by David Nasaw
Faithfully yours,
James Creelman36
Hearst remained on the Sylvia, commuting from Cuban waters to Jamaica, where he cabled his stories and telegrams back to New York. Taking advantage of his newfound respectability, he unmercifully attacked his opponents in New York, especially E. L. Godkin of the New York Evening Post. On July 10, he addressed a telegram to the Daily News, the one-cent Tammany paper in New York City, responding to a letter to the editor from Godkin, who had pointed out an error in one of his articles from the front. Hearst had reported that Cubans had “beheaded” forty Spaniards; Godkin insisted, correctly, that the number was four. Hearst counterattacked brilliantly, attributing his mistake to an “error made in transcribing my dispatch at the cable station.” He then castigated Godkin for being “Spanish at heart” and one of the “skulkers” who had gotten “as far away from the front of the war as possible.” Hearst concluded by reminding the readers of the Daily News that the Evening Posts editor was foreign-born and that his paper had indulged in such “treasonous utterances” that the “boys of Camp Black” had “kicked [its] unhappy correspondent bodily from the field.”37 In one brief telegram, Hearst had managed to get even with a major critic who had accused him rightfully of an egregious error and endear himself to the plain people of New York whom he hoped to entice to buy his Evening Journal.
All told, Hearst was on assignment in Cuba for over a month. On July 19, two days after the surrender of the ranking Spanish general in Cuba, he cabled his mother that he was ready to return to New York City: “Don’t worry. Everything is over here now, and we are coming home.”38
III. Publisher, Politician, Candidate, and Congressman
8. Representing the People
HEARST SAILED BACK to New York City in July. Instead of returning to the house on Lexington Avenue which he shared with Arthur Brisbane, he moved into a private suite of rooms at the Waldorf. “I hope you are getting along well,” he wrote James Creelman, who was recovering from his war wounds at his home in Ohio. “I feel like hell myself. I sit all day in one place in a half trance and stare at a spot. I’m afraid my mighty intellect is giving way. Anybody can have Cuba that wants it.”1
Complaining of this sort was entirely uncharacteristic for Hearst, who never revealed his interior thoughts to anyone other than his mother. That he was now telling Mr. Creelman that he felt like hell was highly revealing. “I guess I’m a failure,” he wrote his mother at about this time:
I made the mistake of my life in not raising the cowboy regiment I had in mind before Roosevelt raised his. I really believe I brought on the war but I failed to score in the war. I had my chance and failed to grab it, and I suppose I must sit on the fence now and watch the procession go by. It’s my own fault. I was thirty-five years of age and of sound mind—comparatively—and could do as I liked. I failed and I’m a failure and I deserve to be for being as slow and stupid as I was. Outside of the grief it would give you I had better be in a Santiago trench than where I am.... Goodnight, Mama dear. Take care of your self. Don’t let me lose you. I wish you were here tonight. I feel about eight years old—and very blue.2
Nothing had turned out quite as he had expected. There had been no parades or congratulatory telegrams to welcome him back to New York. Unlike Teddy Roosevelt, who had returned a national hero and been drafted by the Republicans to run for governor of New York, Hearst was in the same position he had been in before he sailed for Cuba. He had squandered the opportunity of a lifetime. Had he sailed into New York Harbor in uniform, as had Teddy Roosevelt, he might have been thrust into the political spotlight and offered his party’s nomination for governor. Unfortunately, while Roosevelt had led a charge up San Juan Hill and tricked the public into thinking he had singlehandedly won the war in Cuba, Hearst had done nothing more heroic than command a converted steamer from Baltimore. That he had proved to his journalist colleagues that he was capable of writing good copy from the front was of no political consequence whatsoever.
His disquiet on returning to New York was exacerbated by the sorry state of his finances. His newspapers were now the largest selling dailies in the city, but they were also losing more money than ever. While the news from the fronts had boosted circulation, the new revenue did not begin to cover the added costs of putting out special war editions, sending correspondents to Cuba and the Philippines, and cabling back their dispatches to New York. It was rumored that Phoebe was so disturbed by her son's fiscal mismanagement that she had decided to replace him as Journal publisher with S. S. Carvalho, his managing editor.3
Hearst kept his job in the end, but was forced by his mother and her accountants to institute cost-cutting measures, including layoffs. Knowing that it would be far easier to make money if he and Pulitzer called a ceasefire in their circulation wars, he reopened the peace negotiations that had been stalled for over a year and in August agreed with Pulitzer to “stop the unfriendly utterances between the World and the Journal.” In October, the two publishers began negotiations for a comprehensive settlement.4
Hearst's spirits were buoyed somewhat by the return of the American troops from Cuba in early August and the opportunities this afforded for Hearstian promotional stunts. He took the lead in raising money to commemorate the “Maine martyrs”; hosted a “Journal Carnival Night” at Coney Island to honor wounded veterans with a glorious fireworks display; and campaigned for a “complete holiday” to greet the return of the American fleet from Cuba. When on August 20 the fleet sailed into New York Harbor, he dispatched his yacht, the Anita, to greet it and floated a giant hot-air balloon over Grant’s Tomb with color-coded confetti to signal New Yorkers on its progress. Red confetti meant that the fleet’s ships were leaving Staten Island, green and white denoted their progress through the harbor, and “brilliant showers of red, white and blue, followed by all colors of the rainbow” signaled their arrival.5
As he went back to work at his newspapers, Hearst's depression lifted but not enough to dispel the restlessness that had dogged him since his return from Cuba. In defeating Pulitzer in the New York circulation wars—as he had the de Youngs in San Francisco—he had accomplished his goal. That his New York newspapers were not yet making money did not disturb him. He was confident that they would in short order begin to repay their investment. Having done all he had set out to do as a newspaper publisher, he was anxious now to move into electoral politics. His father had waited too long to make the move and had died in the Senate. Hearst set his sights higher. He intended to end his political career in the White House.
His political ambitions were no secret to anyone, certainly not to his mother and close friends. Since Harvard, he had made it clear that he intended to combine careers in journalism and politics. Now, in 1898, having reached the age of thirty-five, the time had come to throw his hat into the ring. No one among his immediate circle had any doubts but that he would accomplish his goal in the end. “Will is simply marvelous,” his friend Orrin Peck wrote Phoebe from Munich where he was still living and painting. “It is only a question of time when you will be doing the honors in the White House as the mother of the President—now mark my words and keep the dust off of‘our Emeralds’ for the occasion.”6
That Theodore Roosevelt, who was less than five years older, was already so far ahead of him only whetted Hearst’s ambitions. It is impossible to measure the depths of his loathing for Roosevelt, who had preceded him at Harvard, been a member of many of the same clubs, including the prestigious Porcellian, been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated at age twenty-one. Roosevelt, he was convinced, was now and had always been a charlatan, skilled only at manipulating the press. He was the same preening aristocrat—though now in uniform—that he had been the year before when Hearst’s Journal attacked him for wearing pink shirts and a tasseled silk sash instead of a vest.7
For a brief time, Will contemplated running for governor as a Democrat against Roosevelt and did his best to convince Phoebe that while the campaign would cost a gre
at deal, it would be money well spent: “Brisbane is sure the nomination will do the paper an immense amount of good. He says just think how it would help the World if Pulitzer were nominated and elected governor of the state of New York. Would there be any doubt in our minds as to how that would dignify the World and raise it in public esteem, especially if he gave a good administration?...That is a fair way to look at it.” Fully aware that Phoebe feared for the future of her investment in the New York newspapers, he informed her that he had “decided to put Brisbane in as publisher of the Morning and Evening papers....I shall give [him] full authority to make changes we discussed.... We believe we can bring the loss down.... Advertising can be increased $300,000 so that for the year of 1899 I will show you a Profit on the Journal”8
Though Phoebe promised him the funding he required, Hearst did not run for governor in 1898, for the simple reason that no one bothered to ask him to. For him to have even contemplated getting the Democratic nomination for governor only three years after arriving in the state was a sign of remarkable hubris, but not uncharacteristic of the man.
Unable to assail Roosevelt from the campaign trail, Hearst went after him in his newspapers. Under Brisbane's leadership, the Hearst papers organized a brilliantly coordinated campaign of ridicule, seamlessly linking news reports, editorials, and editorial cartoons to reduce Roosevelt to size. While Homer Davenport and the Journal's core of cartoonists portrayed Colonel Teddy as an overgrown playacting child, with prominent front teeth, rimless spectacles, and a Rough Riders uniform, Hearst’s editorial assassins, led by Brisbane, excoriated him for accepting the nomination of the boss-dominated state Republican party. “There is no humiliation to which Mr. Roosevelt will not submit that he may get the nomination for Governor,” read an editorial from September 22. “The Theodore Roosevelt that was, was a humbug. The Theodore Roosevelt that is, is a prideless office-seeker.”9
When Roosevelt was narrowly elected in November, Hearst was disappointed but not discouraged. He was already, it appeared, looking ahead to 1900, and William Jennings Bryan’s second run for the presidency. Although he was unknown outside of San Francisco and New York and had never run for electoral office or held any appointive position, he had set his sights on running for vice president on Bryan's ticket. In August of 1899, he asked his mother to entertain Bryan when he visited California:
I know you don’t like Bryan and don’t approve of his politics, but he is coming to California and this gives us an opportunity to approach him in a way in which he is rather susceptible—socially. He is really a fine man, although an extreme radical.... Anyhow, there is something which I know you always considered—the opportunity to make your offspring solid with a power in politics.... It is very important that he should be very close to me and to the Journal.10
Though he was already preparing for his entry into electoral politics, Hearst did not neglect his newspapers. When his attempts to negotiate a peace settlement broke down, Pulitzer went back on the attack, charging Hearst with having violated Associated Press guidelines by reusing wire items received at his morning Journal (which had an A.P. franchise) in the Evening Journal (which did not). While Hearst was in California visiting his mother, Pulitzer’s lawyers hauled one of his top editors into court to testify in the A.P. suit. On his return to New York City, Hearst was tailed by process servers until they caught up with him and compelled him to testify as well. Hearst was outraged by Pulitzer’s tactics. Through Carvalho, he made it clear that he did not “propose to be annoyed or prosecuted personally” in this way. He was willing to fight Pulitzer on the newsstands, but was not going to stand idly by as Pulitzer’s agents trailed him through the street like a common criminal. Mr. Hearst, Carvalho wrote his counterpart in the Pulitzer organization, “desires me to convey notice ... if you are willing to listen to it—to this effect: that if this course is persisted in and Mr. Hearst is compelled to appear before this referee, which is most unfair, the case not even being on trial, he will terminate all relationship existing between the World and the Journal. ...and furthermore, he will begin a personal assault on Mr. Pulitzer in the columns of ‘The Journal,’ making it as personal and as powerful as he can.”11
The hostility and sniping between the Hearst and Pulitzer camps would continue on and off for the next year. Only with the improbably successful strike of the New York newsboys in December of 1899 were the two publishers compelled to cooperate with one another.
During the Spanish-American War, Hearst and Pulitzer had raised the wholesale price of their papers from 50 to 60 cents a hundred. The newsies did not complain at the time because they were selling more than enough papers to compensate for the price hike. They were also convinced that the price increase would last only as long as the war itself. When they discovered a year later that Hearst and Pulitzer had no intention of rescinding the wartime price hike, they went out on strike. The Journal and World editors laughed off the children’s strike—at first. But they found themselves outsmarted and outnumbered as the newsies succeeded in organizing a metropolitan boycott of the Hearst and Pulitzer dailies. Led by the Brooklyn Union’s District Master Workboy, Spot Conlon, attired in his pink suspenders, the Brooklyn boys marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to join forces with their Manhattan comrades. Together, the boys not only shut down street circulation of the afternoon Journals and Worlds in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Long Island City, and up and down the Atlantic seaboard, but they enlisted the public in their crusade by staging a series of parades, open-air rallies, and a huge mass meeting at the New Irving Hall.
As the evening Journals and Worlds disappeared from the streets and advertisers demanded rebates, Hearst’s and Pulitzer’s editors were left with two choices: to accede to the boys’ demands or use strong-arm tactics to get their papers back in circulation. They chose the latter, and directed their circulation managers to tour Bowery flophouses and assemble a brigade of bums to replace the boys in the streets. At the urging of Don Seitz, Pulitzer’s chief lieutenant, Hearst agreed to stop criticizing the police in his pages if they offered the scabs protection. In the end, it made little difference. The newsies persuaded the Bowery bums to pocket the bonuses they were offered and dump the papers in the trash. Hearst and Pulitzer, with no conceivable way now of getting their papers on the street, conceded defeat and offered the boys a compromise settlement, which they accepted.12
Hearst’s intention to enter the political arena was made manifest in the frequency with which his name now appeared in his papers. If in San Francisco and during his first years in New York, the Hearst name had appeared only on the masthead, it was now regularly seen on the front and editorial pages. Though still without an office to run for, Hearst was sounding very much like a candidate. He orchestrated a vicious attack on McKinley’s secretary of war, Russell Alger, and the commissary general, Charles P. Egan, for poisoning American soldiers with “ancient” and “diseased” beef. In signed editorials, he joined the national debate over annexation of the Philippines by declaring for “retention” in the name of what he called “the Jeffersonian principle of national expansion.”13
While taking a position on every significant foreign policy issue, he did not neglect domestic issues. In early 1899, in a series of signed editorials, he published “An American Internal Policy.” Clearly looking ahead to national office, he offered a domestic program which was a brilliantly conceived amalgam of urban progressivism and Western populism. Like the Populists, he called for the direct “Election of Senators by the People” instead of by state legislatures; advocated the substitution of an income tax for the hated tariff which protected Eastern industry by raising the price of imported goods; and demanded currency reform, without explicitly endorsing the free coinage of silver. The remaining planks of his program spoke to issues raised by the urban progressives. He proposed that government be given new powers to regulate and control the growth of the “Trust Frankenstein”; called for “public ownership of public franchises”; and demanded “National, St
ate, and Municipal Improvement of the Public School System.”14
Hearst used the power of his press to organize as well as editorialize. He campaigned for city-owned public transit systems and led fights against the gas trust and the water trust, both of which, he claimed, were stealing from the public by charging inordinate prices for resources which ought rightly to be owned and regulated by the city.15
By early 1900, a little more than eighteen months after his return from Cuba, his crusade for municipal ownership and against the trusts had won over even his most caustic critics, like Colonel Mann, the editor of Town Topics, who publicly congratulated him for exposing the depredations of the ice trust:
William Randolph Hearst and his colleagues ... have earned the profound gratitude of all patriotic citizens, not only in New York City, but throughout the length and breadth of the United States. The Journal's exposure and pursuit of the criminal officials who betrayed the people in the interest of the Ice Trust will stand for many years as one of the most splendid and useful achievements of the modern newspaper. The Journal has made this fight against corruption in high places not only with zeal and determination, but with intelligent and skillful employment of resources. Mr. Hearst and his colleagues have done a great work, and they have done it with exhilarating thoroughness. I congratulate them.16
Still an outsider—with no position or standing in the city, state, or national Democratic party—Hearst had only one link to the electorate and the Democratic officials who chose candidates: his newspapers. To establish himself as a force in the national party and a potential running mate for Bryan in 1900, he needed to find a way to make his voice heard outside of New York and San Francisco. The most effective and efficient way to do this was by starting up a new newspaper in the nation's second largest city, Chicago.