Hearst, William Randolph

Hearst, William Randolph (1863–1951), newspaper publisher and son of mining millionaire and California Democratic senator George Hearst.Privately educated, William Randolph Hearst attended Harvard for several years. Having worked briefly on Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, he used it as a model to remake his father's San Francisco Examiner. He made the paper successful by means of sensationalism, crusades against the Southern Pacific Railroad, and luring the best talent.

When his father died, Hearst's mother, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, gave him $7.5 million to buy the New York Journal in 1894. Raiding Pulitzer's staff, he launched a circulation war with the World, using crude sensationalism and crusades against “the money power.” Accuracy was slighted in this “yellow journalism” and in the Journal ’s exploitation of the Cuban revolution and the Spanish‐American War.

An egomaniac burning with political ambition, Hearst served two terms in Congress (1903–07), received 263 Convention votes for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1904, lost a third‐party race for mayor of New York in 1905, and lost again as the Democratic candidate for governor of New York in 1906. After this he exercised his influence indirectly through his newspapers. By the 1920s he controlled a publishing empire of over twenty newspapers, several magazines, the International News Service, and the King Features Syndicate. But he spent more than he earned, collecting art and antiques; promoting the film career of his mistress Marion Davies; and building a palatial mansion, San Simeon, in California.

Hearst helped Franklin Delano Roosevelt secure the 1932 presidential nomination, but his early support of the New Deal ended in 1935 with attacks on business regulation, new taxes, and Roosevelt's foreign policy.

The Depression battered Hearst's fortune. By 1937 he was forced to sell some of his newspapers and art and antiques, and to relinquish financial control of his publications. His papers prospered during World War II, and he recovered some of his control in 1945. At his death in 1951, his remaining properties passed to his five sons. His biographer W. A. Swanberg concludes that Hearst “was essentially a showman and propagandist, not a newsman.” Orson Welles's classic 1941 film Citizen Kane was based on Hearst's career.
See also Journalism; New Deal Era, The.

Bibliography

W.A. Swanberg , Citizen Hearst, 1961.
David Nasaw , The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, 2000.

James L. Crouthamel