The Chief

by David Nasaw

  By mid-April, the campaign for the Democratic nomination had reached a critical stage with the convening of the New York state convention in Albany. Though Hearst realized that he had no chance of winning a majority of the New York delegates, he expected to pick up enough to keep his bandwagon rolling. When it became apparent that ex-Governor David Hill had the votes to “instruct” all the delegates to vote for the candidate who won the majority, thereby assuring that Parker would leave Albany with seventy-eight delegates, Hearst zero, his campaign advisers panicked. Though Hearst was, at the time, in New York City with Millicent and their newborn son, he had to have been in touch with his campaign officials, who were stationed in the Ten Eyck hotel. With “great secrecy,” the Hearst camp in Albany prepared and distributed a manifesto charging that Parker was August Belmont’s candidate and demanding that the delegates “maintain” their “manhood” by repudiating “the alien pawnbroker who came to our shores just before the Civil War as the representative of the Rothschilds and as vice consul of a petty European state.” The attack was so blatantly anti-Semitic and so vicious that Belmont almost withdrew his name as an at-large delegate. While Hearst did not personally write this manifesto and would not himself have resorted to such anti-Semitic references, his subordinates were acting under his instructions and, no doubt, with his knowledge. They were, one and all, furious at the political shenanigans in Albany and determined to do whatever was necessary to rescue Hearst’s candidacy from the party professionals. Their efforts to win support for Hearst by smearing August Belmont failed entirely. The convention voted, in the end, to instruct all seventy-eight delegates from New York to cast their ballots for Judge Alton Parker.25

  The defeat in New York, as feared, slowed the Hearst bandwagon to a crawl. It all but came to a halt the following week when William Jennings Bryan, who had still not endorsed a candidate to succeed him as the Democratic nominee, spoke at the Second Regiment Armory in Chicago. The Hearst camp was convinced that Bryan would endorse the publisher and had packed the house with Hearst supporters. But Bryan, perhaps still harboring the impossible dream that a deadlocked St. Louis convention would turn to him for a third time, endorsed no one. As the Chicago Daily Tribune reported on April 24 in a front-page story, Bryan devoted his entire speech to condemning the conservative wing of the party and its candidate, Judge Alton Parker. The Tribune reported that “except for a passing reference in the Nebraskan’s opening remarks and for a sporadic cheer or two in the audience, the name of William Randolph Hearst went unmentioned.” Without Bryan’s endorsement, Hearst had no hope of securing the votes he needed for the nomination. He fought on, hopelessly now, but unwilling to concede defeat, winning a few more delegates in Illinois, but losing in North and South Dakota, Texas, Oregon, Minnesota, and Montana. The fact that he was headed for inevitable defeat did not silence his critics. His appeal to class division, his support of the unions, and his attempt to bring together rural populists with the urban working class was too incendiary to ignore. In late May, long after the Parker forces had lined up sufficient votes to handily win the nomination, Harper’s Weekly, still unwilling to let down its guard, declared that Hearst’s remained the most “audacious” candidacy the country had ever seen:

  Mr. Hearst has no particular desire to become the Democratic candidate.... He wants to be the candidate of a class, and since classes have not hitherto been recognized as existing in this country, he has bent his energies and given his own talent and hired clever men of specious minds and spent freely of his money in an endeavor to create one. His newspapers are characterized by appeals to ignorance and prejudice, to hatred of the rich simply became they are rich ... to socialism, discontent, and envy, to the basest of human passions. From the standpoint of a patriot, a lover of his country, the great and free, although still experimental republic, this is dastardly work. One shudders to contemplate the logical conclusion of its successful continuance.26

  The Democratic nominating convention met in St. Louis during the week of July 4. Hearst, who had been campaigning in Chicago with Millicent (we don’t know where two-month-old George Randolph was), returned to Washington to await the delegates’ decision. The reporters who had expected fireworks in St. Louis were sorely disappointed. Hearst canceled the contract for one hundred and fifty rooms at the Jefferson Hotel and called off the huge demonstrations planned on his behalf. As the New York Times reported on July 3, 1904, “Hearst Boom Noiseless. Divested of Its Clangor As It Reaches St. Louis.”

  Though his opponents, up until the last minute, expected him to disrupt the proceedings by denouncing the party or bolting it entirely, he behaved admirably, taking the high road to defeat. He did not criticize the undemocratic, boss-ridden procedures—like the unit rule—that he was convinced had robbed him of the nomination; he condemned neither his opponents nor Bryan; he declined to consider the nomination of the Populist party; he insisted that no matter what occurred in St. Louis, he would remain a loyal Democrat. Privately, he held his fire out of the belief that he would, if not now, then in 1908 or 1912, be elected president because his antitrust, antimonopoly, proworking class philosophy provided the nation with the only alternative to class warfare.

  The Hearst delegates, as his papers reported in full, did their best to make sure that the Democratic platform adopted in St. Louis included progressive planks like those advocating the direct election of senators and jury trials in labor injunction cases. Hearst permitted his name to be put into nomination by Delphin M. Delmas, a San Francisco lawyer who had been an ally of his father, and Delmas dutifully delivered a stirring speech about Hearst, “the foremost living advocate of the equality of man ... the champion of the rights of toil, the foe of privilege and monopoly.” Clarence Darrow, the progressive lawyer whom Hearst had hired to serve as his newspapers’ general counsel in Chicago, seconded his nomination, asking the delegates to look beyond the convention hall and consider the needs and wishes of “the countless millions who do their work and live their lives and earn their bread without the aid of schemes or tricks.... Sometime when the fever of commercialism has run its course, when humanity and justice shall once more control the minds of men, this great party will come back from the golden idols and tempting fleshpots, and once more battle for the rights of man.” Following the nominating speeches came an obligatory but spirited demonstration, which, according to the Hearst papers, lasted a full forty-three minutes; according to the New York Times, it was a still impressive thirty-eight minutes.27

  At 5:45 in the morning, the first ballot was completed. Hearst received 204 votes; Parker, 667, nine votes short of the two-thirds which he needed for nomination. There was no need for a second ballot, as sufficient delegates switched their votes to Parker to guarantee his nomination.

  Hearst returned to New York, Millicent, and his son George in July. “The baby is undergoing singular transformations,” he proudly informed his mother. “He has grown until he weighs considerably over twelve pounds. His hair is getting lighter daily until it is almost blond and perhaps he will turn out a tow head after all. His face has grown longer and he is developing a nose instead of the push button he started out with. I shall take some more pictures of him in a few days.”

  That, unfortunately, was about the only thing that was going right with his life. “I have had an awful siege here,” he admitted to Phoebe. “I have stopped giving the slightest attention to politics and have been working truly day and night to straighten things out” at his newspapers and with his finances, both of which had deteriorated while he was on the campaign trail:

  I get to bed about three and frequently am up at five again walking the floor and trying to think things out. I have not had one night’s sleep since you left. As a result I am pretty sick and miserable and blue and if I didn’t have the family constitution I would be well along with nervous prostration or locomotor ataxia.... My eyes have gone wrong and I have had to ... get fitted for glasses. Imagine your dutiful son with big lamps on his nose. Mill
y is well but pretty tired too as she spends most of her time at night rubbing my head and trying to put me to sleep. If we get through the summer I suppose things will be better but if any of us get through the summer we will be lucky. Anyhow the baby is well and don’t seem to worry much. He will have his little troubles in time, I suppose.28

  Not even Hearst’s money could save his young wife and baby from the stifling heat that engulfed New York City. (This was to be the first—and last—summer the Hearst family would spend in New York.) As Millicent wrote to Phoebe in Pleasanton, California, the heat had become so punishing and the baby “so restless and fretful” that Will had, in desperation, rushed out “and bought five electric fans and eight buckets full of ice and tried to cool the room the baby was in. When everything got going it sounded like a flying machine and looked like a cold storage warehouse, but didn’t feel any cooler than before. Will was so hot carrying the ice upstairs and fussing with the electric fans that I think he raised the thermometer several degrees.” His attempt to cool off their home having failed, Will moved his family into the Netherlands hotel for the duration of the heat wave.29

  In August, Will’s world came crashing down around him. He had been on a merry-go-round for more than a year, commuting back and forth from Washington to New York, running a political campaign and serving in Congress, trying, at the same time, to oversee his publishing empire and spend time with his wife and newborn son. Exhaustion and depression took their toll. For one of the few times in his life, he had literally run himself into a corner.

  “The work and worry about the papers and campaign and everything broke Will down and we had to come to Mt. Clemens to take the baths and to get a rest,” Millicent wrote Phoebe from the Michigan spa in August. “We expect to be here about two weeks, but I don’t know whether we shall stay so long or not. The papers get in every morning and there is always something the matter with them. I think we shall have to go someplace where there are no papers. We may run up into Canada.”30

  Will also wrote his mother from Mt. Clemens, but betrayed no hint of the breakdown Millicent had mentioned. On the contrary, his letter was as maniacally cheery as the ones he had written her from Cambridge, twenty years earlier:

  I have found a place that beats Carlsbad all to pieces. The waters are nastier, the place is duller, the food is worse and if possible there are more Jews. I am sure people ought to get cured here of anything they ever had. All I am afraid of is that I may lose my own diseases that I am used to and acquire somebody’s else that will be new and unfamiliar and perhaps embarrassing.... We all bathe in the same bath tubs and interchange greetings and ailments in the most intimate and agreeable way. I don’t know what I have drawn yet and I shall not, of course, for awhile, but I rather suspect that I have added eczema scrofula and the itch to my present collection.... The baby is at the beach.... He is a smart little thing, if I, who am chiefly responsible for his abilities, do say it myself. Milly also admits it. He weighs nearly sixteen pounds now and about fifteen and a half of that is brain. You see he does take after his father and his father’s ma, doesn’t he?31

  In late summer, Hearst returned to New York. In October, he accepted renomination for a second term in Congress. He had no taste for the campaign trail in his local district, having spent the previous year running for president. It didn’t much matter. His surrogates flooded his district with campaign literature and he was easily reelected in November. Judge Alton Parker had no such luck. While Hearst watched from the sidelines, endorsing the Democratic nominee but doing nothing on his behalf, Judge Alton Parker was outvoted by Theodore Roosevelt by twenty percentage points, the largest margin in American history. Even Bryan, in 1900, had been able to poll 1.3 million votes more than Parker did in 1904.

  In nominating Judge Parker for the presidency, the conservative Democrats had, Hearst believed, made it clear that they did not want to be identified with working people. The result was a debacle for the party, a Pyrrhic victory for radicals like Hearst, and a triumph for Gene Debs and the Socialists, who had polled over 400,000 votes, 3 percent of the total. No one knew yet what Parker’s defeat and Debs’s vote tally meant for the future. The common wisdom, as dispensed by the national press and summarized in Current Literature, was that the Democratic party would “be reorganized—perhaps to the point of obliteration.” The question that was being asked across the country was who would reorganize it, Bryan or Hearst?32

  10. “A Force to Be Reckoned With”

  HEARST RETURNED TO WASHINGTON in December of 1904 for the lame-duck session of the 58th Congress. Recovered from his post-Convention depression, he was on track again, pointed toward the 1908 nominating convention. The fact that party leaders had passed him over to nominate Alton Parker, who had no chance of winning, confirmed every one of his suspicions. The Democratic party, at the local, state, and national level, had become as corrupted by money as the Republican. He had been mercilessly attacked during the campaign—and would continue to be attacked—because he dared to speak this truth to the American people. “The corporations,” he wrote his mother in 1905, “control the Democratic machines quite as much as they do the Republican machines and anyone who is really opposed to the corporations must count upon opposition from the machines of both parties.”1

  In Congress, as elsewhere, he made his own rules, refusing to allow himself to be compromised or to contribute in any way to legitimizing the collection of boodlers and bagmen that held power. He proudly skipped 168 out of 170 roll calls in his first term, voted only 26 times in his four years in the House, and very rarely attended floor debates, even on the bills he had sponsored. He became instead a scold, a provocateur, a modern-day Jeremiah. He took extreme positions and refused to budge. He introduced new bills mandating his old causes: an eight-hour day for government workers, investing circuit courts with jurisdiction to enforce antitrust laws, providing federal funds for roads, requiring the direct election of senators, outlawing railroad rebates, establishing a parcel post system, regulating towing at sea, and increasing the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission.2

  None of this legislation had any chance of getting out of committee and he knew it. His aim was not to make better laws, but to convince voters that their government, as constituted, was incapable of meeting their needs and that he alone was capable of rescuing it from the stranglehold of trust-controlled and corrupted politicians.

  Other candidates for national office might need political parties to advance their causes. Hearst did not. Bryan’s betrayal had convinced him—if he needed further convincing—that he could not trust any professional politicians. Having been viciously attacked by the conservative element in his party and betrayed by the Bryan “radicals,” he had no choice but to go it alone. As Frederick Palmer concluded in the three-part series on “Hearst and Hearstism” published in Collier’s in 1906, Hearst represented “a strange, new element that presents to us a startling possibility. His is the first one-man party to have gained anything like national headway in the history of our democracy.... His power has been gained purely by advertising himself and his propaganda in his own daily editions.... He is a celebrity who is guaranteed four million readers every day. This is the largest continuous audience that any American public man has ever possessed.”3

  No one, it appeared, was neutral about Hearst. He had gathered around him a group of ten or twelve congressmen, referred to disparagingly as the “Hearst brigade,” two of whom, Champ Clark of Missouri and John Garner of Texas, he would later support for the presidency. Outside of these few, he was distrusted and disliked on both sides of the aisle.

  He devoted most of his energy during the lame-duck session that lasted from December to March to attacking his fellow congressmen, especially the Democrats, for being in the pay of the trusts. Congressional Democrats who refused to get behind the “Hearst bill” which would have increased the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate railroad rates were assailed in his newspapers for not
being “real Democrats” and for putting the interests of the railroads ahead of those of their constituents. When Representative John A. Sullivan, a second-term Democrat from Massachusetts, either on his own or at the behest of party leaders, remarked that had Congressman Hearst been truly interested in the legislation he sponsored, he would have appeared on the floor on behalf of it, the New York American attacked him as “a bald, red-nosed young man [who] revealed his hitherto unsuspected presence in the House” by asking some questions which showed he knew nothing of the hearings at which Hearst’s bill had been discussed. The American attributed Sullivan’s ignorance to either “congenital incapacity or indifference to the people’s rights.”4

  On February 13, Representative Sullivan sought and received unanimous consent to state his case on the floor of the House. He was, he explained, not in the habit of replying to newspaper criticism, but this was different, as “the proprietor of the newspaper was also a Member of Congress” who was trying to silence those who disagreed with him by assaulting them in his newspapers. To protect the integrity and dignity of the House, Sullivan declared that he intended to discuss from the floor the “motives beneath” the article that had smeared him. He began by impugning Hearst’s masculinity—a “manly man” would have criticized him face to face “instead of hiding under the cover of ... cowardly newspaper attacks.” In criticizing Hearst, he alluded to “the case of the moral degenerate who insolently casts his eyes upon the noblest of women whose virtue places them beyond the contamination of his lust.” He assailed Hearst as a socialist; pointed derisively to his record of absenteeism; hinted that he did not speak in Congress because it might violate his “monarchical dignity” or reveal that his voice was neither “sonorous” nor “manly”; and referred to the Hearst papers’ attack on him as a “scheme of political assassination which has been marked out by a Nero of modern politics.”