The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (37 page)
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Authors: Kenneth Whyte
BOOK: The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst
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Early in 1897, the
Evening Telegram,
sister paper to Bennett’s
Herald,
followed Pulitzer’s lead and dropped its price from two cents to a penny. Bennett called publicly for collusion among proprietors to reduce the size of their papers, increase their prices, and bring salaries under control.
4
The
Tribune
held its three-cent price but offered its readers special promotions such as free tokens for the Brooklyn Bridge (valued at two and a half cents).
5
The
Evening Post,
easily the most conservative of the New York dailies in style and politics, and thus seemingly insulated from the new competitive threat, shocked the street by announcing it would buy new presses and increase its size.
6
And those titles were the lucky ones. After months of missing its payroll, the
Mercury
closed.
7
The
Times
was forced into receivership, from which it would emerge under new ownership.
7
The
Recorder
joined the
Times
in receivership and died there.
8
Evening Telegram,
sister paper to Bennett’s
Herald,
followed Pulitzer’s lead and dropped its price from two cents to a penny. Bennett called publicly for collusion among proprietors to reduce the size of their papers, increase their prices, and bring salaries under control.
4
The
Tribune
held its three-cent price but offered its readers special promotions such as free tokens for the Brooklyn Bridge (valued at two and a half cents).
5
The
Evening Post,
easily the most conservative of the New York dailies in style and politics, and thus seemingly insulated from the new competitive threat, shocked the street by announcing it would buy new presses and increase its size.
6
And those titles were the lucky ones. After months of missing its payroll, the
Mercury
closed.
7
The
Times
was forced into receivership, from which it would emerge under new ownership.
7
The
Recorder
joined the
Times
in receivership and died there.
8
Not all of this ruin could be laid at Hearst’s feet—there were other economic factors at play, including the lingering effects of the depression—but after twelve months of watching with distaste and alarm the progress of the
Journal,
his rivals no longer had any doubts as to the threats he presented, politically, journalistically, and commercially. He had caused them serious problems. He had made them look bad. They were now bent on returning the favor. Some, like Pulitzer and Bennett, fought back with price cuts and new spending, while doing their best to compete with Hearst’s journalism. Several others, unable to keep up commercially, fashioned an entirely different response: they declared a moral war.
Journal,
his rivals no longer had any doubts as to the threats he presented, politically, journalistically, and commercially. He had caused them serious problems. He had made them look bad. They were now bent on returning the favor. Some, like Pulitzer and Bennett, fought back with price cuts and new spending, while doing their best to compete with Hearst’s journalism. Several others, unable to keep up commercially, fashioned an entirely different response: they declared a moral war.
Moral wars were nothing new in the nineteenth-century newspaper world. In fact, they were a routine reaction to every stage in the development of popular journalism. Since the advent of the penny press, papers in pursuit of mass audiences had been leavening their political and business reports with ever-increasing amounts of crime, scandal, calamity, and other human-interest content. Dana articulated the strategy best: an editor should attempt to offer “a daily photograph of the whole world’s doing in the most lively and luminous manner.”
9
He should consider as news everything “of sufficient importance to arrest and absorb the attention” of the general public. If his wares did not “correspond to the wants of the people,” he would never succeed. And if that took his paper into the mud, so be it. “I have always felt,” said Dana, “that whatever the Divine Providence permitted to occur I was not too proud to report.”
10
James Gordon Bennett had followed this basic recipe when he launched the
Herald
in the 1830s. Shocked at the contents of his paper, to say nothing of its success, Bennett’s opponents had accused him of wallowing in filth and sensation, of coarsening public taste, of corrupting women and children, of belittling the good and great, of endangering democracy by emboldening the mob, and of spoiling the market for more intelligent and uplifting newspaper fare. Bennett was hailed as an “obscene vagabond,” a “venal wretch,” “a vile nuisance,” a “leprous slanderer,” and an “infamous Scotchman.”
11
Dana and Pulitzer had been similarly received in their primes. Now it was Hearst’s turn.
9
He should consider as news everything “of sufficient importance to arrest and absorb the attention” of the general public. If his wares did not “correspond to the wants of the people,” he would never succeed. And if that took his paper into the mud, so be it. “I have always felt,” said Dana, “that whatever the Divine Providence permitted to occur I was not too proud to report.”
10
James Gordon Bennett had followed this basic recipe when he launched the
Herald
in the 1830s. Shocked at the contents of his paper, to say nothing of its success, Bennett’s opponents had accused him of wallowing in filth and sensation, of coarsening public taste, of corrupting women and children, of belittling the good and great, of endangering democracy by emboldening the mob, and of spoiling the market for more intelligent and uplifting newspaper fare. Bennett was hailed as an “obscene vagabond,” a “venal wretch,” “a vile nuisance,” a “leprous slanderer,” and an “infamous Scotchman.”
11
Dana and Pulitzer had been similarly received in their primes. Now it was Hearst’s turn.
Moral wars never really worked—Bennett, Dana, and Pulitzer had all thrived despite the criticism—but Hearst’s attackers could be excused for thinking him an easier target. He tried harder than any of his predecessors to arrest and absorb readers. He chased even the most sordid human-interest stories exactly as he covered politics: with naked enthusiasm and an unparalleled application of journalistic resources. And there was now so much to chase. New York was expanding at a phenomenal pace, and as it grew, the volume of lurid news grew with it. Much to the disgust, the well-orchestrated and very public disgust, of his competitors, Hearst was all over these stories, and sometimes directly involved in them. Take, for instance, the Stephen Crane episode.
EVEN BEFORE HE BECAME the
Journal
’s most notorious correspondent in the autumn of 1896, Stephen Crane was famous.
The Red Badge of Courage,
his slim but powerful novel of the Civil War, had been published twelve months earlier. It arrived, said H.L. Mencken, “like a flash of lightning out of a clear winter sky; it was at once unprecedented and irresistible.”
12
Drawing comparisons to the work of Hugo, Tolstoy, and Zola, it climbed bestseller lists in the United States and London. Many who read the book assumed Crane to be a wizened veteran of the Civil War—an understandable error given his vivid rendering of the horrors of battle—but he was twenty-four years old and a veteran of nothing more dangerous than the Syracuse University baseball diamond. His novel was a triumph of the imagination, the product of his ridiculously large literary talent. Crane, wrote Joseph Conrad, “was a seer with a gift for rendering the significant on the surface of things with an incomparable insight into primitive emotions.”
13
He was also a newspaperman.
Journal
’s most notorious correspondent in the autumn of 1896, Stephen Crane was famous.
The Red Badge of Courage,
his slim but powerful novel of the Civil War, had been published twelve months earlier. It arrived, said H.L. Mencken, “like a flash of lightning out of a clear winter sky; it was at once unprecedented and irresistible.”
12
Drawing comparisons to the work of Hugo, Tolstoy, and Zola, it climbed bestseller lists in the United States and London. Many who read the book assumed Crane to be a wizened veteran of the Civil War—an understandable error given his vivid rendering of the horrors of battle—but he was twenty-four years old and a veteran of nothing more dangerous than the Syracuse University baseball diamond. His novel was a triumph of the imagination, the product of his ridiculously large literary talent. Crane, wrote Joseph Conrad, “was a seer with a gift for rendering the significant on the surface of things with an incomparable insight into primitive emotions.”
13
He was also a newspaperman.
Crane had begun to freelance news squibs to New York dailies at the age of sixteen, while living in Asbury Park. He eventually graduated to feature articles and short stories in the Sunday editions. He considered his newspaper work preparation for a literary career: “I decided that the nearer a writer gets to life the greater he becomes as an artist, and most of my prose writings have been toward the goal partially described by that misunderstood and abused word, realism.”
14
In his twenties, Crane would begin trampling the distinction between journalism and literature. His fiction was “nearer to life” in a newspaper sense: he was drawn to scenes of action and danger, crisis and war. He employed an episodic narrative style and the sparse and concrete language of reportage. His tone—world-weary, ironic, skeptical to the point of insolence—was also more journalistic than conventionally literary. Before Dreiser, Hemingway, Mailer, and a host of others, Crane owned the swaggering persona of the big-time adventure-seeking writer-reporter. As Mencken said, he single-handedly “lifted newspaper reporting to the level of a romantic craft, alongside counterfeiting and mining in the Klondike.”
15
14
In his twenties, Crane would begin trampling the distinction between journalism and literature. His fiction was “nearer to life” in a newspaper sense: he was drawn to scenes of action and danger, crisis and war. He employed an episodic narrative style and the sparse and concrete language of reportage. His tone—world-weary, ironic, skeptical to the point of insolence—was also more journalistic than conventionally literary. Before Dreiser, Hemingway, Mailer, and a host of others, Crane owned the swaggering persona of the big-time adventure-seeking writer-reporter. As Mencken said, he single-handedly “lifted newspaper reporting to the level of a romantic craft, alongside counterfeiting and mining in the Klondike.”
15
For most of the summer of ’96, Crane had been on assignment to Hearst’s
Journal,
one of a handful of name-brand pens providing sketches of life at popular resorts in upstate New York and on the New Jersey seaboard. It was not terribly romantic work, but then Crane’s entire writer-reporter persona was riddled with holes. His creed of “getting closer to life” to become a great artist was fine in theory, but he was going about it backward: he had produced a great war novel long before he had covered a war. And his journalistic skills were limited. The sketches he submitted to dailies were sometimes rejected as too literary, too daring. He was unreliable on deadline and he was known to miss central events of important stories. But he at least made an effort to master the craft of journalism. It offered him things the literary life could never match, starting with money. The fees he received were modest but far better than those he got for his early fiction, news editors being quicker to see value in the strength and originality of Crane’s voice. Most important, journalism fed Crane’s restless and daring nature. He had a need, as the critic Mark Van Doren has noted, to live “in the midst of all but unbearable excitement.”
16
The
Journal
was about to give him an assignment that would bring him all he could handle.
Journal,
one of a handful of name-brand pens providing sketches of life at popular resorts in upstate New York and on the New Jersey seaboard. It was not terribly romantic work, but then Crane’s entire writer-reporter persona was riddled with holes. His creed of “getting closer to life” to become a great artist was fine in theory, but he was going about it backward: he had produced a great war novel long before he had covered a war. And his journalistic skills were limited. The sketches he submitted to dailies were sometimes rejected as too literary, too daring. He was unreliable on deadline and he was known to miss central events of important stories. But he at least made an effort to master the craft of journalism. It offered him things the literary life could never match, starting with money. The fees he received were modest but far better than those he got for his early fiction, news editors being quicker to see value in the strength and originality of Crane’s voice. Most important, journalism fed Crane’s restless and daring nature. He had a need, as the critic Mark Van Doren has noted, to live “in the midst of all but unbearable excitement.”
16
The
Journal
was about to give him an assignment that would bring him all he could handle.
There was a vogue in the 1890s for stories from America’s burgeoning inner cities. To people fortunate enough to live elsewhere, urban slums were an exciting spectacle, full of exotic characters, strange customs, and squalid scenes. Like foreign fields of battle and the unsettled reaches of America’s West, the slums were unprotected by the hard veneers of civilization; life remained raw and elemental, and the primitive emotions still ran riot. The market for slum novels, slum journalism, and slum photography was bottomless. Wealthy New Yorkers took up a new form of urban tourism known as the “slumming party.” Under the pretext of social concern, bluestocking men and women would rush through the Bowery, giddy at their proximity to wretchedness and vice.
17
17
On a September afternoon in 1896, Henry Haxton, a
Journal
editor, ran into Hearst on a stairway at the Tribune Building and delivered a pitch on Crane’s behalf for a series of “novelettes based upon real incidents of New York life.” Crane was a recognized authority on the lower orders. The success of
The Red Badge of Courage
had recently emboldened publishers in New York and London to issue his first full novel,
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
—a book they had all rejected in 1893 as risqué and entirely bereft of social uplift. Hearst gave his assent and Haxton promptly wrote to Crane: “I am sure that if you read the police news in next Sunday and Monday mornings’ papers and go to Jefferson Market Police Court on Monday morning, you will get the material for a good Tenderloin story to start with. I suppose that if you are going there on Monday you would be glad to have a reporter, who knows the ropes, meet you there.”
18
Journal
editor, ran into Hearst on a stairway at the Tribune Building and delivered a pitch on Crane’s behalf for a series of “novelettes based upon real incidents of New York life.” Crane was a recognized authority on the lower orders. The success of
The Red Badge of Courage
had recently emboldened publishers in New York and London to issue his first full novel,
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
—a book they had all rejected in 1893 as risqué and entirely bereft of social uplift. Hearst gave his assent and Haxton promptly wrote to Crane: “I am sure that if you read the police news in next Sunday and Monday mornings’ papers and go to Jefferson Market Police Court on Monday morning, you will get the material for a good Tenderloin story to start with. I suppose that if you are going there on Monday you would be glad to have a reporter, who knows the ropes, meet you there.”
18
The Tenderloin was a square mile of saloons, nickleodeons, dance halls, peep shows, opium dens, gambling joints, and whorehouses, running through the West 30s on either side of Broadway, and in the 1890s, according to the chief chronicler of New York lowlife, Luc Sante, it set “what was probably the city’s all-time standard for vice in one district.”
19
The Jefferson Market Police Court was where denizens of the Tenderloin had their morning reckonings. Crane met a
Journal
court reporter at Shanley’s Restaurant around 9 a.m. on Monday, September 14. They hustled to court and spent a few hours watching the day’s lot of transgressors grind through the machinery of justice. On the following evening, Crane furthered his research by observing the same population in its natural habitat. He crawled the Broadway dives.
19
The Jefferson Market Police Court was where denizens of the Tenderloin had their morning reckonings. Crane met a
Journal
court reporter at Shanley’s Restaurant around 9 a.m. on Monday, September 14. They hustled to court and spent a few hours watching the day’s lot of transgressors grind through the machinery of justice. On the following evening, Crane furthered his research by observing the same population in its natural habitat. He crawled the Broadway dives.
For this part of his assignment Crane needed no guide. A wiry little man with a thin mustache under his prominent nose, he met up with a couple of chorus girls in a Turkish smoking parlor on West 29th Street. Some time before midnight they wandered over to Broadway Garden, which had a reputation as a “resort for notorious women.”
20
There they ran into Dora Clark, an acquaintance of the chorus girls. Miss Clark was a ravishing young woman, barely twenty years old, with masses of curly dark red hair. The foursome later left Broadway Garden together. Crane put one of the chorus girls on an uptown streetcar and turned around to find a policeman arresting Dora Clark and the remaining chorus girl for soliciting. Amid the “wildest and theatrical sobbing,” the chorus girl told the policeman that Crane was her husband. Crane backed her up. “If it was necessary,” he would later explain, “to avow a marriage to save a girl who is not a prostitute from being arrested as a prostitute, it must be done, though the man suffer eternally.” The policeman lost interest in the “married” girl but pressed his case against Miss Clark. He warned Crane that she was a known prostitute. “If you people don’t want to get pinched, too, you had better not be seen with her.”
21
20
There they ran into Dora Clark, an acquaintance of the chorus girls. Miss Clark was a ravishing young woman, barely twenty years old, with masses of curly dark red hair. The foursome later left Broadway Garden together. Crane put one of the chorus girls on an uptown streetcar and turned around to find a policeman arresting Dora Clark and the remaining chorus girl for soliciting. Amid the “wildest and theatrical sobbing,” the chorus girl told the policeman that Crane was her husband. Crane backed her up. “If it was necessary,” he would later explain, “to avow a marriage to save a girl who is not a prostitute from being arrested as a prostitute, it must be done, though the man suffer eternally.” The policeman lost interest in the “married” girl but pressed his case against Miss Clark. He warned Crane that she was a known prostitute. “If you people don’t want to get pinched, too, you had better not be seen with her.”
21
The patrolman, Charles Becker, led Crane and the two women to the 30th Street station house, where he locked up Dora Clark. Crane calmed the hysterical chorus girl long enough to say goodnight and went home. By his own account he tried to sleep but instead spent the night wrestling with his conscience. He knew Miss Clark was probably a courtesan: “The sergeant at the station house seemed to know her as well as he knew the Madison Square tower.” But Crane firmly believed the arrest to be wrong. He guessed that he could hardly be the first man of character to witness a wrongful arrest, but he supposed that “reputable citizens” wouldn’t dream of interfering with the law. A man might lose his job if it became known that he was out until 2:30 a.m. with chorus girls. But didn’t he have a civic responsibility to speak up? Wasn’t it the right thing to do?
22
22
On the morning of September 16, 1896, Crane sat quietly in the Jefferson Market Police Court as the red-headed Dora Clark was led sobbing from the prisoner’s box to the bar. Face flushed, eyes downcast, she stood accused of what the next day’s
Journal
would call “the most degrading of all offences.” Patrolman Becker explained the circumstances of her arrest to the court. Magistrate Cornell asked the young woman if she had anything to say. Miss Clark admitted that she had been in Broadway Garden and acknowledged that the hour was late for a woman to be on the town but said she had been lonesome and in need of company: “I was out where there were people and lights and music.” She denied the charge of solicitation and responded bitterly to the statement of prior offenses. Her earlier arrest, she said, had happened after a policeman had spoken insultingly to her and she had rebuffed him. Since that incident, she declared, the police had made a target of her. The presiding magistrate asked Becker if there was any doubt in the case. None at all, he said: “She’s an old hand and always lies about it.”
23
Journal
would call “the most degrading of all offences.” Patrolman Becker explained the circumstances of her arrest to the court. Magistrate Cornell asked the young woman if she had anything to say. Miss Clark admitted that she had been in Broadway Garden and acknowledged that the hour was late for a woman to be on the town but said she had been lonesome and in need of company: “I was out where there were people and lights and music.” She denied the charge of solicitation and responded bitterly to the statement of prior offenses. Her earlier arrest, she said, had happened after a policeman had spoken insultingly to her and she had rebuffed him. Since that incident, she declared, the police had made a target of her. The presiding magistrate asked Becker if there was any doubt in the case. None at all, he said: “She’s an old hand and always lies about it.”
23
“Young woman,” said the magistrate, “I have listened patiently because it is a terrible thing to judge a girl on such a charge unheard. But the officer’s testimony and your past record. . . .” Before Cornell could render judgment, Crane rose from his seat. He wore a dark blue suit and a blue-striped shirt. His tawny hair was carefully combed and parted in the middle. “Your honor, I know the girl to be innocent. I am the man who was with her and there is no truth in what the officer has charged.” The magistrate asked his name. He looked pale and nervous but his voice was firm: “I am Stephen Crane, the novelist.”
24
24
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