The Chief

by David Nasaw

  In October 1917, in the midst of the mayoral campaign, Merton Lewis, the Republican attorney general of New York, leaked information to the New York Tribune that Hearst was under investigation for his ties with Bolo Pacha, a Frenchman who was being tried in Paris as a German spy. Pacha, who had been in New York the year before, ostensibly as the representative of a French newspaper, had given a dinner for Hearst at Sherry’s and Hearst had reciprocated by giving him a farewell party at the Clarendon. While French and American officials had sufficient evidence to indicate that Pacha was a spy, they had nothing to link him to Hearst. Hearst denied Lewis’s charges and threatened him with a slander suit. Lewis refrained from leaking any more information to the press, but opened a new investigation and detailed a special deputy, who happened to be a convicted felon, to interview employees and residents of the Clarendon where Hearst was alleged to have met with German spies and agents.11

  Intelligence-gathering agencies on two continents were now sharing information in an attempt to uncover evidence against Hearst. The French provided testimony from their interrogation of Bolo Pacha; Naval Intelligence contributed the complete text of all dispatches wired between Nauheim, Germany, and Sayville, New York; the attorney general’s office in Albany offered reports from the field agents and volunteers who had interviewed Hearst’s Riverside Drive neighbors, chauffeurs, doormen, and elevator boys; the Military Intelligence Division and the Bureau of Investigation in Washington added gossip and hearsay picked up by agents and volunteers across the country.12

  Even with unlimited resources at their disposal and the absolute certainty that Hearst was guilty of something, the investigators after more than a year of searching were unable to uncover any proof of treason or disloyalty. The closest they came was a working hypothesis that Hearst had accepted German money because he was in financial difficulties. According to General Churchill, who was the Military Intelligence Division’s liaison with A. Bruce Bielaski, chief of the Bureau of Investigation, Hearst was having trouble paying for newsprint and his mother was threatening to withdraw support. This much was probably true, but had been for decades. It did not constitute a motive for treason.13

  The cumulative effect of these investigations on Hearst’s editors and writers was devastating, as they too were placed under suspicion of disloyalty and treason. “One of the gravest allegations lodged against me,” recalled Moses Koenigsberg, who ran Hearst’s feature service, “was ‘the maintenance of secret relations with W. R. Hearst.’...Despite its absurdity, the complaint nettled me. It was at the height of a country-wide series of attacks on Hearst. Denounced by countless enemies in print and speech as pro-German, he was burned in effigy in several cities. Copies of his newspapers were gathered at public places in different states from time to time and piled on bonfires.” When Koenigsberg reported to Hearst that he was being investigated by the ultrapatriotic American Protective League, Hearst only laughed. “‘What is the matter?’ he asked banteringly. ‘Can’t you stand an investigation?’ Then, with a mischievous smile, he added, ‘I just love to be investigated.’” That, Koenigsberg continued, “was a boast without reservation. No man had a keener sense of publicity values than Hearst. He approved the judgement of the theatrical ham who rated ‘a bad notice better than no notice.’ But unlike the actor, he could and did turn adverse mention to immediate account. He welcomed attack. It was a pretext for the expression of his greatest talent. No publicist of his generation surpassed him in polemic writing.”14

  While Hearst laughed off the attacks or responded with his own, the charges of disloyalty were having an effect on his business. In January of 1918, he warned Joseph A. Moore, the head of his magazine division, that because his newspapers were losing money, the magazines had to take up the slack: “Mrs. Hearst and I will have to get a good deal of our personal income out of the magazines ... Mr. Moore, we must make money out of these magazines. I am not conducting them merely for an artistic success. I do not think anything is successful that does not pay and pay well.” In a telegram sent the next day, he provided Moore with specifics: “I want to get $10,000 a month [a little more than $100,000 in today’s currency]—$5,000 for Mrs. Hearst and $5,000 for myself—out of the magazines in the way of regular salary. We work hard enough, I think, to get this, and I want it paid regularly. You must consider this in your budget.”15

  As had become their custom, Hearst and Millicent spent their winter vacation at The Breakers in Palm Beach. Not coincidentally, Marion and her mother were also vacationing in Palm Beach that winter, as the New York American reported on February 28, 1918, in an item headlined, “All Palm Beach at Feet of Lovely Marion Davies.” Hearst had grown too fond of Marion—and perhaps too jealous as well—to let her out of his sight for any length of time, even during his vacation with his wife. For at least the third time in his life, he had fallen in love with the wrong woman. Twenty years earlier, he had dated another Broadway chorus girl half his age; twenty years before that he had “kept” a Cambridge waitress as his mistress. But instead of treating these women—and now Marion—as disposable playmates, he had fallen in love with them.

  In early May, Hearst and Millicent left New York City again for a brief vacation at the spa in Mt. Clemens, Michigan, that they had been visiting regularly since the summer of 1904. Even in Michigan, on vacation with his wife, W. R. felt compelled to stay in touch with Marion, if only by letter and telegram. In one telegram from Mt. Clemens he wrote, referring to himself in the third person,

  Billy says he is not chasing petticoats and doesn’t like them. He says the reason he doesn’t like them is because the dearest and sweetest thing that he knows in all the world doesn’t wear them. Billy says his idea of perfect attire is a sort of filmy combination of pink silk and lace and that he would follow that inspiration forever as the fanatic Moslems followed the trousers of Mahomet. Billy sounds kind of mushy and not wholly moral to me but the poor fellow is madly in love and is not altogether responsible.16

  Hearst returned from Michigan to oversee the publicity campaign for Marion’s new picture, Cecilia of the Pink Roses. The film was produced by the Marion Davies Film Company, though it had been paid for by Hearst. According to a June 12, 1918, article in the New York Sun, the film was so promising that Lewis J. Selznick had not only agreed to distribute it under his Select Picture Corporation, but had paid a premium for the right to do so. Moving Picture World reported in its June 15, 1918, issue that Selznick had agreed to release five more Marion Davies films after Cecilia. Selznick was not banking on Davies’ star quality alone. He—and the rest of the industry—knew that Hearst intended to back her films with every resource he owned. As Colonel Mann’s Town Topics reported on June 3, well before the film opened, the city was already

  plastered with lilies and other flamboyant advertising material of Marion Davies, who has been making movie appearances here recently. This advertising, which must have cost a fortune, is reported to have been done by William Randolph Hearst, who is deeply interested in the movie business and believes that in Miss Davies he has another Pickford. Last winter, the Hearsts entertained the Davies girl at Palm Beach, together with the Dolly Sisters, and no one will be more disappointed than the newspaper magnate at the failure of his new star to impress the critics and enthuse the audiences.17

  Colonel Mann was incorrect—but devilishly so—in claiming that the Hearsts, plural, had entertained Marion at Palm Beach. To guarantee that no such items would appear in future, Hearst instructed Joseph Moore to begin advertising in Town Topics, in effect paying Colonel Mann not to write about him and Marion.18

  In the spring of 1918, as American soldiers engaged the enemy on the battlefields of France, the Chief acceeded to the mounting assaults on his loyalty by discontinuing publication of his German-language newspaper. The Deutsches Journal, formerly the Morgen Journal, had in November of 1917 added New Yorker to its title, reduced the Deutsches to unreadably small letters, and adopted the tag line, “An American Paper printed in Ge
rman on behalf of American Unity and Universal Democracy.” Unfortunately, in the increasingly hostile atmosphere of 1918, not even these concessions were sufficient to remove distrust. On April 21, 1918, the New Yorker Deutsches Journal announced in English that it was suspending publication in a “supreme sacrifice in behalf of AMERICAN UNITY.”19

  The following month, Congress passed a sedition act, imposing harsh penalties on anyone using “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the flag, the army, conscription, or the government. The Chief’s response was to write and sign a lengthy editorial detailing every patriotic action his papers had taken since the war began.20

  It was already too late. The new legislation emboldened his enemies to attempt to destroy him one more time. The attack was led by the New York Tribune, the staunchly Republican newspaper that had been on the opposite side of Hearst on every issue. With information leaked from the state attorney general’s office and the encouragement of officials in Washington, the Tribune on successive Sundays from April through June of 1918 published a scathing six-part attack on Hearst’s loyalty that was, in effect, a brief for prosecuting him under the new legislation.21

  Widely circulated in pamphlet form under the title, “Coiled in the Flag—Hears-s-s-s-t,” the Tribune series argued on the basis of war coverage and editorials in the New York American and Deutsches Journal that Hearst was a German sympathizer and traitor to his country. Each of the six articles was preceded by a boxed scorecard:

  Since the United States entered the war the Hearst papers have printed:

  74 —attacks on our allies

  17 —instances of defense or praise of Germany

  63 —pieces of antiwar propaganda

  1 —deletion of a Presidential proclamation

  Total 155

  —or an average of nearly three a week, while America has been engaged in the life and death struggle with civilization’s enemy.22

  Adopting the practice Hearst himself excelled at, the Tribune followed its exposés with news items describing their effect. On July 1, it ran a story about a patriotic anti-Hearst rally in Methodist churches in Chatham, New York. There were stories on July 2 about the anti-Hearst button that had been designed by an army lieutenant and was in demand “in many states.” That same day the Tribune reported that the boycott of Hearst papers had spread to Great Barrington, Massachusetts; Port Jervis, New York; and Rutherford, New Jersey, which had proudly refused “to Be Prussianized By the Hearst Trust.” On July 17, the Tribune's front-page headline read, “Charge Hearst Employee Sold Secrets of U.S.” On July 22, the paper reported that a “dead Prussian soldier at Hill 304, Verdun,” had been found with a copy of a German newspaper with extracts from a Hearst editorial. On July 31, it was reported, again on the front page, that Deputy Attorney General Becker had released a letter from the hanged German spy Bolo Pacha which “Named Hearst as ‘My Friend.'”23

  That same month, July 1918, the state Democratic party of New York convened in Saratoga to choose candidates for state office. All year long, there had been rumors that Hearst, building on support in the Irish, German, and Russian-Jewish communities, was going to run for office again. Judge Samuel Seabury, once Hearst's principal ally, was so outraged by the possibility that he asked for the floor to introduce a special resolution:

  Resolved, that this conference of Democrats ... as an earnest of their loyalty, repudiate every truckler with our country's enemies who strives or has striven to extenuate or excuse such crimes against humanity as the rape of Belgium, the sinking of the Lusitania and the German policy of assassination by submarines; who seeks or has sought to sow dissension among our allies, or who now seeks to capitalize by election to public office, the latent treason whose total annihilation is the most pressing need of the hour.

  The resolution named no names, but Seabury acknowledged to reporters that “I meant Hearst when I proposed the resolution.” It passed by a large margin, ending all discussion of a Hearst nomination. Al Smith was nominated for governor and, with Hearst's endorsement, was elected in November.24

  In the fall of 1918, Garet Garrett, an assistant editor at the Tribune, prepared a brief charging Hearst with treason under the Espionage Act of 1917 and traveled to Washington, D.C., to outline his case to Attorney General Thomas Gregory. In October, a federal grand jury sitting in New York City interviewed Garrett and subpoenaed a copy of his brief. While Garrett insisted that he had “evidence tending to show treasonable activities” on Hearst’s part, he was unable to produce any. The case against Hearst was dropped. Still the suspicions lingered.25

  Through it all, Hearst did very little to defend himself. Convinced that he had been correct in opposing American entry into the war and thereafter to urge a negotiated peace, he was not about to surrender his right to speak his mind to his readers. When, in November of 1918, after more than four years of war, an armistice was signed, Hearst alone greeted the moment not with congratulations for the nation’s leaders or a prayer of thanksgiving for its soldiers, but with another angry warning: “Since the entrance of America into the war I have unquestionably acquiesced in the wisdom of the decision of our Government to make war on the side of the Allies.” Peace now having been “finally declared, I resume my rights to opinion ... subservient only to the interests of my own people and my own country.”26

  He was more convinced than ever—and made his opinions known to his readers—that the leaders of the European nations and President Wilson had been criminally insane in their refusal to heed his warnings. Millions had been killed, nations destroyed, Bolshevism unleashed, the cause of Western civilization set back, the Japanese emboldened, and to what end? The only victor, he argued, was the British Empire, which had emerged intact because the American government had protected and preserved it.

  The Treaty of Versailles, with its League of Nations covenant, was, for Hearst, the final confirmation of the war’s futility. The leaders of the allied nations, including President Wilson, Hearst informed his readers in a signed front-page editorial on January 26, 1920, had “preached to their peoples that the war was a crusade for democracy, for liberty, for the self-determination of nations and the independence of peoples; that it was a crusade against imperialism and militarism.” But once their dynastic war was won, they devised “a treaty and a covenant of nations which repudiated every pledge they had made and violated every preachment they had uttered.”27

  The conferees in Paris had allowed Japan to retain the Shantung peninsula in China, which it had occupied since driving the Germans out in 1914. In so doing, they had rewarded Japanese militarism and invited a second generation of wars in Europe. Even more stupidly, they had rearranged the map of Europe, dividing up the Austro-Hungarian Empire and ceding German land to Poland and Czechoslovakia: “To revert to small states in Europe is distinctly a step backward....It means not more liberty, but less individual freedom, less tolerance, less progress, more jealousy, more conflict, more acts of oppression like these massacres of the Jews.” The May 1919 pogroms in Poland were, for Hearst, only the first “instance” of what he regarded as the “evil results of dividing Eastern Europe into a number of inconsiderable, irresponsible, states whose main idea of liberty is license to commit excesses.”28

  If Wilson had merely participated in writing a flawed peace treaty, Hearst felt, that would have been bad enough. But he committed an even more serious error in attaching the League of Nations covenant to the treaty. Article X of the League covenant provided for collective force to be used against any nation that violated the sovereignty of another. In practical terms this meant that the United States, in joining the League, was offering its services as global policeman to protect the territorial status quo in Europe. Should Europe once again be drawn into suicidal civil war, the United States would be bound to send troops to rescue it. As Hearst wrote to Harry Haye Tammen, the co-publisher of the Denver Post, “I do not consider it a league to keep us out of war but a league to get us into war. A man doe
s not keep himself free from the small pox by going to bed with four other people who have it; and we cannot keep free from war by tying ourselves up with nations like England, France, Italy and Japan, which have the war disease in its worst form.”29

  Instead of wasting the nation’s time, energy, and dollars by tying its future to that of Europe, Hearst, with Western senators like Hiram Johnson of California, urged Wilson to pay more attention to Asia, where the Japanese had accumulated new power, resources, and territory:

  The great problem before the white races is not whether boundaries of white nations in Europe shall run this way or that way, but whether Japan shall absorb and organize Asia for the conquest of the World ... Who shall say that the stupidities and jealousies of the white peoples, which have reached an unbelievable degree of madness and blindness, shall not some day create a situation which will arouse the yellow races to succeed?...The Japanese situation is a genuine danger, more immediately to America, but ultimately to the whole white world. Upon us will fall the first burden of the battle for the white man’s civilization.30