Hearst's Legacy

William Randolph Hearst is dead--as dead as yesterday's tabloid. But his name, like a faded headline, is a yellowing memento of the Yellow Age of U.S. journalism, when the potentate of the penny press sometimes seemed to wield more power than the President, when live bullets flew and dead bodies fell in circulation wars, and a newspaper was often the last place anybody looked for news.

In Citizen Hearst (Scribner; $7.50), Biographer William Andrew (Jim Fisk, Sickles the Incredible) Swanberg swings lustily into the latest effort to explain and understand that extraordinary man. It is an all but impossible task, and Swanberg, who even enlisted the service of a psychiatrist in his attempt to solve the Hearstian enigma, does not succeed. What he has produced is a fascinating, exhaustive and meticulously impartial study of a man whose true meaning eluded all who knew him.

"Not Newspapers at All!" But if Hearst the man defies understanding, his influence on journalism can be measured with micrometer accuracy. It was heavy, lasting, and often malign. The conclusion is unavoidable, and Swanberg, for all his book's devotion to impartiality, draws it again and again. "Considerations of taste in journalism didn't disturb him," the biographer reports. "He had long since decided that the masses had no time or training for such a luxury as taste, and could be reached and molded most effeclively by the noise, sensation and repetition which he liked himself." The Hearst-papers, Swanberg argues, "were not newspapers at all. They were printed entertainment and excitement--the equivalent in newsprint of bombs exploding, bands blaring, firecrackers popping, victims screaming, flags waving, houris dancing, and smoke rising from the singed flesh of executed criminals."

Hearst's "sure instinct for vulgarity" found first expression on the San Francisco Examiner, a limp rag that his father, George, who had made millions in mining, had taken over on a bad debt. In 1887, at 23, ambitious Willie wheedled the Examiner from his parent. In his very first issue, he ran a tearjerker on Page One about foundlings in a lying-in hospital, together with a juicy story about the trials of one Job Cram--whose affliction was a heavy-drinking wife. Hearst also wooed his readers with sure-fire crusades, among them a protracted campaign against the imperious and unpopular Southern Pacific Railroad. Southern Pacific trains ran so consistently late, sneered the Examiner, that "the passenger is exposed to the perils of senility."

The Journal's War. Within four years the Examiner's circulation trebled, and the paper soon took on the black glow of financial health. Hearst moved impatiently on; with $7,500,000 conned from mother, he invaded New York. He needed all his grubstake, and more, for he bought the sickly Morning Journal (circ. 77,000) and led it into mortal battle against Joseph Pulitzer's powerful World (morning and evening circ. 500,000). The fight drained his funds at the rate of $100,000 a month. The Journal picked up strength from circulation promotions and from some of the best talent in the business--much of it lured from the World's newsroom--but Hearst had larger excitement in mind. Eying the Spanish colony of Cuba, where revolt had been smoldering for years, Hearst decided to stir up a war of his own.

The result, writes Swanberg, was "the orgasmic acme of ruthless, truthless newspaper jingoism." Hearstmen in Cuba trumped up atrocity stories to The Chief's (and the public's) taste. Sent down to draw the look of battle, Artist Frederic Remington cabled his desire to return: EVERYTHING is QUIET. THERE is NO TROUBLE HERE. THERE WILL BE NO WAR. Hearst's infamous response: PLEASE REMAIN. YOU FURNISH THE PICTURES AND I'LL FURNISH THE WAR. Seizing upon the still-unexplained sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor as an excuse, Hearst whipped the U.S. into a chauvinistic frenzy. And when the war that Hearst wanted finally flared, he could not resist crowing for two days on the Journal's front page: HOW DO YOU LIKE THE JOURNAL'S WAR?

Dismembered Monastery. At the zenith of his career, Hearst's empire included 26 daily papers, 11 magazines, 13 million readers and 38,000 salaried subjects. He owned mines and ranches in Mexico, $50 million in mid-Manhattan real estate, $50 million in objets d'art (including a dismembered monastery), and castles all over. On his vast timberlands at Wyntoon, in Northern California, he refused to let a single tree be cut. Any aspect of death dismayed him utterly.

But even as his kingdom grew, it degenerated. The upkeep was staggering--up to $6.000 a day just to run San Simeon--and a waning public appetite for vulgarity in journalism had turned the Hearst papers into anachronisms, with little experience in what the new reader wanted. In 1937 a team of horrified accountants, assigned to probe Hearst's 94-corporation maze, discovered that The Chief was $126 million in hock. Neither Hearst nor his papers ever recovered from their retrenchment.

Ultimate Desecration. But even as his empire dwindled, Hearst maintained editorial control. Each morning he sat in nis San Simeon study, spread the Hearst-papers on a priceless Persian rug and turned the pages with his slippered feet. Memos continued to clatter out over his private Teletype. He kept visitors hanging around San Simeon for days before granting them the audience they sought.

When he died in 1951, at 88, the remnants of his empire passed to his sons. But actual control went to hard-eyed businessmen who, in their own way, have proved as ruthless as The Chief. Interested primarily in the ledger book, these men have sold off four Hearstpapers (while adding one, the Albany, N.Y. Knickerbocker News). From its high-water mark, the list is down to 13 dailies. Hearst's profitable magazine holdings have been expanded. The new management has also committed the ultimate desecration by logging Wyntoon.

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