"For decades, the name “Hearst” meant megamedia — an empire of dozens of opinionated newspapers, magazines, broadcast properties, a movie studio and expansive real estate holdings as well as a great art collection. Even now, the company that William Randolph Hearst left behind at his death in 1951 owns 16 daily newspapers, 16 magazines, and television and radio outlets that reach 18 percent of American households.
The creator of this empire has attracted repeated biographers eager to understand his legendary life. In this newest addition to the literature, Kenneth Whyte, a Canadian editor and publisher, sets out to de-demonize Hearst in his dramatic early years.
The creator of this empire has attracted repeated biographers eager to understand his legendary life. In this newest addition to the literature, Kenneth Whyte, a Canadian editor and publisher, sets out to de-demonize Hearst in his dramatic early years.
Whyte largely succeeds, showing that the young Hearst did not get ahead merely by throwing family money around, did not corrupt investigative journalism and did not incite the Spanish-American War. He was not at all Citizen Kane, the indelible caricature that Orson Welles put on film. The young Hearst was a restless entrepreneur and an obsessively hard worker, respected by his staff. He came to New York in the mid-1890s at age 31 to take on Joseph Pulitzer and transform the newspaper world.
This is not a new portrait. In “The Chief,” his masterly biography of Hearst’s whole life, published in 2000, David Nasaw drew similar conclusions that challenged the historical Hearst mythology. Whyte nevertheless presents another, arresting portrait — of the emerging power of the press at the end of the 19th century.
In this present moment of media history, newspaper lovers ponder the uncertain autumn of the print press. The comedian Stephen Colbert has called the Newseum in Washington the “Newsoleum.” Thus there’s poignancy in Whyte’s account of print’s riotous spring, a different transformative time for newspapers.
The 1890s brought waves of turbulent change to New York. With heavy immigration and the consolidation of the five boroughs, the population more than doubled in a decade, to 3.4 million. Suddenly, bicycles were everywhere. Literacy soared. And people felt the tightening grip of industrial and corporate forces like the trusts that controlled railroads, electricity and even water.
Hearst arrived in New York from San Francisco, where he had turned his father’s failing Examiner into a successful big-city daily. Now he was challenging himself to do the same in America’s biggest city, then home to 48 daily papers.
Pulitzer had already responded to the growing market for a working-class newspaper. He had come from St. Louis in 1883, bought The New York World and increased its circulation to 250,000 from 11,000 by 1895. Undeterred, Hearst bought The Journal and its German-language cousin, with a combined circulation of about 110,000. Competing fiercely with Pulitzer, he gave the paper “every ounce of his care and concentration and prodigious energy from the start,” Whyte writes, and on the day after the 1896 election, sold more than 1.5 million copies.
Hearst and Pulitzer reached new heights with their ceaseless innovation, transforming dull gray walls of type through bold headlines, halftone photographs, thick Sunday editions and the introduction of rival cartoon characters, colored yellow and known as the Yellow Kids — hence the epithet yellow journalism. “Far from being shady, squalid or trivial,” Whyte writes, “the yellows were big, rich businesses run out of towering buildings with elevators, telephones and electric lights. . . . Their dazzling color presses could spit out a million copies a day for delivery over thousands of square miles. They could generate a fresh edition with the latest news from a conflict halfway around the globe in a matter of minutes. . . . They spoke to the nation with a frankness and familiarity that politicians could only envy.”
True, The Journal, like The World, traded heavily in sensationalism, what David Nasaw called “fully illustrated stories of exotic murders . . . and scandals involving men of wealth in tuxedos and chorus girls in underwear.” Then, long before he turned to the right — even to what critics called the fascist right — Hearst had loftier ambitions. These were reflected in one cartoon caption: “The Press to the Rescue! ‘Government by Newspapers vs. Boss Rule.’ ” Whyte writes: “Hearst hammered away frenetically, day after day, week after week, at privately held trusts in ice, water, gas, sugar, rubber, coal and railways. . . . As an activist and community servant, Hearst was operating with a vigor, scope and conviction unprecedented in American newspapers.” A British editor said he might be the “uncrowned king of an educated democracy.”
This “journalism of action” characterized Hearst’s early embrace of the Cuban rebels fighting their Spanish colonial masters. He was motivated not just by a coarse desire to sell papers but also by a determination to denounce Spain’s brutal repression, which included reconcentrados, squalid concentration camps for hundreds of thousands that brought endless misery and often death. Parenthetically, Whyte cites Samantha Power, who, in her book “ ‘A Problem From Hell’ ” says America has “never in its history intervened to stop genocide.” In this case, he writes, even though that word was not yet in use, “the American people, with leadership from their newspapers, did . . . ‘muster the imagination needed to reckon with evil.’ ”
Like other biographers, Whyte focuses on what he calls one of the most remarkable anecdotes in American journalism. In January 1897, Hearst dispatched Frederic Remington, the noted sculptor and illustrator, to Cuba to send back drawings of the atrocities. Remington reportedly wired that there would be no war. Hearst is said to have wired back, in what, true or false, may be his most famous utterance: “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”
Neither telegram has ever been found, and Whyte concludes that the only account of this exchange is certainly wrong. Remington was hired for one month and was impatient to return home. America didn’t declare war until 15 months later.
The larger point is that the American public was gradually, inevitably headed for war with Spain. Hearst may have been an enthusiastic, even reckless war lover, but, Whyte writes, he did not and could not have caused armed intervention in Cuba. That’s what Nasaw concluded in his own biography: “Even had William Randolph Hearst never gone into publishing, the United States would nonetheless have declared war on Spain in April of 1898. That Hearst has received so large a measure of credit or blame for that ‘glorious war’ is a tribute to his genius as a self-promoter.”
Whyte, in his research, obviously pored over hundreds of old newspapers, including the trade press. Occasionally, he falls into a “gotcha” mode, triumphantly correcting assertions by prior biographers that seem less than consequential. At times, he seems infected by 1890s-style prose: “His manners were a tad artificial but nonetheless exquisite.”
Still, Whyte accomplishes his mission, achieving the same conclusion that Hearst himself also reached: those were the days. The early years — long before he ran for Congress and president, long before he created his media empire, long before he made that empire a megaphone for the far right — the early years were Hearst’s best."
THE UNCROWNED KING
The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst
By Kenneth Whyte
Illustrated. 546 pp. Counterpoint. $30
