The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst by Kenneth Whyte Page B
Authors: Kenneth Whyte
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the grandeur of the Hoffman House with a thrill of decadence, as did the fact that the hotel’s owner, Edward Stokes, had served time in Sing Sing for shooting the financier Jim Fisk, his rival for the attentions of the actress Josie Mansfield. On arriving in New York to negotiate the purchase of the Morning Journal, Hearst checked in at the Hoffman House, and he remained there for the balance of the year.
The consensus of the two best Hearst biographies—W.A. Swanberg’s Citizen Hearst (1961) and David Nasaw’s The Chief (2000)—is that the young Californian floundered on assuming control of the Morning Journal on November 7, 1895. Swanberg has Hearst closely imitating Pulitzer’s World, exceeding the master only in “schoolboy simplicity” and the “loving attention” he gave to crime and scandal. 1 Nasaw, too, sees scandal and fearmongering reports of “terrifying crime against ordinary folk” as Hearst’s formula for success. 2 Neither biography credits Hearst with a single meritorious piece of journalism in his first several months on the job, although Nasaw does mention that the Journal ’s violent and gossipy melodramas were well written, “if a bit long-winded.” The biographers agree that it was only after stealing Pulitzer’s talent, and engaging in several months of relentless promotion, unbridled spending, and lurid journalistic excess, that Hearst’s new paper began to enjoy significant circulation gains.
It is one of the curiosities of the Hearst literature that characterizations of his work as shallow and lurid themselves tend toward the shallow and lurid. Part of the problem is the source material. Accounts of Hearst’s beginnings at the Morning Journal lean heavily on the memoirs of ancient journalists. High in color, hazy in detail, twisted by time and personal agendas, these works are as unreliable as they are indispensable, given the dearth of alternatives. Fortunately, they can be tested, to some extent, against the actual contents of Hearst’s paper, the pages of his rivals, and the records of the several trade publications that reported and commented on New York’s bustling newspaper scene in the late nineteenth century, functioning as something of a Greek chorus to the action on Park Row. These sources permit an entirely different and more reliable account of Hearst’s methods and results as he assembled his staff, reorganized his newspaper, and shot to immediate prominence on journalism’s biggest stage.
The stage was far more crowded than is generally supposed. Hearst’s primary target may have been Pulitzer’s World, but the reality of the marketplace was that he was competing against all 48 dailies in New York, not to mention a vibrant suburban press—Brooklyn alone had at least three significant sheets. 3 Each of these newspapers was vying for the attention of some portion of greater New York’s three million souls, a vast metropolitan population, as diverse as any in the world, ranging from the hundreds of thousands of Irish refugees, German artisans, Shtetl Jews, Russian peasants, Italian laborers and Southern blacks who were crowded into the Bowery’s grimy tenements to Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred, opulently ensconced on upper Fifth Avenue in grand French chateaux and Italianate villas with electric lights, steam heat, and new-fangled telephones. Every morning, the population of Manhattan Island swelled by a million as great hordes of shopkeepers, lawyers, accountants, salesman, laborers, mechanics, and secretaries flowed in by ferry, train, cable car, and the Brooklyn Bridge. At the end of the day they poured home again to White Plains, Queens, Staten Island, and Jersey City. Somehow this nightly ebb barely registered in the street. New York was already the city that never sleeps. Visitors cursed the impossibility of slumber “in the midst of all the thunder and the rush and the roar of her million-crowded streets, along which surges as a restless
The consensus of the two best Hearst biographies—W.A. Swanberg’s Citizen Hearst (1961) and David Nasaw’s The Chief (2000)—is that the young Californian floundered on assuming control of the Morning Journal on November 7, 1895. Swanberg has Hearst closely imitating Pulitzer’s World, exceeding the master only in “schoolboy simplicity” and the “loving attention” he gave to crime and scandal. 1 Nasaw, too, sees scandal and fearmongering reports of “terrifying crime against ordinary folk” as Hearst’s formula for success. 2 Neither biography credits Hearst with a single meritorious piece of journalism in his first several months on the job, although Nasaw does mention that the Journal ’s violent and gossipy melodramas were well written, “if a bit long-winded.” The biographers agree that it was only after stealing Pulitzer’s talent, and engaging in several months of relentless promotion, unbridled spending, and lurid journalistic excess, that Hearst’s new paper began to enjoy significant circulation gains.
It is one of the curiosities of the Hearst literature that characterizations of his work as shallow and lurid themselves tend toward the shallow and lurid. Part of the problem is the source material. Accounts of Hearst’s beginnings at the Morning Journal lean heavily on the memoirs of ancient journalists. High in color, hazy in detail, twisted by time and personal agendas, these works are as unreliable as they are indispensable, given the dearth of alternatives. Fortunately, they can be tested, to some extent, against the actual contents of Hearst’s paper, the pages of his rivals, and the records of the several trade publications that reported and commented on New York’s bustling newspaper scene in the late nineteenth century, functioning as something of a Greek chorus to the action on Park Row. These sources permit an entirely different and more reliable account of Hearst’s methods and results as he assembled his staff, reorganized his newspaper, and shot to immediate prominence on journalism’s biggest stage.
The stage was far more crowded than is generally supposed. Hearst’s primary target may have been Pulitzer’s World, but the reality of the marketplace was that he was competing against all 48 dailies in New York, not to mention a vibrant suburban press—Brooklyn alone had at least three significant sheets. 3 Each of these newspapers was vying for the attention of some portion of greater New York’s three million souls, a vast metropolitan population, as diverse as any in the world, ranging from the hundreds of thousands of Irish refugees, German artisans, Shtetl Jews, Russian peasants, Italian laborers and Southern blacks who were crowded into the Bowery’s grimy tenements to Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred, opulently ensconced on upper Fifth Avenue in grand French chateaux and Italianate villas with electric lights, steam heat, and new-fangled telephones. Every morning, the population of Manhattan Island swelled by a million as great hordes of shopkeepers, lawyers, accountants, salesman, laborers, mechanics, and secretaries flowed in by ferry, train, cable car, and the Brooklyn Bridge. At the end of the day they poured home again to White Plains, Queens, Staten Island, and Jersey City. Somehow this nightly ebb barely registered in the street. New York was already the city that never sleeps. Visitors cursed the impossibility of slumber “in the midst of all the thunder and the rush and the roar of her million-crowded streets, along which surges as a restless
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