William Randolph Hearst

William Randolph Hearst was born in San Francisco, California. He received the best education that his multimillionaire father and his sophisticated schoolteacher mother could buy mysterious tutors, private schools, grand tours of Europe, and Harvard College. Young Hearsts journalistic career began in 1887, two years after his Harvard expulsion. l want the San Francisco Examiner, he wrote to his father, who have the newspaper and granted the request.When Williams father died, he left his millions in exploit properties, not to his son, but to his wife ho compensated by giving her son ten one thousand dollars a month until her death. The Daily Examiner became young Hearsts laboratory, where he gained a talent for making excogitate news and faking real news in such a way as to create uttermost populace shock. From the outset he obtained top talent by paying top termss.To get an all-star send packing and an audience of millions, however, Hearst had to move his headquarters to Ne w York urban center, where he immediately purchased the old and dying New York dawn Journal. Within a year Hearst ran up the circulation from seventy-seven thousand to ver a million by expense enough money to beat the aging Joseph Pulitzers World at its own sensationalist (scandalous) game. Some convictions Hearst engage away the World s more aggressive executives and reporters some clippings he outbid all competitors in the open market.One of Hearsts editors was paid twice as much in salary as the sale price of the New York World. Hearst attracted readers by adding heated reporting of sports, crime, sex, scandal, and human-interest stories. A Hearst newspaper is like a screaming charwoman running down the street with her throat cut, said Hearst writer Arthur James Pegler. Hearsts slam-bang showmanship attracted new readers and nonreaders. During the expire five years of the nineteenth century, Hearst set his pattern for the first half of the twentieth century.The Journal suppo rt the Democratic Party, yet Hearst opposed the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) in 1896. In 1898 Hearst O.K. the Spanish-American War (1898 a war in which the United States aided Cuba in its fight for freedom from Spanish rule), which Bryan and the Democrats opposed. Further, Hearsts wealth cut him off from the troubled masses to whom his newspapers ppealed. He could not grasp the basic problems the wall plug of the war with Spain raised.Entering politics Having shaken up San Francisco with the Examiner and New York City with the Journal, Hearst established two newspapers in Chicago, Illinois, the Chicago American in 1900 and the Chicago Examiner in 1902 a newspaper in capital of Massachusetts, Massachusetts, the Boston American and a newspaper in Los Angeles, California, the Los Angeles Examiner in 1904. These added newspapers marked more than an extension of Hearsts Journalistic empire, they reflected his sweeping decision to seek the U. S. presidency. Perhaps his ambition came from a desire to follow in his fathers footsteps.His personality and fortune were not suited to a political career however. In 1902 and 1904 Hearst won election to the star sign of Representatives as a New York Democrat. Except, his Journalistic activities and his $2 million presidential campaign lett him little time to speak, vote, or answer roll calls in Congress . His nonattendance angered his colleagues and the voters who had elected him. Nevertheless, he found time to run as an independent candidate for mayor of New York City in 1905, and as a Democratic candidate for governor in 1906. His loss in both elections ended Hearsts political career.Personal demeanor In 1903, the day before his fortieth birthday, he married twenty-one-year-old Millicent Willson, a showgirl, thus giving up Tessie Powers, a waitress he had back up since his Harvard days. The Hearsts had five boys, but in 1917 Hearst fell in get by with another showgi rl, twenty-year-old Marion Davies of the Ziegfeld Follies. He maintained a relationship with her that ended only at his death. When Hearsts mother died, he came into his inheritance and took up permanent residence on his fathers 168,000-acre ranch in southern California.There he fatigued $37 million on a private castle, put $50 million into New York City real estate, and put another $50 million into his art collectionthe largest ever assembled by a single individual. Hearst publications During the 1920s one American in every four read a Hearst newspaper. Hearst owned twenty daily and eleven Sunday papers in thirteen cities, the KingFeatures syndication service (organization that places featured articles or comics in multiple papers at once), the transnational News Service, the American Weekly (a syndicated Sunday supplement), International Newsreel, and six magazines, includingCosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and Harpers Bazaar. Despite Hearsts wealth, expansion, and spending, his popularity with the public as well as with the government was low. Originally a progressive Democrat, he had no bargaining power with Republican Theodore Roosevelt (1859-1919). Hearst fought every Democratic reform leader from Bryan to Franklin Roosevelt (1882-1945), and he opposed American participation in both world wars. In 1927 the Hearst newspapers printed forged (faked) documents, which supported an accusation that the Mexican government had paid several U. S. senators more than $1 million to support a CentralAmerican plot to wage war against the United States. From this scandal the Hearst press suffered not at all. In the coterminous ten years, however, Hearsts funds and the empire suddenly ran out. In 1937 the two corporations that controlled the empire found themselves $126 million in debt. Hearst had to turn them over to a seven- member committee whose purpose was to save what they could. They managed to hold off economical failure only by selling off much of Hearsts p rivate fortune and all of his public powers as a newspaper owner. William Randolph Hearst died on August 14, 1951, in Beverly Hills, California.