The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst Read Free Page B

were all there, with the Star and the Evening Post just around the corner. There was a rationale behind this geographic squeeze. Park Row was convenient to City Hall and the U.S. courthouse, prime sources of metro news. It was also near the Post Office, where papers picked up “exchanges” of copy from around the country. Over the years, the street had sprouted taverns, oyster broils, billiard halls, and other amenities, making Park Row not only the journalistic nerve center of greater New York but its own bustling ink-soaked village, swarming at all hours with newspapermen, newsboys, petitioners, hawkers, delivery trucks, and horse-cab operators poised for rush assignments.
     
    Of particular interest to Hearst on his visit that day would have been two mismatched buildings directly across from City Hall. The squat structure with a clear view of the park was home to the New York Sun, edited by Charles Anderson Dana. The Sun had been the most popular newspaper in America when Hearst had entered Harvard in 1882. Next door, casting its long shadow over the Sun, was the Pulitzer Building, headquarters of the New York World, the most popular newspaper in America by the time Hearst left college in 1886.
     
    Park Row had seen its share of conflict in the nineteenth century, but nothing more venomous and momentous than what had transpired between Pulitzer and Dana in those few years. They were two proud, brilliant journalists who unfortunately shared the identical goal of publishing the most interesting and influential Democratic newspaper in New York. There could only be one winner and neither man was inclined to yield. Their great clash, ruinous to each in different ways, riveted Hearst while he was at school. It was a crucial part of his newspaper education, shaping his ideas, tastes, and ambitions. The letters he wrote to his father advocating changes to the San Francisco Examiner were strongly influenced by the so-called “new journalism” that Pulitzer was unleashing on Dana in New York. Hearst’s move eastward from San Francisco emulated Pulitzer’s 1883 journey from St. Louis to Manhattan. The strategic plan Hearst carried in his head as he stalked Park Row that day, the proud new owner of the New York Journal, was drawn directly from Pulitzer’s attack on Dana: he would employ similar approaches to content, political alliances, circulation, pricing, and promotions in his own campaign for newspaper supremacy. The most significant difference between his plan and Pulitzer’s was that Hearst’s target was not Dana. Hearst was aiming to supplant Pulitzer himself as the predominant publisher in America, and he intended to do so by beating the master at his own game.
     
     
     
    IT IS DIFFICULT TO APPRECIATE the magnitude of what Hearst was attempting in New York—or the magnitude of what Pulitzer had earlier accomplished—without first taking the measure of Charles Anderson Dana, the original master, the most successful and admired editor on Park Row for two decades after the Civil War.
     
    Dana, still working long hours despite his seventy-five years, may well have been at his desk the day Hearst closed the deal. His offices were at the top of a spiral staircase on the third floor of the weathered Sun Building. He was almost completely bald now, with a bushy white beard on his somber block of a face, but age seemed only to underscore his eminence. Whatever luster his paper had lost since the war with Pulitzer, his record of accomplishment was unassailable. In addition to three decades at the helm of the Sun and fifteen years as managing editor of Horace Greeley’s celebrated New York Tribune, Dana had published a life of Ulysses S. Grant and a spirited defense of the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. He had co-edited a sixteen-volume American Cyclopaedia that had sold three million copies. There probably wasn’t a sharper intellect in any newsroom in New York, nor anyone else with his depth and range of