by David Nasaw
The Examiners first major front-page crime story appeared on May 19, 1887, on the right-hand side of the front page under the headline, “THUGS!...A Band of Murderers Discovered in San Francisco.... Killing Men to Collect Their Insurance ... Unnumbered Awful Crimes Laid at the Door of These Molochs.” Though the story carried no byline, its first sentence referred to the role played by Examiner reporters in uncovering “the most frightful conspiracy in the modern criminal annals of the civilized world.” Hearst not only inserted his reporters into his crime and scandal stories, but made them the heroes and heroines of a morality play within a play. Examiner crime stories uncovered two layers of criminality at once. They exposed the original crimes in all their bestiality and then analyzed at great length the blundering, sometimes criminal, incompetence of the officials investigating and prosecuting the case. Because the police and prosecutors were not doing their job, the Examiner reporters were forced to do it for them. Readers were reminded again and again that the city’s foulest criminals would have gone unpunished save for “The Invincible Determination of the ‘Examiner' to Bring Them to Justice.”33
Through the first summer of Hearst's tenure at the Examiner, there were reports, editorials, and cartoons about the corrupt police and hack politicians who were depriving San Franciscans of the civic improvements they not only deserved, but had paid for with their taxes. The crimes of corruption were legion: there was jury tampering, murder, cover-up, bribery, kidnapping, all waiting to be exposed by the Examiner staff. No institution was safe from scrutiny. The newspaper found corruption in Folsom Prison, in the surveyor general's office, even in the privately managed but publicly funded Home for the Care of Inebriates.34
The lead editorial on October 30 reminded its readers—yet again—that Examiner reporters gave “Justice a lift when her chariot gets mired down”:
Examiner reporters are everywhere; they are the first to see everything, and the first to perceive the true meaning of what they see. Whether a child is to be found, an eloping girl to be brought home or a murder to be traced, one of our staff is sure to give the sleepy detectives their first pointers ... The Examiner reporter is a feature of modern California civilization. His energy, astuteness and devotion make him the one thing needed to redeem the community from the corruption that seems to have selected this period as its peculiar prey.35
Having found a successful formula for his newspaper—one that created “buzz” and attracted readers—Hearst pushed it as far as he could. On March 1, 1888, to choose a day at random, the Examiner’s front-page headlines were:
SAD SCENES. The Julia’s [a capsized steamer] Victims Borne to the Cities of the Dead. A MOURNFUL HOLIDAY.
TIGHTENING THE GRIP. Every Day Brings More Evidence Against the Opium Ring.
MURDERED BY CHINESE. Thomas Gibbs, a Tramp, Fatally Stabbed by Supposed Garroters. A Cold-Blooded Deed. Knifed Without Pause, and Because He Wanted to Defend Himself.
BUTCHERED AS THEY RAN. The Fearful Climax to a Land Dispute in Texas. Seven Negroes Killed. Five Shot Dead and Two Perish in a Burning Cabin.
A TALE RETOLD. The Sudden Stoppage of a Train Between Stations. CoolHeaded Robbers. The Engineer and Fireman Compelled to Assist the Desperadoes.
KILLED FOR HIS MONEY. The Horrible Crime to Which a Young Villain Has Confessed. A Man Decapitated. Insanity of the Victim’s Widow—The Murderer’s Mother Greatly Affected.
As Hearst remade the paper, the writing got better, more focused, and more detailed. Articles took on the pace and coloring of short stories. While the prose was at times hackneyed, it was often first-rate. In the finest tradition of newspaper journalism (like the O. Henry stories that would appear in the New York World in the early 1900s), it was never easy to tell where reporting ended and fiction began. As Michael Robertson, the author of Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature, observes, this mingling of genres was common to “journalistic discourse at the turn of the century.... Newspaper reporters and readers of the 1890s were much less concerned with distinguishing among fact-based reporting, opinion, and literature.” The cult of objectivity which would define journalistic standards—if not always journalistic practices—later in the twentieth century was not yet in place. What readers expected of their newspapers was not literal, but figurative truth. They wanted a map of the city with the “feel” of events, the “sense” of being there, and this is what Hearst gave them every day.36
Following the examples of New York editors—Benjamin Day and Charles Dana of the Sun, James Gordon Bennett and his son at the Herald, Horace Greeley at the Tribune, and most recently and spectacularly, Joseph Pulitzer at the World —Hearst found in the daily life of the city and its humblest inhabitants some of his strongest source material. In the Sunday, May 29, 1887, paper, five full columns were devoted to an article entitled “NIGHT WATCHES. From Evening Till Morning in San Francisco Streets. Toilers in Darkness. Men and Women Who Toil Not, Neither Do They Sleep.” The story was an account of a journey through the city, beginning on Market Street at 7:30 in the evening and ending at 5:30 the next morning. The prose is vivid, the line drawings beautifully crafted, the descriptions of the city and its denizens after dark haunting. Was this short fiction or firsthand reportage or a bit of both? Whatever the proportion of fact to fiction, it made for a fine story.37
If in the features he added to the paper Hearst was reaching out to a broader constituency than the one that had traditionally bought and read the Examiner, editorial policies remained much as they had been, with one exception. As he had earlier warned his father, the Examiner was not going to be a Democratic party organ. It reserved the right to criticize any and all politicians, when they deserved it.38
Under Will’s stewardship, the Examiner was defiantly prolabor, anticapital, and antirailroad. It defended labor’s right to unionize and strike and supported Samuel Gompers’s call for the eight-hour day. This prolabor stance was tainted with virulent anti-Asian racism. As the historian Roger Daniels has written, from the 1870s onward California’s workingmen tended to attribute all their ills to the presence of cheap “‘Mongolian’ labor, and, consequently, directed their protests against the Chinese and the men who employed them.” Almost every labor leader, every labor newspaper, and every politician and publisher who courted the workingman’s favor enlisted in the campaign to exclude Chinese, and later Japanese, immigrants from entering the nation. The Examiner was not the most virulent opponent of Asian immigration. Other California dailies, including the Chronicle, were every bit as racist. Still, because Hearst's paper positioned itself as a Democratic newspaper dedicated to the cause of working people, his editorialists and reporters endlessly repeated organized labor's argument that Chinese gang-laborers, imported by the railroads and other large corporations, were robbing “white” workers of their livelihood and destroying San Francisco by promoting gambling, lotteries, and houses of ill fame in Chinatown, and crime and opium addiction everywhere else. The attacks were relentless and inevitably linked to demands for exclusion of the “Mongolian horde.”39
While Hearst broke no new ground in his racist diatribes against Asian immigrants, unlike his competitors he took practical steps to demonstrate his commitment to “white labor.” Because, as the Examiner alerted its readers in January 1889, the Chinese hordes were multiplying at “an alarming rate,” the paper offered to sponsor a “labor train” to bring white laborers to California to replace the Asian. Though nothing came of this proposal, in February the Examiner opened a free employment service for white male and female applicants competing for work with Chinese laborers.40
This was but one of the many free services Hearst and the Examiner offered San Franciscans. Like the workingman’s saloon and the political clubhouse, Hearst's newspaper served as an unofficial public agency, an honest broker, an unpaid intermediary between the people and their government. As a front-page advertisement on March 24, 1892, triumphantly claimed, San Franciscans could on any given day get help from
the Examiner if they had “Indian Depredation claims to collect, a patent to secure, a pension to get, a land title to straighten out, or any business to do with the Government.”41
It is difficult to put much faith in newspaper circulation figures before 1914, when the Audit Bureau of Circulations was established. Still, even discounting Hearst's own boasting on his front pages, there is no doubt that he succeeded in dramatically improving the circulation of the Examiner. In the first few weeks, circulation, as he wrote his father, had “increased at the rate of about 40 or 50 a week,” but soon jumped to “50 a day.” The Examiners circulation doubled in its first year and, by 1890, it had drawn even with the Chronicle’s.42
All of this cost money, which George Hearst reluctantly paid, not because he wished to indulge his son but because having lost money for years on the Examiner, he was now willing to invest whatever it took to turn the paper into a profit-making enterprise. Will was not given carte blanche, but had to persuade his father and Irwin Stump, the senator's chief financial adviser, that every expenditure made sense. Most of the time, he got his way. He convinced the senator to pay for an expanded staff of editors and writers, for two new web presses, nicknamed the “Monarch” and “Jumbo,” built especially for the Examiner by Hoe and Company, and for the new Linotype machines manufactured by Ottmar Mergenthaler, which enabled compositors to set type much faster by operating the keyboard on a machine that cast type in metal strips, line by line.43
Though in the years to come critics like A. J. Liebling would complain that Hearst’s only contribution to the newspaper industry had been the use “of money like a heavy club” to bludgeon his competitors into submission, the reality was that Hearst had, for the most part, spent his father’s money wisely in San Francisco. There was an old adage in the mining business that it took a mine to dig a mine, meaning that only those with millions to invest stood any chance of making any money in the industry. Though Liebling might have bemoaned the fact, the truth was that by 1880 newspaper publishing had also become a big business which required “big money” to enter. Readers, able to choose between several competing papers, wanted their money’s worth and more. Hearst succeeded in San Francisco—as he would soon succeed in New York—because he had the resources to give those readers what they wanted: a bigger, better looking, better written, better printed and illustrated paper than his competitors could offer.44
We have no idea how long it took before the Examiner began to pay off on the senator’s investment. We do know that in 1890 when George Hearst’s reminiscences were recorded for a possible autobiography, he claimed that the Examiner was already on a paying basis. “After I had lost about a quarter of a million by the paper,” he told his interviewer, “my boy Will came out of school, and said he wanted to try his hand at the paper ... He said ... that the reason that the paper did not pay was because it was not the best paper in the country. He said that if he had it he would make it the best paper, and that then it would pay. I ... agreed to stand by him for two years. Now, I don’t think there is a better paper in the country....I believe it is now worth upwards of a million.”45
5. “I Can’t Do San Francisco Alone”
WILL HEARST, still several years shy of thirty, had proved himself an extraordinarily capable newspaper editor and proprietor, but the strain had been enormous. In the newspaper business, you are only as good as today’s issue, as this week’s circulation figures, and though he had made steady progress, he was competing against Michel de Young of the Chronicle, a veteran publisher with an experienced staff and capital of his own to invest. De Young matched Hearst every step of the way and then, in November of 1888, went him one better by announcing that he was going to build a monumental new, fully electric office building for the Chronicle.
Though it would cost a few million dollars to erect a similar modern structure for the Examiner, Hearst insisted to his father that it be done—and immediately. The new Chronicle building, he wrote his father, was undoing all he had done to make the Examiner the city’s leading newspaper. “That damned Chronicle building is a tremendous advertisement and helps them immensely. Everybody talks about it and everybody thinks it is pretty fine and there is great difficulty getting subscribers away from a paper that is doing a big thing like that. The effect upon the advertiser is even worse.... How long do you suppose it will be before we can put up a building—a stunner that will knock his endways and make him as sick as he is now making me. I hope it won’t be long. I am getting pretty tired and worried.”
The cost of buying a downtown site and constructing a building would be immense, but Will was certain that it could be done. He had been talking it over with Irwin Stump, George's treasurer and chief financial adviser, and had agreed to reduce his salary to a thousand a month (equivalent to around $20,000 today). “We’d like to cut you down a little if you don’t mind,” Will wrote his father. “Can’t you sell that stable pretty soon. You promised faithfully you would sell it years ago.”1
Only days later, Will took up his argument again: “I wish you could come out right away. I want to talk with you and arrange a plan of campaign. It is hard to write everything.” De Young’s plans for the new Chronicle building were, Will explained to the senator, proceeding apace: “He is going to put in his tower the largest clock face in the world. The New York Sun had a column about this clock ... It had an effect on Grandpa even. He said, ‘Dear me, that fellow must make an awful lot of money’...I tell you the whole country knows about that building and is impressed by it.... We are losing subscribers, we are losing advertisements, we are losing prestige. I tell you, governor, we have got to do something. We have either got to go in and win or we have got to go out of the business. I am doing the best I can. I have sent my girl away and I am working at the paper all the time....I can’t do any more.”2
Will, in the end, got his way. On May 21, 1890, it was announced on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner that land had been purchased to erect a new building at the corner of Market and Third.
It had not taken long for William Randolph Hearst to make a success for himself as a newspaper publisher. But he was still, in his dealings with his father, a little boy begging for a handout. He had told his father he had sent Tessie away in the hope that this would convince his parents that he was in dead earnest about the Examiner. As long as he ran one of his father’s businesses, his business and personal life would be inextricably linked.
Though Will was now, in his mid-twenties, a successful businessman, his mother did not leave him alone. She had only recently rescued him from what she was sure would have been a personal disaster by separating him from Eleanor Calhoun. But instead of settling down to marry a respectable woman, he had taken up again with his Cambridge waitress. Phoebe was not a prude. She was well aware that other men had mistresses, but they, unlike her son Will, had the good sense to entertain them in the backrooms of tenderloin saloons or in private dining rooms, privileged spaces where they could misbehave without their sins being bruited about. Will was placing his future at risk—or so Phoebe believed—not because he “kept” a woman, but because he was so open about it.
For the next five years, Phoebe and Will would engage in a marathon battle over Tessie, with George on the sidelines, unable or unwilling to fully take his wife’s side. In early 1888, Phoebe won the first round and Tessie was sent away—at least for the time being. From Munich, Orrin Peck, who was Will's oldest and dearest friend but owed allegiance to Phoebe, who supported his art studies, congratulated his patron. “How was it you got rid of that young lady?” he wrote Phoebe in Washington. “Mastered her in her own language? and left out the oaths? A masterpiece I assure you worthy of a [word illegible] lawyer.”3
In the summer of 1888, Phoebe returned to San Francisco, where she had rented a home for herself at Taylor and Sacramento Street. She did not ask Will to meet her at the train station because, as she wrote George who remained in Washington, she wanted to spare herself the disappointment w
hen he didn’t show up. She made her own way to her hotel, had breakfast, and then telephoned the Examiner, only to be told that Will had gone to the baseball game. She met instead with Irwin Stump and got a full—and rather frightening—accounting of Will's spending. Will appeared at her hotel “just as dinner was served and remained until ten o clock,” Phoebe wrote her husband. “He really seems glad to see me and has shown me more kind feeling and affection during the last four hours than he has shown during as many years. We had a quiet, reasonable and thorough discussion of the subject that has caused anxiety [Tessie Powers]. Tomorrow we will spend most of the day and evening together and I will write you fully.”
Though her meeting with Will had gone well, she was quite distressed by what she had learned from Irwin Stump earlier in the afternoon: “Will has been spending an enormous amount of money, more than you and me together....However I will talk more with Will and see Townsend [George ’s former secretary and now the Examiner's business manager] and get an idea of the needs and expenses of the paper and a more thorough understanding of personal affairs. Then you will be able to judge of the amount required, and act accordingly. Things have been going on in rather a bad way. I am anxious to save you any unhappy hours and think it best not to go into details now.”4
Over the next few weeks, Phoebe learned, to her horror, that her son had in a year's time spent $184,513 on the Examiner, equivalent to about $3.7 million today, and another $47,939, or $950,000, on himself. She blamed George entirely for their son's carelessness and urged him to reduce the boy’s allowance: “If you have any courage, it might be well to say a few words to Will.”5