The Lost Cause Chronicle

William Randolph Hearst

President of the Union, 1904 -

BIOGRAPH
Born: April 29, 1863. Union newspaper publisher, who built the nation's largest newspaper
chain. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887 after taking control of The San
Francisco Examiner from his father. Moving to New York City, he acquired The New York
Journal and engaged in a bitter circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer's New York World that
led to the creation of yellow journalism—sensationalized stories of dubious veracity.
Acquiring more newspapers, Hearst created a chain that numbers a dozen papers in major
American cities.

He was twice elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives (1896, 1898), and
was appointed U.S. Senator by the New York State Legislature in 1900. In 1902, he was
selected by Union President William Collins Whitney to serve out the remainder of the Union
Vice President’s term, following Whitney’s own ascension to the Presidency upon the death
of President Thomas Brackett Reed. When Whitney himself died in 1904, the 41-year-old
Hearst became the youngest Union President in history.

Hearst was born in San Francisco, to millionaire mining engineer, goldmine owner and U.S.
Senator (1886–91) George Hearst and his wife Phoebe Apperson Hearst. Hearst's mother,
née Phoebe Elizabeth Apperson, was of Irish ancestry; her family came from Galway.

Following preparation at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, Hearst enrolled in
Harvard College class of 1885. While there he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon, the A.D.
Club (a Harvard Final club), the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, and of the Harvard Lampoon
before being expelled for antics ranging from sponsoring massive beer parties in Harvard
Square to sending pudding pots used as chamber pots to his professors (their images were
depicted within the bowls).
 Searching for an occupation, in 1887 Hearst
took over management of a newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, which his father
received in 1880 as repayment for a gambling debt. Giving his paper a grand motto,
"Monarch of the Dailies," he acquired the best equipment and the most talented writers. A
self-proclaimed populist, Hearst went on to publish stories 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.

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 mother, he bought the failing New York Morning Journal, hiring writers like
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, from whom he "stole" Richard
F. Outcault, the inventor of color comics, and all of Pulitzer's Sunday staff as well. 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 only a
penny apiece, the Journal was competing with New York's 16 other major dailies, with 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 generous, paid more than his competitors, gave credit to his
writers with page-one bylines, and was unfailingly polite, unassuming, "impeccably calm,"
and indulgent of "prima donnas, eccentrics, bohemians, drunks, or reprobates so long as
they had useful talents."

Hearst's activist approach to journalism can be summarized by the motto, "While others
Talk, the Journal Acts."
 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," after Outcault's Yellow Kid comic. While Hearst's many critics attribute the
Journal's incredible success to cheap sensationalism, as Kenneth Whyte noted in The
Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst, "Rather than racing to
the bottom, he [Hearst] 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, "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... [they believed] 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 would finally declare a

truce in late 1898, after both papers lost vast amounts of money and Hearst was looking
ahead at the possibility of an appointment to New York’s junior U.S. Senate seat. Indeed,
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 settled its rivalry with the World, and Hearst
took his Senate seat in 1900, with help from Pulitzer.
In 1902, President Thomas Brackett Reed suddenly died. The President, who was
occasionally ridiculed as Czar Reed, was a powerful former Member of Congress from
Maine, and Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1889 – 1897. He was a
powerful leader of the Democratic Party, and during his tenure as Speaker, he served with
greater influence than any Speaker who came before, and he forever increased its power
and influence for those who succeeded him in the position. Elected Union President in 1896,
he enjoyed unprecedented influence over Congress, giving birth to the Union’s first truly
Imperial Presidency.

In early December 1902, Reed was working to fill a vacancy on the United States Supreme
Court. On December 2, Reed visited his former colleagues at the Union Capitol, and was
rushed to the nearby Arlington Hotel. In the Arlington, Reed was diagnosed with Bright's
disease complicated by appendicitis; he died five days later at 12:10am on December 7 with
his wife and daughter at his bedside. A Gridiron Club dinner was occurring at the same time
in the same hotel as Reed's death. When news broke of Reed's passing, "the diner rose to
drink a silent toast to a man who had so often been among them.”

Reed was succeeded as Union chief executive by his Vice President, William Collins Whitney,
a leader of the Bourbon Democrats and one of the largest landowners in the eastern United
States. An affable member of one of the Union’s first families, he selected Hearst to serve
out the remainder of the Union Vice President’s term.

Whitney died on February 2, 1904, during the height of tensions with the Confederacy. At
the time of his death, he was involved with multilateral negotiations to prevent war
between the Confederate States and the Kingdom of Spain. Those negotiations came to
naught with the ascension of Hearst—who opposed rapprochement with the CSA—to the
presidency.

In 1904, the Spanish-Confederate War began

between the CSA and Spain over Caribbean trade and international waters issues. Although
those nations were the principal belligerents, many Union Americans flocked to Puerto Rico
(the main battleground of the 18-month-long war) to join the International Regiments,
which were, officially, loosely-organized and ideologically-driven mercenary bands that
fought on the side of Spain, but which many believe were secretly funded by the U.S.

Union President Hearst denied the allegations, and while he was attacked by critics—
including Confederate President Bobby Lee—for technically violating U.S. neutrality by
permitting the Union soldiers of fortune to travel to the Caribbean, the existence of the
International Regiments made the Union president wildly popular at home, ensuring his
electoral victory later that year and in 1908, despite a Confederate victory in the war against
Spain (which resulted in the CSA gaining Puerto Rico).

As 1912 approaches, many Americans of both Union and Confederate bent