The Chief

by David Nasaw

  In October of 1916, anxious to produce his own films instead of merely releasing those produced elsewhere, Hearst directed Joseph A. Moore, the head of his magazine division, to instruct his magazine editors to “get moving picture options on all stories and try to monopolize all best fiction and all best moving picture material.” In December he wrote Moore again, emphasizing how important it was that they begin to corner the market on commercial magazine fiction: “A great story ought to make circulation and prestige for the magazine and to be valuable as a moving picture asset, and as a book asset thereafter.”40

  That fall, Hearst personally contacted D. W. Griffith, the most famous and successful producer and director in the country, with an offer “to start some sort of business arrangement.” Though Griffith was unable or unwilling to enter into a partnership with Hearst, the Chief graciously promised that he would “do everything I can for Intolerance [Griffith’s latest film] anyhow.”41

  Marion Davies was not a part of any of these early moving-picture ventures. She did not star or have a role in any of Hearst’s serial films or in the four Golden Eagle features that were released by the International Film Service. Her first film, Runaway Romany, had been produced by her brother-in-law, George Lederer, and financed by Paul Bloch. Marion played Romany, a rich man’s daughter kidnapped by gypsies. Though neither she nor the critics thought much of her acting, Hearst screened her film and found her performance promising enough to offer her a film contract for five hundred dollars a week for one year with an option. “I signed it,” Marion remembered, “because on the stage I was only getting forty-five or fifty dollars a week.”42

  As a player in musical comedies and reviews, Marion had to spend a good deal of time on the road in places where Hearst could not easily visit her. As a film actress, she could work closer to home, in New York and New Jersey. This was, however, not the only reason why Hearst signed her to a film contract. To succeed in moving pictures, as he had succeeded in the newspaper and magazine business, he needed a leading lady to play the Mary Pickford-like roles that were popular with audiences. On screen, Marion radiated alternating images of fragile innocence and gritty independence, much like Pickford. Her stammer might have held her back on stage, but it would not be a problem in moving pictures that had not yet learned to speak.

  W. R.’s affair with Marion Davies was played out against the backdrop of a European war which daily moved closer to American shores. In December of 1916, President Wilson responded to a German peace feeler by asking both Germany and England to publicly state their war aims so that he might mediate a peace settlement. When the Allies rejected Wilson’s offer of mediation—the Germans had simply ignored it—the Hearst papers attacked their “veiled insult to the President of the United States.” American entry into the European war now became a more distinct possibility.43

  With no hope now for a negotiated peace, Ambassador von Bernstorff, on January 31,1917, informed Secretary of State Robert Lansing that German U-boats were, the next day, going to renew their attacks on merchant vessels bound for the British Isles, including ships of neutral countries like the United States. The Germans recognized that by placing American vessels in harm’s way they were forcing Wilson to declare war. Still, they expected that their blockade of England would bring the war in Europe to an end before the Americans were able to mobilize.

  As American intervention in the war grew closer, the Hearst papers’ editorial rhetoric grew more heated. Declaring that they spoke for the majority of “plain, every-day, hard-headed and clear-thinking Americans [who] are not deceived by cheap declamation and cheaper cant about Europe’s war,” the Hearst papers repeated over and over that neither Germany nor the American people wanted war. “Let Us Firmly Resolve That Under No Circumstances Will We Waste Our Wealth and Slaughter Our Youth in the Wars of European Alliances,” declared the editorial headline on February 9, 1917. A week later, in a particularly strident editorial, “Let Those Who Have to Pay for War Decide Whether They Shall Go to War,” the Hearst papers demanded that war not be declared until the people had been polled “upon the question [in a national referendum]. And the women should vote as well as the men.” The advocates of war in Europe, the editorial contended, were aged politicians “Who Will Not Run the Slightest Risk” of getting hurt. Elihu Root, Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Hearst’s readers were reminded, though nineteen years of age in 1864 “did not enlist....WHEN THE NATION’S LIFE WAS AT STAKE....We protest against war being forced on the nation by men who had neither the patriotism nor the courage to fight for the nation in their own youth. The shirkers and slackers of 1861 have no right to be the jingoes of 1917.”

  From Palm Beach, where he was vacationing at The Breakers with his family, Hearst cabled Solomon Carvalho, who had run his newspaper empire since coming over from Pulitzer twenty years earlier, with daily instructions on the next morning’s editorials. While he believed strongly that Germany’s violation of American shipping rights as a neutral was not a cause for war, he dared not champion peace while German U-boats were attacking American ships. To cover himself against charges of disloyalty, he hid behind the flag, instructing his editors to “run little American flags to right and left of date lines on inside pages,” print masthead titles in red, white, and blue, and run “the verses of the Star Spangled Banner as originally written” across the top of the editorial pages.44

  As war with Germany was now all but inevitable, his editors scurried to protect themselves—and their chief—from charges of disloyalty or treason. Caleb Van Hamm, an editor at the New York American, urged Hearst by telegram in late February to “check or stop Hale dispatches [from Germany]. They come by wireless and surely are picked up. Despite your well-known attitude of neutrality these dispatches are so worded as to permit the interpretation that Berlin is dictating our policy. I fear we are drifting into a situation akin to the false McKinley one only accentuated many fold. With profound respect I urge we check Hale and all agencies that tend to throw discredit upon our declared attitude of sturdy Americanism.”45

  Van Hamm was right. Every dispatch from Germany was being forwarded by the navy from the radio station in Sayville, Long Island, to the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department and the Bureau of Investigation. The case against Hearst was being built, cable by cable.

  15. “Hearst, Hylan, the Hohenzollerns, and the Habsburgs”

  HEARST GREETED AMERICA’S ENTRY into the European war by festooning his front and editorial pages with flags and opening “enlistment bureaus” in the “six great cities” his papers served. Still, he made it clear that this declaration of war, unlike the one against Spain in 1898, was not a cause for celebration.

  As if from Mount Olympus, he and his newspapers looked down upon the war effort and saw only frailty, ignorance, and inevitable tragedy. Employing the rhetoric of defeatism, Hearst insisted that because successive administrations had failed to build the modern navy that he had been calling for editorially since 1898, the American war effort was doomed to failure. “It is no secret that we are almost wholly unprepared for real warfare,” read the editorial published on April 3, one day after Wilson had called for a declaration of war. “That is no fault of the Hearst newspapers. We have argued and pleaded for preparedness for twenty years. Most of that time our reward was the sneers and the jeers of the unthinking and the foolish.”

  Given America’s lack of preparation for war and the ever-present danger posed by the Japanese, Hearst argued strenuously against providing America’s allies, particularly the British, with any material assistance. To leave America defenseless by shipping food, military supplies, and soldiers to fight a war in Europe, he declared on April 13, was nothing short of madness. “In these circumstances of uncertainty ... there is only one possible course that is sensible, and that is to keep every dollar and every man and every weapon and all our supplies and stores AT HOME, for the defense of our own land, our own people, our own freedom, until that defense has been made ABSOLUT
ELY secure. After that we can think of others nations’ troubles. But till then, America first!”

  The official surveillance of Hearst that had begun the year before was stepped up now, as officials in the War Department and Bureau of Investigation looked for the “smoking gun” that would tie Hearst to the German government. When the Bureau received a report from Phoebe’s niece, Anne Apperson Flint, who was staying with Phoebe while her husband served in the army, that five of her aunt’s employees at her Pleasanton Hacienda were pro-German, agents from the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department were sent to investigate. When a tip was received that the two maps with “Arabic hieroglyphs” in a New York American cartoon might contain encoded information intended for the Germans, the Bureau of Investigation looked into it. When neighbors reported that Hearst’s lawyer in Boston, Grenville MacFarland, had purchased a thousand rounds of ammunition, employed a German woman, and received phone calls from Washington, the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department instructed agents in Boston to initiate a full-scale investigation. When an anonymous letter was received in the San Francisco office of the Bureau of Investigation charging that the Hearst newspapers were being “subsidized by the German government and that the hanging of the American flag around the office of the Examiner is a mere bluff to divert suspicion,” the Bureau assigned Customs Inspector Mencke to investigate. Mencke found nothing out of the ordinary. “The Examiner’s office,” he reported, “shows every evidence of being most loyal and it is giving their whole-hearted support to our Government. They have a recruiting station right in their office.”1 Though none of the rumors were ever substantiated, Hearst’s enemies kept looking.

  The first sign of trouble came from an entirely unexpected source. Six months before the declaration of war, Hearst’s grandest serial film to date, Patria, had opened to generally good reviews and a strong box office. Patria, like so many other films produced in 1916, was a “preparedness” serial about a Pearl White-like adventuress who saved her dangerously unprepared country from an invading military force. Instead of being anti-Hun, like every other “preparedness” film, it was, as the New York Telegraph declared in its November 20 review, “frankly anti-Mexican and anti-Japanese in line with William Randolph Hearst’s policies.” The heroine of the story, Patria Channing, played by the ballroom dancer Irene Castle, is the sole survivor of a patriotic American family of munitions makers. When Japanese and Mexican spies incite a strike at her plant, she foils it by granting her workers’ demands, in return for their agreement to volunteer for military training and stay away from foreign agents. In the final episode, “For the Flag,” she and her men, armed with her weapons, turn back the invading Mexican cavalry, led by Japanese soldiers.

  The film was virulently racist, as were almost all the films of the 1910s which featured Japanese actors or characters, but there had been no complaints by reviewers or censors until April of 1917, when Japan, which had in 1914 declared war on Germany, became an American ally. Within days of the American declaration of war, the commissioner of the Department of Licenses in New York City demanded that Patria be withdrawn from distribution because it was critical of Japan. The commissioner, supported by the second assistant secretary of state, asked Pathé, which distributed the serial, to “voluntarily withdraw the films from display ... through patriotic motives.” Hearst and Pathé agreed to reedit the film to remove the most blatantly anti-Japanese images. The new version was screened and put back into circulation. But this was not the end of the story.2

  On June 1, Secretary of Commerce William Redfield asked President Wilson to personally request that Pathé withdraw Patria from the theaters because a “business friend” had told him that the film inflamed “the idea of suspicion toward Japan.” Three days later, Wilson wrote the Pathé executive in charge of distributing the serial that he had “seen portions of the film entitled ‘Patria’” in Keith’s Washington, D.C., vaudeville palace and was disturbed by the character of the story. It is extremely unfair to the Japanese and I fear that it is calculated to stir up a great deal of hostility which will be far from beneficial to the country, indeed will, particularly in the present circumstances, be extremely hurtful. I take the liberty, therefore, of asking whether the Pathé Company would not be willing to withdraw it if it is still being exhibited.”3

  Pathé responded immediately, informing the president, without mentioning Hearst’s name, that his International Film Company had invested “a great deal of money ... in the making, advertising and marketing of this picture” and that the film had already been reedited once. The State Department counsel informed the president that the federal government had no legal grounds for censoring the film or withdrawing it from circulation, but Wilson wrote the Pathé representative again, asking that the company voluntarily reedit or withdraw the serial as a favor to him and the nation: “It would seem desirable to omit all those scenes in which anything Japanese appears, particularly those showing the Japanese and Mexican armies invading the United States, pillaging homes, kidnapping women and committing all sorts of other offenses. I trust that this will be found possible, and if not, I again venture to ask whether you are not prepared to withdraw the film entirely from exhibition.”4

  Though Wilson had no desire to negotiate directly with Hearst or his representatives, the Pathé executives’ refusal to proceed without the publisher’s approval forced President Wilson to discuss the matter with Hearst’s attorney and adviser, Grenville MacFarland. MacFarland assured Wilson in writing that the changes he had requested would be made, “though with great difficulty.” All images of Japanese kimonos, costumes, servants, interior fittings, flags, and military uniforms would be eliminated from the reedited version which would be sent to the State Department “for further inspection.” While MacFarland, following Wilson’s lead, did not refer to Hearst directly in his letter, he must have infuriated Wilson by suggesting that those who disapproved of the propaganda in Patria reminded him “of the very respectable Athenian citizens who denounced Demosthenes for attempting to disturb the amicable relations of Athens with the friendly power of Macedonia.”5

  Patria, now in its second revision, was screened in October of 1917 by representatives of the State Department and the Japanese Embassy who found it improved, but still objectionable. Secretary of State Lansing suggested that the film be returned for another round of alterations, but Wilson refused to push the matter further. Patria had, after almost a year in the theaters, already reached its audience, and the president knew that he had no legal grounds for proceeding against Hearst nor did he want to ask him for any more favors.6

  The controversy over Patria may have alerted Hearst to the troubles ahead. In May of 1917, Arthur Brisbane, no doubt with the approval and financial backing from his chief, bought the Washington Times and launched a one-man campaign to convince the Wilson administration that Hearst was on its side. In the fall, Hearst authorized his attorney, Grenville MacFarland, to arrange a private meeting for him with the president. MacFarland wrote Wilson a personal letter describing the ways in which the Hearst papers were “helping the great cause” and asked Joseph Tumulty, Wilson’s secretary, for “permission to bring over some day next week Mr. Hearst for a little informal talk.” In the event that the president was unable to meet with Hearst, MacFarland asked that the fact that he had suggested the meeting “be kept confidential.” Wilson tersely replied that it was “out of the question for me to see Mr. Hearst on any business of any kind and I would be very much obliged to you if you would convey that intimation to Mr. MacFarland so that this suggestion might be as if it had never been made.”7

  There was little Hearst or his editors could do now to alleviate the Wilson administration’s suspicion that they were traitors to their nation. In early October, T. V. Ranck, his editorial director, traveled to Washington on a goodwill mission with a Hearst reporter by the name of Andersen who supposedly had information about events in Germany to report to the War Department. Capta
in Dick Slaughter of the Military Intelligence Division interviewed Andersen and informed his commanding officer that he had been

  very careful to keep both Ranck and Andersen under my eye at all times while they were in the building, so that I am sure that they got nothing out of Military Intelligence on which to base an article or a statement....I am convinced that Hearst desires to use the Military Intelligence for the purpose of showing how loyal he is in submitting articles to the Military Intelligence before publishing them....I am convinced that Ranck desires to “plant” Andersen as an officer in the Military Intelligence to work in the interests of Hearst.8

  Ironically, as Hearst discovered, the same lack of enthusiasm for the war which caused him such trouble in Washington had enormously enhanced his popularity in New York City. His nonstop assault on the English—at one point, he demanded that no American troops be sent to Europe until the “500,000 English slackers” in the United States had been “shipped straight to the fighting lines in Flanders”—combined with his crusade against the “disloyal defamation” of antiwar dissenters and German-Americans had boosted his standing among Irish, German, and Jewish-American voters. He was once again being spoken of as a possible mayoral candidate against John Purroy Mitchel, who had in 1913 defeated Tammany’s candidate for mayor and was running for reelection in 1917.9

  As Hearst had no interest in the mayoralty, when the Democrats nominated Judge John Hylan of the Brooklyn County Court, a nondescript but perfectly presentable candidate, to run against Mitchel, Hearst endorsed him. Mitchel and his supporters immediately seized upon Hearst’s endorsement as the major issue in the campaign. A vote for the Democrats, they claimed, was a vote for “Hearst, Hylan, the Hohenzollerns, and the Habsburgs.” The charge that Hearst was a German sympathizer and Hylan his willing puppet was taken up by his opponents everywhere. The New York Times, in its editorial the week before Election Day, referred to him as “the spokesman of the Kaiser in this country.” J. M. Beck, a politician, lawyer, and stridently pro-English propagandist, “denounced” Hearst at Carnegie Hall as “the ‘fountain head’ of the pro-German propaganda in the United States which has as its purpose the destruction of the morale of the American people.” The Times published Beck’s speech, verbatim, on its front page, under the boldface headline, “Nation’s Greatest Menace.”10