The Chief

by David Nasaw

  Will Hearst, like his father before him, had battled the Southern Pacific in the Examiner, hiring as editorialists two of its most caustic critics, Ambrose Bierce and Arthur McEwen, the tall, blond, fiercely independent and combative Scotsman, who was every bit as brilliant a polemicist as Bierce but much further to the left. For McEwen, Leland Stanford’s election to the Senate had been nothing less than “an indictment of the intelligence and moral character of the people of California.”48

  When Hearst moved to New York, he took McEwen with him to write the trustbusting editorials he had specialized in at the Examiner. In San Francisco, there had been only one major octopus of a trust, the Southern Pacific. In New York City, there were several. With monopoly control over ice, water, gas, power, transit, and insurance, the trusts wielded enormous economic power which, like the SP in California, they used to buy political influence. The citizens of New York, as the Hearst papers reminded them daily, were doubly victimized by the trusts. As consumers of public services, they were forced to pay too much for their gas, power, coal, ice, milk, even water—all of which were under the control of the trusts. As citizens they were deprived of voice, vote, and the wherewithal to protect themselves from the monopolies. Those who worked for the trusts were three-time losers.

  Hearst had assumed control of the New York Journal at a time when the trusts were consolidating their hold on the city’s economy. By late 1896, as the depression that had persisted since 1893 began to lift and as the population of the city burgeoned, there was a growing, inexorable demand for more sewers, tunnels, bridges, roads, streetcars, and electric lighting. The Republican legislature in Albany and the board of aldermen in New York City responded to the demand as they always had: by awarding the trusts exclusive franchises for twenty-five years, with an option to renew for another twenty-five.

  Hearst and his papers kept a careful eye on the process, ever alert to new swindles, new payoffs, new “grabs” by the trusts and their lackey politicians, who were paid handsomely for their help—in cash and stock certificates. When, in late 1896, Mayor William Strong and the board of aldermen granted the Consumers' Fuel and Gas Company a franchise to tear up the streets of the city and lay entirely new and unneeded gas mains, Hearst hired a young attorney, Clarence Shearn, to enjoin the mayor and the aldermen from proceeding. Shearn's injunction was granted by Supreme Court Judge Robert Pryor on December 13, 1896. The Journal reported the news in a headline that extended clear across the front page, in bold type—the largest the paper owned—“WHILE OTHERS TALK THE JOURNAL ACTS!,” with the word “acts” in double boldface. With this declaration, the Journal announced to the city that its political activism had not ended with the Bryan campaign, but would, in fact, become as integral a component of the newspaper as its crime stories. Shearn was kept on retainer at the paper to fight the gas, water, coal, and ice trusts in the courts. On December 9, 1897, the Journal announced that he had drafted an antitrust bill to abolish them entirely.

  On December 3, 1897, Hearst marked the beginning of his third year in New York by celebrating the role he had carved out for his newspapers. The lead editorial that day was entitled “The Journal's Settled Policy”:

  Within the past year a new force has appeared on the side of good government in New York.... Above the boards and councils and commissions stand the courts, and by the side of the courts stands the New Journalism, ready to touch the button that sets their ponderous machinery in motion.... The Journal has adopted the policy of action deliberately, and it means to stick to it. It thinks it has discovered exactly the engine of which the dwellers in American cities stand in need. When it adopted the two mottoes, “While others talk the Journal acts,” and “What is everybody’s business is the Journal’s business,” it showed how the multitudes that are individually helpless against the rapacity of the few could be armed against their despoilers.

  From this point on, Hearst would daily highlight the role his newspapers played in the life of the city, the nation, and the world. On December 20, 1897, to choose only one day at random, the Journal carried more than a half-dozen stories in which the newspaper was the chief protagonist. On page one, the top right-hand column reproduced a telegram from the lord mayor of London, under the headline: “Through the Journal He Sends Heartiest Greetings with Friendly Interest in the Prosperity of the Sister City.” In the middle of the front page, another story, headlined “Spain’s War on the Journal,” claimed that the Spanish government was retaliating against the Journals pro-Cuban activities by evicting it from its Havana offices and attempting to assassinate its representatives. At the bottom was an article about the New Year's Eve celebration the Journal was hosting to greet “the birth of the Greater New York.” A story on page four told of a Professor Young who had written the Journal asking it to sponsor a “long distance fiddling match”; on page five was an announcement of “The Journal’s $1,000 Prophecy Competition”; on page ten, an article outlining the Journal's plan to “establish a state institution for reception of child criminals.”

  The following day, December 21, a portrait of Kaiser William II of Germany appeared on the front page. The headline, “Kaiser Is Europe’s New York Journal,” reminded readers that the newspaper they were reading, like the German Kaiser, made history by “acting” instead of “talking.”

  Hearst had carved out for himself a unique place in New York politics. He was a reformer and an opponent of the trusts, a critic of Tammany Hall, and a loyal Democrat. There were obvious contradictions here, but Hearst chose to ignore them. To be a loyal New York Democrat in the 1890s was to be a backer of Boss Croker, the man who provided the trusts with the lavish contracts that permitted them to make a fortune by overcharging New Yorkers for transportation, water, gas, milk, power, and just about every other daily necessity. Born in Ireland, Richard Croker had risen through the ranks from volunteer fireman to chief sachem of Tammany Hall. He was a master of what George Washington Plunkitt called “honest graft.” He “didn't steal a dollar from the city treasury, just seen opportunities and took them.” No contract was let, no franchise awarded, no license assigned, no appointment made, no nomination secured, no policeman paid off without the Boss getting his cut. By the 1890s, Croker had pocketed a fortune in “honest graft,” but with good government reformers, Albany Republicans, and crusading journalists keeping watch, he could not spend it as conspicuously as he would have liked in New York. Instead he relocated to the English countryside to enjoy the life of a country squire and raise race horses.49

  Boss Croker returned home in 1897, to solidify his hold on the party and elect the first mayor of Greater New York, the consolidated city that included Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and those parts of the Bronx that had been separately governed. Croker’s candidate was Robert C. Van Wyck, an unknown and undistinguished judge. He was opposed by an equally nondescript Republican and two independent, anti-Tammany, reform candidates, Seth Low, the former two-term mayor of Brooklyn who was now president of Columbia University, and Henry George, the author of Progress and Poverty, founder of the Single-Tax movement, and arguably the most famous, if not the most widely read, radical in the country. With the support of New York's labor leaders, George had run for mayor in 1886 and though defeated by Tammany’s candidate had polled more votes than the Republican nominee, Theodore Roosevelt. This time around, his chances of winning the election appeared excellent.

  Ideologically, Hearst was closer to Low and George than he was to Van Wyck. Unwilling to abandon his father’s political party, however, he supported the Democratic candidate, while publicly distancing himself from Boss Croker. “Please make an editorial saying the Journal is a Democratic paper,” he directed James Creelman, his chief political writer and adviser, “and it believes the best way to secure good government is to fight for it within party lines.... There is no shadow upon the Democratic ticket except Croker and Croker ... can be everywhere fought and overcome by good Democrats within party lines”50

  When Henry
George died of a stroke four days before the election, Van Wyck’s election was assured. Still, Hearst took credit for his victory in large part because the city’s other newspapers, including Pulitzer’s World, had supported either Low or the Republican candidate. In return for his papers' endorsements, Hearst had secured a plank in the Democratic platform calling for increased support for the public schools. When Croker and the Van Wyck administration reneged on their promise, Hearst sent Creelman to talk to the Boss. “Tell Mr. Croker,” he instructed Creelman, “that the school plan was put in platform at Journal insistence and that when Journal supported Tammany we pledged Tammany’s sincerity to our English and German readers [Hearst’s German-language paper had also endorsed Van Wyck]. Journal would like to continue to warmly support Tammany as it is the democratic organization. I personally would like to be wholly friendly with Croker as he is an agreeable gentleman but the education of American children is not a question of party politics or even of personal friendship but of public duty....I have asserted my friendship. Let Mr. Croker display his.”51

  On New Year's Eve, 1897, Will Hearst celebrated his new, self-proclaimed role as New York's favorite son by organizing a mammoth celebration to mark the amalgamation of the five boroughs into what would now be known as Greater New York. Nothing pleased Hearst more than staging a spectacular. His taste for the theatrical, his talent for self-promotion, and his love of modern technologies were all enlisted in planning the event. As the staunchly Republican New York Daily Tribune, still smarting from Tammany's victory in November, reported the next morning, “the spirits of disorder poured forth into the city streets and found their noisy and tumultuous way to City Hall Park, where the formal demonstration, held under the auspices of the New York Journal, was to be held.... The Journal offices were ablaze with colored lights, electric flags and all manner of illuminations.... The crowds came early. By nine o’clock they were packed in dense masses in the park.” Though the weather was wintry cold and raining, it did not dampen the festivities Hearst had planned for the citizens of his newly adopted city. Choral groups from the city’s ethnic societies and organizations sang before a panel of judges, which included the vaudeville impresario Tony Pastor. Floats and marching bands paraded under gleaming white magnesium searchlights. At 10 o’clock “the Journal showed its own special decoration—an oblong square of electric lights eighty feet long by forty feet” arranged in the Stars and Stripes. At midnight, the singers joined together in Auld Lang Syne; Henry J. Pain, the nation’s most celebrated fireworks expert, set off a dazzling display of skyrockets, a battery of guns fired a deafening hundred-gun salute, and from three thousand miles away, Mayor Phelan of San Francisco pressed a magic button which sent an electrical signal across the nation to City Hall Park and “propelled the blue and white flag of Greater New York whipping up the staff of the City Hall cupola.” “No one,” the New York Daily Tribune concluded the next morning, “could hold a Roman candle to Hearst when it came to staging a spectacle.”

  7. “How Do You Like the Journal’s War?”

  THERE ARE NO ACCOUNTS of Hearst’s life nor are there histories of the Spanish-American War that do not include some discussion of the role of the Yellow Press in general and Hearst in particular in fomenting war in Cuba. Still, it is safe to say from the vantage point of one hundred years that even had William Randolph Hearst never gone into publishing, the United States would nonetheless have declared war on Spain in April of 1898. That Hearst has received so large a measure of credit or blame for that “glorious war” is a tribute to his genius as a self-promoter. It was Hearst who proclaimed the war in Cuba to be the New York Journals war and he who convinced the rest of the nation that without the Hearst press leading the way there would have been no war.

  The first Cuban revolution against Spanish colonialism had begun in 1868, when Hearst was five years old, and was only subdued after ten years of fighting. In early 1895, the rebellion was reignited after the United States imposed a new American tariff on Cuban exports that led to massive unemployment on the sugar plantations and economic hardship throughout the island. By the fall, the Cuban revolutionaries had freed enough territory from Spanish rule to proclaim their own provisional government. “The reports indicate that Cuba is likely to gain her independence,” the San Francisco Examiner editorialized in August of 1895, “but not before many battles have been fought, many lives have been lost, much property has been destroyed.” Concluding that Spain was prepared to “fight a war to extermination” in Cuba, the Examiner called on the government in Washington to protect the innocent men, women, and children of Cuba from the fate that had recently befallen the Armenians at the hands of the Turks: “It may not be our duty to interfere in Turkey, but we certainly cannot permit the creation of another Armenia in this hemisphere ... Cuba is our Armenia, and it is at our doors ... We are determined that no more butcheries and arsons shall be laid to our door. Cuba must not stand in the relation to us that Armenia does to England.”1

  In early 1896, Spain responded to the growing insurrection in Cuba by sending 150,000 troops to the island commanded by General Valeriano Weyler (soon to be known in the American press as “Butcher” Weyler). Weyler tried to quell the rebellion by herding Cuban peasants into concentration camps to prevent them from supporting the rebel armies with food and new recruits. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans were forced from their land to die of starvation and disease behind barbed wire. The suffering was unimaginable. Pulitzer’s World, Dana’s Sun, and the Journal, which were fed a steady diet of stories from the Junta, the rebels’ unofficial diplomatic and publicity arm, covered the events in Cuba as if they were happening next door.

  That Spain had no moral or political right to maintain a colonial empire in the New World was not, for Hearst, a matter of debate. But this was not the primary reason why the Cuban conflict was given a prominent place on his front pages. What made Cuba such a compelling story was the fact that events on the island lent themselves to Hearst’s favorite plot line. Here was raw material for tales of corruption more horrific than any yet told. The villains were lecherous and bloodthirsty Spanish officials and army officers; the victims, innocent Cuban women and children; the heroes, crusading Journal reporters and their publisher.

  “Credible witnesses have testified,” read an editorial from December 1896, “that all prisoners captured by Weyler’s forces are killed on the spot; that even helpless inmates of a hospital have not been spared, and that Weyler’s intention seems to be to murder all the pacificos in the country.... The American people will not tolerate in the Western Hemisphere the methods of the Turkish savages in Armenia, no matter what the cost of putting an end to them might be. Twenty Spains would prove no efficacious obstacle in the way of a righteous crusade like that. Let us not act hastily, but let us act.”2

  In early 1897, Hearst offered Richard Harding Davis $3,000 a month plus expenses to serve as the Journal's special correspondent in Cuba. Artist Frederick Remington was sent along to illustrate Davis’s articles. The two were transported to Cuba—with a full crew of assistants—in Hearst’s new steam-driven 112-foot yacht, the Vamoose, which he had purchased in the early 1890s and kept moored in New York. Unfortunately the Vamoose, though a magnificent-looking yacht and reportedly the fastest ship in New York Harbor, was entirely unsuited for the mission. After three attempts at landing, the captain had to turn back. Davis was so frustrated at being marooned offshore that, as he wrote his mother, he lay on the deck and cried. The Vamoose returned to Key West, where Hearst wired his reporters an additional $1,000 to buy or lease another boat. Davis and Remington decided instead to take the regularly scheduled passenger steamer to Havana.3

  Hearst made the most of his stars’ heroic entry onto the battle-scarred island. In mid-January, the Journal reported triumphantly that its representatives had caught up with the insurgent Cuban army. Davis was outraged. As he had written his mother a few days earlier, not only had he not found any army in the field, he had in his entire
time in Cuba not “heard a shot fired or seen an insurgent....I am just ‘not in it’ and I am torn between coming home and making your dear heart stop worrying and getting one story to justify me being here and that damn silly page of the Journal’s ... All Hearst wants is my name and I will give him that only if it will be signed to a different sort of a story from those they have been printing.”4