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 cloak-and-dagger tutors, private schools, grand tours of Europe, and Harvard College. Young Hearsts journalistic career began in 1887, both years after his Harvard expulsion. l ask the San Francisco Examiner, he wrote to his father, who owned the paper and granted the request.When Williams father died, he left-hand(a) his millions in mining properties, not to his son, but to his wife ho equilibrize by giving her son ten thousand dollars a calendar month until her death. The Daily Examiner became young Hearsts laboratory, where he gained a talent for make fake news and faking real news in such a way as to create maximum general shock. From the outset he obtained top talent by paying top prices.To get an all-star escape from and an audience of millions, however, Hearst had to move his headquarters to New York City, where he immediately purchased the centenarian and dying New York Morning Journal. Within a year Hearst ran up the circulation from seventy-seven thousand to ver a million by spending liberal money to beat the aging Joseph Pulitzers World at its own ballyhoo artist (scandalous) game. Sometimes Hearst hired away the World s more self-asserting executives and reporters sometimes he outbid all competitors in the open market.One of Hearsts editors was compensable twice as much in salary as the cut-rate 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 paper is like a screaming woman running down the way with her throat cut, said Hearst writer Arthur James Pegler. Hearsts slam-bang showmanship attracted new readers and nonreaders. During the hold five years of the nineteenth century, Hearst set his pattern for the first fractional of the twentieth century.The J ournal endureed the antiauthoritarian Party, yet Hearst opposed the die hard of Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) in 1896. In 1898 Hearst backed the Spanish-American struggle (1898 a war in which the United States aided Cuba in its bear on for freedom from Spanish rule), which Bryan and the Democrats opposed. Further, Hearsts wealth cut him off from the troubled mass to whom his newspapers ppealed. He could not grasp the basic problems the issue of the war with Spain raised.Entering political relation 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 Boston, 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 conglomerate, they reflected his sweeping decision to seek the U. S. presidency. Perhaps his ambition came from a need 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 House of Representatives as a New York Democrat. Except, his Journalistic activities and his $2 million presidential squeeze lett him little time to speak, vote, or answer roll calls in sexual 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 life In 1903, the day sooner his fortieth birthday, he married twenty-one-year-old Millicent Willson, a showgirl, thus giving up Tessie Powers, a waitress he had supported since his Harvard days. The Hearsts had five boys, but in 1917 Hearst fell in lov e with another showgirl, 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 heritage and took up permanent residence on his fathers 168,000-acre ranch in southern California.There he spent $37 million on a private castle, cast off $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(prenominal) four read a Hearst newspaper. Hearst owned twenty daily and xi Sunday papers in thirteen cities, the KingFeatures syndication service (organization that places featured articles or comics in multiple papers at once), the International 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 tense 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 pep up suffered not at all. In the next 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 give up what they could. They managed to hold off economic failure only b y marketing off much of Hearsts private fortune and all of his public powers as a newspaper owner. William Randolph Hearst died on August 14, 1951, in Beverly Hills, California.