by David Nasaw
“The battle against the League of Nations” was, Cora Older declared in her 1936 authorized biography, “the most important of [Hearst’s] many campaigns during his life as a journalist.” “Other editors might have carried on my other campaigns,” Hearst told Older, “but there was no one else with so many newspapers actively interested in defeating the League of Nations ... If it had not been for my papers, this country might, through the League of Nations, have become involved in war.”
When, in November of 1919, the treaty was defeated in the Senate, the Hearst papers responded with an editorial headlined “Thanks Be to God, This Nation Has Indeed Had a New Birth of Freedom.”31
Peace had returned to Europe, but the charges against Hearst were too numerous, too widely publicized, and too often circulated by high government officials to be quickly forgotten. In December of 1918 a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on “foreign propaganda, espionage, and intrigue in the United States during the World War.” The result was another round of front-page headlines tying Hearst to German spies. While the hearings were in session, Mayor John Hylan of New York, with characteristic fealty, publicly invited Hearst to serve on a committee of citizens to welcome the returning veterans to American shores. The public response was overwhelmingly negative. Beginning in December and continuing through March of 1919 when the ships landed, the non-Hearst New York papers ran daily stories condemning Hylan and Hearst. The mayor tried to control the damage by enlarging the size of the welcoming committee to 5,000 members, but he refused to publicly disinvite Hearst.
Opposition newspapers tracked the protest against Hearst from New York City to South Dakota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania where state legislators had forwarded resolutions to Congress demanding that the disembarkation point for the troops be shifted away from New York Harbor so that Hearst would not be present to greet the returning troops. In Washington, the Military Intelligence Division monitored the threatening letters sent to Mayor Hylan, including one from a Private Robert W. Owens who suggested that in the interest of Hearst’s personal safety the mayor “take particular pains to see that Hearst is not on the reviewing stand when Battery B 341 Field Artillery passes by. We have been over here in the land of hell, hate, and Hun and are in no mood to deal softly with such a slimy Hun sympathizer as Wilhelm Hearst.”32
The Chief went on the offensive, charging that his enemies were part of the “large Tory element in this country, which seems to think now as it thought in the days of the Revolutionary War—that the only way to be pro-American is to be pro-English.” Specifically named among those enemies were Rockefeller, Morgan, and Du Pont. To show his patriotism and court veteran support—and because he believed it was the right thing to do—Hearst wrote signed editorials demanding that all soldiers be demobilized immediately with a six-month bonus.33
When the Mauretania arrived in New York Harbor with the first contingent of returning veterans, Hearst was there to greet it. As Nat Ferber, at the time a city reporter for the Hearst papers, described the scene, Hearst, who “might have faced the meeting with trepidation, was jubilant. Placing one arm about Gene Fowler, a fellow reporter, and the other around me, he skipped with us, schoolboy fashion, down the deck, the earflaps of his ‘Sherlock Holmes’ cap flapping in the wind.”34
On March 26, 1919, the first major contingent of veterans, the soldiers of the 27th Division, paraded up Fifth Avenue, greeted by crowds so large that the police lost control and several spectators were injured. On the reviewing stand at 82nd Street and Fifth Avenue, they were greeted by Mayor Hylan, flanked by Governor Al Smith and Acting Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hearst was nowhere to be seen. Then, according to the New York Times, as the column of soldiers approached the stand, “the place that had been occupied by Mr. Roosevelt was taken by William Randolph Hearst, and thereafter Mr. Hearst received with the Mayor the salutes of the regimental battalion and company commanders as they passed the stand.”35
In his first two decades as editor and publisher, Hearst had focused his attention and, he hoped, that of his readers, on the intertwined issues of the trusts and political corruption. But, in the course of the Great War he had been forced to direct his gaze outward to encompass questions about America’s role in the world beyond its borders. His position was unambiguous. He was unalterably opposed to American involvement in European affairs and would be for the next thirty years. When, in December of 1919, the Wilson administration sent American troops to Russia to join the fight against the new Bolshevik regime, Hearst protested:
The Russian people have thrown off the yoke of the Czars and of the corrupt and cruel nobility and have established a democracy—not a perfect democracy, but a form of democratic government that will develop daily into a better democracy ... Why should President Wilson, without authority of Congress, without the approval of the American people, send our American boys to the snows of Siberia to endure the hardships of military service ... in order to try to fight down an infant republic and to reestablish an autocracy of despotic Czars, corrupt and conscienceless nobles and cruel Cossacks?36
While American politicians and publishers criticized the Bolsheviks for being German agents, making a separate peace, confiscating and nationalizing private property, and, most incredibly, as the New York Times reported in October of 1918, requiring eighteen-year-old girls to register at a government “bureau of free love,” Hearst cautioned restraint. In December of 1918, Gerald MacFarland, speaking for Hearst in a Boston American editorial—which was clipped and filed by agents at the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division—urged Americans to withhold judgment on the Bolsheviks until they knew more:
This newspaper does not know the truth about Russia. For all we can say positively the Bolsheviki leaders maybe saints or crooks or just ordinary men. But we can say this with certainty, that the great majority of people keep them in power, and that for more than a year there has been a vast conspiracy to slander them, and that there is a good ground for suspicion that men who have to be lied about continuously in order to make them appear bad are not so very bad after all.37
Hearst’s opposition to administration policy on the Soviet Union posed so serious an obstacle toward establishing a national consensus that Brigadier General Dennis E. Nolan, General Pershing’s chief of intelligence in Europe, wrote the War Department in June of 1919 to suggest that new pressures be applied to Hearst to join the anti-Bolshevik campaign. “Indications,” he wrote, “are that Hearst is eager at this time to bid for absolution.” Nolan was mistaken. If Hearst blamed himself for anything, it was for not speaking out loudly and forcibly enough to prevent American involvement in a costly, bloody, and senseless war. He would, he pledged to himself and his readers, not allow this to happen a second time.38
Hearst’s antagonism to what he now called “Wilsonian internationalism” remained at so high a pitch of intensity that he declared, in a front-page editorial in the fall of 1920, two years after the armistice, that he would support James Cox, the Democratic nominee for president in 1920, only if he threw off the Wilson yoke. When Cox refused to do so, Hearst, for the first time in his life, endorsed a Republican, Warren G. Harding. The paramount issue in the election, he declared, was “the defeat of the Wilson foreign league.”39
V. A Master Builder
16. Building a Studio
PHOEBE, NOW IN HER SEVENTIES, refused to allow old age to slow her down. She remained an active member of the Pacific Coast Field Committee of the YWCA and a leader of the Women’s Board which helped to organize the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Though she did not publicly support the National Women’s Party, she worked closely with its leader Alice Paul and was a cofounder with her of the National Mothers’ Congress. In the summer of 1916, while her son called for military preparedness in his daily newspapers, Phoebe accepted an invitation to join the “preparedness” parade in San Francisco scheduled for July 22. Ignoring the threats of violence—and
the bomb that was thrown during the parade and killed nine or ten marchers—Phoebe Hearst, at age seventy-four, dressed in white, wearing a flowered hat, a parasol in one hand, an American flag in the other, marched the entire route of the parade at the head of the women’s contingent.
In December of 1918, one month after the German surrender ended the Great War, Phoebe traveled East to spend the Christmas holidays with the Hearsts at the Clarendon. Though seventy-six years of age and suffering from a nasty cold, Phoebe still found time for shopping, visiting with friends, dining out, attending the opera, and traveling to New Haven to visit her niece, Anne Apperson Flint, who had returned from Pleasanton when her husband, a professor of surgery at Yale, left military service. In late January, exhausted from her travels, Phoebe was forced to take to her bed, but after a few days’ rest she was well enough to travel West by private railway car, accompanied by her grandsons Bill, Jr. and John, Edward Clark and his wife, and the usual entourage of servants.1
During her stay in the East, as Hearst later testified at a hearing on the estate taxes, his mother had entered the sitting room where he was reading his newspapers and asked him about his finances: “I told her they were pretty fair considering the war conditions, but that I had to borrow some money and that I might have to borrow some more....She said her own affairs were not in any too good condition and that I must be careful and not call upon her for further help, because she would not be able to give it to me.”2
W. R. was putting the best possible gloss on his financial situation. Advertising had plummeted during the war and his newspaper circulation had been affected by the adverse publicity and boycotts his enemies had incited. Instead of retrenching until his newspapers began to earn money again, he had gone deeper into debt to finance his moving-picture business. The combination of debts owed his mother and those incurred by the Star Company, his primary holding company, made it impossible for him to seek further credit from the banks, which he required regularly to refinance outstanding loans. In February of 1919, Phoebe bailed him out again by agreeing to write off the $1.8 million (equivalent to almost $19 million in today’s currency) he owed her because, as she put it, “the existence of these obligations would naturally embarrass and hamper you in making representations to your bankers.”3
On returning to California in February, Phoebe found enough strength to sit up for several hours a day dictating letters, visiting with friends, and making plans to take her grandchildren to Wyntoon for the summer. But as the weeks wore on, she grew weaker instead of stronger. It was becoming clear now that what she had thought was a simple cold was the influenza that the soldiers had brought back from Europe. By mid-March, her condition had deteriorated to the point where her physician, Ray Lyman Wilbur, who was at the time president of Stanford University, contacted her son in New York. A nurse was engaged and Phoebe’s local doctor put on call. On March 26, as Hearst was making his stealth appearance on the reviewing stand to greet the returning veterans, her condition took a turn for the worse and she developed pneumonia. W. R. and Millicent boarded a train to California the next morning. They arrived at the Hacienda on March 31. Phoebe brightened on seeing her only son and seemed to recover, but within a week had relapsed again.4
On April 13, Easter Sunday, at 4:30 in the afternoon, Phoebe Apperson Hearst died in her sleep. “This was the first time that I had looked death in the face,” her grandson Bill, Jr. recalled in his memoirs. “I wept for days. The whole world had fallen and crashed into smithereens for this eleven-year-old boy. I could not envisage life without her.” We have no first-person record of William Randolph Hearst’s reaction to his mother’s death, only the words of his authorized biographer, who may have interviewed him on the subject. “It was,” Cora Older wrote of the Easter Sunday his mother died, “the most melancholy day in Hearst’s life.”5
For the next three days, Phoebe’s body, dressed in a lilac dress, her casket surrounded by flowers, was placed on view in the Music Room of her Hacienda. Private services were held for family and friends at the Hacienda, followed by a public funeral at the Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco, with the governor of California an honorary pallbearer. For those not able to attend either ceremony, a musical service was held later in the day in the Civic Auditorium. Phoebe was buried at the Cypress Lawn Cemetery, south of the city, in the family mausoleum beside her husband. The day of her funeral, all activities were canceled at the University of California at Berkeley, where she had been a regent and major benefactor. According to the New York Times, the California Superior and Justice Courts were also closed down as was the Federal District Court, the first time a woman was so honored.6
Phoebe’s death left her only son bereaved—and extraordinarily rich. She had bequeathed half a million dollars in gifts to friends and other members of her family and $60,000 to the University of California at Berkeley for Phoebe A. Hearst scholarships. The Examiner building in San Francisco was left to her grandchildren, as were the proceeds from the sale of her Pleasanton Hacienda. Wyntoon was given to her niece. Everything else—the land in Mexico, the “cattle ranch” at San Simeon, and the family’s other real estate, stocks, and bonds—went to her son and heir. Edward Clark estimated the total value of the estate at $7.5 million, worth around $75 million today; the New York Times put it at between $5 and $10 million—a considerable amount, given that Phoebe had, since her husband died, donated more than $20 million to charities and forgiven her son another $10 million in debt.7
At age fifty-six, William Randolph Hearst finally came into his patrimony.
By 1919, Hearst’s film companies had produced several very successful serials, hundreds of newsreel episodes, and almost a dozen feature films. With the arrival of peace in Europe—and perhaps the expectation that he would soon inherit the money rightfully due him—Hearst was ready to take the next step forward in the film business and set up his own studio. When, in January, D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks announced that they were going to establish their own film company, United Artists, Hearst proposed that they enter into a partnership with him. In a telegram to Max Ihmsen who, now that Hearst’s political career was on hold, had been moved to the Los Angeles Examiner, the Chief set forth the terms of the partnership. Hearst would distribute their films and in return get 50 percent of the gross proceeds, out of which he would cover all costs of distribution and promotion. “We have no interest in this matter from a small view point,” he informed Ihmsen. “We are the biggest institution of publicity and promotion in the world with all our magazine and newspaper services, news films, feature services, etc. We are only interested in this combination of stars because that is the biggest thing of its kind in the world.”
When the “Big Four,” as Hearst referred to them, declined his offer, he was not in the least discouraged. As he had earlier told Ihmsen, the main advantage of a deal with United Artists would have been the “association with these big stars.” He was convinced, nonetheless, that with or without them, he would be able to establish himself as a major power in the film business.8
His next approach was to Adolph Zukor, the bearded and diminutive Hungarian fur-dealer who had entered show business as part owner of a penny arcade and moved on to become the nation’s top producer, distributor, and exhibitor of feature-length moving pictures. Hearst proposed to Zukor an arrangement under which he would establish his own independent film studio in Manhattan, Cosmopolitan Productions, and produce features which Zukor would distribute. Although Hearst had no experience running a studio and, just short of his fifty-sixth birthday, was rather old to begin a new career, Zukor gladly joined forces with him. On March 22, 1919, five days before Hearst took the train to California to visit his ailing mother, the picture industry trade journals announced that the two moguls, one of the press, the other of the screen, were entering into a partnership. The announcement and the advertisements that followed it reminded the industry that while Hearst’s new company, Cosmopolitan Prod
uctions, had not yet made any pictures, it entered the marketplace with an enormous advantage over its competitors. “This company,” reported Motion Picture World, “controls motion picture rights to the works of the greatest authors writing today. Just a few of these names include John Galsworthy, Elinor Glyn, Robert W. Chambers, Rupert Hughes....The publicity possibilities of the Cosmopolitan Productions are enormous owing to the special alliance with such magazines as Cosmopolitan, Hearst’s, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s Bazar, Motor, and Motor Boating, besides newspapers whose circulations run up into the millions.”9
As Hearst’s trade-journal advertisements told potential exhibitors, Cosmopolitan Productions features would arrive presold. The vast majority of these early pictures were based on material that had already appeared in the Hearst magazines. This was especially important in the era of silent films. Audience familiarity with story lines and characters made it much easier to tell stories without extensive subtitles. The tie-in between Cosmopolitan magazine and Cosmopolitan Productions, the multipage spreads in the trade journals proclaimed to the exhibitors, was creating “a new class of motion picture patronage. Every Cosmopolitan reader and their myriad friends, and the countless thousand friends of these friends will want to see the characters—those they enjoyed so much in print—live. Better arrange to take care of your regular patrons and then book a few extra days to handle the new business the picture is bound to bring you.”10