by David Nasaw
For his past support of organized labor and striking workers, Hearst expected to receive organized labor’s backing for his candidacy. And he did. But his invocation of the rights of labor did not sit well with the party’s leaders or the business community. It was one thing to publish a daily newspaper that supported the right to strike. It was far different to elevate support for unions into a political principle.
Hearst’s critics had tried at first to laugh his candidacy to death. But they realized quickly enough that he was in earnest and dangerous. In January of 1904, Franklin K. Lane, a California Democrat whom Hearst had earlier refused to support for governor, wrote a friend from San Francisco that the Hearst “boom [was] increasing. That it is possible for such a man to receive the nomination, is too humiliating to be thought of.” In February, Mayor Harrison of Chicago called a meeting of Cook County leaders to plan an anti-Hearst strategy before it was too late.12
The personal attacks began in San Francisco in February 1904, when the Star, a weekly that specialized in politics and scandal, published the first in a series of scurrilous poems recounting in verse the tales about Sausalito Bill that had circulated a decade earlier, when Will Hearst and Tessie Powers had sailed up, down, and across San Francisco Bay in Hearst’s yacht.
What’s the matter with Bill?
He’s the limit still.
His Sausalito ark
Was the real thing after dark,
When the corks made
A fusillade,
And the guests, promiscuously vying,
Were trying,
After their wines and beers,
To kick down the chandeliers,
And the soubrettes sweet
Stood on their heads and waved their feet....
And there was nothing to do but drink
And so forth—“so forth” having in’t
All that the press declines to print.
The poem continued for another four stanzas, ending with Sausalito Bill in the White House, holding prize fights and poker games, with “blue” vaudeville shows every Sunday night.13
The following month, the Star ran a second poem, this one more scurrilous still, called “The Message from Bill: A Nightmare Dream in Which the Unspeakable Bill, as an Impossible President, Informs Congress How Honorable Diplomats Ignore Him and Self-Respecting Americans Ostracize Him.”14
The San Francisco News-Letter, another weekly which specialized in political scandal, published a series of political cartoons reminiscent of those Hearst himself had used to ridicule McKinley and the Republicans in 1896 and 1900. Hearst was pictured as a ghoul juggling bombs, a stampeding ass, and a college boy in a beanie. He and the smaller figures who surrounded him were covered with captions rich in allusions to past scandals.15
On the first of March, the New York Evening Post, among the oldest and most distinguished newspapers in the nation, legitimized the assault on Hearst’s character by joining in with a vicious editorial, “The Unthinkable Hearst.” After professing its reluctance to “speak of the Presidential candidacy of William R. Hearst” because it was “one of those things that ‘need much washing to be touched,’” the editorial went on to describe the “darker and more fearful” aspects of the Hearst candidacy in lurid detail:
It is well known that this man has a record which would make it impossible for him to live through a Presidential campaign—such gutters would be dragged, such sewers laid open! We can only refer to the loathsome subject. Let those who want a hint of the repulsive details turn to the Congressional Record of January 8, 1897. There they will find a speech by Representative Johnson of California showing the kind of millstone that will be hung around Hearst’s neck if he were ever to come before the voters.... We are convinced that it is only necessary to set forth the facts in order to make an end of this unspeakable candidacy. Hearst’s record will crush him as soon as it is known.... It is not a question of policies, but of character. An agitator we can endure; an honest radical we can respect; a fanatic we can tolerate; but a low voluptuary trying to sting his jaded senses to afresh thrill by turning from private to public corruption is a new horror in American politics.16
Other men might have retreated from public life in the face of such an onslaught but Hearst remained almost oblivious to it. The accusations were repeated often enough to gather about them the texture of truth. There was sufficient money available—from unnamed and untraceable sources—to reprint and distribute anti-Hearst campaign literature across the country. The San Francisco News-Letter circulated thousands of extra copies of its “Hearst issue”; the Evening Post editorial, “Unthinkable Hearst,” was reprinted in bulk and “sent to every editor, every educator, every clergyman, every public man in the South.”17
Whatever the psychic toll, William Randolph Hearst had strutted onto the public stage and would remain there for the next half century. Ridiculed, feared, or adored, he would, from this point on, be impossible to ignore. He had become a new kind of political celebrity, his fame based equally on rumors about his personal life and the image he had cultivated as a knight on horseback come to rescue working people from the trusts.
In March, the first delegates to the national convention were chosen in Rhode Island. To the dismay of conservative Democrats and journalists around the country, Hearst won six of eight seats. The New York Times, which under Adolph Ochs had become an outspoken opponent of the Bryan wing of the Democratic party, sounded the alarm. In its lead editorial on March 12, 1904, “The Ambitions of Mr. Hearst,” the paper asserted that while Hearst would never get the nomination, “the work he and his organizers are doing and the money they are spending ... will have a certain effect, an evil effect, upon the body politic and upon the fortunes of the Democratic party.... He makes his appeal solely to restlessness and discontent.... He represents the sterile policy of agitation, nothing more. That is to say, Mr. HEARST stands for absolutely nothing but the arraying of class against class in the United States.”
“It cannot be said that his Presidential boom is a thing of mushroom growth,” the Forum reported in April of 1904. “Its blossoming may have been a surprise; but, as a matter of fact, the seed was planted more than two years ago, and there has been careful watering and fertilizing ever since.... His agents have been in almost every State; his position as president of the National League of Democratic Clubs has brought him into close and intimate association with party workers; while the attitude of his papers upon labor questions has secured him the support of the laboring classes in every section of the country.... He will be the only candidate who will go to St. Louis [for the nominating convention] with an organization behind him.”18
Like a modern-day celebrity, Hearst was both omnipresent and elusive. The New York Times in an April 8, 1904, article about the “would-be President” reported that his “face and figure” had become “familiar to the galleries.” Whenever he appeared on the floor of the House, “a whisper of ‘There’s Hearst!’ rushes through them, and everybody looks at the candidate.” Still, while images and representations of his own and his enemies’ making were omnipresent, Hearst kept his distance from the public. He was personally shy and professionally wary. Perhaps because he knew how the press worked, he never spoke informally or off the record and did not invite the press to his home. He remained, as Lincoln Steffens would characterize him in his 1906 profile in the American Magazine, a “man of mystery”—to the press as well as the public. Did he have any ideas of his own? Did he write his own articles and speeches or edit his paper? Was he Brisbane’s puppet or merely another rich man looking for a vocation in politics? The more journalists investigated, the less they learned. No one knew the man; no one, in fact, knew anyone who had ever had a serious conversation with him.19
His critics and the few journalists who remained neutral on the “Hearst question” assumed that his reticence, his shyness, his unwillingness to give interviews or speeches were signs of incapacity. A reporter from the Chicago Record-Herald who h
ad accompanied the candidate on a campaign trip through the South found him tongue-tied: “He could not, at least did not, open his mouth. He was as inane as he looked ... One of the men who rode with Hearst nearly the whole of one day and tried to talk with him thus relates his experience: ‘I could not carry on a conversation with the man. He did not seem to know anything. He had no views, at least he did not express any. He was not only shy, he seemed to be deficient in his thinking department....I was, too, forced to the conclusion that nothing came out because there was nothing inside, and that he has brains only when Arthur Brisbane and his other brilliant men on his staff are at hand to make and express ideas for him.’” The reporter from the New York Times assigned to penetrate the Hearst mystery disagreed. If Hearst had little to say to reporters, it was because he was “bashful,” not because he had no ideas: “He suffers in the presence of the men he meets. Personally, from all accounts, he is a kindly and courteous gentleman, considerate of those about him, gentle in his dealings with men.”20
Hearst had swept into Washington in the fall of 1903, leased the mansion within sight of the White House that had been occupied by McKinley’s secretary of war, Elihu Root, demanded and won a seat on the prestigious Labor Committee after bombarding the House leadership with letters of support from labor leaders, and then left town. He had more important things to do than waste his days in a House of Representatives run from the top down by the Republican majority leader “Uncle Joe” Cannon and the Democratic minority leader John Sharp Williams of Mississippi, neither of whom thought much of or paid much attention to the freshman congressman from New York’s Eleventh Congressional District.
“He goes the usual road of new Congressmen, sought only by his own little clique of friends, as is the custom with all legislative tyros,” the New York Times reported of Hearst in April 1904. “He is not a ‘mixer,’ and the majority of the Democrats are as aloof from him, as he from them.” He missed most roll calls, made no speeches, and appeared on the floor only when one of his pet projects was being debated. He was much more active in committee work. He attended “all the meetings [of his Labor Committee] at which testimony has been taken and has participated in them ... At these hearings Hearst frequently asked questions and made suggestions designed to bring out the organized labor side of the issue.” Louis Brownlow, a Washington-based journalist, attended one hearing at which Hearst testified on behalf of his bill for “government ownership of the railroads.” The committee room was full of reporters who, like Brownlow, had come to see Hearst “flounder in disgrace.” They were completely disappointed, Brownlow recalled in his autobiography: “Mr. Hearst, without notes, first made an oral presentation of his ideas on the problem and the solution that he had proposed in his bill. Then the questions began to come. No doubt most of the members of the committee had had the same notion that I had, but Hearst was too much for them. He knew his subject—from his point of view, of course—and he answered easily, quickly, succinctly, and in very good humor.”21
Hearst’s pet project was a bill mandating the eight-hour day for railroad workers and government employees. When the Republicans decided to bottle up the bill in committee, Hearst countered by attempting to add an eight-hour proviso to a naval appropriations bill, and surprised everyone by appearing himself in the House chamber. Then, according to the New York Times reporter covering the debate, there took place “one of the strangest scenes ever witnessed in Congress, and one absolutely without precedent”:
Without uttering a word except in a whisper, sitting on the small of his back with one knee in the air, and apparently having nothing to do with the debate, for three-quarters of an hour [Hearst] kept the House in a turmoil.... The old-line Democrats looked on silently at the curious scene. The members of the “Hearst Brigade” would come over to their chief one after another and get their assignments. Immediately afterward the man assigned to the work would arise and throw a new bomb into the Republican side. All this time the chief never changed his position except once, when he walked around to give an assignment personally to Mr. Livernash [a congressman from California], who was formerly a reporter on Mr. Hearst’s San Francisco paper. Throughout the fight, the unversed and unsophisticated tourists in the galleries never suspected that the silent man sitting crouched in his chair had anything to do with the fight, much less that he was the head centre of it. He played on the House like a piano, and succeeded amply in his purpose to put the Republicans on record against the Eight-Hour bill....It was an extraordinary sight. He and his handful of supporters were the whole show, and no debate so run has ever been witnessed in the House. It was unique.... When it was over and the Eight-Hour bill was beaten, Hearst put his hands into his pockets and lounged out. The scene no longer interested him, and when the roll call came on the passage of the bill he was absent.22
The Hearst bandwagon rolled merrily along through the winter and early spring of 1904, picking up support in the Middle West and the West, wherever the Bryan forces remained intact. As the New York Times explained to its readers in an April 1 editorial, “The Hearst Disease,” the publisher was winning delegates by “appealing with equal fervor and greater recklessness to the very prejudices and passions aroused by the utterances of BRYAN ... Here and there Democrats are found, in some States many Democrats, who, having welcomed Mr. BRYAN as the great deliverer, now acclaim Mr. HEARST as the appointed continuer of his work.” Fortunately, the Times continued, the Democrats showed signs of “beginning to expel the Hearst poison” and uniting behind the candidacy of Judge Alton Parker of New York, “an old-school Democrat.” Judge Parker was firmly in the grip of the conservative, anti-Bryan wing of the party.23
The Hearst camp responded to the relentless editorial criticism in the Times with an editorial in the morning American and the Evening Journal on April 7, accusing Adolph Ochs of being in the pay of Judge Parker’s chief supporter, the Wall Street financier August Belmont. Though Belmont was, as charged, a Times stockholder—as was J. P. Morgan—there was no evidence that either of them had interfered in the paper’s editorial policy. There was no excuse for the anti-Semitic imagery the editorial employed in portraying Ochs as “an oily little commercial gentleman [who had come] cringing into Mr. Belmont’s office, with oily smiles, obsequiously curved shoulders and nervously rubbing his hands.” Until now, the Hearst papers, unlike Dana’s Sun, for example, had not stooped to this sort of caricature in criticizing Pulitzer or Ochs. In the heat of political battle, however, Hearst’s editorial writers had begun to bring out all the weapons in the “populist” arsenal, including attacks which linked Wall Street financiers like Belmont—and their supporters like Ochs—to international Jewish conspiracies led by the Rothschilds. The anti-Semitic thrust of the attack was contradicted, but not erased, a few paragraphs down by the description of the publisher as “an ordinary type of the very ordinary man, who is as respectable as he dares to be, and whose opinions are given to him by his stockholders.”
Contrary to the assertion by Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones in The Trust, their book on the Sulzberger and Ochs families, Hearst did not write or sign this editorial. On April 7, the day it appeared, he was, according to his own newspapers and the New York Times, in Washington, introducing a resolution calling on the attorney general to furnish Congress with evidence his office had acquired in 1902 of “a conspiracy in restraint of interState trade among the anthracite coal railroads.” Still, even though Hearst had taken a leave from day-to-day control of his newspapers for the duration of his campaign, he remained responsible for their editorial policies. He may not have personally approved and certainly did not write the antiSemitic slurs against Ochs, but he never apologized or retracted them or muted the attacks on August Belmont as a Rothschild agent.24
From April 7, the day the anti-Belmont, anti-Ochs editorial appeared, to April 22, there was an uncharacteristic silence about Hearst’s whereabouts or activities in his and the opposition newspapers. We can only assume that he spent these two weeks
in New York City with Millicent who, on April 10, gave birth to their first son, George Randolph Hearst. The birth of his first son and child may have been kept out of his newspapers because he did not wish to call attention to his private life or to his marriage the year before. As both mother and son were healthy and there were plenty of servants and family members to look after them, Hearst returned to Washington on April 22 in response to a written invitation to testify before the House Judiciary Committee.
According to the New York Times, reporting on April 23, the hearing had been called solely “to learn whether or not Representative William R. Hearst can make a speech.” If the intention was to embarrass Hearst publicly, it failed. Hearst appeared in the hearing room as requested, with his attorney Clarence Shearn, and “many documents and legal works. When Chairman Jenkins announced that the hearing was open, Mr. Hearst arose. He was pale, but self-possessed. He wore a frock coat with silk facings; a puff tie of blue with white stripes, and gray trousers with a very faint stripe in them. He kept his coat buttoned, and thrust his hand into his trousers pocket, where it incessantly played with a bunch of keys or a knife while he spoke.” Though he had few specifics to offer the committee about the antitrust conspiracy he had accused the coal companies and railroads of engaging in, Shearn, who followed him, provided the facts and figures. At the conclusion of the hearing, “the Hearst resolution was referred to a subcommittee.... When the meeting was over Mr. Hearst was found in the corridor, standing by a window, with his hat and gloves in his hand, patiently waiting for Mr. Shearn.”