which he now presented to his father. Though he pressed the senator to ingratiate himself with the editors of the World, he confessed that in the New York circulation wars, he stood for the Herald, the World’s chief competitor, with all his force: “It is an honest and brave paper and one can respect it. It is the kind of paper I should like the Examiner to be, while the World is, because of the Jew that owns it, a nasty, unscrupulous damned sheet that I despise but which is too powerful for us to insult.” There was, regrettably, nothing unique in Will’s anti-Semitic slurs on Pulitzer and his newspaper. While he had failed to get a degree at St. Paul’s or at Harvard, he had been sufficiently socialized into upper-class Protestant society to regard Jews, in the words of Leonard Dinnerstein, as “dishonest businessmen always out for material gain ... alien upstarts trying to wedge their way into restricted social circles.” He differed from his publishing colleagues only in keeping such thoughts pretty much to himself.11

  Hearst intended to use all the leverage he had as the son of a rich and powerful senator to boost the Examiners circulation and profits. When he had difficulty getting the company that sold papers on Central Pacific trains to carry the Examiner, he asked his father to request that California’s senior senator Leland Stanford, the president of the railroad, intercede on the Examiners behalf.12 When he discovered that George’s friends and business associates were placing their advertisements in the Chronicle instead of the Examiner, he demanded that his father do something about it: “As these sons of bitches are principally indebted to you for whatever they have, I think this is the god-damndest low down business I ever heard of. I don’t apologize for the swear words for I think the circumstances excuse them. Now if you will telegraph Stump [George's business manager in San Francisco] a hot telegram to withdraw all your business from these firms ... and not to give them any more until they advertise in the Examiner and not in the Chronicle, I think we can accomplish something.”13 When he learned that the Examiner was not getting its fair share of government contracts to print laws, notices, bulletins, advertisements, and other documents, he asked his father to do what he could to remove the director of the Port of San Francisco and the California surveyor general from office, because they were both “violent enemies of the paper and positively use their influence against it to prevent our getting advertisements.”14

  Will was having the time of his life, fighting the fight of his life. At the Lampoon, he had been only the business manager, scorned or ignored by the paper's editors and writers. Now, at the Examiner, he was in the center of things, the boss, the chief. He relished his role as virtuous underdog, fighting the entrenched power of the Chronicle, which was, he hinted in a letter to his father, stealing his ideas as fast as he introduced them in his own newspaper. “The Chronicle is fighting tremendously hard, and it does not hesitate to adopt any idea we bring out....If they see anything good they grab it. This gives us a hard row to hoe, but we are hoeing it vigorously and hope to keep advancing. You must do all you can in the East to help us.” The letter was signed, “Your hard working son.”15

  As editor and publisher, Will worked from ten in the morning to well past midnight, every night, prying into every corner, learning the business from the top down. “I don't suppose I will live more than two or three weeks if this strain keeps up,” he wrote his mother, only half joking. “I don’t get to bed until about two o’clock and I wake up at about seven in the morning and can’t get to sleep again, for I must see the paper and compare it with the Chronicle. If we are the best, I can turn over and go to sleep with quiet satisfaction but if the Chronicle happens to scoop us, that lets me out of all sleep for the day. The newspaper business is no fun and I had no idea quite how hard a job I was undertaking when I entered upon the editorial management of the Examiner.”16

  As Will had warned his father a year earlier, he needed a loyal cadre of Harvard revolutionists to make his revolution in West Coast journalism.17 To back up his recruits from the Lampoon, and to add the leaven of experience and a knowledge of San Francisco, he brought in the Scotch-born and brilliantly acerbic Arthur McEwen to write editorials, made Edward Townsend, his father’s secretary, his business manager, and hired a new staff of illustrators, cartoonists, and city reporters.

  Within weeks of arriving at the Examiner, he crossed the Bay to Oakland to offer Ambrose Bierce a position writing editorials and “a column of prattle for the Sunday edition.” Bierce was, in 1887, in his early forties. After serving in the Union army in the Civil War, he had wandered west to San Francisco where he acquired a “considerable local reputation” writing bitterly caustic editorials and short comic pieces for San Francisco weeklies. He enjoyed what he was doing—especially the total freedom he had to write what he pleased—but he was short of money and had not yet achieved the wide audience or the fame he believed he deserved.

  Bierce had no idea who the young man was who appeared unannounced at his door. “His appearance, his attitude, his manner, his entire personality suggested extreme diffidence. I did not ask him in, instate him in my better chair (I had two) and inquire how we could serve each other. If my memory is not at fault I merely said: ‘Well,’ and awaited the result.

  “‘I am from the San Francisco Examiner,’ he explained in a voice like the fragrance of violets made audible, and backed a little away.

  “‘O,’ I said, ‘you come from Mr. Hearst.’

  “Then that unearthly child lifted its blue eyes and cooed; ‘I am Mr. Hearst.’”

  Though he may have looked like a child, Hearst was smart enough to know what mattered to Bierce. His offer of journalistic freedom and more money than Bierce had ever earned—or imagined he would ever earn—was quickly accepted.18

  For his managing editor, Will imported Sam Chamberlain from New York. Chamberlain, who had worked for James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the owner of the New York Herald, as an editor of Bennett’s New York Evening Telegram and his English-language paper in Paris, had many qualities to recommend him. He was a remarkable-looking man and an extraordinarily fastidious dresser, with a monocle in one eye and a fresh gardenia in his lapel. He was also a master at the sort of “stunt” journalism that had won Pulitzer's World so many new readers. His only drawback was his drinking—which was more than considerable.

  Winifred Black, one of the reporters hired by Chamberlain, remembered the Examiner as “a place full of geniuses.... Nowhere was there ever a more brilliant and more outrageous, incredible, ridiculous, glorious set of typical newspaper people than there was in that shabby old newspaper office.”19 Though her only work experience before joining the Examiner had been playing Henriette in a touring company of The Two Orphans, Black could write well, was fearless, and under the pen name Annie Laurie became one of the paper's leading “sob sisters,” Hearst's feature writers known for their ability to bring tears to the eyes of their readers.

  Black’s first big assignment, one typical of the “stunt” journalism that was instrumental in raising the Examiners circulation and lowering its reputation among its colleagues, was to investigate “rumors of queer doings at the City Receiving Hospital.” To get herself admitted, she dressed herself in old clothes, put a few drops of belladonna in her eyes, and “walked up and down Kearny Street three or four times before I could get my courage to the sticking point ... finally I staggered, stumbled, and pretended to fall....I was so frightened and excited that I was undoubtedly as white as a sheet; and the belladonna gave my eyes a sort of glazed stare.” She was carted off to the Receiving Hospital where she “found that the stories we had heard about the gross cruelty and neglect were true. When my story came out in the Examiner the next day ... the whole staff of the hospital was removed, and the Governor of the state telegraphed asking the authorities to clean up first and investigate afterwards. Everybody in all the public institutions started to watch for redheaded girls to be sure of what happened when they were around.”20


  As editor, Will was intent on remaking the editorial content of the Examiner. But he was publisher as well and in that capacity had to worry about production, distribution, and advertising. With the help of George Pancoast, a printer from Boston who became his first secretary, Hearst learned a great deal about modern printing technologies. He was convinced, as he would be for the rest of his publishing career, that for a paper to look good, it had to be printed with the finest equipment available, no matter what the cost. Soon after taking control of the Examiner, he asked his father to “see Mr. Hoe of Printing Press fame” and to make inquiries about purchasing a new “photographic instrument” and a “routing machine for fine plates.” When his father was, as usual, too busy to respond to his son’s request, Will directed Edward Townsend, George’s secretary and the Examiner’s business manager, to buy the equipment and arrange for training for the pressmen and engravers.21

  Because San Francisco, a city of no more than 350,000, had three strong morning papers, Hearst recognized that he would have to expand the Examiners circulation base by delivering papers by railway north to Sacramento and south to Santa Cruz and San Jose. To make sure everybody in the Bay Area knew what he was doing, he devoted half of his front page on May 23, 1887, to the story. The language was characteristically overblown and self-important, but it made the point Hearst wanted: that the Examiner was more than just another daily, that it intended to perform a public service for its readers. “To North!...To South!...The bond is welded which knits together in unity and brotherhood the great metropolis of the West with the country around it ... Too long ... have the people of the city and the people of the country held their aims and problems far apart. But now their elder sister, San Francisco, says to the younger boroughs and cities of the State: ‘We are one in purpose; ours is the common cause of universal progress, of the grander education, of the moral and healthful improvement of this splendid heritage, this earthly paradise—California.’”22

  Hearst’s achievement, despite the quality of the prose which described it, was substantial. As the Journalist would announce in June and again in October, the Examiner had, under Hearst’s management, become the state’s first truly metropolitan daily.23

  To attract the attention and circulation he needed to make his “revolution,” it was necessary, Hearst knew, to change the form as well as the content and distribution of his newspaper. The Examiner that he inherited in March of 1887 was, even by San Francisco standards, a decidedly uninviting newspaper. The front page was made up of dozens of stories and advertisements laid out in a nine-column unbroken wall of text. Will reduced the number of columns and the number of stories, doubled the size of the headlines, and eliminated the advertisements that had crowded the lower right-hand side of the page. Above the masthead, he inserted black-bordered endorsements and reports on the Examiners circulation. The major change was the insertion of line drawings which extended across several columns of the page. Illustrations, he had lectured his father the year before, do not simply “embellish a page, [they] attract the eye and stimulate the imagination of the lower classes and materially aid the comprehension of an unaccustomed reader and thus are of particular importance to that class of people which the Examiner claims to address.”24

  In his first few months as editor, Will changed the makeup of the paper so often that the Journalist in New York City felt compelled to comment on it. The only constant was his generous use of drawings on page one to draw the attention of potential readers. The illustrations grew in size and number. On April 22, fully half the front page was devoted to illustrated “Impressions of Life and Nature by California Artists.” Five days later, the paper printed twenty-two different line drawings to illustrate its front-page story about the wedding of Miss Hattie Crocker, Will's contemporary and the daughter of the banker and railroad magnate Charles Crocker.25

  The front page was his billboard, his advertisement for the new Examiner. On April 3, 1887, he let San Franciscans know what was in store for them by devoting all of page one and, indeed, most of that morning’s paper to the fire that had destroyed the Hotel Del Monte, the luxury resort in Monterey where Joseph Pulitzer had recently stayed and where Will had romanced Sybil Sanderson and Eleanor Calhoun. The Examiner had been scooped on the breaking story but quickly caught up with its rivals. Hearst hired a train to carry a carload of writers and artists to Monterey to report firsthand. Not only was the resulting Monterey fire edition of the Examiner —at fourteen pages—the largest yet published in San Francisco, but the size of the type, the width of the headlines, and the quality of the illustrations that took up the front page that day were truly sensational:

  HUNGRY, FRANTIC FLAMES. They Leap Madly Upon the Splendid Pleasure Palace by the Bay of Monterey, Encircling Del Monte in Their Ravenous Embrace From Pinnacle to Foundation. Leaping Higher, Higher, Higher, With Desperate Desire. Running Madly Riotous Through Cornice, Archway and Facade. Rushing in Upon the Trembling Guests with Savage Fury. Appalled and Panic-Stricken the Breathless Fugitives Gaze Upon the Scene of Terror. The Magnificent Hotel and Its Rich Adornments Now a Smoldering Heap of Ashes. The “Examiner” Sends a Special Train to Monterey to Gather Full Details of the Terrible Disaster. Arrival of the Unfortunate Victims on the Morning's Train—A History of Hotel del Monte—The Plans for Rebuilding the Celebrated Hostelry—Particulars and Supposed Origin of the Fire.26

  It was this kind of excess and excitement that Hearst intended to bring to his newspaper every day. In his Overland Monthly article, Hearst would reply to the “gentleman who had said the Examiner was a ‘sensational paper’...that he hoped it was.” Interviewed by the Journalist in December of 1888, he would say that while his long-term goal was to make the Examiner a “first-class newspaper entirely aside from its sensational features,” his immediate aim was “to get the people to look at the paper” and to do this required that “he do many things out of the usual order.”27

  Will experimented by putting different kinds of stories on his front page. In mid-May of 1887, baseball scores began to appear on the bottom of page one; by June, sports stories on baseball, boxing, horse racing from Jerome Park in New York City, and yacht racing had become regular front-page features. His goal was to attract the widest possible circulation. Newspapers in smaller cities like San Francisco, he explained in his April 1888 Overland Monthly article, did not have the luxury of addressing particular classes and still making a profit: “To have a large circulation,” a San Francisco daily “must address almost everybody ... it must have articles to suit the different classes.”28

  Hearst wanted every resident of San Francisco—baseball cranks and horse-racing enthusiasts, yachting aficionados and Sarah Bernhardt fans, recent immigrants anxious for news from abroad, businessmen concerned with international commerce, readers with a literary bent, even those with interests on the salacious side—to find something to read in his newspaper. While sending his sob sisters out on “stunts,” publishing international news cables from the New York Herald, beefing up his sports coverage, and giving Ambrose Bierce and Arthur McEwen, his chief editorial writer, forums to insult whomever they pleased, he added new higher-class literary features. In late May, he began serializing a Jules Verne story on the front page; the next month, he introduced H. Rider Haggard’s novel Allan Quatermain. He had specifically directed Townsend to pay whatever he had to get the Quatermain story because, as he explained, Haggard was “enormously popular among all classes.”29

  To the dismay of his critics, and some of his own writers, including Arthur McEwen, Hearst also published more than his share of salacious frontpage articles about naked ladies and adulterers. More titillating material was found on the inside pages where it could be accompanied by racy drawings of women in various states of undress, some of them rather bold, like the half-dozen illustrations of ballerinas in tights and tutus which accompanied “The Poetry of Motion. A History of the Ballet From the Earliest Times. The Goddesses of Dance,” and the drawings of women frolicking in
bathing suits which illustrated the article which asked, “Shall We CoBathe? An Englishman Says the Sexes Must Not Mingle in the Surf. Some Pastors Say So Too. Splashes On the Subject From a Number of Well-Known Clergymen.”30

  It did not take long for Hearst to find the formula he was looking for. Within weeks of taking over the paper, he began to run crime stories on his front pages, and he continued to add them. The pre-Hearst 1880 Examiner had devoted about 10 percent of its news space to crime stories; the Will Hearst version gave more space, 24 percent, to crime than to any other news topic. But it was not simply the quantity of the crime coverage that marked the new Examiner; it was the quality and narrative form of the reporting.31

  In the grand tradition of James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald, which had exploited the 1836 murder of the prostitute Helen Jewett to the point where the future lawyer George Templeton Strong, then a Columbia University sophomore, would record in his diary that everyone was talking about the case, Hearst's reporters focused attention on selected incidents of violent crime by treating them as morality plays and examining them from every conceivable angle.32