Making of a Mogul

William Randolph Hearst is a mythical giant in American life. A newspaper mogul, a powerful man who was listened to, and whose newspapers were read, he was also the object of Citizen Kane, called by many the best American film of all time.

He was a newspaper owner and publisher. As with every form of the written word, editing is crucially important. In this review, in the first sentence of the second paragraph, this glaring gaffe jumps out: Ah, but there was a time – not so long ago in the grand scheme of things – when people not only read newspapers but waited with baited breath for the latest edition to hit the street.
Baited? To catch fish? Or bated, as in reduced, lowered, restrained? Indeed bated.

The Uncrowned King
By Kenneth Whyte Counterpoint, 546 pages, $30

In 1895, William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) arrived in New York City from his family home in San Francisco to assume the position of owner and publisher of the New York Morning Journal, a name he immediately shortened to the New York Journal. Once Hearst was installed in his Park Row office, he soon leapt into national prominence; how he managed this breakthrough is the subject of Kenneth Whyte's "The Uncrowned King," an engaging chronicle of Hearst's first three years in New York.

In 1883, freshly expelled from Harvard, he convinced his father, Senator George Hearst (who filled a seat vacated by death for a few months in 1886, then won and served from 1887 until his death in 1890), to let him run the San Francisco Examiner. He ran that newspaper with hucksterism, and moved onto New York in 1895 to run one of 17 dailies then published.

Mr. Whyte offers a sympathetic account of Hearst, presenting him as someone far different from the megalomaniacal Citizen Kane-esque brute of legend. Mr. Whyte's Hearst is eccentric, to be sure, but he is also an earnest general in the vanguard of the paper wars and a virtuoso of the front-page salvo.

Whatever the case, in New York Hearst learned from Joseph Pulitzer (New York World) and Charles Dana (New York Sun): banner headlines, heart-tugging human-interest stories, tendentious crusading, scoops (facts be damned). Hearst gleaned everything he could from Pulitzer and Dana before he surpassed them.

"The Uncrowned King" centers on the two major news stories gripping the U.S. during Hearst's early years at the Journal: the 1896 presidential election, pitting the upstart Democrat William Jennings Bryan against William McKinley; and the Cuban theater of the Spanish-American War.

Ah, yes, yellow journalism. Election in 1896: Jennings Bryan versus McKinley; Spanish-American War.

Bryan lost the election, but Hearst gained tremendous credibility with the Journal's election reporting, Mr. Whyte says. He reports that The Fourth Estate ("A Newspaper for the Makers of Newspapers") praised the Journal for covering the race "in splendid style" and cited the 1.5 millions copies sold of the paper's election edition as evidence that readers trusted the Journal even though its candidate had lost.

Bryan railed about a "Cross of Gold" and gained much support from farmers and other borrowers, and was opposed by East Coast lenders (no one in the West loaned money?), and yet Hearst supported him (curiously to this observer).

Mr. Whyte devotes nearly half of "The Uncrowned King" to the Spanish-American War, specifically the dueling among the major dailies to secure news from Cuba. This was America's first post-Civil War fight as a united nation – or at least it was united behind the cause of Cuban independence after Hearst's relentless campaign to shame a reluctant President McKinley into war. Amid rising tensions between the two countries in 1898, an explosion sank the battleship Maine in the Havana harbor. The cause of the blast was murky, but Hearst seized on it as the ultimate war-worthy outrage. Mr. Whyte acknowledges that the paper practiced some "atrocious journalism" during this period, but he also brings to bear a refreshing sense of context.

Whyte exonerates Hearst: the paper's reporting suggesting that the ship had been sabotaged was based on credible sources, he says. The coverage was "nowhere near the acme of ruthless, truthless journalism."

Hearst wound up on the ground in Cuba as a correspondent. On his return he found himself at the pinnacle of the newspaper world – a successful publisher, acclaimed editor, even a writer of some repute. But he was also reviled in many quarters, particularly by other publishers. A scathing Lincoln Steffens article "became a foundation stone of a Hearst legend that would continue to grow in scale and perversity and culminate in the fine but scurrilous motion picture, Citizen Kane."

The myth exploded:

But then, typically and to his credit, Mr. Whyte tests the conventional wisdom by consulting the autobiography that Steffens wrote many years later. It turns out that Steffens regretted writing the piece because he had been pressured by his editors to take a hatchet to Hearst. Steffens confessed that he had "compromised" with his colleagues "to keep my job." Hearst was "a great man, able, self-dependent," the old reporter wrote. "He had no moral illusions; he saw straight as far as he saw, and he saw pretty far."


One of many New York Journal front pages devoted to news about the destruction of the battleship Maine in 1898. Top: William Randolph Hearst in the early 1900s.