by David Nasaw
After the show, accompanied by that evening’s handpicked company of newspapermen and chorus girls, Will would top off the day with a late-night supper at Jack’s on Sixth Avenue, Jim’s Chop House on Broadway, Martin’s on University Place, or Delmonico’s, and then return to the Journal office to put the next morning’s paper to bed. He would, according to the Journal editor Willis Abbott, turn up “at about one thirty A.M. ...full of scintillating ideas and therewith rip my editorial page to pieces. Other pages were apt to suffer equally, and it was always an interesting spectacle to me to watch this young millionaire, usually in irreproachable evening dress, working over the forms, changing a head here, shifting the position of an article there, clamoring always for more pictures and bigger type.” While the composing room at this time of night was a nightmare of jagged nerves and competing egos, young William remained calm, polite, and well-mannered in the extreme. “Not once,” according to Abbott, who worked with him for sixteen years, “did he ever show signs of irritation or lose his temper.... To those whom he knew and whose work he liked, he was in those days an ideal ‘boss.’ A good piece of work always brought a word of congratulation over the ’phone and not infrequently more substantial recognition.”35
We know relatively little about Hearst’s personal life. It is likely that his next steady companion after Tessie was Millicent Willson, the sixteen-year-old dancer from Brooklyn whom he met in 1896 or early 1897 while she was performing at the Herald Square Theatre alongside her eighteen-year-old sister, Anita, in The Girl from Paris. The Willson sisters were part of the chorus of “bicycle girls” who showed as much leg as possible without getting arrested. The Girl from Paris was a musical comedy review on the risqué side, with lots of singing and dancing and very little plot. Hearst saw the show several times with his old friend the printer George Pancoast, and may have been responsible for James Ford’s tardy but spectacular review in the Journal on January 17.
When The Girl from Paris closed, the Willson sisters moved on to the Casino Theatre and an even naughtier musical comedy, The Telephone Girl, which the New York Times referred to as “coarse enough to be called nasty. Its subject is the everlasting contest of the sexes, and the treatment of it is from the point of view of barroom loafers and street girls.” Millicent, who played “Toots,” got a few good notices. Even the Times critic acknowledged, in an otherwise negative review, that her song and dance had shown “signs of vitality.” The Telephone Girl may have been Millicent’s last role on Broadway; there is no further record of her on stage.36
Phoebe’s niece Anne Apperson Flint, who had moved to New York to attend the Spence School, lived at the Netherlands Hotel, where Phoebe’s accountant and adviser Edward Clark had relocated with his wife to watch over Will. She recalled that there was quite a lot of “common talk” about Will Hearst’s having taken up with two chorus girls half his age. Mrs. Clark, in particular, “was a little outraged” by it. Hearst had given Millicent “a hansom cab with a white horse ... which she drove around in. This was well known.... We would all dodge when we’d see them because we didn’t want to face them.” Will not only escorted the girls to the theater and afterhours restaurants; he also, according to Henry Klein who worked at the Journal as a night telephone-story writer (he took dictation from reporters in the field), brought them along on his late-night trips to the composing room.37
Years later, Millicent would tell her friend, the Hearst reporter Adela Rogers St. Johns, that her mother had insisted that her sister Anita accompany her on her dates with Hearst. “When he asked me to go out with him ... my mother was against it ... I recall she said, ‘Who is he? Some young fellow from out West somewhere, isn’t he?’ She insisted Anita had to come or I couldn’t go. Well, he took us down to the Journal —the New York Journal —we’d hardly heard of it, and he showed us over it, all over it. I hadn’t the foggiest notion what we were doing, walking miles on rough boards in thin, high-heeled evening slippers, and I thought my feet would kill me. Of course this wasn’t our idea of a good time. We wanted to go to Sherry’s or Bustanoby’s. More than that, Anita kept whispering to me, ‘We’re going to get thrown out of here, Milly, the way he behaves you'd think he owned it.’”38
The sight of Will Hearst, with a young girl on either arm, promenading through the streets, snuggled together in a hansom cab, or touring the Journal offices was quite scandalous, even for New York. Will had chosen to live his life in New York on the margins of polite society, as he had in Cambridge and San Francisco. With a bit of effort, he might have taken the city by storm, but, as his cousin recalled, “he didn't care” what people thought of him and “despised” society. He did not attend society cotillions; he did not rent a box at the Metropolitan Opera; he did not join civic or reform associations; he did not attend society receptions or weddings; he did not court or escort eligible women to the theater; he lived downtown in Madison Square while fashionable New York moved northward; and he made no attempt whatsoever to marry well.39
Though he was not as closely watched as in San Francisco, the newspaper community in New York was too close-knit and too addicted to gossip, and his exploits too deliciously scandalous, to be ignored. In August of 1897, the Journalist informed its readers that “Billy Hearst is down the coast with a cottage, young friends and a yacht, sighing for the unattainable ... fully occupied with what he believes to be Pleasure—with a capital P.” In October, “New Comer,” the Journalists chief gossip columnist, who claimed that he had gotten to know the regulars fairly well by working at Hearst's morning paper, described it as “a sort of go-as-you-please place ... As near as I can get at it, Hearst is a very easy mark for girls, who like yachting, good feeding and jolly times in general; for men with schemes and odd suggestions; for men about town, who can post him in the ways of the world; for sharks and sharps, especially those who were educated in what the Sun is pleased to call, ‘The Academy of Crime.’ He is good-natured, kindly disposed, slow to suspicion, and very proud of his father's money.”40
James L. Ford, Hearst's theater columnist at the Journal, recalled in his autobiography that he found it hard to take his employer “seriously, for he reminded me of a kindly child, thoroughly undisciplined and possessed of a destructive tendency that might lead him to set fire to a house in order to see the engines play water on the flames.”41
As Upton Sinclair would write much later in his nonfiction book The Industrial Republic, Will Hearst had “turned traitor to his class ... instinctively, and without pangs....It seems to have pleased him to defy all their conventions. I was told, for example, that when he first came to New York, he made himself a scandal in the ‘Tenderloin.’ I was perplexed about that, for the members of our ‘second generation' are generally well known in the Tenderloin, and nobody calls it a scandal. But one young society man who had known Hearst well gave me the reason—and he spoke with real gravity: ‘It wasn't what he did—we all do it: but it was the way he did it. He didn't take the trouble to hide what he did.'”42
The veneer of invulnerability that Hearst so proudly wore was never pierced. But it was dented. The most serious attack, one whose effects would continue to wound him for the rest of his life, came in early 1897. The San Francisco Examiner had been engaged in an exceptionally bitter campaign against the Southern Pacific Railroad, which was trying to get the federal government to forgive its massive debts. In the course of this campaign, the paper had strenuously opposed the reelection of the Southern Pacific’s major spokesman, the California congressman Grove Johnson. Johnson was defeated in November of 1896, but returned to Washington for the lame-duck session of early 1897 and took the floor of the House to accuse Hearst of having solicited and received bribes from the Southern Pacific. According to Johnson, Hearst had turned against the railroad only after it refused to continue paying his bribes. The story was on face value rather ridiculous. Hearst had sufficient resources of his own and did not need to take bribes from the railroad. More to the point was the fact that the Examiner had
never stopped attacking the Southern Pacific, even after the date on which Hearst was supposed to have received his first payoff. What was most salient about Johnson's accusation was not his claim that Hearst had taken a bribe, which would fade in time, but his attack on Hearst’s character, which did not. “At first, we Californians were suspicious of ‘Our Willie,’ as Hearst is called on the Pacific Coast,” Johnson proclaimed from the floor of the House, and went on:
We knew him to be a debauchee, a dude in dress, an Anglomaniac in language and manners, but we thought he was honest. We knew him to be licentious in his tastes, regal in his dissipations, unfit to associate with pure women or decent men, but we thought “Our Willie” was honest. We knew he was erotic in his tastes, erratic in his moods, of small understanding and smaller views of men and measures, but we thought “Our Willie,” in his English plaids, his cockney accent, and his middle-parted hair, was honest. We knew he had sought on the banks of the Nile relief from loathsome disease contracted only by contagion in the haunts of vice, and had rivaled the Khedive in the gorgeousness of his harem in the joy of restored health, but we still believed him honest, though low and depraved. We knew he was debarred from society in San Francisco because of his delight in flaunting his wickedness, but we believed him honest, though tattooed with sin.43
Until Johnson's speech, such accusations had been conveyed only in anonymous letters—like the ones Phoebe had received from Cambridge—and published only in scandal sheets and weekly newspapers. Johnson's charges would be preserved forever in the Congressional Record and excerpted widely in the years to come—with added weight for having been delivered, in person, from the floor of the House.
Johnson's attack was political, of course, and as such unavoidable for Hearst, for whom there were no discernible boundaries between the vocations of publisher and politician. George Hearst had bought the Examiner for the sole purpose of boosting his political career. While Will, on taking it over, had made clear to his father that he did not intend to run the Examiner as a party organ, that did not mean that he was not going to take a political position on every local, state, and national issue of importance.
Hearst evinced no interest in running for electoral office in San Francisco or New York. He had been too young and had acted too scandalously to be elected in San Francisco, and he was a newcomer to New York. Still, as a loyal Democrat whose readers were for the large part Democrats as well, Will expected to play a role in New York politics in 1896, a presidential election year. Since 1868, every Democratic nominee for president had been a New Yorker, except for one Pennsylvanian, Winfield Hancock. The pattern was abruptly broken when William Jennings Bryan, an up-and-coming Nebraska journalist who had served one term in the House and then been defeated in a race for the Senate, was nominated. For New York Democrats, the choice of the man known as the great commoner was a nightmare. Bryan was not only too young and too inexperienced, he was an outspoken opponent of the trusts and monopoly and too committed to agrarian issues and constituencies to win votes in the cities. His pledge to increase the money supply, deflate the currency, and lower prices by coining silver was anathema to Eastern businessmen and bankers. In the days following Bryan's nomination, Eastern party leaders and newspaper publishers, aghast at the theft of their party by Western Populists and “free silver” radicals, withdrew all support from Bryan. In New York, he was abandoned not only by Tammany Hall, the state party organization, and the former New York governor, President Grover Cleveland, but also by Pulitzer, who had made his mark in New York as a Democrat.
Hearst's business advisers urged him to sit out the election as well. But his political advisers—including radicals like Arthur McEwen he had brought with him from San Francisco—counseled otherwise. Presidential election campaigns arrived only once every four years. Bryan was, like Hearst, young, a Westerner, and a radical. He was also the nominee of the Democratic party and, for this reason alone, deserved the support of Senator Hearst's only son. Hearst agreed.
As he recalled many years later, in its support of Bryan the New York Journal was “like a solitary ship surrounded and hemmed in by a host of others, and from all sides shot and shell poured into our devoted hulk. Editorial guns raked us, business guns shattered us, popular guns battered us, and above the din and flame of battle rose the curses of the Wall Street crowd that hated us ... Advertisers called on me and said they would take out every advertisement if I continued to support Bryan, and I told them to take out their advertisements, as I needed more space in which to support Bryan.”44 It was assumed that Hearst had backed Bryan because his family owned silver mines and stocks and would profit from the remonetization of silver. The truth was exactly the opposite. Though the Hearst family owned silver mines, it had larger investments in gold, which would depreciate significantly if Bryan were elected.
As a recent arrival in New York City, Hearst had no political base and no feel for local politics. But when Tammany Hall and the state Democratic party refrained from actively supporting Bryan, the Journal office became headquarters for the campaign. Hearst opened a subscription drive for funds to “educate” voters and promised to match every dollar received in the Journal offices. He printed a weekly “campaign extra” which Bryan supporters distributed free of charge. His reporters followed Bryan's every step along the campaign trail; interviews and articles were published daily. Easterners who wanted to read about Bryan or follow his campaign had no choice but to read the Journal. Circulation boomed for the morning Journal and the evening edition, which Hearst started up during the campaign.45
With unmatched energy and skill, Hearst concentrated his newspapers' resources on the task of winning voters to Bryan by ridiculing his Republican opponents. There were no ambiguities in Will Hearst’s political universe: while individual Democrats might be corrupt, the party stood foursquare for the people. The Republicans, on the contrary, were the party of wealth, privilege, monopoly, and the railroads. William McKinley and Senator Mark Hanna, the Cleveland industrialist and financier who ran the party, represented it at its worst: smug, complacent, fat, and monied. Every day, the front page of the Journal was marked by Homer Davenport cartoons of a bloated “Boss Hanna” covered by dollar signs, and his puppet, a grossly overweight, buffoonish McKinley.
On Election Day, November 3, 1896, the Journal triumphantly displayed in the middle of its front page, in type as large as any Hearst had yet deployed, a telegram from Bryan thanking the editor of the New York Journal for the paper's “splendid fight in behalf of bimetallism and popular government.” Beneath it was a second telegram, from Mark Hanna, McKinley’s campaign manager, predicting, in much smaller type, that McKinley would win at least 311 votes in the Electoral College. On the left-hand side of the page, the Journal alerted its readers to:
WATCH THE JOURNAL’S STAR FOR THE ELECTION RETURNS
Colored Electric Lights from a Monster Balloon Will Flash the News to Greater New York and Jersey. If a Red Light Twinkles, Bryan is Leading; if Green, McKinley. Steady Red Glow Means Bryan Elected; Green, McKinley Wins. All Over the City Will Be the Journal's Bulletins, with Bands of Music, Stereopticons and Moving Pictures Showing Wonderful Views.
On the second page of the paper was the “Map Showing Locations of Journal Bulletins, Bands and Balloons” with the injunction to “Cut This Out and Carry It with You.”
Though Bryan would lose the election—and every state north of Virginia and east of Kansas—Hearst would emerge as a winner in New York City. His brash and enthusiastic support of the Democratic candidate and his constant hammering away at Hanna and McKinley had resulted in increased circulation, a good deal of it from Pulitzer's papers which had, for the first time, declined to support a Democratic candidate for national office. On November 5, the Journal proudly declared that the Election Day circulation of its three editions, the morning, evening, and German-language, had reached 1.5 million, a journalistic record.
Hearst did not shy away from the power that came with the capacit
y to speak every day to hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. Though he had not as yet decided to run for electoral office, he remained in the political arena after the election by taking on the “trusts,” the generic term of disapproval used to describe the corporate monopolies that were growing stronger by the day.
The post—Civil War economy was defined to an extraordinary extent by the rapid and irreversible increase in the size and influence of private corporations. Businessmen had discovered the advantages of combination, of vertically and horizontally extending their enterprises and controlling competition through pooling their resources in legal trusts. According to the historian Richard L. McCormick, one of the unintended consequences of large-scale industrialization and the organization of trusts was “the unorganized public's dawning sense of vulnerability, unease, and anger in the face of economic changes wrought by big corporations. Sometimes, the people’s inchoate feelings focused on the ill-understood ‘trusts’; at other times, their negative emotions found more specific, local targets in streetrailway or electric-power companies.” The Hearst papers articulated this “vulnerability, unease, and anger” more powerfully and persistently than any other public medium in the 1890s.46
Will Hearst had inherited his antitrust sentiments from his father and the California Democrats. George Hearst’s political career—and that of just about every other Democrat in the state—had been built upon opposition to the largest, most powerful trust in the West, the Southern Pacific Railroad or SP, as Californians were accustomed to calling it. The Octopus, as novelist Frank Norris referred to the railroad in his novel of that name, held in its tentacles the people of the state, wherever they lived, however they made their livings. “The SP offered the most obvious instance,” the historian Kevin Starr has written, “of what was grossly wrong with California: a very few of the super-rich virtually owned the state—its land, its economy, its government—and were running it as a private preserve.” The Big Four monopolists, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, and Collis Huntington, all of whom had emigrated from the East—three from upstate New York—with the Forty-Niners, had built for themselves an interlocking empire of “railroads, steamship companies, land holdings (vast acres were granted by the federal government as a subsidy and spur to railroad construction), irrigation projects, hotels and urban real estate.” The foundation and guarantor of their wealth was their manipulation of the political system. Generous bribes, insider business opportunities, free passes and hotel rooms, and campaign contributions had bought them control over the state Republican party, the legislature in Sacramento, the judiciary, and the big-city Democratic bosses and machines. Leland Stanford himself had served as governor and represented the state—and his railroad—in the United States Senate.47