The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (32 page)
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Authors: Kenneth Whyte
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Incensed at the financial disparity between the Democratic and Republican campaigns, Hearst stepped into the breach. Throughout the summer, the
Journal
had been promoting Bryan but making a show of even-handedness on the currency issue. Much of its editorial page had been given over to a feature entitled “Battle of the Standards,” where interested parties were encouraged to present arguments for and against the free coinage of silver. Hearst now junked “Battle of the Standards” in favour of a direct campaign to raise funds for Bryan:
Journal
had been promoting Bryan but making a show of even-handedness on the currency issue. Much of its editorial page had been given over to a feature entitled “Battle of the Standards,” where interested parties were encouraged to present arguments for and against the free coinage of silver. Hearst now junked “Battle of the Standards” in favour of a direct campaign to raise funds for Bryan:
Never in the history of American politics has there been such a discrepancy in the means at the disposal of two contending parties as now. The Republican party has enlisted the services of almost all the holders of accumulated wealth in the country. . . . The result is that the country is flooded with sound money documents designed to convince the voter that bimetallism would reduce the independent American citizen to the level of the Chinese coolie and the Mexican peon. . . .The
Journal
feels that the meager fund within reach of the Democratic managers ought to be increased, and that every citizen who desires an enlightened national verdict in November ought to have an opportunity to contribute to it. . . . And in order to start the current of popular contributions the
Journal,
until further notice, will give a dollar of its own for every dollar entrusted to it by the people.
26
From the beginning of September forward the
Journal
published a record of contributions it received in care of the Democratic campaign. The sums were paltry, most in the range of 25 cents to a few dollars. Some people, no doubt, simply wanted to see their names in the paper. Others donated anonymously for fear of reprisals in the workplace. After five weeks, the paper had raised $15,000 in contributions, which it matched and sent along to the Democratic National Committee. Almost apologetically, the paper explained that it was closing the fund: its purpose had been to educate voters, and the window with which to print and distribute documents was fast closing. Roughly $5,000 more came in over the next few days, bringing the fund’s total (with Hearst’s matching contributions) to $40,000. Hanna could have raised the same amount at a single meal, but it was by far the largest contribution to a Democratic campaign that spent about $350,000.
27
Journal
published a record of contributions it received in care of the Democratic campaign. The sums were paltry, most in the range of 25 cents to a few dollars. Some people, no doubt, simply wanted to see their names in the paper. Others donated anonymously for fear of reprisals in the workplace. After five weeks, the paper had raised $15,000 in contributions, which it matched and sent along to the Democratic National Committee. Almost apologetically, the paper explained that it was closing the fund: its purpose had been to educate voters, and the window with which to print and distribute documents was fast closing. Roughly $5,000 more came in over the next few days, bringing the fund’s total (with Hearst’s matching contributions) to $40,000. Hanna could have raised the same amount at a single meal, but it was by far the largest contribution to a Democratic campaign that spent about $350,000.
27
In the absence of a functioning Democratic machine, Hearst, ironically, was assuming for the Democrats some of the chores Hanna handled for the Republicans. In addition to raising money, he addressed Bryan’s lack of effective campaign literature. Hearst began publishing a weekly “campaign extra” compiled from the
Journal
’s files. Hundreds of thousands of copies were printed and distributed at his expense. The newspaper’s offices, in the meantime, were transformed into an unofficial campaign headquarters: Democratic candidates and spokesmen rushed in and out at all hours, bearing news tips and statements for release, requesting advice or attention, and suggesting initiatives helpful to their cause.
28
Journal
’s files. Hundreds of thousands of copies were printed and distributed at his expense. The newspaper’s offices, in the meantime, were transformed into an unofficial campaign headquarters: Democratic candidates and spokesmen rushed in and out at all hours, bearing news tips and statements for release, requesting advice or attention, and suggesting initiatives helpful to their cause.
28
However welcome this practical support to the Democrats, by far the
Journal
’s most important contribution to the campaign was its journalism. Over the course of the race, the paper had occasion to explain and defend practically every plank in the Democratic platform and to answer every argument posed by the Republicans in favor of gold and protective tariffs (without ever endorsing unlimited coinage of silver). The
Journal
not only called attention to the unprecedented role of money in the GOP campaign but helped to expose sharp tactics employed in McKinley’s name. Republican-friendly employers, for instance, were warning workers of widespread layoffs in the event of a Democratic victory, submitting them to mandatory “education” seminars led by GOP speakers, and demanding their attendance at Republican parades and rallies.
29
Again, Hearst’s was the only major paper in the Northeast with enthusiasm for this work.
Journal
’s most important contribution to the campaign was its journalism. Over the course of the race, the paper had occasion to explain and defend practically every plank in the Democratic platform and to answer every argument posed by the Republicans in favor of gold and protective tariffs (without ever endorsing unlimited coinage of silver). The
Journal
not only called attention to the unprecedented role of money in the GOP campaign but helped to expose sharp tactics employed in McKinley’s name. Republican-friendly employers, for instance, were warning workers of widespread layoffs in the event of a Democratic victory, submitting them to mandatory “education” seminars led by GOP speakers, and demanding their attendance at Republican parades and rallies.
29
Again, Hearst’s was the only major paper in the Northeast with enthusiasm for this work.
One of the most interesting fights the
Journal
picked with Republicans in 1896 was over sectionalism and the Civil War. It was a Republican habit in national campaigns to seek opportunities to stoke remembrance of the Civil War among the party’s supporters in the North. Waving the bloody shirt, as the tactic was known, emphasized the Republicans’ standing as the party of national unity and patriotism and painted the Democrats as the party of division and rebellion. It was particularly effective in this campaign. With the Democrats wedded to a currency policy popular in the South and West yet anathema to the Northeast, the Republicans had their opening. No sooner had Bryan been nominated than McKinley began associating silver with regional discord and flaying his opponent with Civil War imagery: “Then section was arrayed against section. Now men of all sections can and will unite to rebuke the repudiation of our obligations and debasement of our currency.”
30
Republican sheets were quick to take up the theme. “The country is in greater danger than it has been since 1861,” worried the
Tribune.
“This is not merely our opinion, and is not merely a party opinion. It is the profound belief of patriotic men without distinction of party and in every section of the country.”
31
Journal
picked with Republicans in 1896 was over sectionalism and the Civil War. It was a Republican habit in national campaigns to seek opportunities to stoke remembrance of the Civil War among the party’s supporters in the North. Waving the bloody shirt, as the tactic was known, emphasized the Republicans’ standing as the party of national unity and patriotism and painted the Democrats as the party of division and rebellion. It was particularly effective in this campaign. With the Democrats wedded to a currency policy popular in the South and West yet anathema to the Northeast, the Republicans had their opening. No sooner had Bryan been nominated than McKinley began associating silver with regional discord and flaying his opponent with Civil War imagery: “Then section was arrayed against section. Now men of all sections can and will unite to rebuke the repudiation of our obligations and debasement of our currency.”
30
Republican sheets were quick to take up the theme. “The country is in greater danger than it has been since 1861,” worried the
Tribune.
“This is not merely our opinion, and is not merely a party opinion. It is the profound belief of patriotic men without distinction of party and in every section of the country.”
31
To dramatize the supposed menace of the Democratic platform, Hanna funded a Patriotic Heroes’ Battalion comprising Union army generals.
32
The veterans traveled 8,000 miles and held 276 meetings in the last months of the campaign. At each stop, they would ride out in full uniform to a bugle call. There was no subtlety to their message. As one of their number argued, “The rebellion grew out of sectionalism and the veterans who are here and their comrades all over the land know too well what it cost us to put that rebellion down. Five hundred thousand lives and uncounted millions of treasure. A million homes left desolate. . . . We cannot tolerate, will not tolerate, any man representing any party who attempts again to disregard the solemn admonitions of Washington to frown down every attempt to set one portion of the country against another.” These remarkable words brought hosannas from the Republican papers in New York.
32
The veterans traveled 8,000 miles and held 276 meetings in the last months of the campaign. At each stop, they would ride out in full uniform to a bugle call. There was no subtlety to their message. As one of their number argued, “The rebellion grew out of sectionalism and the veterans who are here and their comrades all over the land know too well what it cost us to put that rebellion down. Five hundred thousand lives and uncounted millions of treasure. A million homes left desolate. . . . We cannot tolerate, will not tolerate, any man representing any party who attempts again to disregard the solemn admonitions of Washington to frown down every attempt to set one portion of the country against another.” These remarkable words brought hosannas from the Republican papers in New York.
It was left to the
Journal
alone among leading U.S. newspapers, to refute this characterization of the Democratic platform and to answer the charge of sectional incitement. Hearst’s paper did not dispute that the country was divided. It attributed the “curse” of sectionalism, however, not to any desire for rebellion in the outlying regions but to the eagerness of eastern Republicans to indict as rebels those who disagreed with their monetary policy. Instead of honestly debating silver and other campaign issues, Republicans were dismissing Bryan as “a demagogue, a Socialist, an Anarchist,” and his followers as “a horde of brainless, characterless zealots” bent on evading their honest debts. The paper asked what these harsh characterizations contributed to the spirit of national unity, and suggested that the Republican effort to win a partisan monopoly on patriotism was a greater act of rebellion than anything the Democrats had in mind.
33
Journal
alone among leading U.S. newspapers, to refute this characterization of the Democratic platform and to answer the charge of sectional incitement. Hearst’s paper did not dispute that the country was divided. It attributed the “curse” of sectionalism, however, not to any desire for rebellion in the outlying regions but to the eagerness of eastern Republicans to indict as rebels those who disagreed with their monetary policy. Instead of honestly debating silver and other campaign issues, Republicans were dismissing Bryan as “a demagogue, a Socialist, an Anarchist,” and his followers as “a horde of brainless, characterless zealots” bent on evading their honest debts. The paper asked what these harsh characterizations contributed to the spirit of national unity, and suggested that the Republican effort to win a partisan monopoly on patriotism was a greater act of rebellion than anything the Democrats had in mind.
33
The
Journal
appealed to the Republicans to quit their saber-rattling, drop their “campaign of opprobrium” against Bryan and his followers, and engage in a more civil debate.
34
There was hypocrisy in this plea, given what the
Journal
was inflicting on Hanna and McKinley, and it was Bryan, after all, who had claimed that he and his followers were being crucified. But the belligerence of the Republican campaign did need to be answered. Not only were a bunch of Civil War heroes riding around advising old soldiers to vote as they shot, but senior New York Republican Edward Lauterbach made the ominous proclamation that if the Chicago platform received a mandate from voters, “we will not abide the decision.”
35
Journal
appealed to the Republicans to quit their saber-rattling, drop their “campaign of opprobrium” against Bryan and his followers, and engage in a more civil debate.
34
There was hypocrisy in this plea, given what the
Journal
was inflicting on Hanna and McKinley, and it was Bryan, after all, who had claimed that he and his followers were being crucified. But the belligerence of the Republican campaign did need to be answered. Not only were a bunch of Civil War heroes riding around advising old soldiers to vote as they shot, but senior New York Republican Edward Lauterbach made the ominous proclamation that if the Chicago platform received a mandate from voters, “we will not abide the decision.”
35
New York’s anti-Bryan papers were every bit as shrill as Lauterbach:
• The New York
Sun
heard among the Democrats the “murmur of the assailants of existing institutions, the shriek of the wild-eyed, the tramp of the Coxeyite army marching again upon Washington.” It also saw the coming of an era of “[r]epudiation, robbery, inequitable taxation, a free hand for the forces of socialism, a clear field for the advance of the skirmish line of Communism and Anarchy.”
36
• The
New York Times
called Bryan “an irresponsible, unregulated, ignorant, prejudiced, pathetically honest and enthusiastic crank” presiding over a “freaky,” howling “aggregation of aliens.”
37
• The
New York Herald
warned that the Jacobins of the West and South had raised the flags of “silverism, Populism, and Communism. These are crimes against the nation, as secession was. They menace national repudiation and dishonor, disaster to business and suffering to the people. They [are] an assault upon constitutional government and republican institutions. . . . ”
38
• The
New York Tribune
congratulated the Democrats on becoming the “avowed champion of the right of pillage, riot and train-wrecking.” The party’s members were driven by “all the unclean passions that deform the human soul,” their “burn-down-your-cities”platform was an assault upon the Constitution and the Ten Commandments, and their leader a “wretched rattle-pated boy, posing in vapid vanity and mouthing resounding rottenness.”
39
Perhaps the
Journal
’s best answer to all of these eruptions was the pen of editorialist Arthur McEwan. McEwan invented an arch-Republican character called “A Gentleman,” who was “a sort of combination of all the snobs of history.” The Gentleman saw it as his social duty to speak for the “enlightened few against the imbruted many.” He scolded the
Journal
in its own pages for foolishly encouraging common laborers to consider themselves competent to pass judgment on important issues of public finance. He thought it absurd that anyone might consider a man born in Nebraska and educated at a freshwater college suitable for the presidency. When a group of boisterous Yale students hooted down Bryan as he addressed a mass gathering of Democrats at New Haven, the Gentleman regretted the disturbance—“discourtesy even to a scoundrel is never to be defended.” All the same, he could not help but be impressed that a few hundred well-born students from his alma mater, shouting their “inspiring class yells,” had cowed 15,000 unwashed proletarians. “Blood will tell,” he shrugged. The
Journal
received bales of mail in response to McEwan’s work. Some writers satirized the satirist; some threatened to lynch him.
40
Journal
’s best answer to all of these eruptions was the pen of editorialist Arthur McEwan. McEwan invented an arch-Republican character called “A Gentleman,” who was “a sort of combination of all the snobs of history.” The Gentleman saw it as his social duty to speak for the “enlightened few against the imbruted many.” He scolded the
Journal
in its own pages for foolishly encouraging common laborers to consider themselves competent to pass judgment on important issues of public finance. He thought it absurd that anyone might consider a man born in Nebraska and educated at a freshwater college suitable for the presidency. When a group of boisterous Yale students hooted down Bryan as he addressed a mass gathering of Democrats at New Haven, the Gentleman regretted the disturbance—“discourtesy even to a scoundrel is never to be defended.” All the same, he could not help but be impressed that a few hundred well-born students from his alma mater, shouting their “inspiring class yells,” had cowed 15,000 unwashed proletarians. “Blood will tell,” he shrugged. The
Journal
received bales of mail in response to McEwan’s work. Some writers satirized the satirist; some threatened to lynch him.
40
The
Journal
met the
Sun
head-on over its assessment of the Democratic platform as a summons to anarchy. Dana was sincere in this charge. The Democrats, to his mind, were bent on manipulating the currency to effect a massive repudiation of debt. They also sought to defy a recent Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of taxes on certain forms of income (the Democratic platform sided with a minority of the court in favor of income taxes). The
Sun
argued that the anarchist who had recently fired at President Faure of France would, if allowed into America and “armed” with citizenship papers, vote for Bryan and the Chicago platform. Hyperbolic as it was, the
Sun
never lost its wit. It aimed the following piece of doggerel at Bryanites:
Journal
met the
Sun
head-on over its assessment of the Democratic platform as a summons to anarchy. Dana was sincere in this charge. The Democrats, to his mind, were bent on manipulating the currency to effect a massive repudiation of debt. They also sought to defy a recent Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of taxes on certain forms of income (the Democratic platform sided with a minority of the court in favor of income taxes). The
Sun
argued that the anarchist who had recently fired at President Faure of France would, if allowed into America and “armed” with citizenship papers, vote for Bryan and the Chicago platform. Hyperbolic as it was, the
Sun
never lost its wit. It aimed the following piece of doggerel at Bryanites:
Pile the load on plutocrats’ backs;
sock it to ’em with the income tax.
Of goldbug law we make a sport;
when the time comes we’ll pack the court.
On with the program without a hitch;
skin the East and skin the rich.
Lift the heart and lift the fist;
swear to be an Anarchist.
Our greed is ruin; our flag is red.
On brother Anarchists, and raise Ned.
41
The
Journal
responded by pulling from the shelf a copy of Charles A. Dana’s 1849 defense of “the Great French Anarchist” Proudhon. The paper found it interesting that the one time Dana had written about an avowed anarchist, he had warmly applauded his ideas. He had been keeping a sharp lookout for anarchists ever since, applying the label to Grover Cleveland, Illinois governor John Altgeld, the writers William Dean Howells and Henry George, and the Reverend Lyman Abbott, among others. When writing about these men, none of whom claimed to be anarchists and none of whom had ever otherwise been associated with anarchism, Dana denounced them as anarchists with grim ferocity. The
Journal
attributed this difference in treatment to the fact that the book on Proudhon had been written when Dana was in the prime of his intellectual life: “His years were sufficient to have given him education and discretion, and still few enough to leave him unspoiled by the sordid associations of long business life.”
42
Journal
responded by pulling from the shelf a copy of Charles A. Dana’s 1849 defense of “the Great French Anarchist” Proudhon. The paper found it interesting that the one time Dana had written about an avowed anarchist, he had warmly applauded his ideas. He had been keeping a sharp lookout for anarchists ever since, applying the label to Grover Cleveland, Illinois governor John Altgeld, the writers William Dean Howells and Henry George, and the Reverend Lyman Abbott, among others. When writing about these men, none of whom claimed to be anarchists and none of whom had ever otherwise been associated with anarchism, Dana denounced them as anarchists with grim ferocity. The
Journal
attributed this difference in treatment to the fact that the book on Proudhon had been written when Dana was in the prime of his intellectual life: “His years were sufficient to have given him education and discretion, and still few enough to leave him unspoiled by the sordid associations of long business life.”
42
One of the more bizarre attacks on Bryan during the campaign came from the
New York Times,
which asked, “Is Mr. Bryan Crazy?” The
Times
believed that no one could review Bryan’s speeches and public pronouncements without “feeling that these are not adaptations of intelligent reason to intelligent ends.” The candidate would not stop talking, and he would not listen to anyone who disproved his theories. He was convinced that the world was falling to pieces and that he alone was competent to rectify its problems. Of course, the same could be said of just about every candidate for high office, but the
Times
took its suspicions to an “eminent alienist,” who concluded Bryan was unhinged and that a Democratic victory would put “a madman in the White House.” Just what kind of madman, however, vexed the
Times.
Every psychological expert the paper queried had a different diagnosis. Was Bryan suffering from delirium, megalomania, paranoia, paranoia reformatoria, paranoia querulenta, querulent logorrhea, oratorical monomania, graphomania? For
Times
readers, the precise nature of Bryan’s psychosis emerged as one of the most hotly contested issues of the campaign.
43
New York Times,
which asked, “Is Mr. Bryan Crazy?” The
Times
believed that no one could review Bryan’s speeches and public pronouncements without “feeling that these are not adaptations of intelligent reason to intelligent ends.” The candidate would not stop talking, and he would not listen to anyone who disproved his theories. He was convinced that the world was falling to pieces and that he alone was competent to rectify its problems. Of course, the same could be said of just about every candidate for high office, but the
Times
took its suspicions to an “eminent alienist,” who concluded Bryan was unhinged and that a Democratic victory would put “a madman in the White House.” Just what kind of madman, however, vexed the
Times.
Every psychological expert the paper queried had a different diagnosis. Was Bryan suffering from delirium, megalomania, paranoia, paranoia reformatoria, paranoia querulenta, querulent logorrhea, oratorical monomania, graphomania? For
Times
readers, the precise nature of Bryan’s psychosis emerged as one of the most hotly contested issues of the campaign.
43
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