The Chief

by David Nasaw

  This is not to say that there wasn’t a steady decline in the quality of the Hearst papers, especially the evening editions and the New York Mirror. The international and national coverage was no longer as well-written or as complete, the front pages were no longer laid out as cleanly as they had been, there were too many thick, bold headlines, and on the inside pages ads usurped space that should have been devoted to news items.

  The Hearst papers had always specialized in crime stories, the more heinous and bloody the better, but while earlier these stories had also called attention to the role of political malfeasance and police incompetence in fostering criminality and derailing justice, that subtext had largely disappeared. If Hearst had earlier built a readership and political constituency among his working-class and ethnic voters by presenting himself as their ally in the battle for a safer, more livable city, he now attempted to hold on to that constituency by practicing a sort of identity politics. Gone were the crusades against the trusts and the bosses, against corrupt machine politicians and judges. In their place were rather blatant attempts to appeal to ethnic groups by hiring their “heroes” to write columns.

  As part of his never-ending and never successful attempt to compete with the Daily News, Phil Payne at the Mirror asked for Hearst’s permission to commission the world’s most famous Italian, Benito Mussolini, to write a regular column. “Believe a Mussolini signed editorial exclusively in the Mirror would mean hundred thousand extra daily circulation for us in New York,” Payne telegrammed the Chief in February of 1927. “Mussolini is constantly seeking to influence American public opinion. That is why I think he will do the job for nothing. What do you think about it?” Hearst replied that he thought the Mussolini idea was great. Unfortunately, Mussolini had already signed an agreement with the United Press syndicate, which was at the time Hearst’s major competitor, to write “opinion pieces.” To get Il Duce’s articles, Hearst had to buy them from the United Press, which he reluctantly agreed to do.8

  Payne had more luck with his “Jewish” columnist. In February of 1927, he wrote Hearst at San Simeon that he had been able to sign on Rabbi Stephen S. Wise to do a column for the Mirror. Hearst was delighted. As he had earlier advised Lee Ettelson, the editor of the American, his other New York morning paper, it was “very important to have the support of the Jewish people in New York.” The New York Times, he feared, was doing a much better job “looking out for the interests of the Jews—possibly because Mr. Ochs is a Jew; but although we are not, it is the policy of the New York American to deplore any race prejudice and to promote good feeling among all creeds and classes and protect the interests of every worthy cause.”9

  Instead of attempting to represent the people in their fight against the bosses and the trusts by seeking injunctions or organizing demonstrations, the Hearst press in the 1920s had begun to rely on “stunts” and contests to attract new readers and hold on to old ones. The Mirror outdid itself, month after month, in this regard. In the fall of 1927, Phil Payne engineered his most spectacular—and last—circulation stunt for Hearst. Caught up in Lindbergh fever with the rest of the nation, Hearst had offered to sponsor an entry of his own in a contest to fly the Atlantic, nonstop, to Rome. When Phil Payne announced that he was joining the crew of “Old Glory,” the Hearst plane, in its trans-Atlantic flight, the Chief argued against it. To prove to Hearst that “Old Glory” was flight-worthy, Payne took Millicent up for a ride from the Old Westbury, Long Island, field that Lindbergh had used. Millicent immediately telegrammed Hearst her enthusiastic endorsement: “I know the boys will make Rome in Old Glory. Think this is a most wonderful ship.”10

  Hearst remained opposed to the plan and just days before departure telegrammed Payne that he would back the flight “only if the Government [assumed] authority and responsibility.” Receiving no answer from Payne and fearing the worst, Hearst sent another telegram, this time to Mitchell Shiber, an editor at the New York American. “Rush Extra. Get this message by telephone to Phil Payne wherever he is immediately and confirm by telegram, quote, ‘Do not let Old Glory hop off except under Government sanction per telephone message to Coblentz last night, unquote.'”

  It was already too late. “Old Glory” had taken off as scheduled and crashed in the Atlantic with no survivors. Hearst, deeply embarrassed and ashamed that the life of his editor had been lost in so obvious a circulation stunt, published his correspondence with Payne in the American.11

  Although Hearst had balked at risking a life to win circulation, in the spring of 1927, when he was presented with a golden opportunity to thrust himself—and his newspapers—back into the headlines, he had grabbed it. Edward Clark, his financial adviser and the overseer of his Mexican properties, had discovered a cache of secret documents that “proved” that Mexican president Plutarco Calles was not only a Bolshevik, but had, with Russian support, fomented and financed the 1926 Nicaraguan revolution. Hearst was interested in the documents and directed Clark to secure them. If authentic, they would not only discredit the new Mexican government, which Hearst and most other American landowners and businessmen heartily distrusted, but win circulation for his newspapers.

  Ever since the overthrow of Porfirio Díaz and the onset of the Mexican Revolution in 1910–1911, W. R. had been arguing that American intervention was necessary to restore “order” to Mexico and safeguard American investments. He had temporarily made peace with Mexico during the presidency of Álvaro Obregón, who had won his confidence by revalidating his title to his Mexican properties. But Calles, on succeeding Obregón in 1924, had not only refused to endorse his predecessor's agreements, but had threatened to expropriate the property of American oil companies and in 1926 had provided material support to Augusto César Sandino and the army of insurgents that was attempting to overthrow the pro-American government in Nicaragua.12

  President Coolidge and his secretary of state, Frank Billings Kellogg, branded Calles and his government as Bolsheviks, but they had no intention of intervening in Mexico. Instead, Coolidge appointed Dwight Morrow of J. P. Morgan and Company as ambassador to Mexico to negotiate a comprehensive settlement with Calles. By the time that news of the secret documents reached Hearst in the spring of 1927, tensions between Mexico and the United States had been thoroughly defused.

  Hearst, on receiving the documents from Miguel Avila, the Mexican-Texan who claimed to have stolen them, dispatched Edward Clark to South Dakota to show them to the vacationing President Coolidge. When Coolidge refused to examine them—as did Secretary of State Kellogg who was also contacted—Hearst realized that he had no choice now but to proceed to try to authenticate them on his own. Victor Watson, the editor of the New York American, suggested that Miguel Avila be planted in the Mexican consul-general’s office in New York to see if he could locate more corroborating documents. It was ludicrous to entrust the thief who had stolen the documents with the task of authenticating them, but Hearst agreed with Watson’s plan. Not surprisingly, Avila found a new cache of “secret” documents in New York that supposedly confirmed the authenticity of the ones he had brought with him from Mexico City.13

  On November 14, the Hearst dailies began publishing the documents, which they claimed established beyond doubt the existence of a Mexican plot against the United States. Every day for the next three weeks, they published a new set of Mexican documents in translation, complete with facsimiles, commentaries, illustrations, and editorials. Curiously enough, given the Chief’s later preoccupation with Russian Bolshevism, the articles had little to say about the role of the Soviets in this anti-American Bolshevik conspiracy. On the contrary, it was made clear in the first installment that “the Hearst papers ... have no special antagonism towards [the Russian] government ... and that the Russian people’s right to establish their own government should not be interfered with by other governments.”14

  The Bolshevik villain in all the articles was the Mexican president Calles. On November 16, the Hearst papers charged Calles with funneling $1 million to
Nicaragua to finance an anti-American insurrection; on November 17, with paying $25,000 to the Russian legation in Mexico City to defray the costs of communist propaganda and $30,000 to “Pablo Polivichi, a communist propaganda expert” to print propaganda-filled textbooks for Mexican children and conduct a propaganda campaign among the Indians of Guatemala; on November 18, with transporting three thousand boxes of rifles and cartridges to the Nicaraguan rebels; on November 19, with transferring $100,000 to a Comrade Litvinoff in Russia for Bolshevist propaganda purposes. The secret Mexican documents plastered across Hearst’s front pages disclosed a widening conspiracy emanating from Mexico to support Bolshevists around the world, from Communists in China to striking dockworkers in England to Ernest Gruening, the editor of the Nation (and the future senator from Alaska).

  Only the Hearst papers paid any attention to the story, until on December 9, during the third week of exposés, the Chief released his most “newsworthy” document. Signed by the controller-general of Mexico, it authorized the payment of $1.15 million to four United States senators, ostensibly bribes to support pro-Mexican legislation. The senators’ names were blacked out in the facsimile, although Hearst claimed that the original, in his safe, revealed them.15

  By blacking out the names of the accused senators, Hearst shielded himself from libel suits and forced the Senate to act on his charges. As Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania explained on the floor of the Senate, as long as Hearst’s story “appears in print untested, uninvestigated, undenied, the honor of every member of this body is at stake.” A five-member Senate investigating committee was promptly empaneled to investigate his charges. On December 15, Hearst appeared before it to deliver all of his documents, including the one which named the four senators accused of taking bribes from the Mexican government. Displaying no sign of unease or impatience, the Chief explained where he had gotten the documents and described the efforts his editors had made to authenticate them.16

  Three of the four accused senators, William Borah of Idaho, Thomas Heflin of Alabama, and Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin, appeared before the committee to deny the charges against them. George Norris of Nebraska, who was too ill to attend the session, responded in an open letter to Hearst, asserting that the publisher had attacked these four senators because they had “all been prominent in the Senate in their opposition to interference by our government in the affairs of Mexico.” Norris went on to say,

  You have testified before the committee that you have very valuable properties in Mexico. It is almost common knowledge that you were in favor of the overthrow of the present government.... For the sake of your financial investments, you were not only willing to ruin the reputation of honest and innocent men but you were willing to plunge our country into war with a friendly neighbor, and thus increase the army of widows and orphans and wounded and crippled soldiers.... The record which you made in this matter ... demonstrates that the Hearst system of newspapers, spreading like a venomous web to all parts of our country, constitutes the sewer system of American journalism.17

  In his reply to Norris, published as usual on the front pages of his newspapers, Hearst displayed the polemical skill he had sharpened in previous battles with the likes of William Gaynor and Al Smith. He admitted that he owned $4 million worth of property in Mexico, but assured Senator Norris that had he cared to protect his Mexican investments, he would have kept his silence: “Certainly nobody but a perfect jackass—and Senator Norris is not that—at least not a perfect one—could imagine that my property holdings were benefited by losing the friendship and favor of the Mexican Government.” He insisted that he held no animus against the four senators named in the documents: “Senator Borah, I have had occasion to support and commend you probably more than any man in the Senate. I do not know that I have ever supported Senator Norris, but then I cannot recall that he’s ever done anything worth supporting.”18

  While Hearst was engaged in his front-page polemics with Senator Norris, the investigating committee recessed for the Christmas break, after putting the disputed documents in the hands of six handwriting experts—three selected by the committee, an additional three by Hearst. When the committee reconvened on January 5, W. H. DeFord, Hearst’s counsel, informed it that Hearst’s handwriting experts had unanimously determined that the Mexican documents were spurious. On January 11, the committee issued its final report on the matter, declaring that it had found “not a scintilla of evidence that any United States senator has accepted, or was promised, or was offered ... or received money from the Mexican government.” The story was buried in the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and other non-Hearst papers. Only the Hearst press put it on the front page—under the subhead, “Hearst Not Criticized.”19

  For nearly a month, Hearst had published front-page articles based entirely on fictitious sources. He had libeled several nations, dozens of foreign statesmen, at least two prominent American journalists, Oswald Garrison Villard and Ernest Gruening, and four United States senators. And yet, as the New York Herald Tribune reported the morning after the final report was issued, neither the committee nor any of its members had seen fit to criticize Hearst. Outside of Senator Norris, everyone, it appeared, had accepted his claim that because he had “left the whole thing to his editors,” he was not to be blamed.20

  Though suspicions would later be voiced by Hearst’s biographer Ferdinand Lundberg, among others, that Hearst had had a hand in the forgeries, there is no evidence to support this allegation. The records of the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department demonstrate clearly that, as soon as Hearst discovered that the documents had been forged, he sent his own agents into Mexico to find the forger.21

  Despite all the signs to the contrary—including the misspellings and grammatical errors on almost every page of every “official” document—Hearst had accepted the documents as authentic because they confirmed everything he believed about Mexican radicalism and the necessity for American intervention. His editors, for their part, did not go out of their way to establish their authenticity, because they knew the Chief was anxious to publish them.

  The investigating senators exonerated Hearst because they believed he was no longer exercising day-to-day control over his newspapers, but they were quite mistaken. Little, if anything, appeared in his magazines or papers—especially on the front page or the editorial page—without his approval. When one or the other of his editors dared venture off on his own, he was swiftly reprimanded. As the Chief had written in 1929 to C. S. Stanton, the editor of the Herald-Examiner in Chicago, in a blistering seven-page, single-spaced memo, “I have always been in direct charge of the editorial departments of my papers.... You will please conduct the paper in all its editorial departments according to the instructions which you receive from me.”22

  Although permanently ensconced in San Simeon, the Chief made all the decisions on editorial policy. “The editorials I write are not written as individual policies,” he reminded Edmond Coblentz, the managing editor of the New York American, in December of 1929. “They are written to outline policies for the paper to be pursued at every opportunity thereafter until rescinded. They should not be regarded as ‘sacred cows,’ only inserted to please the boss, and therefore casually inserted and hurriedly forgotten; but as basic outlines of policy on which the newspapers are to be conducted. Will you please so regard them and will you please keep a scrapbook of them, and let the scrapbook serve as a guide to editorial writers?”23

  Still, while Hearst had never given up control of his publications, he had learned over the years to isolate and distance himself from the more devious machinations of editors and reporters who went out of their way to get news that the Chief would want to print. “If there is any skullduggery, he does not want to know about it,” Silas Bent wrote in the Outlook in January of 1928. “And so if a managing editor looked Hearst in the eye and told him that the Mexican documents were the goods and a whale of a story, that was enough. The publisher has all the year
ning of a cub for a big beat; his fondness for sensational news has carried him away more than once.”24

  Following the Mexican documents fiasco, Hearst began a major reorganization of his newspaper division, not because his editors had blundered into publishing three weeks of stories based on bad forgeries, but because they were losing their circulation wars. While the circulation of his twenty-eight newspapers in 1928 still comprised more than 10 percent of the nation’s total circulation on weekdays and almost 20 percent on Sundays, only on the West Coast did his papers dominate their local markets. While he continued to expand his total circulation by buying new papers, the mainstays of his empire—his big-city morning papers—were rapidly falling behind the competition. Between 1925 and 1928, the gap in Chicago between Colonel McCormick’s Tribune and the Hearst Herald-Examiner had grown from 274,000 to almost 360,000. In Boston, Hearst’s Herald was outsold by the Globe and the Post. In New York, the American had lost almost one-quarter of its circulation since 1925 and now ranked below not only the tabloids but the Times, the Herald Tribune, and the World.25