HEARST, WILLIAM RANDOLPH

born April 29, 1863, San Francisco, Calif., U.S. died Aug. 14, 1951, Beverly Hills, Calif. American newspaper publisher who built up the nation's largest newspaper chain and whose methods profoundly influenced American journalism for a time. Hearst was the only son of George Hearst, a gold-mine owner and U.S. senator from California (188691). The young Hearst attended Harvard College for two years before being expelled. In 1887 he took control of the struggling San Francisco Examiner, which the elder Hearst had bought in 1880 for political reasons. He remade the paper into a blend of reformist investigative reporting and lurid sensationalism, and within two years it showed a profit. He then entered the New York City newspaper market in 1895 by purchasing the unsuccessful New York Morning Journal. He hired such able writers as Stephen Crane and Julian Hawthorne and raided the New York World for some of Joseph Pulitzer's best men, notably Richard F. Outcault, the inventor of colour comics. The New York Journal (afterward New York Journal-American) soon attained an unprecedented circulation by its reduced price of one cent; by the use of many illustrations, colour magazine sections, and glaring headlines; by sensational articles on crime and pseudoscientific topics; and by bellicosity in foreign affairs. Hearst's Journal and Pulitzer's World became involved in a series of fierce circulation wars, and these newspapers' use of sensationalistic reporting and frenzied promotional schemes soon gave rise to the term yellow journalism in describing such tactics. The Journal excoriated Great Britain in the Venezuela-British Guiana border dispute (from 1895) and then demanded (189798) war between the United States and Spain. Through dishonest and exaggerated reportage, Hearst's newspapers whipped up public sentiment against Spain such that they actually helped cause the Spanish-American War of 1898. Hearst supported William Jennings Bryan in the presidential campaign of 1896 and again in 1900, when he assailed President William McKinley as a tool of the trusts. While serving rather inactively in the U.S. House of Representatives (190307), Hearst received considerable support for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1904 and, running on an anti-Tammany Hall ticket, came within 3,000 votes of winning the 1905 election for mayor of New York City. In 1906, despite (or because of) his having turned to Tammany for support, he lost to Charles Evans Hughes for governor of New York, and in 1909 he suffered a heavier defeat for mayor of New York City. Rebuffed in his political ambitions, Hearst continued to vilify the British Empire, opposed the United States' entry into World War I, and maligned the League of Nations and the World Court. By 1925 Hearst had established or acquired newspapers in every section of the United States, as well as several magazines. He also published books of fiction and produced motion pictures featuring the actress Marion Davies, his mistress for more than 30 years. In the 1920s he built a grandiose castle on a 240,000-acre (97,000-hectare) ranch at San Simeon, Calif., and he furnished this residential complex with a vast collection of antiques and art objects that he had bought in Europe. At the peak of his fortune in 1935 he owned 28 major newspapers and 18 magazines, along with several radio stations, movie companies, and news services. But his vast personal extravagances and the Great Depression of the 1930s soon seriously weakened his financial position, and he had to sell faltering newspapers or consolidate them with stronger units. In 1937 he was forced to begin selling off some of his art collection, and by 1940 he had lost personal control of the vast communications empire that he had built. He lived the last years of his life in virtual seclusion. Additional reading W.A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst (1961, reprinted 1986), is a biography; the title refers to Orson Welles's motion picture Citizen Kane (1941), in which the central character of Charles Foster Kane was modeled largely on Hearst.