by David Nasaw
The competition with the World, a crusading Democratic paper, had sharpened Hearst’s and the Journals political focus. To compete with Pulitzer required that he establish himself, as Pulitzer had before him, as a champion of New York City’s working people. Though he continued to dress like a dandy and live the life of a playboy, Will Hearst was, or believed himself to be, as authentic an advocate of the workingman as his rival. There was no blue blood in the Hearst family. While Will had been raised with a silver spoon in his mouth and gone to Harvard, he had never forgotten where his father came from. In New York, as in San Francisco, he ran a paper that was pro-labor, pro-immigrant, and anti-Republican. The Journal opposed the new Raines law, which harshly regulated saloons. It supported the “starving tailors” against the monstrous contractors, and demanded better treatment for arriving immigrants at Ellis Island.21
While there was no call to attack the Chinese and Japanese as in San Francisco, Hearst joined his competitors in denigrating African-Americans in “darky” cartoons and jokes. At the same time, however, he went out of his way to avoid offending the city’s European ethnic groupings. While Joseph Pulitzer was regularly attacked in print with anti-Semitic slurs—the Journalist referred to him as “Jewseph”—Hearst’s papers defended Jewish immigrants from anti-Semitic attacks. On June 14, 1896, the Journal published a full-page article headlined “Will the Jews Own New York? A New York Minister Said So in His Sermon Last Sunday and the Journal Has Hunted Up the Real Facts.” The Journal article listed “New York’s Big Millionaires” and provided assorted charts, graphs, and illustrations to prove the minister wrong. The Jews did not own New York, the Journal informed its readers, no matter what the Reverend Isaac Haldeman had pronounced the Sunday before in his Baptist church at 71st Street and the Boulevard (i.e., Broadway).
“The ignorant, the debased and the downtrodden Jews are no more to be feared, as far as their influence upon or their power over the rest of the world is concerned, than the ignorant, the debased and the downtrodden of any other nation or people,” the Journal explained. “The cultured Jew, who knows the history of his race and who has a decent pride in his ancestry, is a citizen of whom any community might well be proud. There is nothing to fear from him.”
European immigrants were treated with respect in the Journal’s pages, though often with a heavy dose of sentimentality. The Journal regularly published quaint little vignettes about life on the Jewish and Italian East Sides and in German and Irish social clubs, as well as darker “naturalist” portraits of life “in the Tenderloin” by authors like Stephen Crane, at the time the best-selling author of The Red Badge of Courage.22
It was in his Sunday papers that Hearst, like Pulitzer, reached out most directly to the city’s working and immigrant peoples. The Sunday papers reflected the vitality, prosperity, and optimism of the city’s readers and the talent of its writers and artists. Even at a distance of one hundred years, there is something extraordinarily exhilarating about reading through a turn-of-the-century Sunday newspaper. Like continuous vaudeville in the 1890s, amusement parks in the 1900s, and the movie palaces in the 1920s, the Sundays were intentionally oversized, overstocked, and overwhelming. To attract customers who might not otherwise be ready to spend money on a commodity that was not absolutely necessary, the Sunday editors and publishers went out of their way to provide their readers with an incredible bargain—a newspaper of close to one hundred pages with enough in it to provide reading material for the rest of the week.
The Sundays were newspapers in name only. The first few pages looked much like the dailies, but from there on, the Sundays were a genre unto themselves, with separate staffs, printing and distribution schedules, and more than a few items that would have been out of place in any other sort of publication. On any given Sunday, readers of the Hearst papers were treated to lengthy illustrated stories on dinosaurs, extraterrestrials, or medical cures; several pages on Broadway personalities and shows; short stories and excerpts from the best or most popular current fiction; fully illustrated features on ballet dancers, chorus girls, actresses, and other scantily clad performers; and a variety of women's pages and family features. Included as well were three full-color supplements: the American Humorist with its comics, a sixteen-page Sunday American Magazine, and an eight-page Women's Home Journal.
The most visible, popular, and, over time, profitable of Hearst’s Sunday features were his color comics. Pulitzer had published a Sunday humor page in 1889 and a color humor supplement in 1894. One of the more important contributors to this section was the artist Richard Outcault who in early 1896 had begun to draw a series of cartoons organized around a recurring group of characters, the most recognizable of whom was a baldheaded, jug-eared, buck-toothed urchin in a yellow nightshirt. Outcault’s Yellow Kid became so popular a character that Pulitzer used him not just in his comic supplement but in the weekday advertisements for the Sunday paper.23
In the fall of 1896 when Hearst decided to match Pulitzer with a full-color Sunday humor magazine of his own, he custom-ordered specially designed color presses from the Hoe Company and stole Outcault and his Yellow Kid from the World. To make sure all of New York City knew what he was doing, he plastered the town with posters announcing the coming of the American Humorist and, in full-page announcements in his own papers, counted down the days to the arrival of the Yellow Kid, and “Eight Full Pages of Color That Make the Kaleidoscope Pale with Envy.”24
On October 25, the American Humorist made its debut with a full frontpage cartoon panel of the Yellow Kid leading a marching band of children into their new neighborhood. In the weeks to come, the stand-alone color supplement featured not only Yellow Kid cartoons, but gorgeous full-page theatrical drawings by Archie Gunn, sheet music, comic pages, jokes, and illustrations—all, as Hearst proclaimed, for the nickel it cost to buy the Sunday Journal.
Pulitzer tried to stay in the game by asking artist George Luks to draw his own cartoon using Outcault’s characters, thereby giving New York two Yellow Kids every Sunday and providing a convenient nickname, “yellow journalism,” for Hearst's and Pulitzer's newspapers in particular and their style of journalism in general. Unfortunately, on a limited budget and without the capital to install new color presses or the passion for the comics that Hearst had, Pulitzer could not keep pace.
In late 1897, a second comic strip with continuing characters, the Katzenjammer Kids, appeared in Hearst’s Sunday American Humorist. In early 1900, Happy Hooligan made its debut. What all these strips had in common was not only artistic merit and imagination, but characters who were clearly immigrants. Happy Hooligan was an identifiable Irish-American tramp. The Katzenjammer Kids were German-Americans. The Yellow Kid looked Asiatic, was bald like the poor Eastern European kids whose heads were shaved to prevent lice, and had an Irish name, Mickey Duggan, and an Irish girlfriend. He lived in an Irish neighborhood, Hogan's Alley, bowled in Kelley’s Alleys, and played outside Dempsey’s Saloon. Among the Yellow Kid's friends were a wide variety of urban types, including an unnamed “darky” and the Ricodonna sisters, who appeared for one week as young prostitutes before being magically transformed into chorus girls.25
Over the years, as Hearst built a network of newspapers across the country and established his own features syndicate, he would add to the immigrants who were his first comic heroes a pantheon of American types, most of them recognizably urban. At one time or another, his comic pages included a quintessential middle-class boy in Outcault’s Buster Brown; two working stiffs in Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff; an Irish bricklayer who has become a millionaire and his social-climbing wife in George McManus’s Maggie and Jiggs; a rogue “sporting” man in Billy De Beck’s Barney Google; a lower-middle-class Jewish businessman in Harry Hershfield’s Abie the Agent; and a group of ethnically unidentifiable characters in Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo; a middle-class “working girl” in Russ Westover’s Tillie the Toiler; a sailor and his pals in E. C. Segar’s Popeye; a middle-class married couple, Blondi
e and Dagwood Bumstead, in Chic Young’s Blondie —and the cat and mouse in George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. During the 1930s, these characters were joined by a new wave of action heroes: Flash Gordon, Secret Agent X-9, The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, Prince Valiant, and young Hejji, drawn by Dr. Seuss.26
With his comics as with every other element of his newspapers, Hearst was a hands-on publisher, sometimes to the dismay and occasionally with the gratitude of his artists and editors. In the years to come, he would intervene to ban A Piker Clerk from the Chicago American because he thought it vulgar, suggest to Billy De Beck that he provide Barney Google with the “good-looking gal” that turned out to be the extraordinarily voluptuous Sweet Mama, and protect George Herriman’s Krazy Kat from local editors who kept trying to remove it from their comic pages, claiming their readers just didn’t “get it.”27
While Pulitzer waited for his young rival to run out of money, Hearst continued to outspend him on equipment, advertising, and personnel. In editorials and advertisements, he teased Pulitzer and the World as representatives of an old, tired journalism being rapidly supplanted by the young, vibrant Hearst daily. Pulitzer fought back as best he could. When, in the spring of 1897, the United Press dissolved and the newspapers that had subscribed to it sought membership in the Associated Press, Pulitzer, a charter member of the A.P., approved the Times, Herald, and Tribune for membership but vetoed the Hearst papers. Had Hearst not acted quickly, the loss of a wire service franchise might have ended his newspaper career in New York City. Fortunately, he had the funds to buy himself a newspaper with an Associated Press franchise, the New York Morning Advertiser, and merge it and its wire service subscription with his Morning Journal.28
Hearst’s raids on the World intensified in the fall of 1897 as he hired away Pulitzer’s features editor Rudolph Block, city editor Charles Edward Russell, and then, astonishingly, Arthur Brisbane, who had replaced Goddard as the World's Sunday editor. Brisbane, the son of Albert Brisbane, America’s leading Fourierist and a founder of Brook Farm, was the perfect match for Hearst. He too was a “radical” of sorts, a supporter of Henry George and a champion of the workingman, but he was also a young editor on the make, who as his biographer put it, “craved power, popular success, and, above all, money.” Brisbane and Hearst had been born just a year apart, were sons of larger-than-life fathers, and believed that they could do just about anything better than anyone else. Like Hearst, Brisbane was a dynamo and a brilliant newspaperman, with a flair for the spectacular and outrageous. Unlike his boss, however, he was nervous, thin, of medium height, a boor, a pedant, and rather humorless.29
Brisbane, according to his version of the events that led to his hiring, had rebuffed Hearst’s first attempt to bring him to the Journal. Only as it became apparent that Hearst was as talented a publisher as he was a rich one and not about to disappear from the scene, did Brisbane contact him with a proposition. He wanted to take over the Evening Journal, which Hearst had started up in 1896 to compete with Dana’s Evening Sun, Pulitzer’s Evening World, and the Evening Telegram, James Gordon Bennett, Jr.’s evening paper. Hearst told Brisbane that he had made up his mind to close the evening paper, because it had a tiny circulation and he, William R. Hearst, was a “morning newspaper man.” But he was willing, nonetheless, to give the Evening Journal one last chance, and agreed to let Brisbane share in whatever profits might accrue from increased circulation.30
Pulitzer had reined in Brisbane and forbidden him to expand headlines to fill the page. Hearst did not. He gave Brisbane the same marching orders for the evening paper he had given Goddard for the Sunday edition. He wanted increased circulation. Brisbane gave it to him. In creating a new evening edition and putting Brisbane in charge, Hearst was acknowledging that it was not going to be possible to create one newspaper that would reach all segments of the urban population. To do that, he needed an evening edition as well as the morning, Sunday, and German-language editions. While he had made the Journal as reader-friendly and accessible as any other morning paper in New York, many recently arrived immigrants and working people did not have the time, background, or inclination to wade through the longer, detailed, more literary articles it carried each day. Those who already read a morning paper wanted something different in the afternoon: less news, less analysis, less detail, more emphasis on sports and entertainment. Brisbane apparently gave his evening paper readers what they wanted. He condensed the news stories, added oversized boldface headlines to the front and inside pages, and illustrated his lead stories. Under Brisbane’s leadership, the Evening Journal became Hearst’s most profitable newspaper. Because it was so decidedly lowbrow, so clogged with advertisements, and so unliterary, it would never, however, be his favorite.
Arthur Brisbane would spend the next forty years working for Hearst in a variety of roles. Although not terribly well liked by his colleagues, he knew precisely what he had to do to remain in the Chief’s good graces. He took whatever assignment was given him, followed Hearst’s political line through its twists and turns over the next four decades, and was appropriately rewarded with a steadily escalating salary that made him the nation’s highest-paid newspaperman.
Joseph Pulitzer did not sit idly by as the new kid in town stole away his most valuable editors, tens of thousands in circulation, and hundreds of thousands in revenues. Hearst, Pulitzer admitted to his managing editor, Don Seitz, posed an enormous threat to the World in the morning, the evening, and on Sundays, not only because he had money to spend, but because he had “brains and genius beyond any question, not only brains for news and features but genius for the self-advertising acts which have no parallel.” Pulitzer urged his editors to stop looking at the Journal with “contempt” and acknowledge its genuine “strengths.... If we do not admit that the Journal is printed better and so far as pictures are concerned, is better, then we are blind.” In coded messages sent to New York City—Pulitzer had devised a code name for every editor at the Hearst papers—Pulitzer directed his executives to gather information on the Journal’s efforts. He was convinced that Hearst had planted a spy in the World offices and intended to reciprocate: Hearst’s paper, he said, “adopts our ideas without reserve; adopt anything it may produce promptly if of value.” He instructed Seitz in August to “find somebody in Geranium’s [Pulitzer’s code name for the Journal] office with whom you can connect, to discover exactly who furnishes their ideas, who is dissatisfied and obtainable or available even in the second class of executive rank.” In December, after Brisbane's defection to the enemy, Pulitzer authorized Seitz to intensify his espionage into “the inner workings of the Geranium ... with a view to ascertaining who is producing the good ideas. If it would be helpful, get some tactful and discreet man to assist you in getting information.” Pulitzer approved the expenditure of “$25 a week, or more if required as a ‘luncheon fund’ to promote sociability!—a secret service, diplomatic fund, as it were.”31
The competition for readers was costing both Hearst and Pulitzer a great deal of money. While their circulations and advertising were rising, their per-issue prices were too low to cover costs. Fearing perhaps that Phoebe and her cousin Edward Clark might be about to rein him in, Will contacted Pulitzer, in November of 1897, offering to raise the price of his paper to two cents, if Pulitzer would do the same. In return, he asked that Pulitzer drop his opposition to Hearst's application for an Associated Press franchise for his evening paper. Though delighted that Hearst had blinked first, Pulitzer was not prepared to give up anything. He sent his surrogates to meet with Hearst’s, but the negotiations went nowhere.32
On arriving in New York City, Hearst had taken a suite of rooms at the Hoffman House on Fifth Avenue, off Madison Square, before moving to the nearby Worth House, where he leased, renovated, and refurnished the entire third floor with antique furniture and tapestries he had purchased in Europe. When the Worth House was put up for sale, he bought himself the four-story house, once owned by President Chester Arthur, at 123 Lexington Avenu
e on 28th Street, and installed George Thompson, whom he had stolen away from the Hoffman House, as his butler, major-domo, and gatekeeper. Rooms were set aside for Jack Follansbee, who stayed there on his frequent visits from Mexico, and Arthur Brisbane, who like Hearst and Follansbee was still a bachelor.33
Brisbane and Hearst got along well. “Your columnist and editor,” Hearst would write many years later in a newspaper column, “took the night shift from 3 o'clock in the afternoon until 3 o'clock in the morning. His friend and associate, Arthur Brisbane, took the day shift for the afternoon paper from 6 o'clock in the morning until 6 o'clock at night—long hours and enjoyable ones for both. Oftentimes the writer would get home to his house on Lexington Ave. to have supper at 5 in the morning, and find Mr. Brisbane having 5 o’clock breakfast preliminary to keeping his 6 o’clock date on the Journal.”
As in San Francisco, Hearst kept the hours of a morning-newspaper man: to bed at dawn, up at noon. On rising, he would take the short walk to the Hoffman House for his first appointments of the day, in the bar, under gorgeous Bouguereau murals of “nymphs in the nude.” From the Hoffman House at Broadway and 25th Street, it was a short walk to Delmonico’s at Fifth Avenue and 26th Street, where Hearst ate dinner, his main meal, at midday. After dinner, he traveled south to the Journal offices on Park Row and Spruce Street, usually arriving by three in the afternoon and staying through the early evening. Following his second meal of the day, a “late luncheon” at Shanley’s or Rector’s, it was time for the theater. Will’s favorites were light musical comedies of the Weber and Fields variety, preferably with chorus girls, though he enjoyed vaudeville, straight comedy, and the circus as well.34