The Chief
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Phoebe was outraged when Will asked her for the money required to buy a Chicago daily. “I have been feeling greatly depressed and did not feel like writing,” she confided to Orrin Peck while she was traveling in Europe in May of 1899:
Will is insisting upon buying a paper in Chicago. Says he will come over to see me if I do not go home very soon. It is impossible for me to throw away more money in any way for the simple reason that he has already absorbed almost all. In a few months there will actually be no money and we must then sell anything that can be sold to keep on. It is madness. I never know when or how we will break out into some additional expensive scheme. I cannot tell you how distressed I feel about the heavy monthly loss on the Journal and then to contemplate starting another nightmare is a hopeless situation. I have written and telegraphed that no argument can induce me to commit such a folly as that of starting another newspaper.17
Phoebe was really concerned that her son was following in the irresponsible footsteps of his father and investing money in new ventures before the old ones paid out. It took almost as much money to start up a newspaper as it did to dig a new mine. Although Will was confident, as George Hearst had been, that each of his investments would eventually pay off, Phoebe was not so sure. She had spent much of her marriage worrying about her husband’s finances. She did not want to spend her old age worrying about her son’s.
This time around, not even Orrin Peck was ready to defend his friend’s actions. “I cannot understand Will’s demand,” he wrote Phoebe in response to her letter. “As you say, it is madness. He doubtless wishes to control the press of the U.S. That’s alright but the main thing is to get the present established Journal under control. It’s like dashing along a mad road with runaway horses and trying to harness in another. I see the situation is most desperate and makes one simply ill.”18
Smart enough to recognize defeat when it came, Hearst didn’t push his request—for the time being. When he asked again, a year later, the circumstances would be such that Phoebe would be unable to refuse a second time.
In November of 1899, Hearst set off on another of his grand tours, this time of Europe and Egypt, with Millicent and Anita Willson, chaperoned by their parents, as part of the entourage. George Willson, the former vaudeville hoofer, was now on the Hearst payroll, managing benefit performances to raise money for a Journal monument to the Maine. On leaving Europe in mid-March, Hearst reported to his mother that his vacation had been a great success. He was again “happy and well. My nervousness is gone, my stomach is getting into good condition, I sleep well and life is worth living again.... I shall be home soon now and ready to work hard once more.”19
When he returned to the States in April 1900, he was contacted by Bryan’s allies on the Democratic National Committee. As newspapers were not just the principal, but practically the only, effective campaign medium, Bryan and the Democrats were at an enormous disadvantage in the Middle West, where almost all of the big-city dailies were owned by Republicans. To reduce the odds against them, they asked Hearst to start up a daily newspaper in Chicago. They further asked him to serve as president of the National Association of Democratic Clubs, in which role they hoped he would produce and distribute campaign literature. There was no mention of the vice-presidential nomination nor would there ever be.
The invitation to establish a Chicago paper was a godsend, as it provided Hearst with a reason to petition his mother again for start-up funds, this time in the context of loyalty to his, her, and Senator George Hearst’s party. With Phoebe in accord, he accepted the party’s assignments, though not without a bit of strategic complaining.
“The undertaking is big and the prospect of another period of work and strain is not pleasant to contemplate,” he telegrammed Bryan on May 19, 1900. “Still I am most anxious to please you and to be of service to the party. I would like to know how important you consider such a paper, what real benefit to the party it would be. If the good accomplished would compensate for effort and expense, etc. These things being determined I suppose the satisfaction of being of some value would lead me to disregard all other considerations.”20
In May, Hearst invaded Chicago with his trusted associates from New York. S. S. Carvalho found quarters for the new paper in the aging but enormous building on Madison Street that had housed the Steuben County Wine Company; Arthur Brisbane arrived to edit the first issue; Andrew Lawrence, who had been with Hearst since San Francisco, was put in charge of the business and circulation departments. In six weeks' time, Hearst's team had set up an editorial office and a printing plant and hired a full staff of editors, reporters, typographers, compositors, and illustrators. The most difficult task they faced was getting the city’s distributors, dealers, and newsboys to sell the new daily on the street. Most had ties to the Chicago Tribune and were loath to carry a competitor. Only with the assistance of the Annenberg brothers, Max and Moses, who were hired away from the Chicago Tribune, and the small army of thugs they brought with them, was Hearst able to get his new paper to potential readers.21
Democratic party officials had hoped that Hearst’s new daily would be on the streets in time for the fall campaign. Hearst went them one better and had the first issue of his Chicago American ready by July 4. Having done Bryan and his party an enormous favor, Hearst extracted all he could in return. When Bryan agreed to publish an open letter on the front page of the debut issue of the Chicago American, Hearst provided him—through James Creelman, who had returned to work after his wounds healed—with explicit instructions on what to say and how to say it.22
“Please ask Mr. Bryan in his letter to the American to refer to the Work done by the Journal in the former campaign and to allude to the fact that the American was started not merely to make money but to provide at the request of Democratic leaders a Democratic paper for that large and important section of country. Ask him kindly to say that the name is a good one and fits the Journal's well known reputation for staunch Americanism. I hope all these things he will find to be true and may consequently legitimately speak of them.” As published, Bryan’s letter followed Hearst’s suggestions, almost word for word.23
When Bryan was nominated for the presidency in St. Louis the following day, the hall was flooded with copies of the Chicago American. Hearst telegraphed his congratulations in the jocular, personal tone one might employ with an old friend: “Your nomination was not wholly a surprise to us but we are all very happy over it ... and eager to aid in the great fight and be in the van at the hour of victory. Command us Colonel.”24
The 1900 campaign for the presidency would be the lead story in Hearst’s and every other daily newspaper through November. There was, in Hearst’s mind, no contradiction between the imperatives of running a campaign and publishing a newspaper. Well-written partisan political coverage sold more newspapers than dry, distanced “they were here and said this” stories. The 1900 campaign story was plotted like his other continuing front-page features. The villains were McKinley and the wealthy Cleveland industrialist Mark Hanna who pulled his strings; the aggrieved innocents were the American people; the rescuing hero was William Jennings Bryan, with his crusading armies of Democratic candidates and campaign workers.
The crassly melodramatic plot could be presented in a variety of formats: feature stories, interviews, editorials, and front-page cartoons. Homer Davenport brought back his drawings of a grotesquely overweight, ghoulish Mark Hanna with dollar signs all over his coat. Frederick Opper, the equally brilliant cartoonist whom Hearst had hired away from Puck in 1899, produced a series of “Uncle Trusty” and “Willie and his Papa” cartoons, featuring a fat, balding businessman with a bulbous nose and dollar-sign slippers as The Trusts, Hanna as a nursemaid, and McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt, his running mate, as the obedient sons.
While in years to come historians and Hearst biographers would emphasize the Davenport and Opper caricatures of Hanna and McKinley, the politician portrayed most cruelly in the Hearst papers was Theodore Roosevelt. O
pper caricatured him as an ugly boy on a hobby horse, with glasses, huge teeth, and a Rough Rider hat, who bullied McKinley and made him cry. In one cartoon, Nursemaid Hanna and The Trusts asked Willie (McKinley), “What Ails You This Time?” Willie answered, “We’re playing Republican campaign trip, and Teddy’s making all the speeches from the rear platform, and he says I’m merely a brakeman.” Other cartoons ridiculed Roosevelt’s war record, his tenure as police commissioner, and his passions for the West and for hunting.25
Hearst’s newspaper attacks on McKinley, Roosevelt, and Hanna constituted only part of his contribution to the Democrats. He also gave Bryan between $10,000 and $15,000 of his own—or Phoebe’s—money, and turned out an enormous quantity of campaign literature: pamphlets, special editions of his newspapers, and a campaign book, all abundantly illustrated by his cartoonists.26
Hearst was too smart and too ambitious to remain in the background for long. Bryan had envisioned the National Association of Democratic Clubs, which he asked Hearst to chair, as little more than a network of grassroots organizations that would provide the volunteer labor needed to distribute campaign literature, hold a few local rallies, and watch the polls on Election Day. Hearst had other ideas. He installed Maximilian F. Ihmsen, the chubby, rumpled, curly-haired, walrus-mustachioed political reporter who had been his chief Washington correspondent, as secretary of the National Association, and with Ihmsen's help, enhanced its role until it functioned almost as a shadow Democratic National Committee, organizing conventions of loyalists and public rallies across the country.27
As president of the National Association of Democratic Clubs, Hearst sponsored his own Bryan rally in New York City. When he learned that Tammany's Boss Croker was planning a separate rally to welcome Bryan to New York, he informed James Creelman that he was willing to defer his “show” until Croker had held his. In his new role as party leader, Hearst was prepared to go out of his way to ingratiate himself with the Tammany boss whom he had in the past repeatedly criticized for allowing the trusts to rob the people of New York. “Find Creelman,” he wired an associate in New York City, “and tell him to get fine interview with Croker about plans for receiving Bryan, management of state campaign, chances of carrying state ... want very agreeable interview: Get good picture. Old gentleman makes very distinguished appearance with gray hair and frock coat as he stands gavel in hand behind chairman’s desk. Suggest you get a photograph ... Tell Croker I have to go Chicago for few days but if there is anything he wishes done in paper or club to tell you or Ihmsen in my absence.”28
Though Hearst had tried to be accommodating to the Boss, Croker was not willing to cede any authority to the young publisher who, without a single ward leader or district behind him, was acting as if he were the Boss’s equal. Instead of coordinating his Bryan rally with Hearst’s, Croker stole the speakers Hearst had already contacted. Hearst was furious. Another man might have admitted that he had been outsmarted and let it go without causing further trouble with a rival as powerful as Richard Croker. But Hearst could not abide being double-crossed. “Please see Ihmsen,” he telegraphed James Creelman from Chicago, “and organize to make the meeting ... the biggest thing ever... . Croker is jobbing us. He has asked all the speakers he learned we were going to have to speak first at his meeting. Please stop this. It is not fair. I postponed our meeting to please him, deferred announcing our meeting lest it should interfere with his ... He is not acting in good faith and I resent it. America is full of good speakers. If he takes ours I will remember it against him. If we cannot be good friends we had better be active enemies.”29
Bryan lost again in 1900, by a larger margin than in 1896. Hearst won—on several counts. Immediately after the election, he hired William Jennings Bryan as a special correspondent and sent him on a European tour—all expenses paid—thereby putting the “Great Commoner” in his debt. He also retained his position as president of the National Association of Democratic Clubs, and with Max Ihmsen’s help began at once to reconfigure it into an organization dedicated as much to his own future in politics as to his party’s. With his new newspaper in Chicago, the nation’s second largest city, Hearst now had a commanding presence in the nation’s heartland, as well as in the biggest cities on the East and West Coasts.30
On June 29, 1901, exactly two months after his thirty-eighth birthday, Hearst’s portrait appeared on the cover of the inaugural issue of Editor and Publisher. He was identified as “The Foremost Figure in American Journalism.” As he had promised his mother, his forays into politics had enhanced his reputation as a publisher. But there was trouble ahead.31
Before, during, and after the 1900 presidential campaign, the Hearst papers ceaselessly, almost monotonously, attacked President McKinley. When, in February of 1900, Kentucky governor-elect William Goebel was shot dead in an election dispute, Ambrose Bierce marked the occasion by suggesting in verse that the bullet that killed Goebel had not been found because it was “speeding here / To stretch McKinley on his bier.” In April 1901, only days after the second inauguration, Arthur Brisbane outdid even Bierce in a lengthy editorial about the felicitous consequences of past political assassinations. “If bad institutions and bad men,” he concluded, “can be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done.”32
Hearst later insisted that he had pulled the editorial after reading it in the paper’s first edition. James Creelman claimed that Hearst sent him, as an emissary, to apologize to McKinley for the editorial. Neither action would have been characteristic of Hearst, for whom all was fair in politics and journalism, so long as one did not intrude on a candidate’s personal life. In the long run, whether or not Hearst apologized for this particular editorial was of no consequence, as he had been attacking the president for years.
Long before Leon Czolgosz approached President McKinley in the Temple of Music at the Buffalo World’s Fair, with a handkerchief that looked like a bandage wrapped around his right hand, the evidentiary chain had been forged that would later be used to link Hearst to the president’s assassin.
It was of course preposterous to claim that the half-mad assassin who pulled a revolver from his handkerchief and shot and killed William McKinley in September of 1901 had been moved to murder by an editorial published six months earlier in English, which he could not read—or by a stanza in Bierce’s poem, published twenty months before. As Bierce himself recalled, his four lines on McKinley “took no attention” when they originally appeared. It was only after McKinley had been shot that “the verses, variously garbled but mostly made into an editorial, or a news dispatch with a Washington dateline but usually no date, were published all over the country as evidence of Mr. Hearst’s complicity in the crime.”33
With an assassin too incoherent to make a real villain, the Republican press went after its favorite left-wing bête noire, William Randolph Hearst, accusing him of having poisoned Czolgosz’s mind and pulled the trigger for him. Across the country, but especially in places like New York City where competing newspapers were anxious to cut into Hearst’s circulation, boycotts were started, anti-Hearst pledges circulated, and Hearst publicly accused of murder. According to Cora Older, who wrote his authorized biography, the publisher, who was in Chicago at the time of the assassination, began keeping a gun in his desk: “So many threats were made against his life, that when boxes of purported gifts arrived, Hearst had them burned for fear of bombs.”34
The New-Yorker, a weekly magazine not to be confused with the unhyphenated journal founded in 1925, claimed that Hearst was held in such disrepute that the “Maritime Exchange, the New York Athletic Club, and other respectable organizations” excluded his morning and afternoon papers from their reading rooms: “Hearst will either have to print decent newspapers or get out of the business ... As for Hearst personally ... his reclamation and elevation to the plane of honorable men is not to be thought of. He will always remain the degraded, unclean thing that he is, shunned by every honest citizen, and for whose wandering feet there s
hall be no resting place where the American flag rises and falls upon the breeze.”35
It was not only competing editors who held Hearst personally responsible for the bile and violence that saturated political journalism and, it was now claimed, had contributed to the climate that inflamed McKinley’s assassin. As Vice President Theodore Roosevelt wrote his good friend Henry Cabot Lodge on September 9, when it was still believed that McKinley might recover from his wounds, “every scoundrel like Hearst and his satellites who for whatever purposes appeals to and inflames evil human passion, has made himself accessory before the fact to every crime of this nature.”36
For perhaps the first time in his life, Hearst was forced onto the defensive. As a rather blatant attempt to establish his patriotic bona fides, he changed the name of his New York morning paper to the American and Journal, and later on dropped the Journal entirely from the title. The abuse became so intense that he was forced to write his mother to reassure her that he would, in the end, weather the storm: “All that distresses me is the fear that you will be hurt by the wicked assertions in hostile newspapers. I don't believe those attacks have the slightest effect except to lower the papers printing them. In New York all the people are in front of the Journal bulletins and are very friendly, cheering any favorable news. All merchants understand or did motives of assailants and stand by us. In fact as far as I can see the attacks have absolutely no effect whatever except to gratify the people already unfriendly to the Journal.” While he conceded that he and the Journal had “a great many enemies,” he wanted his mother to remember that they also had “nearly a million friends.”37