Nothing too good for the only son.
The Hearsts doted on their boy;
the big lanky youngster grew up solemneyed and selfwilled among servants and hired men, factotums, overseers, hangerson, old pensioners; his grandparents spoiled him; he always did everything he wanted. Mrs. Hearst’s boy must have everything of the best.
No lack of gold nuggets, twentydollar goldpieces, big silver cartwheels.
The boy had few playmates; he was too rich to get along with the others in the roughandtumble democracy of the boys growing up in San Francisco in those days. He was too timid and too arrogant; he wasn’t liked.
His mother could always rent playmates with icecream, imported candies, expensive toys, ponies, fireworks always ready to set off. The ones he could buy he despised, he hankered always after the others.
He was great on practical jokes and pulling the leg of the grownups; when the new Palace Hotel was opened with a reception for General Grant he and a friend had themselves a time throwing down handfuls of birdshot on the glass roof of the court to the consternation of the bigwigs and stuffedshirts below.
Wherever they went royally the Hearsts could buy their way,
up and down the California coast, through ranches and mining-towns
in Nevada and in Mexico,
in the palace of Porfirio Diaz;
the old man had lived in the world, had rubbed shoulders with rich and poor, had knocked around in miners’ hells, pushed his way through unblazed trails with a packmule. All his life Mrs. Hearst’s boy was to hanker after that world
hidden from him by a mist of millions;
the boy had a brain, appetites, an imperious will,
but he could never break away from the gilded apronstrings;
adventure became slumming.
He was sent to boardingschool at St. Paul’s, in Concord, New Hampshire. His pranks kept the school in an uproar. He was fired.
He tutored and went to Harvard
where he cut quite a swath as businessmanager of the Lampoon, a brilliant entertainer; he didn’t drink much himself, he was soft-spoken and silent; he got the other boys drunk and paid the bills, bought the fireworks to celebrate Cleveland’s election, hired the brassbands,
bought the creampies to throw at the actors from the box at the Old Howard,
the cannon crackers to blow out the lamps of herdic cabs with, the champagne for the chorines.
He was rusticated and finally fired from Harvard, so the story goes, for sending to each of a number of professors a chamberpot with the professor’s portrait tastefully engraved on it.
He went to New York. He was crazy about newspapers. Already he’d been hanging around the Boston newspaper-offices. In New York he was taken by Pulitzer’s newfangled journalism. He didn’t want to write; he wanted to be a newspaperman. (Newspapermen were part of that sharpcontoured world he wanted to see clear, the reallife world he saw distorted by a haze of millions, the ungraded lowlife world of American Democracy.)
Mrs. Hearst’s boy would be a newspaperman and a Democrat. (Newspapermen saw heard ate drank touched horsed kidded rubbed shoulders with real men, whored; that was life.)
He arrived home in California, a silent soft smiling solemneyed young man
dressed in the height of the London fashion.
When his father asked him what he wanted to do with his life,
he said he wanted to run the Examiner which was a moribund sheet in San Francisco which his father had taken over for a bad debt. It didn’t seem much to ask. The old man couldn’t imagine why Willie wanted the old rag instead of a mine or a ranch, but Mrs. Hearst’s boy always had his way.
Young Hearst went down to the Examiner one day and turned the office topsyturvy. He had a knack for finding and using bright young men, he had a knack for using his own prurient hanker after the lusts and envies of plain unmonied lowlife men and women (the slummer sees only the streetwalkers, the dopeparlors, the strip acts and goes back uptown saying he knows the workingclass districts); the lowest common denominator;
manure to grow a career in,
the rot of democracy. Out of it grew rankly an empire of print. (Perhaps he liked to think of himself as the young Caius Julius flinging his millions away, tearing down emblems and traditions, making faces at togaed privilege, monopoly, stuffedshirts in office;
Caesar’s life like his was a millionaire prank. Perhaps W.R. had read of republics ruined before;
Alcibiades, too, was a practical joker.)
The San Francisco Examiner grew in circulation, tickled the prurient hankers of the moneyless man
became The Monarch of the Dailies.
When the old man died Mrs. Hearst sold out of Anaconda for seven and a half millions of dollars. W.R. got the money from her to enter the New York field; he bought the Morning Journal
and started his race with the Pulitzers
as to who should cash in most on the geewhizz emotion.
In politics he was the people’s Democrat; he came out for Bryan in ninetysix; on the Coast he fought the Southern Pacific and the utilities and the railroad lawyers who were grabbing the state of California away from the first settlers; on election day in ninetysix his three papers in New York put out between them more than a million and a half copies, a record
that forced the World to cut its price to a penny.
When there’s no news make news.
“You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” he’s supposed to have wired Remington in Havana. The trouble in Cuba was a goldmine for circulation when Mark Hanna had settled national politics by planting McKinley in the White House.
Hearst had one of his bright young men engineer a jailbreak for Evangelina Cisneros, a fair Cuban revolutionist shoved into a dungeon by Weyler, and put on a big reception for her in Madison Square.
Remember the “Maine.”
When McKinley was forced to declare war on Spain W.R. had his plans all made to buy and sink a British steamer in the Suez Canal
but the Spanish fleet didn’t take that route.
He hired the Sylvia and the Buccaneer and went down to Cuba himself with a portable press and a fleet of tugs
and brandishing a sixshooter went in with the longboat through the surf and captured twentysix unarmed half-drowned Spanish sailors on the beach and forced them to kneel and kiss the American flag
in front of the camera.
Manila Bay raised the circulation of the Morning Journal to one million six hundred thousand.
When the Spaniards were licked there was nobody left to heckle but the Mormons. Polygamy titillated the straphangers, and the sexlife of the rich, and penandink drawings of women in underclothes and prehistoric monsters in four colors. He discovered the sobsister: Annie Laurie, Dorothy Dix, Beatrice Fairfax. He splurged on comics, the Katzenjammer Kids, Buster Brown, Krazy Kat. Get excited when the public is excited;
his editorials hammered at malefactors of great wealth, trusts, the G.O.P., Mark Hanna and McKinley so shrilly that when McKinley was assassinated most Republicans in some way considered Hearst responsible for his death.
Hearst retorted by renaming the Morning Journal the American
and stepping into the limelight
wearing a black frockcoat and a tengallon hat,
presidential timber,
the millionaire candidate of the common man.
Bryan made him president of the National Association of Democratic Clubs and advised him to start a paper in Chicago.