The Chief

by David Nasaw

  Though Hearst had not been in the room when Sullivan began his oration, he appeared before it was completed, and asked for the floor to respond. To the charge of absenteeism, he pleaded guilty—with an explanation. “I do not know any way in which a man can be less effective for his constituents and less useful to them than by emitting chewed wind on the floor of this House. [APPLAUSE].” He concluded his ad hominem, ad-libbed attack on Sullivan by recalling, to the amazement of his colleagues, an incident from his own past. “When I was at Harvard College in 1885, a murder was committed in a low saloon in Cambridge. A man partly incapacitated from drink bought in that saloon on Sunday morning ... was assaulted by the two owners of that saloon and brutally kicked to death. The name of one of the owners of that saloon was John A. Sullivan, and these two men were arrested and indicted by the grand jury for manslaughter and tried and convicted. I would like to ask the gentleman from Massachusetts if he knows anything about that incident and whether, if I desired to make a hostile criticism, I could not have referred to that crime?”

  The House exploded into disorder. Mr. Butler of Pennsylvania demanded that the Speaker end the debate at once. When the chair ruled that Hearst still had the floor, Butler interrupted to remind the Speaker that “the gentleman from New York [had] inferentially charged the gentleman from Massachusetts with either having murdered some one or conspired to murder.” That, he insisted, was clearly out of order. The Speaker agreed. Hearst replied that he was finished anyway.5

  Congressman Sullivan admitted the next day that he had indeed been indicted for murder, as Hearst had charged, but had received a suspended sentence because he was only seventeen years old. He served out the rest of his congressional term and then retired from politics.

  Hearst newspapers everywhere followed the Chief’s lead in attacking politicians who, they claimed, were in the pay of the trusts. In Los Angeles, they assailed city officials for floating a water reclamation bond issue that would have enriched the local oligarchy of real estate speculators. In Chicago, they blasted former Mayor Carter Harrison and aldermen “Hinky Dink” Kenna and “Bathhouse John” Coughlin for taking bribes from the streetcar barons. In San Francisco, they attacked Democratic Boss Ruef and Mayor Eugene Schmitz for accepting bribes from local traction companies.6

  In New York City, the Chief’s home base, the Hearst papers concentrated their fire on Mayor George B. McClellan, Jr., the elegant, aristocratic, Princeton-educated son of the Civil War general and Democratic nominee for president in 1864, who they claimed was in the pay of the gas trust. George McClellan was the first in a long line of politicians whom Hearst turned on after endorsing. He was not a particularly “dirty” politician, but neither was he a crusading antitrust reformer. Hearst, relying on his power as a publisher, expected that he could compel the politicians he supported to keep the promises he believed had been made to him. When these politicians didn’t or couldn’t live up to his expectations, “he thrust them from his bosom the better to lambaste their buttocks.” The words were those of Nat Ferber, who grew up on the Lower East Side and went to work for Hearst because he admired him and wanted to join him in battle against the “predatory interests.” “Instead of taking the orthodox newspaperman’s position, which is no position,” Ferber wrote, “I took sides and shouted from the housetops, a cause for every housetop. The gas company, the traction companies, the beach barons, the food purveyors, in their attempts to raise their respective tariffs, found in me a watchful adversary lustily shouting ‘Stop, thief!’”7

  Hearst used all the resources at his command to fight McClellan and the gas trust. He directed his attorney Clarence Shearn to enjoin the city controller and mayor from paying any rate increases to New York Consolidated Gas, attacked McClellan daily in his editorials, and unleashed his political cartoonists against the mayor, the gas trust, Tammany, and its new boss, Charles Murphy, who had succeeded Richard Croker.

  In response to charges that he was attacking McClellan because he planned to run against him in 1905, the New York Evening Journal declared that “Mr. Hearst has neither the desire nor the time to act as mayor. A man publishing newspapers in New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, is fairly well occupied with public questions.... The Hearst newspapers are fighting municipal corruption in all the cities where they are published. Mayor McClellan’s pet gang of Gas Thieves is but one of the Gas Thief gangs that the Hearst newspapers deal with"8

  This much was true. Hearst was fighting the trusts in every city in which he owned a paper; and he did not want to run for mayor—New York City mayors did not get elected to the presidency. Still, he had made up his mind to deny McClellan a second term by running a candidate against him. As McClellan was sure to get the Tammany nod for reelection and Hearst refused to support a Republican, he directed Max Ihmsen, his chief political operative, to organize a new anti-Tammany reform party, the Municipal Ownership League.

  Hearst was indefatigable. While organizing his third party, battling McClellan and the gas trust, and making as much trouble as he could in Congress, he continued to expand his publishing empire. In May of 1905, he concluded negotiations to buy Cosmopolitan, his first general-interest magazine, for $400,000, more than twice what he had paid for the Journal ten years earlier.

  His advisers had been unalterably and unanimously opposed to the venture. Newspaper publishers did not publish magazines. The two media had dissimilar audiences, distinct production and editorial requirements, and very different distribution practices. Hearst went ahead anyway, convinced that he could succeed with a monthly as he had with a daily.

  His timing was impeccable. He bought Cosmopolitan —he had started up Motor for automobile enthusiasts two years before—at the onset of the golden age of American magazines. Like its competitors, Collier’s, Everybody ’s, McClure’s, Leslie’s, and the American Magazine, Cosmopolitan was making a great deal of money publishing the type of slashing exposés on political corruption that would soon be referred to as “muckraking.” Hearst increased the number of stories on politics and current events, imported from his newspapers his most incendiary political writers and editorialists, like Ambrose Bierce and the future Socialist party candidate Charles Edward Russell, and added to them social activist novelists like Jack London and Upton Sinclair, and Socialists and Socialist sympathizers like Robert Hunter, Morris Hillquit, and David Graham Phillips.

  Where his newspapers attacked political corruption at the local level, he intended to use Cosmopolitan to attack it at the top of the political hierarchy: the United States Senate. He tried first to enlist Charles Edward Russell, who had worked for him as writer and editor in New York and Chicago, to write an extended exposé on corruption in Washington. When Russell proved unable to take the assignment, Hearst turned to the novelist David Graham Phillips and offered him a Hearstian sum to write the article. After several months of research and writing, Phillips turned in a draft which was edited, set in galleys, and rushed to Hearst for final approval. Hearst was horrified to discover that Phillips had written an exposé that was too wild even for his taste. At two o'clock in the morning, he telegrammed Cosmopolitan's editor to pull Phillips's article off the presses because it lacked sufficient documentation to withstand the criticism it was sure to receive. “We have merely an attack. The facts, the proofs, the documentary evidence are an important thing, and the article is deficient in them ... We want more definite facts throughout. Supply them where you can. Then run the article if you want, and we will try to get the others later.” Note here the limits of Hearst’s journalistic fact-checking. He was willing to run the article first—and substantiate some of the facts thereafter.9

  The rewrite was better. It was published—with great fanfare—in the March 1906 issue of Cosmopolitan. On the cover was a ghoulishly grinning photograph of New York’s Republican senator, Chauncey Depew, over the caption, “Depew’s joviality and popularity, according to Mr. Phillips, have cost the American people at least one billion dollars.�
�� On the next page was a second photograph of “Depew at close range,” captioned, “Here is the Archetypal Face of the Sleek, Self-satisfied American Opportunist in Politics and Plunder.” Hearst marketed the piece as only he could—with billboards, advertisements, and self-congratulatory editorials in his newspapers. The result exceeded his every expectation. Cosmopolitans circulation jumped by 50 percent. When President Theodore Roosevelt attacked the new journalism and coined the term “muckraking” in a speech at the Gridiron Club and then again at the laying of the cornerstone of the new House Office Building, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he was talking about Hearst.10

  It was no accident that Hearst bought Cosmopolitan within months of allying himself with progressive reformers like Samuel Seabury and organizing his Municipal Ownership League in New York City. All of these ventures were intended to broaden his readership—and political constituencies. Though comparatively low-priced at ten cents, Cosmopolitan was not for common laborers or recently arrived immigrants or for the vast majority of those who read the Evening Journal or Hearst’s other evening papers on their way home from work. Having successfully conquered the “low” end of the market, Hearst was now returning to the “middle” ranges.

  If in publishing and politics Hearst was reaching out to new social groupings, the same could not be said of his personal life. He had entered New York as an outsider and remained one. Even more than Teddy Roosevelt, he was considered a traitor to his class, though the identity of that “class” was in some dispute.

  New York society had never been as homogeneous or closed as Boston’s or Philadelphia’s, but it had become ever more fragmented with the infusion of new money like Hearst’s. There were, observers noted in the 1890s, already five distinct social elites: three British-American Protestant groupings, a German Christian, and a German Jewish. Hearst, the Western publisher of “yellow” journals and son of a Forty-Niner, and Millicent, the dancer daughter of a vaudeville hoofer, did not fit neatly into any of them. Hearst had, on coming to New York, joined a few clubs, including the prestigious Union Club and the American Yacht Club, but he had been asked to leave or had resigned voluntarily. After 1900, his name no longer even appeared in the Social Register.11

  Hearst reveled in his outsider status. Even at the White House, where he and Millicent were invited in 1905, he assumed the role of scorned and scornful outsider. All the other guests, he wrote his mother, had “belonged largely to the class of vulgar rich who seek to conceal ill-breeding and stupidity behind an affectation of self-confidence that amounts to brazen effrontery. The women stared at the passing line from behind the barrier of ropes and through diamond studded lorgnettes. I despise lorgnettes. They are bad enough when they shield blinky, squinty eyes but oh, the insolence of diamond studded lorgnettes behind which ignorance and vulgarity take refuge. There is nothing to compare with it in hardihood unless it be the brutal indifference of the tenderloin lady who is ‘drunk and glad of it.’”

  Hearst proudly informed his mother that his and Millicent's visit to the White House wasn’t “all the society we have been doing.” But from the tone of his letter, it was quite clear that he was far from taking his social obligations seriously: “We went to Mrs. Depew's reception to meet Mr. and Mrs. Vanderbilt and we went to Mrs. McLean’s dance. Milly danced and I sat in a row of old ladies and talked about the past when we were young and ‘did so enjoy anything of this kind, don’t you know.’ Presently we had supper and I foraged for an elderly dame with an ample waist and an appetite to match. Then I rebelled and went off and sat with Milly.”12

  Phoebe was, at the time, in Paris, where she had relocated during her son’s campaign for the presidency, no doubt to escape the unrelenting attacks on his morality. She would remain there for most of the next two years. Will wrote her a chatty letter in early 1905. He had, he wanted her to know, “had some bone taken out of my nose ... It’s a great nuisance going round with a featherbed up your nose as I have had to do ever since the operation but I guess the wadding will be taken out in a day or two and I hope that then I will be able to breathe some. The operation didn’t hurt any. I was all cocained up ... but the thing has been a nuisance since and I leak like a defective hose.” He was, he continued, glad that Phoebe’s Paris house had a “garage ... I hope to heavens I can come over soon and use it some. I hope you are well again. Please be careful and don’t take risks and overdo. You are not any younger than I am.”13

  In April of 1905, as promised, two large automobiles, with their chauffeurs, arrived to park in Phoebe’s Paris garage. In May, after several false starts, Hearst appeared with Millicent, Baby George, sister-in-law Anita, his mother-in-law, and a full staff of personal secretaries and maids. Phoebe welcomed them with varying degrees of warmth: she was especially pleased to see her grandson, but loath to spend any time at all with “Old Mrs. W.,” as she referred to Millicent’s mother.

  After a brief stay in Paris, Millicent and Will took a side trip to London with Phoebe and then left with the baby for an extended motor tour of Spain. Buried in a cardboard box marked “Ephemera” in the Peck family papers at the Huntington Library is a photograph taken on the Spain trip, which Phoebe must have sent to her friend Janet Peck. The handwritten caption reads, “Millicent took this—Mr H and George in shadow.” Hearst is wearing a light summer suit with a full-brimmed hat. He is standing straight up with a stein or mug in his hand, playing to the camera.14

  The Hearsts did not return to the States until September 1905, at which time they signed a lease on a grand new apartment at the Clarendon on 86th Street and Riverside Drive. Will had decided to give up his four-story Lexington Avenue townhouse; it was no longer large enough for a growing family and for his collections of stained glass, arms and armor, tapestries, sculpture, antique furniture, and decorative art objects, which had been expanding steadily since he had left college.

  Instead of moving northward and resettling in a new and larger townhouse or mansion on Fifth Avenue, he confirmed his self-imposed status as a social outsider by moving across Central Park to the West Side and renting an apartment in the Clarendon, one of the first multifamily dwellings built for permanent residents.15 The Clarendon was attractive because of its location on the Hudson River, with a yacht club nearby, and because of the size of the apartments. “Apartments are arranged two on a floor, consisting of ten to twelve rooms and four bath rooms to each apartment,” the offering advertisements declared. “The servants’ quarters are cut off with a separate entrance from the public hall, thus giving the same privacy one would have in a private house. Separate servants' elevator lands tradesmen, etc. direct to kitchen door.” Hearst rented three floors, at a rent of approximately $24,000 a year, about $450,000 in 1990s currency.16

  Part of the reason he chose to rent an apartment was financial. While Phoebe continued to bankroll Will's political campaigns and, according to his son Bill, Jr., contributed $10,000 a month to cover their living expenses, she was not willing to give him the money he needed to build his own home. As Millicent reminded her mother-in-law, rather bluntly calling attention to their financial plight, they had decided to live in rented quarters “until Will gets enough money to build a house on his lot. I guess we will stay there—in the apartment—for some time.” Their new home, fortunately, wasn't “like an ordinary flat, cut up into little rooms but it has a number of fine big rooms and even the bed rooms are not so very bad. The view is really better than we could hope to get from a private house for we are on the tenth floor facing the river and can look up and down the Hudson for miles. Right in front of us is a little yacht club and there are always a number of pretty yachts anchored about it—and if Will ever gets that money that we refer to we may have a motor boat of our own—at any rate if we have nothing more than we have now, we will be very pleasantly situated and very comfortable in the flat.”17

  Though Charles Francis Murphy, Richard Croker’s successor as head of Tammany Hall, was in speech and appearance more of a diplom
at than his predecessor, he did not take kindly to Hearst’s decision to organize a Municipal Ownership League to do battle with Mayor McClellan. In August of 1905, while Hearst was vacationing in Europe, Boss Murphy announced without fanfare that Charles V. Fornes, president of the board of aldermen, would be the Tammany candidate for Congress from the Eleventh District, in November of 1906. He did not mention that Hearst already held that seat. Although Hearst had no great love of Congress, he was not prepared to surrender his seat without at least a token show of his political strength. As the New York Times reported on August 10, Congressman Hearst had decided to “make a contest for renomination.... As a first step Mr. Hearst has completed arrangements to give every man, woman, and child of the district a free trip to Coney Island, including admission to most of the Luna Park shows.... Thousands of tickets are being distributed through the district by Hearst agents.” The Times was wrong. Hearst had no intention of returning to a do-nothing Congress. He had every intention, however, of wresting political power from Boss Murphy and Tammany in New York.

  On returning from Europe on September 30, 1905, he set to work at once looking for a candidate to run on his Municipal Ownership League ticket against Mayor McClellan in November. His first two choices were Judge Samuel Seabury, the thirty-one-year-old progressive reformer, author of a lengthy booklet on the benefits of public ownership, and an early supporter of the Municipal Ownership League, and Charles Evans Hughes, the attorney who had headed the New York State Assembly’s investigation of the gas trust in 1905. When both declined to run, Hearst, unwilling to let McClellan be reelected without a contest, decided to run for mayor himself. He was taking an enormous gamble. The odds against any third-party candidate defeating a sitting Tammany mayor in a three-party race were extraordinarily long. Moreover, should Hearst lose decisively—as was likely—he would forfeit any chance he might have had of convincing voters and party officials to back him for the presidency in 1908. With the help of battle-hardened veterans of earlier Hearst crusades—Arthur Brisbane, Max Ihmsen, Clarence Shearn, and Jack Follansbee, who returned from Mexico to help out his friend—Hearst nearly accomplished the impossible.