Trying to get into the game

President Roosevelt addresses William Randolph Hearst as William Jennings Bryan looks at their marbles game, which includes marbles labeled “tariff revision,” “regulation of R.R.,” “popular election of Sen.,” “popular election of judges,” “ship subsidy,” and “public ownership.”

comments and context

Comments and Context

It is wholly inadequate to identify William Randolph Hearst by first invoking the motion picture Citizen Kane, yet for many people since his death in 1951, that character provides the touchstone, and it is a gross caricature. Hearst’s father George was a prospector who made a fortune from silver claims and other mineral and land opportunities in the West. He rose to attain a vast fortune and secured a seat in the United States Senate. When his son, “Willie,” was expelled from Harvard, George gifted him with the San Francisco Examiner, hoping that a newspaper career would keep him busy, and maybe out of mischief.

Indeed William Randolph Hearst took that “ball” and ran with it, increasing his own fortune and changing the character of American journalism. He engaged in sensationalism — not always scandal, as cliched history would have it, but human-interest stories, personal journalism, a wide range of features, famous staffers, and splashy layouts. The Examiner became the leading paper on the West Coast. With his eyes on New York City, Hearst humbled himself and took a job as a beat reporter on Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in order to learn the techniques of popular journalism on the nation’s largest newspaper. That was in 1894; within four years he increased the circulation of a failing daily he purchased, and often topped the World‘s sales, more than a million a day.

“Yellow Journalism” was the name given to the flamboyant, expose-driven, sometimes irresponsible, but always compelling newspaper fare. Hearst hired famous writers and artists, he was the godfather of newspaper comic strips, and he pioneered Sunday supplements of comics, features, opinion, and of children’s and women’s interest.

He was a Democrat in national politics, and one of the few publishers in America to support William Jennings Bryan. Indeed, Hearst was a radical, sometimes to the left of Populists, and incendiary on many issues; his papers were accused by some people of inciting murderous hatred of President William McKinley.

The publisher had ambitions beyond a newspaper empire that eventually counted forty-four papers (and many magazines, a film studio, a wire service, radio stations, real estate and vast industrial and land holdings) — he had political ambitions. Hearst was elected to Congress in 1902 and 1904; he ran for mayor of New York City in 1905, and governor of New York in 1906. In 1904 he was a serious candidate for the Democrat presidential nomination, and trailed only the eventual nominee Alton B. Parker in delegates.

He aspired once again to the presidency in 1908. He palpably expected support from William Jennings Bryan who had, after all, failed twice in his own campaigns. Bryan remained coy about his plans, and when he declared his candidacy Hearst felt the victim of ingratitude, as he had supported Bryan, sometimes at a price, for more than a decade. Hearst launched his own party, the Independence League. It attracted few professional politicians and scarcely any electoral support, nationally.

Hearst’s subsequent, and long, career was a testament to personal journalism and his own refusal to be tied long to policies. It was not that he was without principles: he had strong beliefs, but the “magnetic north” of national politics and issues shifted, and Hearst’s compass guided him. Always a nationalist, he agitated for war with Spain in 1898 (historians still claim that he and Pulitzer fomented the war); but before World Wars I and II he was a non-interventionist. He would be lukewarm about Woodrow Wilson, grew dismissive of Bryan, opposed the League of Nations, endorsed Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, and quickly became a bitter opponent of the New Deal as its radicalism grew apparent. The former radical Hearst became a major figure in right-wing politics by the end of his life.

In William K. Starrett’s cartoon Hearst is accurately portrayed as an outsider. It was drawn at a time when Hearst felt frozen out of Democratic Party councils and floated his Independence League. Bryan had decided that he could afford to distance himself from the publisher and his (still substantial) influence. Theodore Roosevelt through the years variously shared common ground and bitter antagonisms with Hearst, but was never persuaded to form any alliance, so deep was his deep lack of respect for the publisher.

By 1908, Bryan had moved slightly toward the center of policy debates, and President Roosevelt had sidled toward radical positions on some issues. So their game, as pictured by Starrett, was played with many of the same marbles. But even Hearst’s support of a larger navy — one of Roosevelt’s pet projects — did not buy his entry to the game.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1908-02-24

Creator(s)

Starrett, William K. (William Kemp), 1880-1952

Language

English

Period

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

Page Count

1

Production Method

Printed

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