The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst by Kenneth Whyte Page A
Authors: Kenneth Whyte
Ads: Link
with Pulitzer and Bennett only in his willingness to delegate management responsibilities to trusted colleagues; he thought nothing of holding his editorship and various diplomatic postings simultaneously. Even Dana, in his dotage, was increasingly aloof from the Sun, publishing four books in a three-year span. Bennett, Pulitzer, Reid, and Dana—among the most admired editors in the history of American journalism—were the unmistakable leaders of their newspaper operations. But none of them was really at home at the moment the Journal rushed out of the gate.
CHAPTER FIVE
Like a Blast Furnace, a Hundred Times Multiplied
W ill Hearst’s politics owed much to his father’s politics, which were far more substantive than the senator’s reputation allows. Knocked for buying his way into the U.S. Senate and drinking his way around Washington—facts that are not really in dispute—George Hearst nonetheless gave a lifetime of meaningful support to the Democratic Party and its causes, setting an example his son would follow well into middle age.
George began attending political meetings in boyhood and was a delegate to a Missouri Democratic convention at age twenty-six. Almost two decades later, in 1865, he was elected to the California state legislature. As a southerner and a Democrat, he sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War and voted in the legislature against the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment, requiring states to provide all citizens equal protection under the law. He was a strong advocate of states’ rights throughout his career, identifying with the South and West against the Northeast and promoting individual liberties against government paternalism. He was also a relentless critic of Republican coziness with Wall Street and of Washington’s systems of preferment and protections for industry. To his wife’s annoyance, he poured as much as $500,000 a year into the Democratic machine. 1
George Hearst’s political career took off after he failed to win the Democratic nomination for governor of California in 1882. He was subsequently appointed by the man who beat him, General George Stoneman, to finish the term of a deceased U.S. senator, and later elected to the Senate for his own six-year term. He sat on several committees and was the Democratic point man on the Southern Pacific Railroad file, one of the thorniest tangles of commercial, political, legal, and constitutional issues then extant. But Senator Hearst was no silk-hat statesman. The issues he tackled were mostly related to his regional or commercial interests. The few speeches he made in the chamber were remembered as “blissfully short.” 2 He exerted influence through personal relationships and his seat at the regular Senate poker game. It is worth noting that almost all Gilded Age senators either paid for their seats or had someone else pay for them—and however thirsty George Hearst may have been, he was never short of drinking companions in Washington.
Will was proud of his father’s contributions to public life and freely admitted that George was the major influence on his own politics. He absorbed noblesse oblige from both parents but chose the senator’s example of service through partisan wrangling and journalism over the philanthropic route advocated by Phoebe, who still considered politics demeaning. Will not only followed his father into the Democratic Party, but beat many of the same policy drums, although with the benefit of a few semesters at Harvard, he talked a better game. Will defined himself as a Jeffersonian Democrat, by which he meant a defender of individuals, small businessmen, and farmers against overreaching central governments and concentrated capital in the form of monopolies and trusts. 3 (Trusts were a relatively new corporate structure designed to give a small ownership group the ability to fix prices or otherwise restrain trade in an entire
CHAPTER FIVE
Like a Blast Furnace, a Hundred Times Multiplied
W ill Hearst’s politics owed much to his father’s politics, which were far more substantive than the senator’s reputation allows. Knocked for buying his way into the U.S. Senate and drinking his way around Washington—facts that are not really in dispute—George Hearst nonetheless gave a lifetime of meaningful support to the Democratic Party and its causes, setting an example his son would follow well into middle age.
George began attending political meetings in boyhood and was a delegate to a Missouri Democratic convention at age twenty-six. Almost two decades later, in 1865, he was elected to the California state legislature. As a southerner and a Democrat, he sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War and voted in the legislature against the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment, requiring states to provide all citizens equal protection under the law. He was a strong advocate of states’ rights throughout his career, identifying with the South and West against the Northeast and promoting individual liberties against government paternalism. He was also a relentless critic of Republican coziness with Wall Street and of Washington’s systems of preferment and protections for industry. To his wife’s annoyance, he poured as much as $500,000 a year into the Democratic machine. 1
George Hearst’s political career took off after he failed to win the Democratic nomination for governor of California in 1882. He was subsequently appointed by the man who beat him, General George Stoneman, to finish the term of a deceased U.S. senator, and later elected to the Senate for his own six-year term. He sat on several committees and was the Democratic point man on the Southern Pacific Railroad file, one of the thorniest tangles of commercial, political, legal, and constitutional issues then extant. But Senator Hearst was no silk-hat statesman. The issues he tackled were mostly related to his regional or commercial interests. The few speeches he made in the chamber were remembered as “blissfully short.” 2 He exerted influence through personal relationships and his seat at the regular Senate poker game. It is worth noting that almost all Gilded Age senators either paid for their seats or had someone else pay for them—and however thirsty George Hearst may have been, he was never short of drinking companions in Washington.
Will was proud of his father’s contributions to public life and freely admitted that George was the major influence on his own politics. He absorbed noblesse oblige from both parents but chose the senator’s example of service through partisan wrangling and journalism over the philanthropic route advocated by Phoebe, who still considered politics demeaning. Will not only followed his father into the Democratic Party, but beat many of the same policy drums, although with the benefit of a few semesters at Harvard, he talked a better game. Will defined himself as a Jeffersonian Democrat, by which he meant a defender of individuals, small businessmen, and farmers against overreaching central governments and concentrated capital in the form of monopolies and trusts. 3 (Trusts were a relatively new corporate structure designed to give a small ownership group the ability to fix prices or otherwise restrain trade in an entire
Similar Books
