What Made Willie Run?
SHANNON, DAVID
What Made Willie Run? CITIZEN HEARST By W. A. Swanberg Scribner's. 555 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by DAVID SHANNON Department of History, University of Wisconsin; author, "The Socialist Party of...
...When his mother died, for example, he had a sob-sister dash off a gushy, sentimental biography and then had the cheap literary insult published so lavishly that each copy cost $35...
...The following year, running again as a Democrat, he lost the governorship to Charles Evans Hughes...
...Citizen Hearst is the best biography of the publisher that exists because, unhke the others, it is neither a smear nor a whitewash...
...This is no explanation...
...And what was Hearst's role in the development of America's peculiarly shoddy, commercial, sensational and sentimental urban folk culture...
...San Simeon incidentally, was half the size of Rhode Island and had three castles on it, plus 10,000 beef cattle, a private airfield, a zoo and 35 staff automobiles...
...No amount of editing and polishing, however, would have removed the book's more fundamental weaknesses...
...Again and again he comes back to the problem of Hearst's personality— what made Willie run?—each time concluding that Hearst was a JekyllHyde, a Prospero-Caliban...
...But this is not so much Swanberg's fault as it is his subject's...
...Hearst's bed at his San Simeon estate had once been owned by Cardinal Richelieu...
...supported Al Smith, whom he despised, for Governor...
...When William Howard Taft left the White House, Hearst arranged to buy the special outsized marble bathtub which the 320-pound President had installed...
...After the first 200 pages or so, the quality of the writing deteriorates badly...
...addition to these two residences, Hearst owned other castles (intact, not disassembled), a huge ranch in Mexico, and (with Marion Davies) an ornate beach house in Santa Monica...
...At the time of his death in 1951, at the age of 88, his publishing organization had assets of about $160 million...
...In 1908 Hearst created the now-forgotten Independence party, which nominated two unknowns who together polled about one-fifth as many votes as Eugene V Debs...
...Swanberg's re-creation of Hearst's full life is interesting, but the subject rather than the author provides the interest...
...Several cry out for consideration: Did Hearst actually debase the nation's intellectual and political coinage with his journalistic assumption that most people are morons...
...The manuscript needed a final cleaning to provide much needed transitions, correct some space imbalances, and catch a few anachronisms...
...At Harvard, his notion of a clever prank was to send to each of his instructors a chamber pot with the faculty member's name ornamentally inscribed...
...In 1920, a wild year even for Hearst, he tried and failed to get Hiram Johnson nominated at the Republican convention...
...William Randolph Hearst was the most spectacular vulgarian of his age...
...author, "The Socialist Party of America" In America, it seems, nothing succeeds like failure...
...Second, Swanberg makes errors of judgment in interpretation and in deciding what is important...
...His art and antique purchases, again largely sight unseen, overflowed his many residences...
...But in 1912 and 1916 he supported Wilson, for whom he had only contempt...
...tried and failed to get Democrat nominee James M. Cox to promise him the Navy Department post in exchange for his newspapers' support...
...More important, Hearst was also one of the most influential opinionmakers of his era...
...tried and failed to organize a new third party...
...it only begs the question by stating it differently...
...In 1924 Hearst declared all the candidates were either too conservative or too radical...
...He ran again for Mayor of New York in 1909, this time on a Republican-Fusion ticket...
...Swanberg himself, author of previous biographies of Dan Sickles and Jim Fisk as well as a book on Fort Sumter— none of them a notable commercial success—recently stated he was learning "how to succeed by failing...
...The Hearst apartment on Riverside Drive in New York covered three floors and more than three-quarters of an acre, not counting the roof garden...
...Yet Morris Hillquit's name is not even mentioned...
...Granted that no publisher can make his readers jump through ideological hoops, Hearst nevertheless exercised enormous power over the public mind...
...Hoover received his support in 1928, but in 1932 Hearst was a key figure in nominating Roosevelt...
...Hearst bought European castles sight unseen and had them shipped to the United States stone by stone...
...First, in some areas the research is inadequate and the information thin...
...The Hearst enterprises had once been even larger, but in 1951 they still included 18 daily newspapers in 12 cities scattered throughout the country, International News Service, the American Weekly, King Features Syndicate, International News Photos, and nine national magazines...
...His spending habits were so incredibly lavish—an income of $15 million a year was inadequate—that Thorstein Veblen, if he had known the publisher personally, would surely have called it exhibitionist consumption...
...His garish spending was sometimes plainly grotesque...
...Instead of fruitlessly worrying about Hearst's personality, Swanberg would have done well to have asked himself some other questions...
...He himself was elected to Congress as a Democrat from a New York City district in 1902 and was re-elected in 1904, the same year he was considered a possible Democratic Presidential nominee...
...According to the book's publisher, W. A. Swanberg's Citizen Hearst, which three weeks ago narrowly missed winning this year's Pulitzer Prize for biography, is probably selling more copies now than if it had won...
...Exercising their veto power over the nominations of the Pulitzer Prize advisory board, the trustees of Columbia University presumably rejected Swanberg's book because it did not meet the terms of the award...
...Outlandish fireworks displays were his idea of the ultimate in public entertainment...
...If so, how and to what extent...
...In time, they filled two five-story warehouses in the Bronx and required the attentions of a staff of 30...
...denounced the GOP platform...
...In 1905, running not as a Democrat but as an independent under the banner of the Municipal Ownership League, he barely lost the race for Mayor of New York...
...After FDR's first campaign, however, the publisher always backed Republican Presidential candidates...
...Hearst had great political influence, too, though consistency and party loyalty were not among his virtues...
...But it is nowhere the book it could have been...
...Clearly, Citizen Hearst was not "the best American biography teaching patriotic and unselfish services to the people, illustrated by an eminent example...
...Swanberg devotes many pages to New York City politics and the "loyalty" question during World War I, for instance...
...He supported Bryan in 1896 and 1900, albeit with a good deal of misgiving...
...and came out for Warren G. Harding...
Vol. 45 • May 1962 • No. 11
