by David Nasaw
Hearst married Millicent Willson because he could think of no other way to continue their relationship. For the immediate future, he would be spending a great deal of his time in Washington and on the campaign trail. It was one thing to cavort with a chorus girl half his age in New York City, on vacation in Europe, or on a yacht in the waters off Cuba. It was quite another to live openly with her in the nation’s capital.
The wedding ceremony was scheduled for late April 1903 at Grace Church in New York City with only family and a few friends in attendance. Will invited Phoebe to be part of the wedding and to accompany the couple on their honeymoon trip to Europe. Because there were only “single berths” available to bring her to New York City, Will leased a private railroad car for her. When Phoebe complained that she had other engagements that might interfere with her going to Europe with them, Will offered to delay the trip until she was ready. He even proposed to invite her friend, Mrs. Peck, on the honeymoon caravan.54
Phoebe never did arrive for the wedding, claiming she was too ill to travel East. She did however send a telegram and an emerald brooch, for which she was promptly thanked. “Your lovely telegram made everybody very happy,” Will informed his mother the day of the wedding. “Bishop Potter officiated. He asked after you. He kissed the Bride and says that he wanted to know her better and that when we returned he would help her keep tabs on the Groom. He was extremely kind and pleasant....We send the greatest love to you.”55
Everything had gone off well, as Hearst later wrote his mother at great length:
The chantry was very beautifully decorated with colored roses and apple blossoms. Our wedding was cheerful and not to be mistaken for a funeral. Some thirty of our friends were present. The bell rang, Orrin and I stepped out to the altar. The bishop looked very grand and solemn. Anita came up with Millie and her pa. They didn’t have any bouquet. I had forgotten to bring it, Millie didn’t mind. She stepped up alongside me trembling and frightened. The Bishop married us. Then he kissed Millie quite a smack and patted her on the head ... Then I kissed Millie and the audience applauded. The bishop hushed them and appeared to be rather shocked but wasn’t. We went away after shaking hands with everybody. All seemed pleased.
After the ceremony, the wedding party retreated to the Waldorf where Oscar, the famed maitre d’hôtel, served breakfast in the Astor dining room, while Will retreated downstairs to telegraph his mother.56
In the early afternoon, Will, Millicent, Orrin Peck, and their entourage drove to the docks to board the Kaiser Wilhelm II. A process server was waiting for them—ever since the fireworks disaster in November, Hearst had been followed by them—but Carvalho got rid of him.57
The first stop on the honeymoon tour was London, where Hearst on landing sent his mother another telegram, expressing yet again an almost pathetic gratitude for her present to Millicent which, he said, was the climax of their wedding day. Millicent was even more flattering in her telegram: “I can never thank you enough for your kind telegram and your beautiful present. We hope you will come abroad soon. We will try hard to make you as happy as you have made us.”58
From London, the wedding party moved on to the Hotel Wagram in Paris. Again, Will wrote his mother a long letter, filling in new details about the wedding and thanking her a third time for her present. The letter concluded with a postscript from Millie who, Will informed his mother, “wants to add a line to tell you how fine she thinks you have been. I tell her you are finer than that when she shall come to know you—and I think you will find that she is nicer than you can imagine, when you know her better. We are all pretty nice folk aren’t we?” There followed yet more thank-yous from Millie.59
Will Hearst was not a reflective man, but even had he been, it would have been difficult for him to sort out the many strands in his relationship with his mother. When George Hearst left his entire fortune to Phoebe, he irretrievably compromised her future relationship with her son. From that moment, Phoebe’s role as mother was eclipsed by her position as feudal overlord of the Hearst estates. Whatever the reasons for the strange ritual of avoidance and approach that was played out on Will’s wedding day and honeymoon, it followed the pattern that had been established long before.
On returning from Europe, the newlyweds traveled to Mexico to visit Jack Follansbee, who lived there, and tour the Hearst estates. They then took the train west to California to meet Will’s grandparents in Santa Clara and Phoebe at her vacation home in Pleasanton, forty miles east of San Francisco. It did not take long for Millicent to win Phoebe’s approval. If Will had not married a woman well placed in New York or San Francisco society, he had married one who was willing to go out of her way to be attentive to her mother-in-law. “Quite a number of people like her,” Phoebe wrote Janet Peck in March of 1904, about a year after the marriage. “Will is very happy and Millicent is a good wife.”60
9. “Candidate of a Class”
A NEW LIFE BEGAN at age forty for William Randolph Hearst, publisher and politician. It was as if the previous fifteen years had been prologue for what was to come. The boy publisher with the loud ties and a chorus girl on either arm had been replaced by the black-coated congressman who traveled only in the company of his demurely dressed wife.1
Hearst had been elected to Congress in November 1902, but had no intention of staying there for long. Immediately after his election, he began laying the groundwork for the 1904 presidential nomination. Like others in the Bryan wing of the Democratic party, Hearst believed that the radicals’ victory at two successive nominating conventions had firmly—and permanently—placed the party in their hands. The question was who would represent the radicals and their party in November 1904. There were no candidates from the Bryan wing of the party with national appeal and few with regional appeal. It was into this void that Hearst strode. He had no doubt that he would be elected president, if not in 1904, then four years later. William Jennings Bryan had been nominated after two terms in Congress. Why not William Randolph Hearst after one?
Instead of taking the traditional route to the 1904 convention and organizing party regulars outward from his home state, Hearst detoured around the New York Democratic leaders, whom he considered both hostile and increasingly irrelevant. Unlike other candidates for office, he did not need the support of the party to get his message to the voters, distribute campaign literature, organize rallies, or get voters to the polls on Election Day. His newspapers provided potential voters with a full discussion of the issues on which he was running and a day-by-day commentary on his campaign; the Hearst fortune gave him the wherewithal to set up his own independent political organization.
All through the campaign, he would be dogged by accusations, as his father had been twenty years earlier, that he was buying delegate votes. Estimates of the amount of money Hearst spent ranged from $25,000 a week during the campaign season to $2,000,000. It is possible that some of this money went to bribing politicians. Most of it, however, was spent on building a campaign organization that was entirely independent of the Democratic party and loyal to him alone.
“In his unique campaign, Mr. Hearst has certainly set a few marks in politics,” the political commentator of Leslie’s Monthly noted in the spring of 1904. “None of his chief managers ... are politicians of note. Most of them are newspaper men connected with his various publications. His press bureau is run by John W. Keller, once a newspaper man and recently charity commissioner of New York.” Max Ihmsen, his former Washington correspondent who had organized the National Association of Democratic Clubs, was in charge of logistics; Arthur Brisbane formulated campaign strategy; Lawrence O’Reilly, who had worked for Brisbane and Carvalho, served as his private political secretary. Hinting broadly that Hearst was buying delegates, if not with bribes then with high-priced entertainments, the Leslie's Monthly commentator referred to his “expensive headquarters” in the Hoffman House in New York and the ways in which he wined and dined potential supporters in Washington, D.C.:
Backwoods st
atesmen and country editors and their wives, first provided with free transportation to the capital, sit at Congressman Hearst’s family board and enjoy hospitality of a lavishness beyond their maddest dreams. Politics a la Hearst are dished up between courses, and gifts of value—such, for instance, as solid gold pins bearing Mr. Hearst’s portrait—are forced upon departing guests. Considering everything, Mr. Hearst has accomplished a great deal. He is the only man who ever ran for president with nothing to start on but his own right of suffrage at the polls.2
There was no ambiguity about what he stood for. For years, he had been hammering away at the trusts and defending working people and their unions. A rich and successful businessman, he assured the voters that he was beholden to no party and no financial backers. As Arthur Brisbane explained in an April 6, 1904, letter to the editor of the New York Herald, the source of Hearst’s popularity was transparent:
The American people—like all people—are interested in PERSONALITY. If they are asked to vote they want to know whom and what they are voting for....If any man casts a vote for Hearst for President he will know that Hearst is answerable only to him. Hearst has gone back to the old-fashioned American plan. He appeals to the people—not to a boss or a corporation.... Not even the most venal of newspapers has suggested that anybody owns Hearst, or that he would be influenced by anything save the will of the people in the event of his election.
To provide himself with additional outlets to get his message to potential voters, Hearst established a new morning paper in Los Angeles, the Examiner, and an evening paper in Boston, the American. Each of these papers was added to the Hearst “wire” and carried the same editorials, feature articles, and Sunday supplements. It is impossible to know how much it cost Hearst to start these new papers or where he got the money. With successful newspapers in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, and with Phoebe having forgiven his $8 million debt in 1902, it is quite likely that he was able to borrow money from the banks for his new ventures.
The Hearst campaign started out as little more than a construct of the Hearst newspapers, but the more it was reported on, the more substance it acquired. As early as February of 1903, Town Topics, the gossip weekly with a strong interest in politics that spoke for the conservative faction of the Democratic party in New York State, felt obligated to comment on the rumors of Hearst’s candidacy—all of them first planted by and then reported on in his newspapers. Although Hearst had shown “administrative ability in the management of his numerous and popular newspapers,” Town Topics believed he was too young for the presidency and suggested it might be better if he waited four years before running.3
Through the summer and fall of 1903, the Hearst papers created the appearance of a groundswell of enthusiasm for the Hearst candidacy, transforming random remarks, inconsequential gestures, and simple hospitality into expressions of enthusiastic support. Day after day, there appeared dozens of items on the Hearst campaign, on the endorsements he was receiving, the “Hearst committees” that were being formed, the enthusiasm that greeted his candidacy everywhere in the nation. In July, it was reported that Hearst had been endorsed by several printers’ unions and the letter carriers. President Roosevelt responded to news of the latter endorsement by firing off a confidential letter to his postmaster general, Henry Clay Payne, “Any man who has had any share in introducing resolutions endorsing Mr. Hearst ... should be removed at once from the service.” Civil service employees, he reminded Mr. Payne, were forbidden to engage in political activities.4
In August of 1903, Editor and Publisher, also getting its news from the Hearst press, reported that a group of labor leaders had met in Washington to plan a convention for June 1904, the prime purpose of which was to “nominate a candidate for president, preferably William R. Hearst of New York, as a man pre-eminently worthy to be the people’s choice for president.”5 Hearst’s strategy was now clear. He expected to inherit Bryan’s supporters in the West and Middle West, and add his own endorsements from urban machines and labor organizations in the Northeast. While this might still not give him enough delegates for the nomination, it would guarantee him a voice in selecting the nominee and make him the leading candidate in 1908. Because the first session of the Fifty-eighth Congress was not scheduled to convene until November of 1903, Hearst was able to spend the entire year following his election to Congress traveling across the country—by private railroad car with an entourage of advisers—looking for opportunities to present himself as a serious candidate. When there was no invitation to be garnered to a state or county fair or a meeting of some local Democratic club, Hearst and his advisers invented reasons for their visits.
In late October of 1903, Hearst organized and paid for what his newspapers referred to as a “Congressional Trip by Special Train Through the South-Western Territories in the Interest of Statehood.” He escorted three senators, seventeen congressmen, and assorted photographers, reporters, political advisers, and their wives on a twelve-day circuit of press appearances, from Chicago to Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas, with a brief side trip to Mexico.6
At each whistle stop, Hearst and his guests posed for group pictures and were greeted by local dignitaries, territorial governors, mayors, school children, and marching bands. Uncharacteristically for a politician, Hearst never made a speech. Still, he was the center of attention wherever he went, literally standing head and shoulders above everyone else, outfitted dramatically in his standard political uniform: a black three-piece suit, white shirt, conservative tie, white carnation in his button hole, full-length, double-breasted black overcoat, and black shoes. For evening public receptions, he wore a tuxedo. Only at the end of the trip, as he entertained his guests in a tiny restaurant in Hermocillio, Mexico, did he exchange his black frock coat for a light-colored suit jacket and a loud plaid tie.7
Hearst reporters and photographers accompanying the party telegraphed stories back to his newspapers each day. “Congressman Hearst is a great favorite among the people of the great Southwest and his many acts of charity have made him one of the best known figures of the West,” the New York Evening Journal reported on October 20, 1903. “It is probable that no man could come to Arizona who would be more enthusiastically received or who could make a more profound impression upon the people.” The paper reported in a sidebar that the people of Atlanta were looking forward to the congressman’s visit there to celebrate “press day” at the Interstate Fair.8
In January 1904, Hearst officially declared his candidacy for the presidency in an “interview” with reporters from the Chicago Daily Tribune and the New York Herald, two of the nation’s most respected Republican papers. The interview was still a relatively new reportorial form with no fixed parameters. Hearst, who did not like to be questioned in person, answered questions submitted in advance. He had nothing new to say about the trusts, the major topic of the interview. He emphasized that he was not proposing the elimination of all trusts and combinations, only the “bad” ones, a position which was neither terribly radical nor very much different from President Roosevelt’s. Where Hearst differed from Roosevelt and from every Democrat with a national reputation was in his unequivocal support for labor unions. Without unions demanding higher wages, he argued, the nation might well move in the direction of “China and India where rich mandarins and rajahs lord it over starving populations.” Unions were good not only for working people, but for the economy as a whole. The “prosperity” of the merchant, manufacturer, farmer, book publisher, theater owner, and actor—this was Hearst’s list—depended on the purchasing power of the mass of the people:
Poverty-stricken people do not eat beef or mutton; they do not buy woolen clothes in profusion. They have not enough for life’s real necessities; nothing at all for the books, the travel, the pleasures that should accompany genuine national prosperity. Wide and equitable distribution of wealth is essential to a nation’s prosperous growth and intellectual development, and that distribution is brought a
bout by the labor union more than any other agency of our civilization.9
Apart from Eugene Debs, who would run for president in 1904 on the Socialist party ticket, no candidate for office had a record of support for labor as straightforward and consistent as Hearst’s. But then, no candidate had a father like George Hearst, who had spent the better part of his life in the digging fields. Though the senator had died a millionaire many times over, he had not struck it rich until his fortieth year and didn’t retire from the mines until his sixtieth. As Cora Older put it in her biography, no doubt following the line laid down for her by Hearst himself, “Conquest of fortune was not easy for George Hearst.”10
Forced to choose between men who, like his father, worked with their hands to eke out a living, and those who sat back at leisure and profited from the labor of others, Hearst had no difficulty siding with the former against the latter. As Ambrose Bierce, who had earlier left Hearst’s employ, remarked in 1912, “in matters of ‘industrial discontent’ it has always been a standing order in the editorial offices of the Hearst newspapers to ‘take the side of the strikers’ without inquiry or delay.” The Hearst papers backed railroad workers in California, steel workers and coal miners in Pennsylvania, streetcar workers in Brooklyn. He was so committed to labor’s right to strike that Town Topics declared at the onset of a steelworkers’ strike in 1901 that Hearst should be held accountable for any violence that might occur: “If he could be hanged more than once, the number of times should correspond with the list of those who are more than likely to fall victims of his malevolent counsels. If the present strike does not attain the worst phases of which such affairs are capable it will be through no fault of his.”11