The Chief

by David Nasaw

  As Hearst picked up support on the campaign trail, the attacks upon him intensified. Lincoln Steffens, seldom at a loss for words, confessed in his Autobiography twenty-five years later that he could not “describe the hate of those days for Hearst.”25

  Ten days before the election President Theodore Roosevelt, responding to the request of the English editor John St. Loe Strachey for information about Hearst, sent him a three-and-a-half-page letter, with “Personal & Private” scrawled along the top. Roosevelt wrote:

  It is a little difficult for me to give an exact historic judgment about a man whom I so thoroly dislike and despise as I do Hearst ... Hearst’s private life has been disreputable. His wife was a chorus girl or something like that on the stage, and it is of course neither necessary nor advisable, in my judgment, to make any allusion to any of the reports about either of them before their marriage. It is not the kind of a family which people who believe that sound home relations form the basis of national citizenship would be glad to see in the Executive Mansion in Albany, and still less in the White House ... He preaches the gospel of envy, hatred and unrest. His actions so far go to show that he is entirely willing to sanction any mob violence if he thinks that for the moment votes are to be gained by so doing.... He cares nothing for the nation, nor for any citizen in it ... If the circumstances were ripe in America, which they are not, I should think that Hearst would aspire to play the part of some of the least worthy creatures of the French Revolution.... He is the most potent single influence for evil we have in our life.26

  Roosevelt did his best to broadcast rumors about Hearst’s immorality by forwarding to his Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, “a number of papers which I have received from a California friend, a Democrat ... who believes Hearst to be a corrupt and insincere demagog ... I think you can get some valuable hints from these papers, and I believe your manager should act on them at once and get hold of the men and of the documents mentioned.” The papers were probably the San Francisco weeklies which had attacked Hearst so viciously in 1904.27

  As Election Day approached, rumors of Hearst’s immorality began appearing in opposition newspapers and magazines. The Outlook reminded voters that Hearst had “led a life of looseness and extravagance in San Francisco” and that his manner of life in New York City had been “a matter of concern to those interested in him politically”; the New York Evening Post resorted to classical allusions comparing him to three of history’s greatest charlatans, Paracelsus, Cagliostro, and Alcibiades.28

  While Hearst ignored the attacks, as he had in the past, he worried that his mother would not be able to. “Those articles are outrageous but don’t read them,” he warned her. “Any kind of success arouses envy and hatred. The best punishment is to succeed more. I shall try to do that.... Don’t let us bother about the liars and blackguards. If a dog barked at me in the street, I would be foolish to get down on all fours and bark back.”29

  In late October, Roosevelt, who had done his politicking behind the scenes, agreed to go public. Instead of speaking himself, which would have been quite unseemly for a president, or condemning Hearst in an open letter as his friend Jacob Riis suggested, he dispatched Elihu Root, the current secretary of state and former secretary of war, to New York to speak on his behalf. With less than a week to go before the election, the secretary of state mounted the podium at a Republican rally held in his hometown of Utica, and spoke to the crowd:

  I say to you, with the President’s authority, that he regards Mr. Hearst to be wholly unfit to be Governor, as an insincere, self-seeking demagogue, who is trying to deceive the workingmen of New York by false statements and false promises. I say to you, with the President’s authority, that he considers Mr. Hearst’s election would be an injury and a discredit alike to all honest labor and to honest capital, and a serious injury to the work in which he is engaged of enforcing just and equal laws against corporate wrong-doing.

  And this was just the preamble. As reporters from every paper in the state gathered to hear the speech in person, while editors with advance copies in their possession prepared the text for the next morning’s front pages, Root dropped his bombshell. He announced to the voters of the state that President Roosevelt considered Hearst complicit in the crime of the century, the assassination of President William McKinley:

  In President Roosevelt’s first message to Congress, in speaking of the assassin of McKinley, he spoke of him as inflamed “by the reckless utterances of those who, on the stump and in the public press, appeal to the dark and evil spirits of malice and greed, envy and sullen hatred.”...I say, by the President’s authority, that in penning these words, with the horror of President McKinley’s murder fresh before him, he had Mr. Hearst specifically in mind. And I say, by the President’s authority, that what he thought of Mr. Hearst then he thinks of Mr. Hearst now.30

  While the next morning Hearst’s newspapers bitterly caricatured “Root, the Rat,” every other paper in the state displayed his attack prominently on the front page. Hearst was thrown on the defensive. Instead of continuing his own attacks on the Republicans and the trusts, he had to defend himself against the charge that he was an anarchist assassin. The day after Root’s appearance, Hearst made sixteen separate campaign speeches across the state. There were, unfortunately, only four days remaining before Election Day and that was not enough time to make voters forget Roosevelt’s and Root’s accusations. At the final campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, with Millicent and two-year-old George prominently exhibited in their box seats, Hearst reminded voters that unlike other candidates, he did not need the money the state paid its public officials, but asked only for the opportunity to serve them in Albany. He concluded by thanking them for their friendship and confidence.31

  On November 6, New York’s voters, enjoying perfect weather, went to the polls. Hearst slept late on this Election Day and arrived at the polls a bit after noon. He was not confident of victory, as he had been the year before. Though it quickly became clear that he had been beaten, he refused to concede. On the contrary, the New York Times reported the next morning that Max Ihmsen had telegraphed Hearst’s supporters at eight in the evening to notify them that he had been elected by 50,000 and alert them to guard the upstate ballot boxes carefully. Shortly after midnight, the first edition of the American declared that Hearst had been elected by 20,000 votes. Two hours later, at 2:30 in the morning, Hearst conceded defeat. Charles Evans Hughes had been elected governor by slightly more than 60,000 votes out of a total of almost 1.5 million.

  Hearst left town in a private railway car for St. Louis, en route to Mexico for a vacation with his wife and his son. Physically and emotionally exhausted, he was reported to have gotten into a shouting and shoving match with Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. during a visit to the offices of Pulitzer’s St. Louis newspaper. We don’t know the cause of their dispute, though it may well have had something to do with Hearst’s comment to reporters that he intended to establish a daily newspaper in St. Louis. Later that day, according to a November 17 report in the New York Times, Hearst met up with young Mr. Pulitzer again at the Hotel Jefferson:

  For a moment the two seemed to be conversing in a friendly way ... when suddenly Mr. Hearst seemed to become somewhat excited. His head bobbed up and down emphatically as he spoke to Mr. Pulitzer, and all who were watching were wondering what was going on. Then Mr. Hearst walked away a few feet, took off his overcoat, laid it on the railing, and returned to where Mr. Pulitzer was standing. Mr. Hearst folded his arms and again began speaking to Mr. Pulitzer in emphatic fashion. Suddenly, without either man having raised his voice loud enough to be overheard, Mr. Pulitzer struck at Mr. Hearst two blows, which the latter warded off with his two hands ... As it was, it was a very pretty little bout, and Mr. Hearst certainly showed some knowledge of the manly art of self-defense, for when the boy first struck at him, apparently without warning, he was prepared for him.

  In a calmer moment during his layover in St. Louis, Hearst, questio
ned by reporters about his recent defeat, attributed it to the “treachery of the Democratic organization in the state. McCarren, of Brooklyn [the Democratic boss], and McClellan of New York City knifed me. That’s all there is to it.” He was “not so much interested in politics any more,” he confessed. “‘I’ll have considerable more time now to devote to newspapers,’ he laughingly added.”

  The numbers demonstrated that he had indeed been betrayed by the city’s Democratic leadership, who had not gotten out the vote for him. But it had been his own fault. Though he had accepted the nomination of the Democrats, he had tried throughout the campaign to distance himself from his party and its leaders. This was not a winning strategy. He had already alienated the reformers who had backed his candidacy on the Independence League ticket. When he turned on the Democrats as well, he was left on his own. He had “greatly changed in the last few years,” the former Boss Richard Croker told a New York Times reporter on November 18, ten days after the election. “Now, apparently, he is controlled by the idea that he is greater than the Democratic Party....He is a slave to passion and egotism. His creed is that everybody who is for him is an angel, while everybody who is against him is a demon.”

  Though he had lost another election, he had held on to much of his working-class constituency. “It is perfectly evident that several hundred thousand voters are under the Hearst spell,” the New York Times had editorialized on November 7, the day after the election. “Labor in this election has accepted Mr. Hearst. It has evidently paid little or no attention to what was said against him. It will continue to listen to his appeals.”

  “On the whole,” Current Literature concluded in its review of the 1906 elections, “the majority of the American papers are of the opinion that Mr. Hearst has by no means been ended as a potent political factor.”32

  12. Party Leader

  "I WAS PRETTY MUCH TIRED OUT and discouraged and disgusted with everything,” Hearst wrote his mother in late 1906, “so I left New York and came to Mexico City for a few days.... We are not having a very good time in Mexico.... Every day since our arrival the weather has been cloudy and windy and very disagreeable. Our only consolation is that it is probably worse in the East,—but it surely must be better in California. The baby, or rather the boy for he had got over being a baby, has a little cold and is not well and that adds to our worries.... I could tell you all about the campaign but what is the use. I was beaten, and beaten by alleged democrats. The corporations 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....I am greatly obliged to you for having helped me and regret that I did not win out for the satisfaction of all but I couldn’t do it and I am pretty much worn out in the hard fight I made. I hope to be able to write a more cheerful letter soon when I get over the stings of defeat and get my business back in some sort of shape.”1

  After Mexico, Hearst, Millicent, and young George took the Southern Pacific west to Glendale and then switched to the coastal route north to San Luis Obispo, the station nearest the Hearst property at San Simeon, where they vacationed in the white ranch house with green shutters that George Hearst had built in 1878. Hearst’s mother was still in Paris. “We have just arrived in God Blessed California,” Will wrote her on a postcard. “The light is real sunlight, not artificial light, the heat is real sun heat, not steam heat, the Colorado river is real mud, the Yuma desert is real dirt, and the Indians are mostly real dirt, too....I think California is the best country in the world and always will be no matter who comes into it or what is done to it. Nobody or no thing can shut out the beautiful sun or alter the glorious climate.” The card was signed “Hurrah for dear old California.”2

  From San Simeon, Will and his family traveled north to Phoebe’s Hacienda in Pleasanton, and after spending a few days there took the train back to New York. George was left behind with the servants to await his grandmother’s return. Phoebe, as we shall see, had become an aggressively active grandmother. She had converted the bedroom next to hers at the Hacienda to a child’s room and expected George to spend at least as much time with her in California as he did with his parents in New York.

  From New York, Will wrote his mother a glowing letter about his stay at San Simeon: “I am exceedingly fond of the ranch as you know. We had a glorious time there—a perfectly splendid time.... We camped out and fished and rode horseback. I wish I were there now.... It is awfully hot and disagreeable here in the East. I wish I could spend more time in California. We had such a good time there particularly on the ranch. I am going to save up and build a cabin down there just big enough for you and the baby and me. Then I suppose you will go to Abyssinia and stay a year and a half.”3

  Though he had promised Phoebe that he would not run “for any office in many years,” he refused to give up his crusade against the trusts and the politicians who protected them. Having concluded that the Democratic party was beyond redemption, he had made up his mind that it had to be destroyed. His vehicle would be the Independence League, which he planned to transform into a national political party. There were already active Independence Leagues funded and organized by Hearst in New York, Massachusetts, California, and Illinois, the states where he published newspapers. Max Ihmsen was directed to set up more Leagues in more states, pointing toward a national campaign in 1908.4

  Hearst’s notion that his Independence League might in a very short time grow to rival or displace one of the major parties was not implausible. The Republican party had, only fifty years before, emerged from minor-party status to elect a president. Nationally, the Populists had polled over a million votes in 1892 and, with Bryan as the candidate in 1896, effectively taken over the Democratic party; the Socialists had meanwhile increased their vote for Eugene Debs from 80,000 in 1900 to 402,000 in 1904. There were, of course, problems inherent in building a political party so closely associated with—and controlled by—one man. As Samuel Seabury noted in his diary, Hearst was so obsessed with the corrupting influence of money on party politics that he had convinced himself that the only way to protect the purity of his party was to keep it firmly “in his control or in the control of his friends.” While Seabury sympathized with Hearst’s fears, he recognized that as long as the Independence League remained Hearst’s fiefdom, it would never attract the reformers who were its natural constituency: “If the organization is autocratic many good men, in sympathy with its aims, will have nothing to do with it.”5

  Because there were no major offices at stake in New York in 1907, Hearst chose the most important of the minor ones, sheriff of New York County, and nominated Max Ihmsen, who was his chief political operative, to run against the Democratic nominee, the saloon keeper and Tammany chieftain Big Tom Foley. As had become his usual autumnal routine, Hearst spent the first three weeks of October motoring across Manhattan, Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn to assail Tammany in four and five speeches a day. The transcripts of every speech appeared, verbatim, in his newspapers the next day, alongside cartoons of thuggish-looking political bosses doing business with equally thuggish-looking businessmen and exposés about Tammany corruption, centered on “Nigger Mike,” Tom Foley’s chief of staff, who, the Hearst papers claimed, was a fugitive from justice, having fled a warrant for arrest as a “repeater.”

  In mid-October, news of the campaign was bumped from the front pages by the “panic of 1907.” Cash and credit were already in short supply after a stock market plunge in August, when the attempt of two speculators to corner the stock of a copper company with the help of a major New York trust company resulted in a run on the New York banks. While J. Pierpont Morgan worked on a rescue plan in the library of his New York townhouse, Hearst, with outstanding debts and mortgages all across the country, retreated to the Clarendon to await the outcome. To help the nation—and himself—and stop the run on the banks, he published a signed front-page appeal for calm, urging his readers not to join the line
s “of the panic-stricken” and withdraw their money. “There has been a campaign on and a panic and Will has been in both,” Millicent wrote Phoebe on October 29. “One night Will was trying to learn his speech in time to go to six meetings while Jerome [the New York district attorney] was trying to arrest him for criminal libel and Edward Clark was explaining how everything was going to pieces in Wall Street and we would all be broke in the morning. Will went out without his dinner and wouldn’t eat anything when he came back and I thought that was too much and made him stop speaking for a few days. Edward has been up to the house every day for the past week. Will thinks the situation has cleared somewhat but he never leaves the telephone until after banking hours. The course of the paper has made many friends among business people and Edward says that the day Will printed his signed statement he was the most popular man on Wall Street.”6

  By early November, the immediate crisis having been resolved, Hearst returned to the campaign trail. While he continued to attract huge and enthusiastic crowds everywhere he went, they had come to see him, not to commit themselves to voting for his surrogate, Max Ihmsen, who, with no experience and no following, didn’t stand a chance against Tom Foley. Hearst didn’t even bother to vote on Election Day, disappointing the photographers and reporters who had gathered to meet him at his polling place. Ihmsen and every other candidate who ran on Hearst’s Independence League line were soundly defeated. His only victory was in Massachusetts where the Independence League candidate for district attorney in Suffolk County won his race.7