by David Nasaw
The World would be different. Pulitzer succeeded not only in drawing readers from all of the competing papers, but in enticing those who were not yet in the habit of reading a daily paper. Though Pulitzer charged only two cents for the World, there was nothing cheap about it. Like the new entertainment moguls, he wrapped his product in the most lavish packaging possible. He upgraded his plant and printing equipment—and advertised the fact as often as he could.37
More important than the new machinery were the crusading Democratic politics and the look, the feel, the overall appearance of his newspaper, particularly its front page. On taking over the World, Pulitzer immediately reduced the wording of the masthead from The New York World to simply The World, separating the words with an illustration of two globes and a printing press from which rays of light emanated. On either side of the masthead, he added “ears,” small boxes with promotional matter about the paper. He further opened up the front page by employing woodcuts as illustrations just under the masthead, breaking up what had been a solemn, unrelieved six-column wall of text.
Pulitzer’s triumph in New York was aided enormously by the fact that his was a Democratic paper and, almost alone among New York’s dailies, strongly supported Cleveland in 1884. According to Pulitzer’s biographer George Juergens, the World’s readership had at the end of one year increased fourfold and “at the end of two years by tenfold. Nothing like it had ever been seen before.” With the increase in circulation came a rise in advertising revenues and profitability. In the first year of operation, according to the Journalist, the World earned $150,000. Each succeeding year saw increased earnings.38
None of this was lost on Hearst, who had begun reading the World in Cambridge during his tenure as business manager of the Lampoon and continued, with almost obsessive interest, during his year in exile in New York and Washington. It would not have been difficult for him or for any astute observer of the daily press to see why certain newspapers, like Pulitzer’s World, sold so much better than their competitors. Nor was it any secret how much money Pulitzer was making. He did not hide his financial success, but displayed it proudly for all to see in his mansions, his art collection, his dinners at Delmonico’s, and his yachts.39
In later years, Hearst would claim in one of his daily columns that after leaving Harvard, he had gone to New York “to join the staff of the New York World and give Mr. Pulitzer a few pointers about how to conduct a newspaper.” Though some commentators, unfamiliar with the humorous tone he used to warn readers not to take him seriously—or literally—have asserted that he did indeed apprentice himself to the World, there is no evidence of this. On the contrary, it would have been impossible for him to do so during the year’s hiatus he took between Harvard and his return to San Francisco to edit the Examiner.40
Though he did not work at the World, his correspondence with his father suggests that he was reading it daily, studying every element in its makeup, and comparing it daily with the Examiner. In one of his lectures, written in late 1885, Will wrote:
I have just finished and dispatched a letter to the Editor of the Examiner, in which I recommended Eugene Lent to his favorable notice, and commented on the illustrations, if you may call them such, which have lately disfigured the paper.... In case my remarks should have no effect and he should continue in his career of desolation let me beg of you to remonstrate with him and thus prevent him from giving the finishing stroke to our miserable little sheet. I have begun to have a strange fondness for our little paper—a tenderness like unto that which a mother feels for a puny or deformed offspring, and I should hate to see it die now after it had battled so long and so nobly for existence; in fact, to tell the truth, I am possessed of the weakness which at some time or other of their lives pervades most men; I am convinced that I could run a newspaper successfully. Now if you should make over to me the Examiner —with enough money to carry out my schemes—I’ll tell you what I would do....It would be well to make the paper as far as possible original, to clip only some such leading journal as the New York World which is undoubtedly the best paper of that class to which the Examiner belongs—that class which appeals to the people and which depends for its success upon enterprise, energy and a certain startling originality ... And to accomplish this we must have—as the World has—active, intelligent and energetic young men; we must have men who come out west in the hopeful buoyancy of youth for the purpose of making their fortunes.... And now to close with a suggestion of great consequence, namely, that all these changes be made not by degrees but at once so that the improvement will be very marked and noticeable and will attract universal attention and comment.
He ended his letter with a few words about his preparation for his upcoming Harvard examinations: “I am getting on ... well enough to spend considerable time in outside reading and in journalistic investigation.” And then, in an almost self-mocking note of exasperation, closed it, “Well goodbye. I have given up all hope of having you write to me, so I suppose I must just scratch along and trust to hearing of you through the newspapers.”41 Though George Hearst, as he had predicted, did not answer his letter, Will continued to bombard him with suggestions for improving the Examiner. In January of 1886, he sent him another letter, with copies of the New York Evening Post, the New York Tribune, and illustrations from the World to prove his point that the Examiner was putting out a newspaper inferior in paper quality, type, typesetting, layout, and illustrations. “It is a positive insult to our readers to set before them such pictures of repulsive deformity as these and yet such abortions are not entirely out of place in an article that comes to a climax with a piece of imbecility so detestable that it would render the death of the writer justifiable homicide.” He closed this letter, as he did most of his others on the subject, by asking when his father was coming East and plaintively begging for a response of some kind: “I want to talk with you. Do you receive any of my letters? Please answer when you get this and tell me if you want me to look around and try to find some capable people for the dad gasted old paper.”42
Though it should have been apparent from his continual references to the Examiner and his avoidance of much discussion of his studies that Will had given up on Harvard, his mother and father refused to face facts. In early February 1886, they dispatched Dr. Oliver, their surrogate in Cambridge, to meet again with President Eliot to plead Will’s case. President Eliot agreed that Will would be allowed to take his final examinations and graduate with his class if he petitioned the faculty at once to allow him to return, included a recommendation from his tutor, and declared “that he means to work and that he will work and that there will be no more ‘punches’ or suppers in his rooms [and] that he will not leave Cambridge during the term.”
“Mr. Eliot,” Oliver wrote George, “agreed with me that it was Will’s associates rather than Will himself who did wrong and I came away with the idea that the President was very favorably inclined towards Master Will and would do his part if the young man will agree to do his.”43
Will had no intention of adhering to such a Spartan regimen, especially after March 1886, when his father was appointed to fill the unexpired term of Senator Miller after Miller’s death. Unfortunately, the Democratic governor who had named George to the Senate seat made the mistake of calling a special session of the state legislature. Once in session, the Republican-dominated state senate was empowered to override the governor and elect its own candidate to serve out Senator Miller’s term. After only a few weeks in Washington, George Hearst was sent back to California for what he hoped would be a relatively short stay. If, as he expected, the Democrats won a majority in the state senate in the November 1886 elections, they, not the Republicans, would elect the next senator. George Hearst began at once to do everything he could—and spend all he could—to win a state senate majority for his party and a six-year term in the U.S. Senate for himself.
Phoebe stayed behind to look after their son, who instead of working with his tutor had been commuting between
Washington and New York. He had been elected early in 1886 to the Lotos Club, which offered its members meals and lodging and was conveniently located on 21st Street within walking distance of the city’s theater and entertainment district, where Will spent a good deal of his time.44
Will was distracted that spring not only by his father’s politicking, but by the return of Eleanor Calhoun, his mother’s protégé, whom he had first met in New York in December of 1881. Eleanor had stopped over in Washington to visit Phoebe on her way to London, where she intended to study Shakespearean acting. Like Sybil Sanderson, Will’s first love, Eleanor Calhoun was gorgeous, artistically inclined, and a bit eccentric. Two or three years older than Will, she had, in her middle twenties, already cultivated a theatrical presence that was welcome at the social and cultural events which Phoebe, in preparation for her own career as a senator’s wife, had begun to offer at her Washington home.
“Whatever she saw in me, I don’t know,” Hearst confided to Cora Older, who wrote rapturously of his and Eleanor’s courtship. “He wooed her with flowers, gifts and ardent devotion, but no wooing was necessary,” Older continued. “Eleanor Calhoun was as rapturously devoted to him as he was to her. They had like tastes, a romantic love of the theater and literature. Both were young and handsome. They became engaged.”45
In May of 1886, Will forwarded his petition to the Harvard faculty requesting that he be permitted to sit for his examinations. The petition was refused. Will was not surprised and, it appeared, was quite happy to have the matter settled at last. He wrote his mother:
I have gone to New Haven to see the Harvard-Yale baseball game, but will be back in Boston Saturday night. I write this note to prevent you from allowing Miss Calhoun to attempt the disagreeable and impossible task of conciliating the faculty. Nor do you attempt it either. You will only succeed in increasing the faculty’s already exaggerated idea of their own importance without accomplishing a thing. I don’t propose to eat any more crow myself nor to serve any to the rest of the family so if you please we will proceed with the next course. Moreover, for fear that you would be bad form and would insist upon being helped twice, I have just practically upset the pepper in the plate. I assured the gentlemen of the Faculty of Harvard College that I didn’t regret so much having lost my degree as having given them an opportunity to refuse it to me, and “an abject grovel in the characteristic Japanese style” would hardly be consistent with the above statement.
Don’t [show] this letter to Miss Calhoun. Only tell her that the decision of the Faculty was final and that there is no appeal from it.46
He was now on his own—or was he? He had no training, no money of his own, and no word from his father as to his future prospects. For the time being, none of this mattered. He was in love with Eleanor Calhoun and intended to marry her. He did not apologize to his mother or father for his expulsion—indeed, he appears not to have mentioned it again in his letters. It was summertime and he intended to spend his vacation in California, the only place on earth he felt truly at home.
His summer headquarters was the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey, the resort of choice for San Francisco’s elites. In mid-July, he wrote his mother in Washington, in the charming style that had so often in the past won her over to his side: “Though I have always been known as William the Wise and renowned for the brilliancy and appropriateness of my ideas, I have never been more worthy of my soubriquet or more deserving of my fame than at the present moment. An idea has come upon me. An idea so large, so magnificent in its proportions that it all but fills the spacious chambers of my mighty mind.” And so he continued for another full paragraph before at last getting to the point, obviously fearful that once he did, his mother would say no. He wanted his mother to bring Eleanor Calhoun and her mother to Monterey for a brief holiday at the Hotel Del Monte. “There is tennis, bowling and the baths; there is a little whirl of gayety in the evening—a very small eddy indeed—there are a number of very pleasant people, more than I thought San Francisco could boast and I am positive that we could spend three days or so in a very delightful manner here.” The letter fairly overflows with frantic good cheer and closes with a postscript, “Did you get the delirious letters [no doubt about his love for Eleanor]? Keep ’em.”47
This time, Will sadly misjudged his mother’s intentions. Though she had sponsored Eleanor in San Francisco and introduced her to Will, Phoebe had no intention of permitting her only son to marry an aspiring actress. Miss Calhoun, she wrote in a letter to Orrin Peck, was “wonderfully bright and even brilliant,” but she was also “erratic, visionary, indolent and utterly wanting in order and neatness with extravagant tastes and no appreciation of values.” Worse yet, Phoebe was convinced that the young woman she had introduced to Will years before was a fortune hunter who had hatched a plot with her mother to snare her young and innocent son. While Eleanor was only a few years older than Will, “in worldly experience and craft,” Phoebe wrote Orrin Peck, “she is twenty years his senior.”48
In an attempt to separate Will from Eleanor and “give love a chance to cool,” Phoebe and George sent him to Mexico to inspect the 670,000-acre Babicora ranch in Chihuahua, about 250 miles southwest of El Paso, which George had acquired in 1884. Though Will had no desire to work in Mexico—in any capacity other than as absentee landlord—he agreed to go. Without any means of support outside his allowance, he had no choice but to obey his parents’ wishes, though as he wrote Phoebe while en route, he was “certain” that he would “get very tired of this business before three months are over.” His one hope was that having done as they asked, he would be rewarded with a piece of property large enough to support him in the future, whatever he decided to do.49
Will was not enthusiastic at first about being exiled from Monterey to Mexico. He wired his mother to send him his macintosh, his waterproof boots, his blue trousers, and “different kinds of preserves and some crackers.” He also wanted the Examiner to be delivered to him by Wells Fargo. While he caustically joked that he “wouldn’t think of leaving [Mexico] for theatricals,” he offered to return to help his father and the Democrats prepare for the November elections.50
Though Will had no intention of remaining in Mexico to oversee the family properties, he understood that, having left Harvard under a cloud, he had now to convince his father that he had a head for business. When George Hearst, as usual, declined to answer his son’s letters, Will communicated with him through Phoebe. The government of President Porfirio Díaz, which had privatized Indian communal lands in four Mexican states, was prepared to hire George Hearst to survey those lands and would, in return, give him one-third of the land surveyed with the right to buy another third “with government scrip at its face value.”51
It was a propitious time to buy Mexican land. President Díaz was hungry for foreign capital but, because of repeated failures to repay past debts, was unable to raise much in Europe. To attract American investors, he had repealed the legislation that had set aside the subsoil as a national reserve, thereby giving foreign investors like George Hearst carte blanche to expropriate Mexico’s mineral wealth.52
The possibilities for profit in Mexico were endless, and Will described every one of them to his father. The land was rich in gold, perfect for grazing cattle, and there were limitless opportunities for building “lastingly profitable” railroads. Whatever George decided to do, Will urged him not to let the moment pass. “I really don’t see what is to prevent us from owning all Mexico and running it to suit ourselves.”
Here was the opportunity Will had been looking for to acquire property of his own and do so in such a way as to make his father proud. He was not asking for a handout—or not exactly. He instructed his mother to let George know that he wished only “the money necessary for the survey and the benefit of his advice and then with that push let me go it alone.” If George didn’t want to cover the costs of the land survey, Will would try to raise the money elsewhere. Or if, as Will hoped, his father wanted to fund the venture,
he could pay for it by selling some of the Hearst property in New Mexico or stock in their lesser mines.
Will was determined to escape the fate of a rich man’s son born a generation too late. The myth of the settled frontier, which would be articulated by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, was a living reality for Will Hearst in 1886. He was the dandified, Harvard-educated son of a California Forty-Niner. His father’s generation had settled the West, cleared the land, built the railroads, discovered and mined the precious metals, and made their oversized fortunes. If there were no more internal frontiers to settle, there remained foreign ones—and Mexico was the most promising. “We are pioneers in Mexico,” he wrote to his father. “We have all the opportunities open to us, that ever pioneers in California had and we should improve them.”
Father and son together would conquer a new world as father had conquered the old one, but only if George were smart enough to follow William’s advice. “You have experience now and matured judgment. You have also great influence with the government here and then you have Verger [Hearst’s manager in Mexico] and Follansbee and me all overflowing with youthful energy.” George’s “connections” and “reputation,” already considerable, would be enhanced by election to the Senate which, his son informed him, “will be worth a million dollars to you at the very least here in Mexico. It will give you so much power, it will so impress these fellows. Now work your advantages; use your experience and your judgment, exert your influence; work Verger and Follansbee and me and there is no reason why we should not soon be as rich as Crocker or anybody ... Stir yourself daddy pop. First get elected by all means and then between December and the time you take your seat we can raise enough money to work all our remaining things in a way that will allow us to sit back and watch the coffers swell.”