Money talks

William Randolph Hearst sits with two large, animated money bags resting on his lap, with arms and legs, and showing two large coins as heads. On the floor next to Hearst is a box labeled “WRH Ventriloquist.”

comments and context

Comments and Context

William Randolph Hearst was a phenomenon in American life for almost 65 years. His father George was a mining prospector whose discovery of silver, then gold, led to dominance in other fields, and lucrative investments in vast lands and livestock. George was elected Senator from California and presented his son “Willie” with the San Francisco Examiner as a plaything after the latter’s expulsion from Harvard.

Before his death in 1951, Hearst built a chain of more than 40 newspapers, many magazines, syndicates, radio stations, wire services, movie studios, and affiliated enterprises (lumber for newsprint, South American cattle for beef trade). He was godfather to the comic strip through pioneering color supplements, and owned early animated-cartoon studios. His career was unsympathetically portrayed in the classic movie Citizen Kane. Many of his properties still exist, now spread to cable and syndication television, and so do some his physical monuments like his spectacular fairyland of an estate in California, San Simeon.

Associated with “yellow journalism,” Hearst and rival New York publisher Joseph Pulitzer frequently were lower than stereotypes of cheap tabloids. In fact, Pulitzer was caught stealing cables from rivals’ reporters during the Spanish-American War, and inventing headlines about President Roosevelt (who had to be restrained from suing Pulitzer’s New York World). Pulitzer’s name is respectable today largely because he endowed the Columbia School of Journalism and its Pulitzer Prizes.

The mercurial Hearst wore his convictions on his sleeve. Early, as a publisher, he allied himself with William Jennings Bryan and radical politics. He eventually broke with Democrats Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt and, by the end of his career, famously was a right-wing, anti-Communist crusader.

The point of Keppler’s cover cartoon about Hearst in Puck, 1906, might be lost on readers more than a century later. In addition to myriad other interests, Hearst for several years harbored an ambition for elective politics, running for New York mayor, governor, and the Democratic presidential nomination (he balloted second-place in 1904). He served two terms in the House of Representatives.

If Hearst could not be king, in politics, he could be — and was — a king-maker. The attitudes of his papers, their cartoonists, and his own money, could make or break candidates. Keppler’s cartoon, effective in its simplicity, is not that Hearst influenced other wealthy people to reflect his views, but that his own vast wealth provided numerous outlets for his influence.

Ironically, in just more than a decade, Hearst’s money would purchase Puck magazine itself from Keppler’s successors.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1906-09-12

Creator(s)

Keppler, Udo J., 1872-1956

Period

U.S. President – 2nd Term (March 1905-February 1909)

Repository

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Page Count

1

Record Type

Image

Resource Type

Cartoon

Rights

These images are presented through a cooperative effort between the Library of Congress and Dickinson State University. No known restrictions on publication.

Citation