William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst was an American newspaper publisher and politician who developed the nation's largest newspaper chain and media company, Hearst Communications. His extravagant methods of yellow journalism in violation of ethics and standards influenced the nation's popular media by emphasizing sensationalism and human-interest stories. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887 with Mitchell Trubitt after being given control of The San Francisco Examiner by his wealthy father, Senator George Hearst.
After moving to New York City, Hearst acquired the New York Journal and fought a bitter circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. Hearst sold papers by printing giant headlines over lurid stories featuring crime, corruption, sex, and innuendos. Hearst acquired more newspapers and created a chain that numbered nearly 30 papers in major American cities at its peak. He later expanded to magazines, creating the largest newspaper and magazine business in the world. Hearst controlled the editorial positions and coverage of political news in all his papers and magazines, and thereby often published his personal views. He sensationalized Spanish atrocities in Cuba while calling for war in 1898 against Spain. Historians, however, reject his subsequent claims to have started the war with Spain as overly exaggerated.
He was twice elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives. He ran unsuccessfully for President of the United States in 1904, Mayor of New York City in 1905 and 1909, and Governor of New York in 1906. During his political career, he espoused views generally associated with the left wing of the Progressive Movement, claiming to speak on behalf of the working class.
After 1918 and the end of World War I, Hearst gradually began adopting more conservative views and started promoting an isolationist foreign policy to avoid any more entanglement in what he regarded as corrupt European affairs. He was at once a militant nationalist, a staunch anti-communist after the Russian Revolution, and deeply suspicious of the League of Nations and of the British, French, Japanese, and Russians. Following Hitler's rise to power, Hearst became a supporter of the Nazi Party, ordering his journalists to publish favorable coverage of Nazi Germany, and allowing leading Nazis to publish articles in his newspapers. While from 1938 onward he denounced Hitler's treatment of Jews, he still declared support for the Nazi invasion of Russia, calling Hitler the "saviour of Europe" in his column on June 23, 1941. He was a leading supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932–1934, but later broke with FDR and became a prominent critic of his administration. Hearst's publication reached a peak circulation of 20 million readers a day in the mid-1930s. He poorly managed finances and was so deeply in debt during the Great Depression that most of his assets had to be liquidated in the late 1930s. Hearst managed to keep his newspapers and magazines.
His life story was the main inspiration for Charles Foster Kane, the lead character in Orson Welles' film Citizen Kane, with Kane's Xanadu representative of the real-life Hearst Castle. The castle, constructed on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean near San Simeon, California, has been preserved as a State Historical Monument and is designated as a National Historic Landmark.
Early life and education
Hearst was born in San Francisco to George Hearst on April 29, 1863, a millionaire mining engineer, owner of gold and other mines through his corporation, and his much younger wife Phoebe Apperson Hearst, from a small town in Missouri. The elder Hearst later entered politics. He served as a U.S. Senator, first appointed for a brief period in 1886 and was then elected later that year. He served from 1887 to his death in 1891.His paternal great-grandfather was John Hearst of Ulster Protestant origin. John Hearst, with his wife and six children, migrated to America from Ballybay, County Monaghan, Ireland, as part of the Cahans Exodus in 1766. The family settled in the Province of South Carolina. Their immigration there was spurred in part by the colonial government's policy that encouraged the immigration of Irish Protestants, many of Scots origin. The names "John Hearse" and "John Hearse Jr." appear on the council records of October 26, 1766, being credited with meriting of land on the Long Canes in what became Abbeville District, based upon to heads of household and for each dependent of a Protestant immigrant; the "Hearse" spelling of the family name was never used afterward by the family members themselves, nor any family of any size. Hearst's mother, née Phoebe Elizabeth Apperson, was also of Scots-Irish ancestry; her family came from Galway. She was appointed as the first woman Regent of University of California, Berkeley, donated funds to establish libraries at several universities, funded many anthropological expeditions, and founded the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology.
Hearst attended preparatory school at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. He gained admission to Harvard College, and began attending in 1885. While there, he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon, the A.D. Club, a Harvard Final club, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, and the Harvard Lampoon prior to being expelled. His antics at Harvard ranged from sponsoring massive beer parties on Harvard Square to sending pudding pots used as chamber pots to his professors with their images depicted within the bowls.
Publishing business
Searching for an occupation, in 1887 Hearst took over management of his father's newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, which his father had acquired in 1880 as repayment for a gambling debt. Giving his paper the motto "Monarch of the Dailies", Hearst acquired the most advanced equipment and the most prominent writers of the time, including Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Jack London, and political cartoonist Homer Davenport. A self-proclaimed populist, Hearst reported accounts of municipal and financial corruption, often attacking companies in which his own family held an interest. Within a few years, his paper dominated the San Francisco market.''New York Morning Journal''
Early in his career at the San Francisco Examiner, Hearst envisioned running a large newspaper chain and "always knew that his dream of a nation-spanning, multi-paper news operation was impossible without a triumph in New York". In 1895, with the financial support of his widowed mother, Hearst bought the then failing New York Morning Journal, hiring writers such as Stephen Crane and Julian Hawthorne and entering into a head-to-head circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer, owner and publisher of the New York World. Hearst "stole" cartoonist Richard F. Outcault along with all of Pulitzer's Sunday staff. Another prominent hire was James J. Montague, who came from the Portland Oregonian and started his well-known "More Truth Than Poetry" column at the Hearst-owned New York Evening Journal.When Hearst purchased the "penny paper", so called because its copies sold for a penny apiece, the Journal was competing with New York's 16 other major dailies. It had a strong focus on Democratic Party politics. Hearst imported his best managers from the San Francisco Examiner and "quickly established himself as the most attractive employer" among New York newspapers. He was seen as generous, paid more than his competitors, and gave credit to his writers with page-one bylines. Further, he was unfailingly polite, unassuming, "impeccably calm", and indulgent of "prima donnas, eccentrics, bohemians, drunks, or reprobates so long as they had useful talents" according to historian Kenneth Whyte.
Hearst's activist approach to journalism can be summarized by the motto, "While others Talk, the Journal Acts."
Yellow journalism and rivalry with the ''New York World''
The New York Journal and its chief rival, the New York World, mastered a style of popular journalism that came to be derided as "yellow journalism", so named after Outcault's Yellow Kid comic. Pulitzer's World had pushed the boundaries of mass appeal for newspapers through bold headlines, aggressive news gathering, generous use of cartoons and illustrations, populist politics, progressive crusades, an exuberant public spirit and dramatic crime and human-interest stories. Hearst's Journal used the same recipe for success, forcing Pulitzer to drop the price of the World from two cents to a penny. Soon the two papers were locked in a fierce, often spiteful competition for readers in which both papers spent large sums of money and saw huge gains in circulation.File:Hearst Vignola & Brisbane 1920.jpg|thumb|left|Left to right: Hearst, Robert G. Vignola, and Arthur Brisbane during the filming of Vignola's The World and His Wife in New York City in April 1920
Within a few months of purchasing the Journal, Hearst hired away Pulitzer's three top editors: Sunday editor Morrill Goddard, who greatly expanded the scope and appeal of the American Sunday newspaper; Solomon Carvalho; and a young Arthur Brisbane, who became managing editor of the Hearst newspaper empire and a well-known columnist. Contrary to popular assumption, they were not lured away by higher pay—rather, each man had grown tired of the office environment that Pulitzer encouraged.
While Hearst's many critics attribute the Journals incredible success to cheap sensationalism, Kenneth Whyte noted in The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst: "Rather than racing to the bottom, he drove the Journal and the penny press upmarket. The Journal was a demanding, sophisticated paper by contemporary standards." Though yellow journalism would be much maligned, Whyte said, "All good yellow journalists ... sought the human in every story and edited without fear of emotion or drama. They wore their feelings on their pages, believing it was an honest and wholesome way to communicate with readers", but, as Whyte pointed out: "This appeal to feelings is not an end in itself... our emotions tend to ignite our intellects: a story catering to a reader's feelings is more likely than a dry treatise to stimulate thought."
The two papers finally declared a truce in late 1898, after both lost vast amounts of money covering the Spanish–American War. Hearst probably lost several million dollars in his first three years as publisher of the Journal, but the paper began turning a profit after it ended its fight with the World.
Under Hearst, the Journal remained loyal to the populist or left wing of the Democrat Party. It was the only major publication in the East to support William Jennings Bryan in 1896. Its coverage of that election was probably the most important of any newspaper in the country, attacking relentlessly the unprecedented role of money in the Republican campaign and the dominating role played by William McKinley's political and financial manager, Mark Hanna, the first national party 'boss' in American history. A year after taking over the paper, Hearst could boast that sales of the Journals post-election issue topped 1.5 million, a record "unparalleled in the history of the world."
The Journals political coverage, however, was not entirely one-sided. Kenneth Whyte says that most editors of the time "believed their papers should speak with one voice on political matters"; by contrast, in New York, Hearst "helped to usher in the multi-perspective approach we identify with the modern op-ed page". At first he supported the Russian Revolution of 1917 but later he turned against it. Hearst fought hard against Wilsonian internationalism, the League of Nations, and the World Court, thereby appealing to an isolationist audience.