by David Nasaw
If the New York City mayoralty was not on the path to the presidency, the governorship was. There was no doubt in Hearst’s mind that should he win the Democratic nomination, he could easily defeat anyone the Republicans put forward. But how was he going to get the nomination of the party he had just run against? How was the people's candidate going to become the party’s candidate? There was a simple solution. Hearst would use his 200,000 votes to blackmail the Democrats into nominating him. If they did not, he would run on a third-party line and siphon off enough Democratic votes to guarantee a Republican victory.
Hearst spent the winter and spring of 1906 more frantically active than ever: overseeing his expanding newspaper and magazine empire, meeting with the labor leaders in Los Angeles who had been instrumental in convincing him to start up the Examiner in 1903, traveling to Chihuahua, Mexico, to inspect his ranchlands, commuting to Washington to serve out the final session of his second and last term, taking the train to Albany to lobby for new municipal ownership bills.2
“For the last two months we have been living on the trains,” Millicent wrote Phoebe in March, “going from Washington to New York and from New York to Boston and back again. I wish we could settle down somewhere for a few days and just keep still, but I do not see any signs of it and I suppose we will rush around on the trains until it is time to rush over on the steamer and then rush around in an automobile until we come home again.”3
Though Millicent couldn’t have known it at the time, her life was going to become even more hectic in the coming months. On April 18, 1906, Hearst, as usual sleeping late into the morning, was awakened by a call from the American informing him that the wire had just flashed a story about a San Francisco earthquake. Hearst warned the editor not to “overplay it.... They have earthquakes often in California.” Then he went back to bed.4
The earthquake was only the beginning of the disaster for San Francisco. It was followed by a series of uncontrollable fires which destroyed nearly two-thirds of the city, including the Hearst building which housed the San Francisco Examiner. Hearst relocated the Examiner across the Bay in the Oakland Tribune building and telegraphed William Howard Taft—who as secretary of war was in charge of the disaster area—to ask permission to clear away the rubble so that he could begin at once to construct a new Examiner building.5
Edward Clark was dispatched to San Francisco as his plenipotentiary, while Hearst concentrated his attention on Congress and introduced joint resolutions providing “relief for earthquake and fire sufferers” and funds to “replace public buildings destroyed” by earthquake and fire. He raised additional money in New York for disaster relief by sponsoring benefits at the Casino, the Hippodrome, and the Academy of Music.6
While others, including his mother, grieved over their losses, Hearst, the eternal optimist, saw in the disaster the perfect opportunity to replace the destroyed eight-story Examiner building with a new one twelve stories high “with a six-story tower on top of it.” Edward Clark, Phoebe’s adviser, warned her by letter against giving Will the funds he requested for what was a rather extravagant building project. Constructing a new office building might be “beneficial to the paper, but from an investment standpoint it would certainly not be to your advantage.” In a second handwritten letter marked “Confidential. Please destroy immediately,” Clark explained further why he opposed lending Will any more money: “Mr. H ... is in danger. He owes nearly $2,000,000, none of it pressing at this time but from $100,000 to $250,000 may have to be paid before long. Next year he has notes aggregating $750,000.... He is an able newspaper man but does not look ahead in financial matters. I will write you more fully as soon as I can from S.F. and if any thing urgent will cable.”7
In May, Will traveled with Millicent and their son, George, to survey the earthquake and fire damage. “We are going to the hacienda and will spend summer trying to straighten things out in San Francisco,” he telegrammed his mother in Europe. “It is a bad situation.... Why don’t you come home and spend the summer with baby and us? He is fine big boy and very interesting. You would have lots of fun. Can’t you come?”8
Though she was devoted to her grandson, Phoebe did not visit with him—or with his father and mother—that summer. She had no desire to be drawn into a debate with her son on the advisability of spending millions to erect a new Examiner office building. When, in June, she was called back from Paris to meet with Edward Clark on urgent business matters, probably having to do with losses suffered during the quake, she stayed only a week before returning to Europe. “Please don’t write home that I am going to New York for I do not think it best for me to go to California,” she wrote Mrs. Peck. “If Wm and my friends knew that I was going to NY they might find fault if I failed to go west. So it is best not to speak of it.”9
All summer long, W. R. and Millicent wrote Phoebe in Paris. Their letters were invariably upbeat, designed in part to reassure her that it was safe to invest in San Francisco real estate. “Everybody is confident that a bigger and better city will rise from the ashes of the old one,” Milly wrote on July 30, 1906. “Will thinks the fire will really be a benefit to San Francisco as most of the buildings destroyed were out of date rattletraps and the insurance money will allow modern buildings to be put up in their places. Then the expenditures of two or three hundred million dollars in San Francisco within the next few years will make the city a boom town ... Will says we can all be cheerful about the future of San Francisco but the present is a little bit gloomy.”10
In the end, Phoebe found it impossible to deny her son—and her hometown—a new office building. Work was begun almost immediately to clear away the rubble and erect a new twelve-story building at Third Street and Market, where the old one had once stood.
In late summer, the Hearsts returned to New York City. They had “had such a lovely trip out West,” Millicent wrote Phoebe, forgetting for the moment that an earthquake had devastated the region, “but as soon as we get back we are in all kinds of trouble again—politics and lawsuits and business troubles and everything that is disagreeable and annoying.”11
To his wife’s dismay, Hearst returned to the campaign trail in September—for the third time in three years. He was running for governor as the candidate of the Independence League, the successor to his Municipal Ownership League. In mid-September, the state Democratic party, recognizing that it could not elect a governor with Hearst running on a third-party line and drawing off a substantial portion of the downstate vote, gave him its gubernatorial nomination. In a ruthless display of ambition and opportunism, Hearst accepted the Democratic nomination and turned his back on his Independence League.
Hearst’s candidacy quickly became the political story of 1906. The nation's number one radical had come in out of the cold and was now the nominee of a major political party for an office that was one step away from the White House. Magazines across the country rushed into print with stories on the “Hearst phenomenon,” the “Hearst movement,” the “Hearst problem,” the “Hearst myth,” the “Hearst record,” and the “Satanic Majesty of Hearst.” “All over the country all sorts and conditions of men are asking ‘What about Hearst?’ And nobody seems to know,” Lincoln Steffens wrote in American Magazine. “We approach, in more senses than one, a national question when we ask who, what, where is the reality behind the mystery of William Randolph Hearst, the unknown?”12
Steffens began his article by refuting the most prominent Hearst myths. The publisher did his own writing, ran his own empire, was nobody’s puppet, and was in “deadly earnest” about his political crusade. His goal, simply stated, was to “restore democracy in the United States.” There was, Hearst explained to Steffens in an interview conducted during a long train ride from Chicago to New York, nothing terribly “radical” about his politics.
If Hearst wasn’t a radical and didn’t believe in socialism, as he assured Steffens he didn’t, then why, Steffens asked in his article, was he so feared by the “plutocrats.” The answer was ob
vious: if Hearst did “literally the things he says he will do, it means that this child of the privileged class will really try to abolish privilege in the United States!”
The more difficult question was why he was so feared and distrusted by reformers who agreed with him about the need to curb the power of the trusts. They feared him, Steffens argued, because while he spoke about restoring democracy, he wasn’t really a democrat. Dedicated to securing power to do as he thought best and subordinating every means to that end, Hearst personified “the old spirit” that the reformers were trying to change. He listened to no one, trusted no one:
W. R. Hearst is as hard to see and as inexpressive as E. H. Harriman [the railroad magnate] and Thomas F. Ryan [the streetcar king], who, like him, are mysteries. Hearst’s self-reliance is theirs and their methods are his. He uses force as they do, and the same force, money ... as a substitute for persuasion, charm, humor, pleadings.... He does not work with; he does not support ... the other leaders of reform. He does not know who they are. Mr. Hearst is not a part of the general reform movement; he simply has a movement of his own. This isn’t democratic, that is plutocratic; autocratic. Mr. Hearst is a boss.13
Appearing simultaneously with the Steffens profile was one by James Creelman, Hearst’s past and future employee, who painted a very different portrait of the publisher and politician. Where Steffens found Hearst cold, humorless, and friendless, Creelman reported that he was, on the contrary, “the most placid of humans and finds plenty of time for play. It is hard to believe that this smooth-faced, soft-spoken and tranquil young man of forty-three years who idles in the restaurants, lolls amiably in automobiles, and generally studies the American people from the standpoint of the vaudeville theater, is the master-mind of a movement that keeps a large part of the nation in an uproar.”14
Both Steffens and Creelman had written accurately about the man they had interviewed for their articles. Deliberately attempting to counter the image of the rich playboy, Hearst had, on entering electoral politics in 1902, cultivated the new dour persona which he displayed to Steffens. Creelman, who had worked with Hearst, traveled to Cuba with him, and visited him at home, knew a very different man.
Upton Sinclair, who also wrote about Hearst at this time, did so without the benefit—or distraction—of a personal interview and without attempting to understand his character or motivations. “There is no man in our public life today who interests me so much as William Randolph Hearst,” Sinclair declared in The Industrial Republic, his book-length argument for socialism. “I have been watching him for ten years, during the last half-dozen of them weighing and testing him as the man of the coming hour....He stands the best chance of being the candidate of the Democratic party in 1912; and ... the man who secures that nomination will, if he does his work (and for him to fail to do it is almost inconceivable) write his name in our history beside the names of Washington and Lincoln.” Just as Abraham Lincoln had in 1860 delivered the nation from “chattel slavery,” so, Sinclair declared, would Hearst rescue it from “wage slavery” in 1912.15
Sinclair was not alone in believing that Hearst would one day soon become president. If elected governor in 1906—and this was a distinct possibility—he would be set on the path to the presidency traveled by Grover Cleveland, the last Democratic president, and the current incumbent, Theodore Roosevelt, both of whom had been governors of New York.
“Hearst’s nomination,” Roosevelt wrote his friend and confidant Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts on October 1, “is a very very bad thing.... I cannot blind myself to his extraordinary popularity among the ‘have-nots.’” The danger to the party—and the republic—of a Hearst victory in the gubernatorial contest was so serious that Roosevelt intervened in state politics to make sure that the Republican nomination went to Charles Evans Hughes, the one Republican with antiboss, antitrust credentials as noteworthy as Hearst’s.16
Even with Hughes as the Republican nominee, Roosevelt feared that Hearst might be too strong to defeat. “Hearst’s nomination drives all decent-thinking men to our side,” he confided to Cabot Lodge in late September, “but he has an enormous popularity among ignorant and unthinking people and will reap the reward of the sinister preaching of unrest which he and his agents have had so large a share in conducting.”17
“The labor men are very ugly and no one can tell how far such discontent will spread,” he continued in another letter the following week. “I am horrified at the information I receive on every hand as to Hearst’s strength on the East Side among laborers and even among farmers. It is a very serious proposition.... There has been during the last six or eight years a great growth of socialistic and radical spirit among the workingmen.”18
“We must win by a savage and aggressive fight against Hearstism and an exposure of its hypocrisy, its insincerity, its corruption, its demagogy, and in general its utter worthlessness and wickedness,” he warned Congressman James Sherman, chairman of the Republican Congressional Committee. “Hearst’s nomination is of such sinister significance as to dwarf everything else,” he added that same day in a letter to Charles Sprague Smith, the reformer president of New York’s People’s Institute.19
From his citadel in the White House, Roosevelt obsessively plotted out every step in the Hughes campaign. He urged Hughes to pay more attention to “the great Catholic population of the State.” He suggested that “at least one Catholic [be placed] on our judiciary ticket” and that Attorney General Mayer and Jacob Schiff be asked to campaign among Jewish voters. To attract more Jewish voters to the Republican party, he offered to nominate the first Jewish cabinet member, Oscar Straus, a Democrat, if Straus agreed to support Hughes against Hearst. Straus accepted Roosevelt’s offer.20
While Roosevelt in Washington was secretly devising strategies to defeat him, Hearst was crisscrossing the state by private railroad car and automobile with his wife and child. He gave so many speeches—in a premicrophone era—that he developed recurrent sore throats and periodically lost his voice entirely. On October 17, he woke up in Oswego County on the shore of Lake Ontario, then “swept in a northeasterly curve ... through four rock-ribbed Republican counties.” In Watertown, he spoke from the platform of his private railway car, before being chauffeured into town to speak in a rented hall, a theater, and an opera house.21
Though now in his early forties, Hearst retained a surprisingly youthful face and figure. He was clean-shaven with a broad, plain, but not unhandsome face, his brown hair cut short and parted in the center. While he often smiled in public and was unfailingly polite, his campaign photos show a stern figure, dressed immaculately in a dark suit, the image softened only by the cherubic, smiling two-year-old George Hearst posed beside him. The rumors of unbridled sexual appetites, of tyranny and rapaciousness did not mesh with the image of this gentle giant, with a voice pitched so high it sounded almost girlish. He was not oily, whiskered, or red-faced like the stereotypical political boss; nor was he a grossly overfed society degenerate like the recently disgraced and murdered Stanford White or scabrously thin like the robber baron John D. Rockefeller.
While he toured the state like an old-fashioned “pol,” Hearst was putting together a campaign that was as up-to-date as the motorcars he drove to his speaking appearances. In early October, the New York Times reported that the Hearst campaign would be addressing the state’s voters with talking machine records and moving pictures:
Mr. Hearst, accompanied by one of his campaign managers, went to a talking machine place in Broadway. He spent upward of an hour there closeted with a machine and a mechanician who changed the cylinders as the flood of Mr. Hearst’s oratory required.... As Mr. Hearst talked at the graphophone against the trusts and other things a moving picture man caught Mr. Hearst’s gestures. Within a very few days moving picture outfits by the dozen, together with talking machines and the cylinders containing Mr. Hearst’s speeches will be sent up State in charge of reliable agents, who will visit all the out-of-the-way places, where a real ca
mpaign speech is rarely heard ... and where the farming population ... will gladly drive many miles to listen to a talking machine and see a moving picture show. Mr. Hearst’s moving picture and talking machine shows will be free.
The use of talking pictures in a political campaign in 1906—twenty-one years before Al Jolson sang in The Jazz Singer —was revolutionary in itself. What made it even more remarkable—and effective—was the way the Hearst team coordinated the new communications technologies with the old ones. To get potential voters to see his moving pictures, Hearst advertised them in his new illustrated weekly newspaper, Farm and Home.22
There was no way to avoid the Hearst message. The morning American and the Evening Journal circulated throughout the state, as did Cosmopolitan; Farm and Home was given out free at state and county fairs in rural areas; the German-language Morgen Journal and the Yiddish-language Jewish American (which Hearst began publishing in mid-October and closed down after the election) reached thousands more voters in New York City. For those beyond the reach of his print media, there were the talking pictures, slide shows, and graphophone “canned” speeches, accompanied by free vaudeville.23
Hearst was spreading his message—that he was the only true “Democrat,” that his Republican opponents were beholden to the trusts—and the voters were listening. A reporter from the Outlook, a conservative journal of opinion that opposed his candidacy, reported on the coalition of misfits, including many former Republicans, that Hearst was assembling. The converts included men from every social station: “the man who is embittered by class feeling and wants vengeance; the man suddenly roused against the unjust power of certain corporation managers, and about ready to accept any candidate who is vociferous in promising remedies; the unobtrusive socialistic workingman; the natural bigot who has fallen under the spell of Hearst; and the rather shiftless, thoughtless loafer who follows the herd to which he belongs.”24