The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (27 page)

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Authors: Kenneth Whyte

BOOK: The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst
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McKinley, in short, looked unassailable in the early months of the campaign. That his party was determined to ride into office on the general detestation of the Cleveland Democrats while making as few policy commitments as possible made it still harder for critics to get a bead on him. But Hearst had two unusual weapons at his disposal. The first was a reporter, Alfred Henry Lewis, whom he dispatched to Canton, Ohio, as soon as McKinley appeared to have the nomination sewn up.
 
 
 
IF ANY JOURNALIST IN AMERICA was capable of finding a chink in McKinley’s armor, it was Alfred Henry Lewis. He had reached Hearst’s employ by an unusual route. In his twenties he had been a square-jawed, binge-drinking prosecuting attorney in the Cleveland police courts and then a city solicitor in Kansas City. In the latter post, he had managed to stay sober long enough to win a particularly important case, after which, by his own account, he went out to celebrate with “just one” glass. That one glass led to a bunch more, and to a rash decision to buy a ticket on a westbound train. Before he knew it, Lewis was punching cows on a ranch in New Mexico, not that he minded terribly. He spent some time in the saddle, drying out and living the life of a cowboy hobo and itinerant journalist. He saw much of the Oklahoma Territory, Texas, and Arizona. Not yet thirty, he returned to Kansas City, taking up the law again as well as his pen, but not the bottle.
 
Lewis began to write fiction, spinning his adventures on the frontier into short stories for newspapers. His earliest effort was a crusty old cattleman’s recollection of the first funeral in the tiny town of Wolfville (modeled on Tombstone, Arizona). The corpse was the result of a disputed poker pot. Local worthies decided to bury the dead gambler at least a mile from town on the theory that “you can’t make no funeral imposin’ unless you’re plumb liberal on distances.” Lewis’s story was published in the Kansas City
Times
in 1890 under the signature Dan Quin, his nom de plume
.
He got no money for the piece, but it was syndicated to such acclaim that his next Wolfville tale brought $360.
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In 1891, Lewis gave up the law again and ventured to Washington as a correspondent for the Chicago
Times
and the Kansas City
Times.
He brought a unique set of skills to the job. He could sketch scenes and characters with a light touch, and his legal training was evident in his close attention to fact, but what really set him apart was his rhetoric. Among the angriest and most radical of progressive journalists, he wrote in scorching gales of rage interspersed with bitter humor.
Journal
editor Willis Abbot esteemed him as a “past master of the art of invective, and a singularly vigorous hater.” He was distinguished among early muckraking journalists for rebuking the victims of robber barons and corrupt politicians as spineless and thus deserving of their abuse.
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Lewis flourished in Washington. In 1894, he was offered the editorship of the recently merged Chicago
Times-Herald.
He turned it down but a year later accepted Hearst’s invitation to write on national affairs for the
Journal.
The two men developed a respectful and lasting professional relationship. Lewis did brilliant work at the
Journal,
wrote Abbot, because “Hearst at once recognized his peculiar qualities and employed him on those jobs which he could best do and his writing fairly scintillated in the paper.”
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Lewis’s specific assignment in Canton was to write a “pen picture,” or profile, of the Republican nominee. He spent a few days knocking around town, looking up McKinley’s friends, associates, and rivals, drinking endless cups of black coffee (one addiction having replaced the other). He talked as much as he listened. Apart from everything else, Lewis was a capital conversationalist. He could talk with anyone about anything, all day long.
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“He would talk to you of civilization and savagery, truth and lies, human nature, foes and friends, or anything else that can engage the mind,” said his colleague Julian Hawthorne. On all subjects, Lewis would speak with vehement conviction, although some doubted whether he believed what he was saying or simply felt a need to talk.
10
 
Having sucked what information he could from the locals, Lewis finally dropped in on McKinley. He was surprised to find the prospective nominee living in almost rural simplicity in a rented home in Canton. He described McKinley as a short, handsome individual with wide shoulders and a deep chest: “He has keen eyes, as bright as mirrors, which look steadily at men.” His conversation was genial and trite, and devoid of humor: “his tongue has been checked too often in a life of office-hunting to make any resentful slips.” His mind was mediocre, which was all Lewis believed the presidency required—too much originality and intellectual agility being a hindrance to steady leadership. The candidate’s tender solicitude toward his invalid wife impressed Lewis, as it did all visitors. But for the fact that he smoked “like Vesuvius,” Lewis thought McKinley could pass for a “well-paid pulpiteer.”
11
 
Lewis’s pen picture, published April 13, 1896, did not lay a glove on McKinley. By the writer’s usual standards, it was almost fawning. But Lewis did not leave Ohio empty-handed. To gain his interview, Lewis had endured a pre-interview with the candidate’s gatekeeper, Mark Hanna. This man seemed to have “charge and complete control” of the candidate. Hanna had taken the unusual step of requiring Lewis to avoid all questions of politics in his meeting with McKinley. He had then followed up with the candidate to make sure his orders had been followed. Lewis described Hanna as a “square corpulent figure of a man, with light eyes, light hair, a heavy jaw and whiskers of mutton-chop cut.” He was larger, stronger, and more vigorous, both mentally and constitutionally, than McKinley. He was also “vain, and a bit peacocky.” Lewis hated him instantly.
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Hanna was a Cleveland shipping and steel magnate who, on failing to win the Republican nomination for Ohio senator John Sherman in 1884 and 1888, had decided that William McKinley possessed whatever winning qualities Sherman lacked. Hanna’s personal fortune and prodigious organizational skills had been dedicated to McKinley ever since. When Democratic gerrymandering cost his man his congressional seat in 1890, Hanna quickly organized and bankrolled McKinley’s successful 1891 run for governor of Ohio. At the 1892 Republican national convention, McKinley officially supported the frontrunner, Benjamin Harrison, while Hanna worked on McKinley’s behalf behind the scenes; together they engineered a respectable second-place finish for the governor without ever declaring his candidacy, positioning him as a leading contender for 1896. When McKinley’s career hit another bump in 1893, Hanna was again there to pull him from the ditch: the failure of his friend’s tin-plate business had left McKinley on the hook for $130,000. He was contemplating a return to the law to clear his debts until Hanna organized a syndicate of wealthy Republicans whose generous contributions relieved his distress and saved his political career.
13
 
More than a year before the 1896 Republican convention, with McKinley in Canton maintaining a disinterested pose, Hanna assembled at his own expense a full-fledged campaign machine and retired from business to better oversee its operations. He opened offices in Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, and Washington and organized campaign workers into a tight and unprecedentedly businesslike structure, complete with tendered contracts and organizational charts. Whereas most Republican bosses had been content to work within their own states or regions and to broker support with other bosses, Hanna bought an impressive home in Thomasville, Georgia, and brought McKinley out for a “vacation” during which they assiduously wooed southern delegates. These tactics and superb organization, and McKinley’s broad appeal, allowed Hanna to effectively secure his man’s nomination before the regional bosses got their own candidates into the field.
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But however brilliant Hanna may have been as a campaign manager, he lacked political tact, as Lewis sensed from their first meeting. His manner was overbearing, by some measures arrogant. His speech was gruff and uncompromisingly frank. He was of the firm opinion that all questions in politics in a democracy came down to money. He had a habit of dismissing old-time Republican political bosses as feckless amateurs. He was capable of hurling ungentlemanly language at the most venerable party stalwarts if they were foolish enough to stand in his way. It struck Lewis as curious that so obviously upright a man as McKinley would hitch himself to this swaggering tycoon. Nor could Lewis understand why McKinley would allow Hanna and his friends to clear his debts. “No man of high sensitive regard for himself would have allowed it,” he wrote. “One is left to wonder if the whole moral effect of it all was not to leave McKinley the subject of a syndicate; practically the property of those who took him out of hock.”
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The notion that McKinley was beholden to his wealthy manager captivated Lewis. He nursed an obsession with Hanna and wasted no time in getting a second interview with him in Cleveland. He found the manager in prime form, “rotund, ruddy, rough.” Hanna obliged his visitor with one of his periodic outbursts, describing the eastern Republican bosses Matt Quay and Thomas Platt, both of whom opposed McKinley’s nomination, as “the merest political babies.” He had expected them to be “astute, far-sighted politicians” and instead he found himself “contending with pigmies.”
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The interview was published in the
Journal
the day after Lewis’s McKinley piece.
 
Lewis continued to poke around Ohio, curious about Hanna’s diverse business concerns, the formation of his fortune, his past political adventures, and the nature of his relationship with McKinley. The more he saw, the more outraged he grew, and as his outrage grew, so did his excitement. Lewis had at last found a subject commensurate with his capacity to vituperate.
 
A few weeks later, Lewis published another article on Hanna, this one entitled “McKinley’s Political Manager and His War on Organized Labor.” The article opened with a comprehensive assault on Hanna’s person and character. Hanna is described this time as “broad, tall, carelessly clothed, and of a red, violent visage.” His nature has “all the force and lack of scruple of a torrent.” He has a “bushel of brains; coarse they are, but strong as a horse. One could make two McKinleys out of Hanna and have plenty of Hanna left.” He is “lacking utterly in human sympathy, a king for selfish egotism, void of an imagination and the ability to put oneself in another’s place.” He is in love with money, not as a miser but “because he may make men creep and crawl and spring to do his word. This feeds his vanity, and he is vain with all the vulgarity and ostentatious strut of a turkey cock—a fowl, by the way, he much resembles.”
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All of that is warm-up for Lewis’s account of how this “relentless,” “rapacious,” “ruthless,” “ignorant” man has swallowed whole the probable Republican candidate:
It is as if Hanna had established the picket posts of his commands all about his candidate. No one reaches the McKinley eye or speaks one word to the McKinley ear without the password of Hanna. He has McKinley in his clutch as ever did hawk have chicken, and he will carry him whither he chooses. That is the pact between them; the understanding upon which Hanna and his syndicate is breaking and buying and begging and bullying a road for McKinley to the White House. And when he’s there, Hanna and the others will shuffle him and deal him like a deck of cards.
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To what ends would Hanna shuffle and deal McKinley? As the headline suggests, the news value of the piece was Lewis’s substantial recounting of a four-year conflict between Hanna and the Seamen’s Union, by the end of which Hanna had broken the guild and slashed the wages of his Great Lakes ship workers. Lewis portrayed the tycoon in the worst possible light but Hanna’s performance in this incident did provoke the Cleveland Trades Assembly to boycott all of his businesses in 1884. The seamen’s dispute became for Lewis a symbol of the ruthlessness and self-interest of Hanna and the capitalists with whom he associated. It was a foretaste, he believed, of what Americans could expect from a White House in which Hanna and his friends exerted influence.
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For the next five months, Lewis would repeat and elaborate on this line of attack. His articles were relatively few in number, published irregularly and usually on inside pages, yet they made a deep impression.
Journal
readers were galvanized by Lewis’s furious prose and disturbing allegations. Democratic papers across the country reprinted his articles and took up his arguments, forcing responses from Republican papers. Lewis almost single-handedly flushed Hanna from the back rooms of the Republican Party to the front lines of the rhetorical war between the national parties. But it was left to another of Hearst’s journalistic weapons to brand Hanna forever in the public mind.
 
 
 
HOMER DAVENPORT MAY BE THE ONLY MAN in the history of journalism literally born to be a cartoonist. His mother, Florinda Davenport, an Oregon farm wife, was a devotee of the famed illustrator Thomas Nast, whose work appeared regularly in
Harper’s Weekly.
Around the time she became pregnant with Homer, she read an article by a popular physician on how to give birth to a genius, complete with dietary instructions and mental exercises. She followed it diligently in the hopes of bearing another Thomas Nast. To her delight, Homer, born March 8, 1867, could draw almost before he could walk. She encouraged his nascent talent, making for him a padded bib so that he could lie on his stomach all day and draw with his carpenter’s pencil.
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