The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Being Canadian, Kenneth Whyte's depiction of the Great Publisher is non-biased, and as he states, attempts to simplify and clarify previous biographies of Hearst's early career. With a vastly entertaining writing style, Whyte immerses the reader into an era that is difficult to fathom in today's age. He clearly demonstrates why Hearst's success was as much a result of timing and the state of the world at the time, as it was the ingenuity of a true entrepreneur. Whyte also clears up, once and for all, the debate that Hearst's success was primarily due to his being born into money. Though certainly a factor in his success, lesser men had lost more "spoon fed" funds both before and after him. His impact on Journalism both then and now is dramatic and his accolades justly deserved.
If you have any interest whatsoever in Hearst, the era of Yellow Journalism, or the World at the turn of the 20th century, you will surely enjoy this tome.
I highly recommend it and congratulate Kenneth Whyte on a job well done. What else would we expect from a Canadian journalist?

Like many people, what I know about William Randolph Hearst I got mostly from the movie _Citizen Kane_. That's not at all fair; even though Pauline Kael said that the movie did better than most biographical pictures in portraying its subject (there's faint praise), Charles Foster Kane was a fictionalized character, dreamed up by Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz, even though largely based on Hearst's life. Kane's upbringing and his eventual corruption were disastrous, but these were not really part of Hearst's story. _The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst_ (Counterpoint) by Kenneth Whyte barely covers Hearst's upbringing, and ends around the time of Hearst's marriage, concentrating on Hearst's astonishing early success in the newspaper business. Whyte barely mentions Kane, but fans of the movie will be impressed; Kane as a young man is shown as a vivacious showman and sensationalist, which Hearst certainly was, but also as having sincere concern for the welfare of the public, which Hearst certainly did. And Kane's words that infuriate his financial custodian, "I think it would be fun to run a newspaper," certainly apply. Whyte prompts a reexamination of Hearst, not just as inspiration for Kane, but also a reexamination of his reputation as being the king of yellow journalism; seen in context, Hearst's newspapers' sensationalism was simply the way newspapers in general were conducting themselves, but Hearst's were good at the job, and produced useful insights for their times.

Hearst, like Kane, surely entered the newspaper business with money. He spent some time shopping around for a New York paper to buy, settling on the _Journal_ in 1895. Hearst was condemned at the time and ever afterwards for managing to succeed in the newspaper business simply because he had money to spend. It is true that he had the money, and that he could hire talented men (and sometimes even more important, hire them away from other papers), but Whyte points out that everyone in the higher echelons of New York publishing at the time was fabulously rich and not all of them succeeded. Hearst worked long hours, he was talented, and he liked competing against the other papers, but in Whyte's portrait, he was much more interested in putting out a good paper than in how much money he could make from it or how much his money could buy. The public liked sensation, and the newspapers knew it. A great deal of the last part of Whyte's book is spent on Hearst, the _Journal_, and the Spanish-American War in Cuba, a war the responsibility for which a famous story lays to Hearst himself. Frederic Remington, goes the story, telegraphed Hearst from Cuba that there was no trouble and no war, and he wanted to return home. Hearst telegraphed back, "Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war." (There was a slight change in wording for _Citizen Kane_, but everyone would have known Hearst from this one telegram.) It is amazing to read how little there is to this story. No physical record of such telegrams has ever been found. The story only comes from an anecdote from one of Hearst's own reporters in a memoir five years afterward, and any instruction to Remington that he remain went unheeded, as he left Cuba immediately when his contracted time was up. The _Journal_ did help persuade the reluctant McKinley administration eventually to declare war on Spain, but it did so mainly by describing, without undue exaggeration, how thousands of ordinary Cubans were dying in "reconcentration camps". Whyte convincingly argues that rather than Hearst goading America mindlessly to go into an unnecessary war, it was an instance when journalism incited popular support for a war to end horrors that were occurring ninety miles from our own country. Hearst's anger at the atrocities in Cuba was well founded, and he used that anger, rather than using a motive of profit, to make the atrocities a national and international cause.

This shows the great strength of Whyte's book. He has obviously spent hours reading old papers, not just Hearst's but the competitors as well. Hearst did what they were all doing, but did it better than anyone: "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." Hearst's first years at the _Journal_ were his best years; because of the format of this book, Whyte does not go ahead to the times when Hearst abandoned his populist views and flirted with Hitler and Mussolini, or became a rabidly right-wing critic of FDR, or promoted witch-hunts for reds. We can charitably remember these better years, for Whyte's fascinating picture of these years is convincing: Hearst was a brilliant newspaperman and a genuine champion of public good.

Tyler Cowen remarked offhandedly in his review of The Uncrowned King that it was a revisionist biography of William Randolph Hearst. I would not only disagree but would say that the book's lack of moral judgment is refreshing and helpful.

The book looks exclusively at the 3 years it took Hearst to rise to the top of the New York newspaper market. In the process, he unseated two of the greatest editors in American history, Charles Dana and Joseph Pulitzer. Whyte doesn't excuse the tactics that Hearst employed to get there, rather he explains and contextualizes them. We see that WRH certainly exacerbated the growing tensions in Cuba but no more than any of his colleagues. He had a penchant for running fabricated stories but we forget how regularly he used the paper to drive donations to victims of crime and most memorably, to fund the base of the Statue of Liberty.

In the rush to criticize Hearst's excess, many authors ignore the business acumen that put him in that position. He was no Donald Trump - simply diversifying the family fortune. No, according to Whyte, WRH built a newspaper empire out of sweat and blood and energy. He may have been a rich boy but he was an inspiring leader who knew how to play to the strengths of his strange editors and reporters. It was that skill that let him take a bottom tier newspaper and turn it into the powerhouse of the most competitive city in the world in less than 36 months.

The Uncrowned King is long but rarely drags. It's generally positive but refrains from gushing. Lastly, the author bites his tongue when it comes to modern comparisons and business lessons. The book is simply a chronicle of a great and often under-appreciated American icon.

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