The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst by Kenneth Whyte

direct comparisons of financial resources are impossible. Despite all the fuss about Hearst’s money and its impact on the newspaper industry, we have only the murkiest picture of his accounts. We know what he paid for the Journal. We know that he drove harder bargains and made his money go further than has been credited. We know that his mother had committed a million for his new paper, but that he didn’t receive the sum until the summer of 1896, and he probably didn’t spend more than a few hundred thousand in the interim, during which the Journal was substantially relaunched. We know that Stump expected the Journal ’s monthly operating losses to be $20,000 40 and that, at the heights of the coming war, the paper would for several consecutive months lose approximately $150,000, much to Phoebe’s chagrin. It is likely that Will spent several million on the Journal —possibly as much as $5 million—before it began to pay.
     
    Five million is not as much as Bennett Jr. and Pulitzer sank into their yachts, but it is a large sum. Much of Hearst’s cash went to capital assets, including what was probably the newspaper world’s most advanced printing plant, and all of it has to be considered an investment in establishing himself against entrenched competition in the richest publishing market in the world, an inherently expensive undertaking. His chief rivals could afford to match him dollar for dollar, and their competitive costs were lower than his (it requires far less to defend an established business than to grow a new one). There was always a chance he might get wiped out, but if Hearst succeeded, he would have a franchise capable of spinning out a million a year in profits and the nucleus of a national chain of newspapers. High risk, high reward.
     
    What really distinguished Hearst from his fellow proprietors at the end of 1895—and what must have frightened them most—was not the wealth at his disposal but that he was young, talented, driven, and willing to put everything he had on the line in pursuit of his journalistic ambitions. He was far more interested in making a great paper than in turning a profit. He believed that if he conquered Park Row, his finances would sort themselves out. “I didn’t care about making money,” he said some years later, “at least not just to make money.” 41 One of his financial advisers expanded on this point: “Money as such bores him. His idea of money is that it is something to do something with. He is a builder. He wants to build buildings. . . . His idea is to build, build, build all the time.” 42
     
    No one was more astounded by Will’s attitude toward money than his mother’s banker, who was charged with delivering the funds she had earmarked for him. “I asked Will how he wanted the million paid to him,” Hosmer Parsons wrote Pheobe, “and he said ‘I don’t want any million, I would not know what to do with it.’” Will told Parsons he would prefer to simply draw what he needed from his mother as he went along. “There are not many in America,” wrote Parsons, “who would neglect a chance to claim a million of dollars.” The banker eventually convinced Hearst to deposit the sum in a trust company, and when the matter was finally settled, Parsons observed to Phoebe: “Will is a very peculiar man and cannot be judged by usual standards.” 43
     
    Hearst was also peculiar among the New York newspaper barons in that he was willing to invest his full attention in his daily. Bennett had established and perfected the role of absentee proprietor, cabling his editors comments and instructions from across the Atlantic as though they were just across the hall. He rarely visited the Herald ’s headquarters, or New York, for that matter. Pulitzer emulated Bennett in this regard. He traveled incessantly, never working a day under the golden dome of the World Building, yet he managed to exercise unquestioned control of his paper’s operations. Reid broke