The Uncrowned King
The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst

Current disclosure practices require me to mention that the author of The Uncrowned King, Kenneth Whyte, is a friend of many years and that we happily worked together on several publications. He is a brilliant editor and publisher, as is abundantly clear from his many insights in this ground-breaking book about William Randolph Hearst. If it were not an excellent book, I would have declined to review it.

The picture of Hearst that emerges here is far more credible and nuanced than any that has been seriously advanced before. The Hearst legend preceded any serious consultation of primary sources by many years, and Ken Whyte has very assiduously gone through thousands of editions of all the New York titles in the first several years of Hearst's ownership of the New York Journal and an enterprising breadth of relevant correspondence. The long-accepted take on Hearst relied on Orson Welles's "fine but scurrilous film" Citizen Kane, W. A. Swanberg's 1961 biography, Citizen Hearst (evidently a sequel to the film though somewhat more favorable in its conclusions), and David Nasaw's The Chief (2000).

Previously, the conventional wisdom was that Hearst raised up the circulation of the Journal to over a million and sometimes higher in three years, simply by digging lower, defaming more vituperatively, and stirring base mass passions more shamelessly than his competitors, as well as by throwing his parents' money out of the windows in herniating packets, and that it all came easily.

Hearst bought the Journal for $150,000 borrowed from his mother, in October 1895. His father, Senator George Hearst, had died in 1891, four years after he had given his son the money to buy the San Francisco Examiner at age twenty-four. The elder Hearst had been an extraordinarily successful prospector and miner, developing, among others, the Anaconda (copper) and Homestake (gold) Mines.

Ken Whyte meticulously, but without pedantry or tedious repetition, compares the principal newspapers in the crowded New York field of the 1890s, all led by strong publishers, each of them still almost as legendary as Hearst. The Journal's circulation was a little over 50,000—and nearly 40,000 for its German edition—with a cover price of just one cent. There was the stylishly dissolute but editorially astute James Gordon Bennett Jr. at the Herald (circulation 175,000 at two pennies per copy); the conservative and intellectual former vice-presidential candidate Whitelaw Reid at the Tribune (120,000, three cents); the brilliant and acidulous Edwin L. Godkin at the Post (20,000, three cents); Adolph S. Ochs, the extremely successful builder of the Times (well below 50,000 and about to enter receivership when Ochs bought it); and Hearst's two immediate precursors in broadening the appeal of American newspapers, Charles A. Dana at the Sun (120,000, two cents), and the immensely successful Joseph E. Pulitzer at the World (250,000, two cents). These seven men, including Hearst, among the most famous publishers in newspaper history.

Dana had been a transcendentalist and a friend of Emerson and Hawthorne; he had worked for Horace Greeley at the Tribune, where he engaged Dickens, the Brontës, and his friendly acquaintance Karl Marx, as contributors. He was the assistant secretary of war in the Lincoln administration, a biographer of U. S. Grant, and a successful encyclopedia editor who spoke twelve languages. He bought the distressed Sun in 1868, and produced an elegantly written, witty newspaper that surpassed Greeley's Tribune, in a pattern that would become familiar. He tripled the Sun's circulation to 150,000. (Greeley died after running unsuccessfully against Grant for the presidency in 1872, even before the electoral votes were counted.)

Joseph E. Pulitzer was born in 1847 into a prosperous Hungarian Jewish family. He emigrated to the United States via recruitment into the U.S. Army in 1864 by one of the commissioned recruit hunters the Union sent around Europe and moved to St. Louis at the end of the Civil War. He had a great success with a St. Louis German-language newspaper, moved to New York and worked for Dana for a couple of years, bought the St. Louis Dispatch in 1878, and, after conspicuous success with it, bought the New York World from the financier Jay Gould in 1883.

Pulitzer introduced enticing and prominent headlines, front-page illustrations, and a broader and more daring version of human interest stories. Relations with Dana quickly degenerated into nasty ethnic and other slurs. The Sun, despite Dana's exalted Emersonian scruples, called Pulitzer "Joey the Jew," "Judas Pulitzer," and the "Jew who does not want to be a Jew." Pulitzer claimed that Dana had Greek ancestry (he didn't): that he came from "a treacherous and drunken" race. The World called Dana a "mendacious blackguard" who had stolen a life preserver from a drowning woman to save himself when a ship foundered (a complete fiction). This was the rough and tumble arena Hearst entered when he directly challenged the mighty New York World in 1895.

Swanberg and Nassaw and almost all others have claimed that Hearst gained ground by coarsening the craft, inventing and sensationalizing stories, and dispensing huge sums in order to poach from Pulitzer's best staff. Ken Whyte demolishes this theory with a careful analysis of the different newspapers, almost day by day, and the exact dates of significant migrations between the mastheads. Hearst was more imaginative in finding and promoting causes and in front-page design, but he was not markedly more irresponsible than Pulitzer and some of the others. He hired more newsboys, ran more editions, and engaged in more audacious promotions. He was more astute than anyone at identifying stories that would seize the public's interest.

Hearst stayed away from ethnic slurs, (and was admirably free of such prejudices, even lecturing Hitler forty years later on the virtues of Jews). While he spent liberally, he had a budget from his mother, who carefully doled out her son's equal share (as an only child) of Senator Hearst's estate. Hearst started by importing some of his best writers and editors from his Examiner, and many of those who came from Pulitzer were not raided but voluntarily defected, seeing the rise of Hearst and affronted by Pulitzer's tendency to terrible rages as the pressures on him rose.

The author opens this section of his history by writing that Swanberg, Nasaw, and others ascribed Hearst's success to "shallow and lurid" journalism, and that it is "one of the curiosities of the Hearst literature that their treatment of Hearst tends toward the shallow and lurid." His case is unanswerable.

Similarly, after a thorough canvass of the main New York newspapers, Whyte states that it is not clear that Hearst was more addicted to sensationalism than Pulitzer and some others. His competitors' attacks on the Journal as a "chamber of horrors, a procuress, a brothel, a criminal, a moral disease, a rattlesnake, and a licentious vulgarian without example in the history of journalism" were, he writes, at least as sensational and exaggerated as anything to be found in the Journal itself.

In the great presidential election of 1896, when the Democrat William Jennings Bryan carried the standard of silver coinage, bimetallism, against the conservative Republican William McKinley, Hearst pulled out all the populist stops for Bryan. The Sun saw Bryan as "the advance of the skirmish line of communism and anarchy." The Times called Bryan "an ignorant, pathetically enthusiastic crank" leading a "freaky aggregation of aliens." The Tribune called the Democratic candidate "a rattle-pated, vapid, mouther of rottenness … [and] champion of the right to pillage, riot, and train-wrecking." Pulitzer accused Hearst of serving his family's silver interests by helping to assemble a colossal conspiracy of the "temple of the Silver Knights of America" to rape the country of billions through the scam of bimetallism.

Hearst fired back effectively, but with comparative restraint. On the day after the election, November 4, 1896, all editions of the Journal, which had been selling barely 50,000 copies a year before, sold 1,394,000 copies, plus 112,000 copies of the German edition. This amazing achievement cannot be explained in the simplistic and often false terms that have hitherto been applied. Through most of 1897, the Journal and Pulitzer's World ran neck-and-neck at a little over 750,000 daily sale, before ramping up to unheard-of circulations on the back of the Cuban crisis.

Cuba had been in a state of revolt for decades and had not been very gently governed by the Spanish. About 200,000 people had perished in the Ten Years' War (1868–1878), and the conflict had sputtered on unresolved into the 1890s. This was a natural subject for American sympathy. Anti-imperialist sentiment was strong in the United States, but generally not as strong as pacifist sentiment. Swanberg described Hearst's beating of the Cuban war drums as "the most disgraceful example of journalistic falsehood ever seen."

In fact, as Whyte points out, this campaign began eight months before Hearst bought the Journal, and his competitors were the worst offenders, producing such gems as "Amazon-like Beauties Overwhelming Columns of Spanish Soldiers," and "Insurgent Cannons Fashioned From Tree Trunks." One of Hearst's more notorious headlines, about the Spanish "Feeding Prisoners to Sharks," was true, though the men had been executed prior to their immersion.

What really stoked up American outrage was the escalation of provocations, from the heroic death by firing squad of the dashing revolutionary Adolfo Rodríguez to the rescue of the beautiful revolutionary maiden Evangelina Cisneros to the destruction of the U.S. warship Maine. The Journal ran a beautifully written account of Rodríguez's execution by the distinguished writer Richard Harding Davis that presaged Hemingway at his best, accompanied by a brilliant sketch of the execution, taking almost all of the front page, by the renowned Frederic Remington (February 2, 1897).

Hearst contributed his yacht and hired a fleet of dispatch boats to cover the Cuban story and take copy to Jamaica for uncensored transmission to New York. He sent "Special Commissioners" to Cuba, including the Dickensianly named U.S. Senator Hernando De Soto Money.

A few days after the Rodríguez execution, the Journal ran a front-page illustration of raffish Spanish officers examining a naked, shapely young lady, whose well-sculpted back, posterior, and legs were depicted for the readers, accompanied by another graphic description by Davis of this outrage inflicted on three unoffending American women. It turned out that the inspection had actually been by female Spanish officials. In the prurient and agitated atmosphere of its time, this story had quite an impact, but was a mere sorbet compared to the saga of Evangelina Cisneros that unfolded eight months later.

Apparently the Spanish were going to send this seventeen-year-old girl to an equatorial African prison for twenty years because of her unrepentant participation in the insurgency. Hearst saw the potential of this story immediately and organized an immense petition of American women, including President McKinley's mother and George Washington's grand-niece, asking the Spanish queen-regent, Maria Christina, for clemency. At Hearst's behest, Julia Ward Howe, the author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, wrote in the same manner to Pope Leo XIII, who summoned the Spanish ambassador to the Holy See to discuss the issue.

In October 1897, after milking the story for eight months, the Journal bribed guards and rescued the pretty señorita from her prison. Hearst brought her to the United States to a huge reception that included McKinley. Hearst was Sir Galahad, if not D'Artagnan, rescuing the damsel in distress. Miss Cisneros departed from the Hearst script somewhat by applying for American citizenship in her first full day in the United States, but she assured reporters that she intended to take to the convent in thankfulness for her deliverance and pray full-time for her native land. In fact, "the blameless flower of Cuba" (as the Journal styled her) succumbed to more earthly distractions and married a Cuban-American businessman a few months later.

As Pulitzer tried to debunk the damsel story, the Journal ran cartoons of General Weyler (the ham-fisted Spanish commander in Cuba by now familiar to New York newspaper readers) leading serried ranks of grotesque little Pulitzer lookalikes in a quasi-goose step parade.

Historians have taken some extreme psychological liberties with Hearst over this incident. Swanberg wrote of the Cisneros affair that Hearst became

a creature of pure fantasy… . He could enter into a dreamworld and, like a child, live out a heroic role in it, brushing aside humdrum reality.

Again, it is much more accurate to claim that Swanberg's fatuous mind-reading takes place in a fantasy world. There is no evidence that Hearst thought of this episode as other than a rather humorous promotional opportunity.

The most famous line of Hearst's life—"You furnish the pictures and I will furnish the war"—was probably never uttered. There is no record of such a telegram. Remington, the supposed recipient of it, never mentioned it, and Hearst himself called the story, written by another journalist, James Creelman, who did not claim to have seen such an exchange, "clotted nonsense."

Of course, the Cuban crisis cracked open with the destruction of the USS Maine in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898. The cause has never been discovered, but modern forensic studies indicate that it was most likely an internal explosion caused by a coal fire igniting a magazine. At 319 feet and 6,682 tons, the Maine was a cruiser, not a battleship, and was not "one of the most imposing things afloat," as described. But it was a shocking incident that killed 266 American sailors.

Hearst went to Cuba in person, reported very professionally himself, went right into combat zones, produced daily English and Spanish newspapers in Cuba, and was given the flag that flew over Santiago in the decisive battle of the war by the rebel commanders in gratitude for his support of the insurrection.

By this time, all the New York newspapers were war-mongering. While Godkin in the Post suggested that Hearst had blown up the Maine himself, the Sun and the Times complimented him on his courage, prescience, and on his own reportage. The World carped and the Journal responded by running a brief story on the death in the field of the "renowned Austrian artillerist, Reflipe W. Thenuz." The World cribbed the item and ran it, and the Journal delightedly trumpeted that the item was a canard, and an anagram for "We pilfer the nuz [news]."

The Spanish war was not an unjust one, and Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines did much better with the United States than as colonies of Spain. Spanish misrule, especially the suppurating sore in Cuba, had to end. Ken Whyte makes the very interesting point that the death of approximately 300,000 Cubans in the last thirty years of Spanish rule qualifies as an act of genocide, and was the only such act which the United States has intervened to stop, unlike the twentieth-century massacres of the Armenians by the Turks, European Jews by the Germans, Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge, Bosnian non-Serbs by the Bosnian Serbs, or Rwandan Tutsis by the Hutus.

At the supreme height of the Cuba story, as Hearst was dodging bullets and Teddy Roosevelt was climbing San Juan Hill, the New York Journal sold the astonishing total of 2.7 million copies, the highest daily circulation in the history of the world up to that time, and fifty times its circulation just three years before. Despite his colossal success, Hearst wrote to his mother shortly after the Spanish-American War that he thought himself a "failure." Ken Whyte treads cautiously close to Swanbergian mind-reading by speculating that the reason for this was that, despite his influence, the politicians—the McKinleys and Roosevelts—ruled; his dreams of what newspapers could do to govern America were frustrated. This is at least just a tentative view, and it is probably as good a guess as any, though Hearst's negative self-evaluation does not seem to have lasted long.

This is an excellent if perhaps narrowly focused book. At a time when the newspaper industry is in extremis, and even the greatest titles, like the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, are imperiled, it is refreshing to read of the industry at its most imaginative and effervescent. Readers, as they finish this book, may wish—as I do—that Ken Whyte would produce a second volume to do justice to the balance of Hearst's very long career.

© 2025 Conrad Black