The Chief

by David Nasaw

  While Hearst had, for the moment, put his presidential ambitions on hold, he intended to play a dominant role in setting his nation’s foreign policy from his vantage point as the nation’s leading publisher. His immediate objective was to end the hostilities in Europe but, if that proved impossible, to at the very least keep the United States out of war. If, in pursuit of those objectives, circulation had to be sacrificed, so be it.

  Hearst never shied away from sensation-grabbing headlines that might increase circulation, but he refused to be a pawn of the British and French propaganda offices and run the stories of German atrocities in Belgium which they were peddling, with great success, to American newspapers. “It would be much more complimentary to our national intelligence and information,” he wrote in a February 2, 1915, editorial, “if American publications and American citizens would drop sentimental talk about ‘martyred little peoples,’ ‘Huns at the gates’...and all that sort of manufactured excuse, and recognize the truth that Europe’s struggle is simply a scramble of Europe’s financiers, military and naval aristocracies and throned rulers to rob one another of trade, profit and territory.”4

  When, in the late summer and autumn of 1914, Europe’s young men marched off to war, it was universally believed, as the English historian A. J. P. Taylor has written, “that it would be an affair of marches and great battles, quickly decided. It would be over by Christmas.” By the spring, those assumptions had been discarded. As both sides settled into a war of attrition, each stepped up its efforts to deprive the other of the food and military supplies that were essential to sustain life on the home front and the battlefield. The British, with their stronger navy, had an easier time establishing their blockade and interdicting American trade with the Germans. The Germans were forced to use the threat of their U-boats to slow American trade with the Allies.5

  On May 7, 1915, after repeated warnings, a German U-boat sank the British ocean liner Lusitania, which was carrying a cargo of munitions as well as 128 American passengers. President Wilson responded immediately by demanding that Germany cease its U-boat campaign. Secretary of State Bryan insisted that the president also protest the British blockade. When Wilson resisted, Bryan resigned, becoming at that moment a hero in the Hearst papers for standing up to the British.6

  The Hearst papers, on May 8, 1915, denounced the German attack on the Lusitania as “a deed of wholesale murder,” but they also condemned British calumny and harangued Wilson for not doing enough for peace. Almost alone among American newspapers—Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune being the dominant exception—Hearst’s editorials argued that the American government had no right to demand that Germany cease its submarine warfare while the British maintained their blockade.

  Convinced now that he was fighting on the side of the angels against not only the president and his cabinet, but against the business and banking interests that required an English victory to protect their investments, Hearst and his papers opposed granting loans to the British or permitting American manufacturers to sell them armaments. Alone on the parapets, fighting a holy war to protect the peace from the alliance of Anglophiliac politicians and murderously greedy manufacturers and bankers, Hearst employed every resource he controlled to frighten the American people into agreement with him. The cartoonist Winsor McCay was reassigned to the editorial page where, under the supervision of Arthur Brisbane, he drew almost a cartoon a day, posing wistful Uncle Sams, stoic Founding Fathers, animalized Japanese warlords, and grasping top-hatted businessmen in front of nightmarish Gothic landscapes of war and devastation. Hearst portrayed his call for peace as the only just, the only moral, the only Christian position in a world gone mad with war. McCay’s cartoon on March 9, 1916, portrayed Jesus with uplifted arms. “Let Us Nobly Serve Ourselves and Mankind by Organizing Peace,” read the caption.

  As the war progressed, Hearst’s anti-English, pro-German news coverage and editorials left him increasingly isolated. Nat Ferber, a reporter at the American, recalled in his autobiography that in 1916,

  one had need of great fortitude even to serve him. His delivery men were greeted by bonfires made of the papers they were attempting to distribute. As for the Hearst reporter, few were the assignments on which his ears didn’t ring with the abuse heaped upon him.

  “You work for that man Hearst,” was the usual greeting. “Get the hell out of here.”

  Usually this was followed by the slamming of the door in the reporter’s face.7

  The more Hearst’s coverage outraged the majority of the population, the more popular he became among immigrant New York voters. To the German-American community he was a hero for his political views and his continued publication of a German-language newspaper. The Jewish community remained in his camp because of his vigorous protests against Russian anti-Semitism. His popularity among Irish-Americans soared as he assailed the British and celebrated the Irish nationalist Sir Roger Casement, whom he compared to John Hancock and John Adams, and other signers of the Declaration of Independence. When Casement was hanged by the British as a spy, the Hearst papers’ eulogy for their hero so outraged Edith Wharton that she tried to get out of a contract with Cosmopolitan, which had bought the rights to serialize her new novel, Summer.8

  In October of 1916, the English government, charging that Hearst’s European war correspondents had deliberately falsified their dispatches, denied his International News Service the use of the British mails or cables to transmit reports to the United States. “I will apologize for nothing, retract nothing, alter nothing,” Hearst responded in an open letter published in all his newspapers:

  The act of the English censors is wholly unjust and unjustifiable....I am convinced that the exclusion of the International News Service is ... due to the independent and wholly truthful attitude of the Hearst papers in their news and editorial columns....I will take a personal pleasure in giving our readers and clients the most complete information of the utmost truth and value, and in getting it from more trustworthy sources than the biased and bigoted English censorship affords.9

  Barred from transmitting his dispatches from England, Hearst had no choice now but to rely on his correspondents in Germany to provide the bulk of his war coverage. William Bayard Hale, the former New York Times reporter who had worked for the Wilson administration in Mexico and was now chief German correspondent for the International News Service, made an arrangement with the German government to transmit I.N.S. dispatches by “wireless” from a radio station in Nauheim to a receiving station in Sayville, Long Island. German officials willingly supplied Hale, not only with access to government officials in Berlin, but with moving pictures for his newsreel service. One of the first full-length war documentaries shown in the United States was the History of the World’s Greatest War in Motion Pictures, assembled and produced by Hearst-Selig from German footage.10

  The German government was so intent on getting its pictures into American theaters that when in mid-1915 demand appeared to slacken, it secretly established its own company—the American Correspondent Film Company—to publicize, distribute, and exhibit its films. The man in charge of the American operation, Dr. Karl Fuehr, wrote to Berlin in August and again in October of 1915 that he was in touch with the Hearst organization

  in order to bring about an agreement, which would make available to us without any cash outlay the colossal power of the Hearst papers in the United States for our film matters....The advantages of such a combination under our control are indeed so apparent in view of the well-known power and executive ability of Mr. Hearst and his chief associates that we do not need to discuss them. It is sufficient to mention that Hearst personally owns seven of the most important American newspapers in the East as well as the West, including also one well known paper published in German....An especially interesting point is that the Hearst papers are controlled by a 100% American and are themselves out and out American. They are read by all classes of the population and by all nationalities which will be especial
ly useful to us in the quiet and widespread dissemination of our ideas.

  Though Hearst agreed to distribute the German war footage and share half the profits, before signing any agreement he wanted full assurance that he would have a monopoly on German war pictures. Fuehr contacted Berlin to see if Hearst’s terms were acceptable, adding that they appeared to him to be quite justifiable on account of the great power possessed by the Hearst papers. In the end, for reasons that are not entirely clear, the deal was never consummated.11

  Instead Hearst and Edward Hatrick, who was now in charge of his moving pictures, sought to arrange for their own cameraman, Nelson E. Edwards, to take war pictures from behind the German lines. In December of 1915, Hearst wrote a personal note to Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, the German ambassador to Washington, asking for his help in the matter. The two met several times at the Clarendon and apparently got along quite well. Von Bernstorff was, like Hearst, very much a bon vivant. He was already on good terms with many publishers and politicians and was having an affair with Cissy Patterson, whose family owned and operated the Chicago Tribune.12

  Von Bernstorff needed Hearst to broadcast to Americans the message that the Germans were not brutes; Hearst needed von Bernstorff to gain access to German news and moving pictures. Both got what they wanted. Thanks to von Bernstorff’s assistance, Nelson Edwards was granted permission to cross the border from Holland into Germany to collect war footage for the “Hearst News Pictorial.”13

  Though Hearst made full use of his access to German officials to disseminate the German side of the story, he did not neglect material from other sources. As Count von Bernstorff explained in a confidential report to Berlin in December of 1916, the Hearst newspapers, though friendly to Germany, could not “be regarded as blindly pro-German, for they publish a good deal that can hardly be desirable for us.”14 Side by side with proGerman dispatches from William Bayard Hale in Berlin, the Hearst front pages reported on German espionage rings in the United States and published anti-German diatribes like the one by Rudyard Kipling that appeared on February 7, 1916, under the headline, “Exterminate Entire German Species, Urges Kipling.”

  These reports from the front, pro-German or pro-English, were all written from a particular point of view. The Hearst papers did not subscribe to the view that “objectivity” in a journalist was either possible or desirable. It certainly did not make for readable stories. When questioned after the war by a Senate subcommittee investigating German propaganda efforts, Hearst’s senior editor, Bradford Merrill, acknowledged that Dr. Hale had been “sent to Berlin ... expressly to write the German side of the war, precisely as the American sent other distinguished correspondents to get [other] sides of the war. It was Dr. Hale’s duty to send the German Government’s own interpretation of every important event and the views of the foremost German statesmen.”15

  What Hearst refused to recognize through the early years of the war was that by unapologetically presenting the German side of the story, he was treading on dangerous ground. If in New York and Chicago, Irish, German, and Russian-Jewish immigrants saluted his anti-British, pro-German coverage and editorials, elsewhere he was viewed as consorting with, if not supporting, a future enemy.

  As long as his reporters and editorialists wrote as he wanted them to, few questions were asked about sources or motivations. Hearst never much cared how his reporters got their stories. What counted was the final product. If, in the 1890s and early 1900s, he had surrounded himself with radicals, progressives, and not a few socialists, he now brought into his inner circle writers, editors, and businessmen who were as pro-German as he was. What he did not know was that several of them were in the pay of the German government. Karl Fuehr, with whom he had negotiated for German newsreel footage, was not the owner of an independent film company, but a German government employee. Bolo Pacha, the French newspaper publisher whom Hearst entertained at a special dinner at Sherry’s in March of 1916 and invited to his apartment to discuss newsprint contracts, was a German agent sent to New York to collect funds to establish a pro-German newspaper in Paris. William Bayard Hale, his chief International News Service correspondent in Germany, had been paid by the German government since the war began.

  While assailing the Wilson administration for being too bellicose in Europe, Hearst continued to attack it for being too pacifist in Mexico. Nothing short of armed intervention, he was convinced, would secure a lasting peace in Mexico and permanent protection for American landholders and investors. The revolution which had been launched against Porfirio Díaz in 1910 had entered a new stage in 1914–15. Venustiano Carranza had succeeded General Huerta as president, but he too had been unable to restore peace or unify the nation. His major opponent was General Francisco Pancho Villa whose army was strongest in the northern provinces, including Chihuahua where Hearst’s Babicora ranch was located. In December of 1915, Villa and his army, under siege by forces loyal to President Carranza, seized and looted the Hearst ranch. Five of Hearst’s employees were taken prisoner and one, an American bookkeeper, was killed before the rebels were ousted. Hearst instructed his editors, through Than Vanneman Ranck, who was in charge of foreign coverage, to condemn the Wilson government “for its failure to do anything in Mexico,” but not to mention the Hearst family holdings there.16

  When in early March 1916 Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico, and killed seventeen Americans before retreating into the Chihuahua mountains, President Wilson ordered Major-General “Black Jack” Pershing to pursue him into Mexico. The Hearst papers applauded the incursion as the first step toward a full-scale invasion that would eventually lead to the conquest and annexation of Mexico. “At Long Last Our Flag Has Been Saluted,” read the March 10 New York American headline. Pursuing the story as only it could, the Hearst organization assigned a newsreel cameraman to the Pershing forces and enjoyed an exclusive on moving-picture coverage until the competition complained of the monopoly to the secretary of war, who directed the Hearst organization to share its footage.17

  For the next few months, the Hearst papers, while insisting on American neutrality in Europe, called for continued involvement in the Philippines and armed intervention in Mexico. “Our army should go forward into Mexico first, to rescue Americans, and, secondly to redeem Mexicans,” Hearst declared in a signed front-page editorial on May 3. “Our right in Mexico is the right of HUMANITY.”

  His demands for intervention were so bellicose and his opposition to the Wilson administration so strident that the Bureau of Investigation in Washington, the forerunner of the F.B.I., launched an investigation of rumors that Hearst, either on his own or in cooperation with German agents, was smuggling arms into Mexico to support a counterrevolutionary coup. In the fall and summer of 1916, the Bureau sent undercover agents to San Simeon, Pleasanton, and Chihuahua, Mexico, to look for arms and ammunition stockpiled for shipment to Mexico. The agent assigned to San Simeon got himself hired as a ranch hand so that he could ride over the thousands of acres of Hearst land to locate any hidden ammunition storage areas. After searching the entire ranch—or so he said—making small talk over campfires with Hearst’s ranch hands, and investigating the San Simeon wharves, the agent reported no sign of the ammunition. Agents sent to Hearst’s holdings in northern California and Mexico also found no evidence of smuggled arms. But they kept looking nonetheless.18

  Hearst’s contempt for Wilson was so personal and so intense that he was prepared to do anything possible to deny him reelection. Overlooking for the moment that his old nemesis Theodore Roosevelt was more adamant than Wilson on the subject of American support for the British against the Germans, Hearst tried to persuade him to challenge Wilson for the presidency. Though Hearst, unlike T. R., was unalterably opposed to the United States entering the war in Europe, he was as staunch an advocate of “preparedness” as the ex-president. Hearst was convinced that the best, perhaps the only, deterrent to aggression or invasion was a strong army and navy. Like Roosevelt, he never let an opportunity
pass to assail President Wilson for neglecting his duties as commander in chief.

  In April of 1916, the Chief asked Roosevelt to lunch. T. R. graciously declined, inviting Hearst to visit him instead. “I look forward to seeing you,” he telegrammed Hearst, as if they were old, dear friends. “Meanwhile, I am going to commit the frightful misdeed by sending you a copy of my book. This is a violation of the principle laid down to me by my uncle ... many years ago when he said he had done a good many mean things in the course of his life, but he had never asked anyone to read one of his books.”19

  Hearst responded immediately with the same courtly grace. “You do not have to ask me to read your books. I read them without being asked. I am particularly pleased, however, to have the book you mentioned as a present from you. I am looking forward to our talk on Wednesday next.”20

  The friendly exchange of messages continued all spring, with Hearst at one point inviting Roosevelt to write for his newspapers or, failing that, to choose “any one on our papers who you propose as representative ... to report your acts and utterances fully faithfully and sympathetically.”21

  In June, Hearst assigned himself to cover the Republican national convention in Chicago, hoping that he might be able to engineer a Roosevelt nomination. The Republicans instead nominated Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who had defeated Hearst for governor ten years earlier. W. R. toyed with the notion of supporting Hughes against Wilson and on July 1 instructed Joseph A. Moore, the Canadian publisher whom he had hired to run Good Housekeeping and then made the head of his magazine division, to prepare a series of articles on Hughes, including a “nice personality of Mr. Hughes and his family” for the October Cosmopolitan, an article on Mrs. Hughes for the September Good Housekeeping, and a third piece on Hughes for the August issue of Hearst’s.