The Chief

by David Nasaw

  The election over, Hearst concentrated his attentions again on his newspapers, his finances, and his family. Millicent was pregnant with their second child. “In about ten days, if all goes well,” he wrote his mother in California in early 1908, “there will be another heir to the Hearst millions—and all we will need then will be the millions. The finances are not very cheerful yet but things are improving some and we are gradually getting the debts paid.... Forty thousand we will pay off the day after tomorrow and then we will have nothing but the hundred and fifty thousand ... that is pressing. The banks we will pay off gradually and our spare change will be devoted to satisfying the poor people who have been so unfortunate as to sell us things during the past few months. We will have to be careful about paying some of them. I am afraid the shock might be fatal in certain cases.”8

  On January 27, 1908, Millicent gave birth to William Randolph Hearst, Jr. The pregnancy had not gone well. Millie, Hearst wrote his mother, had been “somewhat worried because the promised baby doesn’t seem to be in the right position.” The plan had been for Millie, George, and the newborn baby to spend the rest of the winter with Phoebe at the Hacienda. But unlike his older brother, George, now almost four, Bill, Jr. was not a healthy child and was not able to travel West until the spring. “I was puny and sickly from the start,” Bill, Jr. recalled in his memoirs. “It was only a year before I got pneumonia. Mom and Pop didn’t think their young offspring was going to make it. I did, but was plagued with one illness or another much of my life.”9

  In April or May, Millie boarded the train for San Francisco with her four-month-old son, two nurses, and her father and sister. George had been sent West earlier. In Chicago, Millie turned around and returned to New York, while the nurses and her father accompanied Bill, Jr. to his grandmother’s Hacienda in Pleasanton.

  Hearst wanted his boys to grow up as Californians, and as Phoebe was delighted to raise them—with the help of a squadron of nurses and tutors, presided over by a German governess—he left them in her care for extended periods of time. Phoebe’s ninety-two room Hacienda, on two thousand acres of land forty miles east of San Francisco, became the boys’ second home. She built a fifty-foot playhouse for the two older boys and when John, the third Hearst son, was born in 1909, had her architect, Julia Morgan, design a two-story, freestanding “Boys’ House” for them, with thirteen large rooms upstairs and a gigantic playroom, complete with pool and billiard tables, reading rooms, and places for visitors downstairs.10

  During the summer, Phoebe took her grandsons to Wyntoon, her estate near Mount Shasta just south of the California-Oregon border. For young boys, Wyntoon, situated in the mountains at the edge of the McCloud River, was even more exciting than the Pleasanton Hacienda. Phoebe had been introduced to the region in 1899, when she visited her friend and lawyer, Charles Stetson Wheeler, who had built a hunting lodge there. When Phoebe asked if she could buy some of his property, Wheeler refused, but offered her instead a ninety-nine-year lease on the understanding that she would erect a modest structure in the woods. Phoebe had other plans. She hired Bernard Maybeck, a founder and chief practitioner of what Lewis Mumford referred to as the Bay Region Style. Maybeck, a master at combining wood and stone into romantic rustic structures that meshed perfectly with their landscapes, designed a seven-story Gothic German stone castle that looked as if it had been lifted from a fairy-tale version of the Rhine. It was artfully sited, just above the flowing river, with tall pine trees towering above it. The castle was completed in 1904, the year of George Hearst’s birth.11

  George and Bill, Jr. stayed with their grandmother at Pleasanton and Wyntoon from April through November of 1908. Only Millicent, it appeared, was unhappy with the arrangement. “Milly is much worried about Brother William,” Will telegraphed his mother in mid-November, “and I think it would be a good idea if you could send us a telegram every Sunday telling her all about the children. It does not cost anything to send it over the special wire [the news service cable that connected the Hearst papers], and it relieves her mind. I hope the babies are well and that you are too.” The following week, apparently not having heard anything in the meantime, he renewed the request. “Milly interrupts to ask if you will not please have some pictures taken of Brother William and George and send them to her. She is getting very lonesome for the children and I suppose we will have to go West soon.”12

  The battle over who was going to raise the Hearst children would continue for the rest of Phoebe’s life. Because Will was occupied with his newspapers and the campaign trail and because Phoebe didn’t completely trust Millicent to hire the right people to care for her grandchildren, she kept them in California as long as she could, and bristled when her son or daughter-in-law hinted that she was usurping their responsibilities. “Don’t you think I show considerable confidence by leaving my children away from me half the year which most parents don’t do?” Hearst wrote her in 1915. “I must continue, however, to take some natural interest in them, to ask information and make recommendations for their welfare.”13

  From three thousand miles away, Hearst gave his mother directions on how to raise his children, as he gave his faraway editors instructions on how to write their editorials. He set the basic ground rules, the “policy” which he expected others to adhere to. “Warn the children,” he telegrammed her just before July Fourth sometime in the early 1910s, “not to be gay with firecrackers and please don’t let them have airguns yet. Paper only the other day had news items to the effect that two children had been wounded and one blinded by these airguns. Let them throw rocks at the birds. The exercise will do them good.” He was worried that George, who he feared was “something of a jackass,” might drown himself or kill himself with a pistol or lead William astray. “Don’t let George get too independent ... he may grow up to be as bad as I am,” he telegrammed her in 1913 when George was nine, after a trip West to deposit the boys for the season.14

  Though Will was a more responsible parent than his father had been, he was always a distant one. He spent little time with his boys and instead delegated authority for rearing them—to Phoebe, to Millicent, to the headmasters of the boys’ boarding schools, and then to the publishing executives the boys worked for. According to Bill, Jr., his sons all suffered from the neglect: “All of us in the family felt he should have given us more of his time. My brothers and I felt we needed the reassurance of his presence and more personal guidance while we were growing up.”15

  Phoebe had expected her son and Millicent to join her and the boys in Pleasanton for their 1908 summer vacation, but Will decided to vacation in Europe instead. “We are only going abroad for six weeks,” he explained to his mother by letter. “I suppose I will have to do some talking in September and October [during the upcoming 1908 presidential campaign] and that is really hard work so a little rest and change will do me some good. I would not get a real rest in California because I would get political telegrams and newspaper telegrams every day in addition to having the affairs of the California papers to attend to. So we thought we would take the little trip first and then come out later.”16

  From on board the Lusitania, Millicent wrote Phoebe to apologize. The change in plans hadn’t, she insisted, been her idea, but her husband’s: “You say that I am like Will and never tell you about our plans. As a matter of fact we never have any plans. Will thinks he is going to do one thing one day and another thing another day and when the time comes we don’t do either but something entirely different. We didn’t know until the last moment whether we would go abroad or go out West or take a trip to Canada.”17

  Such was life with Will Hearst. After six weeks abroad, he and Millicent returned home on the Cunard luxury steamer Lucania on July 25. That same day, they boarded the Twentieth Century Limited for Chicago, where the first national convention of Hearst’s Independence party was being convened. The Republicans had already nominated William Howard Taft for the presidency; the Democrats, William Jennings Bryan; the Populists, Tom W
atson; the Socialists, Eugene Debs; and the Prohibitionists, Eugene Chaffin. Each of these parties had a constituency, a permanent party organization, and a recognizable candidate. Hearst’s Independence party had none of these. Still, oblivious to the effect another losing campaign might have on his political reputation, Hearst plunged ahead, hoping that he could come up with a presidential candidate in 1908 who could win enough votes to keep his third party in the news until 1912 when he intended to run for president again.

  On July 27 at 8:25 in the evening, as always a bit late, William Randolph Hearst entered Chicago’s Orchestra Hall and strode down the main aisle to take his seat at the platform. Twenty minutes later, he mounted the podium to deliver his address. The convention then proceeded to its main business. Thomas Hisgen, a manufacturer and dealer in kerosene and axle grease from Massachusetts, was nominated for president; John Temple Graves, a Hearst employee known for his small size and large vocabulary, for vice president.18

  Because “Honest Tom” Hisgen could not possibly draw a crowd by himself, Hearst accompanied him everywhere on the campaign trail. With nothing particularly new to say, he found it impossible to get coverage anywhere except in his own newspapers, until in mid-September, he publicly revealed that he had in his possession “legal evidence and documentary proof” that John Archbold, who had been running Standard Oil since John D. Rockefeller’s de facto retirement, had bribed prominent U.S. senators to influence elections, appointments, and legislation.

  While Hearst announced that the Archbold letters had just come into his possession, he had in fact secured them almost four years earlier. Late in 1904, a young man named Charles Stump had appeared at the offices of the New York American with letters and telegrams from Archbold, which he claimed had been rescued from the wastepaper basket by Willie Winkfield, the janitor who worked in his office. Stump had tried to sell the letters to the World, and when he was rebuffed visited the Hearst papers. They too refused to buy, but gave him instead a list of 200 prominent Washington politicians and told him that they would pay for letters addressed to any of them. Over the next three months, Winkfield went through Archbold’s files with his list of names in hand. Letters addressed to the men on the list were taken to the American's offices and photographed before being returned to the Standard Oil offices.19

  Hearst had kept the existence of these letters secret, waiting for the perfect moment to disclose them. On September 17, 1908, without advance warning to anyone, he pulled a sheaf of papers from the inside pocket of his frock coat during a rally in Columbus, Ohio, and began reading letters which he claimed, according to the New York Daily Tribune’s report the next day, “had been written by John D. Archbold, of the Standard Oil Company, to Senator J. B. Foraker, of Ohio, referring to legislation pending in Congress, and mentioning two inclosures of checks, one for $15,000 and another for $14,500.”

  Aware now that he had the full attention of the press, Hearst read two more letters the next day at a rally in St. Louis, one from Archbold to Republican Senator Foraker, the second from Archbold to Governor Haskell of Oklahoma, a Democrat, who was serving as Bryan’s campaign treasurer. Archbold issued a curt statement dismissing Hearst’s allegations as “pure fiction.” Senator Foraker acknowledged that the letters were authentic, but claimed that the payments referred to compensation for work he had done for Standard Oil as a private citizen. Governor Haskell claimed that the Haskell referred to by Archbold was not him, but “another Haskell who had relations with Standard Oil.” Such unbelievable answers were more than enough to keep the story going for another day or two.20

  Hearst, a master of the continuing front-page exposé, now had the national press corps following his every step. And so began his strange journey across America, letters in hand, Hisgen trailing behind. From podiums in Memphis, New York City, El Paso, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, Hearst pulled letters out of his pocket and read them aloud to his audiences—and reporters—frightening politicians everywhere who feared that they too might be mentioned in Archbold’s correspondence.21

  Hearst was in his element once again, the center of attention, entertaining large crowds everywhere with his mixture of self-deprecating charm and bombast. Hearst’s revelations remained big news through September and into October. But his reappearance in the headlines did not translate into support for his Independence party candidates. He had succeeded in reminding American voters that their political leaders were on the take. But having destroyed their confidence in the major political parties, Hearst had nothing to offer them in return: no vision, no alternative politics, no viable candidates. What voter, no matter how disaffected he might have become with Taft and Bryan, was going to elect Hearst’s candidate, a dealer in axle grease, to the highest office in the land? While Hearst cannot be blamed for the decline in voter turnouts that had begun earlier in the century, he was contributing daily to the perception that the political system was so corrupt it didn’t much matter who was elected. In 1896, 79% of the electorate had voted for president; in 1908, only 65% of those eligible voted; by 1912, the percentage would decline to 59%.22

  When the votes were finally counted on November 4, 1908, the Republican candidate, William Howard Taft, was the winner. There were many losers, most prominent among them William Jennings Bryan, who for the third time suffered defeat by a landslide. At the bottom of the vote totals stood the Independence party with 86,000 votes, a third of them in New York City. Debs and the Socialists, in comparison, had polled over 420,000 votes; the Prohibitionists, over 250,000. While the November 5 New York Daily Tribune reported that Independence party officials had acknowledged that their totals “were much smaller than they had expected,” Hearst had already, the day before the election, declared himself satisfied, whatever the vote totals. His Independence party, win or lose, had “laid the foundations for great reforms. It has made history. It has ... sown the seeds for a rich harvest in future achievements.” What he didn’t say was that the defeat of Bryan in 1908, coupled with Judge Alton Parker’s resounding defeat in 1904, left the Democratic party leaderless for 1912, a vacuum he intended to fill.23

  There is a coda to the Archbold letters story. Two weeks after the election, Hearst wrote his mother that he had been summoned to the White House for a secret meeting with President Roosevelt. “I don’t know what it is all about, but I doubt if it is a matter of importance. I suppose Roosevelt will touch on Standard Oil letters. Maybe that is the important thing he wants to see me about. He is mentioned in some of them.” This, unfortunately, is all we know about the meeting. Neither Hearst nor Roosevelt ever again referred to it.24

  Having spent the last five autumns on the campaign trail, each year doing worse than the year before, Hearst might, one would think, have been ready to retire from politics, but he was not. In October of 1909, he announced that he was running for mayor of New York City on his Independence party ticket. His major opponent was Judge William Gaynor of Brooklyn, whose reputation for independence, opposition to the trusts, and lifelong advocacy of municipal ownership of public utilities was such that Hearst had tried to enlist him to run for mayor on the Independence party line. The fact that Tammany had nominated Gaynor was an ironic tribute to Hearst’s political success. He had so frightened Tammany in 1905 that its boss, Charles Francis Murphy, had been forced to nominate a man like Gaynor in 1909 instead of the usual party hack.

  Tammany having stolen his candidate and his issues, Hearst was left with no basis on which to campaign except personality, which was far from his strongest suit. He accused Gaynor of improperly supporting horse-racing interests while on the bench and vilified him as a paranoiac, a liar, an intellectual hypocrite, a demagogue, a fanatic, an agitator, an old man, and for being “mentally cross-eyed.” Gaynor and Tammany assailed him, in turn, for trying to buy his elections as he bought his newspapers, for advertising himself “as though he were a patent medicine or a nostrum,” and for being hypocritical, dishonest, and immoral, with a face that, Gaynor confessed, “almost
makes me puke.”25

  As part of its assault on Hearst’s character, Tammany published an anonymous forty-eight-page pamphlet entitled The Life of William R. Hearst, with cartoons reprinted from the San Francisco scandal sheets of 1904, describing in exhaustive detail every blemish on his reputation, beginning with “the record of duplicity, deception and depravity which made his name a by-word in California.” The concluding “indictment” pulled out all the stops:

  Buying newspapers with his millions, he debauches the press, prostitutes writers to the service of his personal ambition, and degrades and disgraces the profession of journalism. He violates every propriety, tramples upon every principle of justice, invades the sacred precincts of the home and contaminates the air of the fireside with the foul breath of suspicion, to gain circulation for his malodorous sheets. He appeals to the evil passions of the weak and the malignant and strives to ruin that which he cannot rule.... Such is the pampered pet of fortune who, to gratify his monumental egotism, has slandered all who scorned his bribes, betrayed every cause he has espoused, turned traitor to Democracy and dastard to his political comrades and whose criminal journalism may boast as its most conspicuous achievement the assassination of President McKinley by one of its feeble-minded dupes. It is to New York’s everlasting shame that a man with such a record could be seriously considered as a candidate for Mayor—it is the duty of every earnest, patriotic citizen to see to it that his impudent assumption is properly rebuked.26