Hearst, Politics, and the Media

David Nasaw Discusses His Award-Winning Biography

A notoriously complicated and enigmatic figure, William Randolph Hearst is the original media mogul, building an empire that included newspapers, magazines, radio stations, a film studio, and newsreels. When Professor David Nasaw, former Executive Officer of the Ph.D. Program in History and Director of the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, decided to write Hearst's biography, he knew he had his work cut out for him: How to humanize a larger-than-life man who played a monumental role in forging the modern culture of communication and entertainment in the United States? How to humanize the face behind Orson Welles's cinematic, autocratic press baron, or the opulent San Simeon estate, or his beautiful movie-star companion Marion Davies? Nasaw's book, which won the Bancroft Prize for 2001 and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, is the first Hearst bio to avail itself of hundreds of thousands of private Hearst documents previously unavailable to scholars and historians and to finally address questions concerning Hearst's education, professional ascensions, private relationships, and dealings with the likes of Hitler, Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Mussolini. In this excerpted conversation, Nasaw talks to folio about writing the life of this complex and powerful figure.

The Chief (Houghton Mifflin, 2000) is the first biography you've done. What made you want to write a biography and why on William Randolph Hearst?

I didn't set out to write a biography; never thought of myself as a biographer. What I wanted to do was write a reasonably sized book about politics and money, politics and the media. When I was began this project, in the early 1990s, the specter of Ross Perot loomed large, and the specter of any number of millionaires using their money and influence to buy themselves public offices was very visible. As a historian I wanted to examine this phenomenon by doing a case study, and the most interesting case of politics and the media is Hearst, who made up his mind to use his media power and savvy to get himself and others elected into public office. But then I discovered that the guy was into everything--publishing, politics, newsreels, radio, feature films, magazines. After some additional research I discovered that the last biography was written 40 years ago, and that no biography has been written using his personal and business papers. I found that there was considerable material at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley--60 huge cartons of correspondence between Hearst and family members, people who worked for him, and powerful figures from Winston Churchill to Eleanor Roosevelt to Louis B. Mayer to Gary Cooper. And then I discovered that there were papers that were privately held that no one had ever seen before. That's all I needed: the guy was fascinating, nobody had written about him in 40 years, and there was all this new material that necessitated the biography.

How did you get access to the material people hadn't used before?

It took several years of making my case to the Hearst family that what was most important to me as an academic historian was my reputation in the profession, and that the only interest I had was in writing a full and fair biography. I also made it clear to the family and the corporation, both of which had copyright of the papers, that all the rumors and the negative depictions were already out there. Hearst had been slammed in the press for over a hundred years, and no one had tried to reassess the man using primary documents--his own words and words that had been written to him. It took a long time to convince them, and because they are publishers, they knew and I knew that once they gave me this material, they had to give me full access with no censorship.

Have you had any contact with them since the book's been published?

I hear through the grapevine that some family members I got to know are very pleased. They're pleased because the other side of the story is out there: Hearst as the first media mogul, and as the man who crossed from newspapers to magazines, and then went on to radio, propaganda films, newsreels, feature films. There's a case to be made that Hearst is to the 20th century what Edison was to the 19th. Because if, in the 19th century, electricity changed the economy and society and culture, Hearst did it in the 20th with media/entertainment conglomerates.

What were some of the difficulties you faced in trying to write about such a paradoxical and enigmatic character?

When I began this project, I was convinced that I was going to detest the man. And I am critical of many of the things he did and many of the positions he took. From the 1930s on, he was a vicious redbaiter and an anti-New Dealer, which I find reprehensible. And I don't like Hearst's ideology: he believed that he earned the money, and not the thousands of people who worked for him. But I also discovered that he was a progressive and a leftist for many more years than he was a rightist. It was difficult to figure out how the change in political beliefs came about, and how it came about as violently as it did. He turned against Roosevelt, but first he got him elected. So up until the middle 1930s, he had strong opinions, but they were not out of the bounds of reason. And even in 1931-32 he proposed a lot of the New Deal programs that Roosevelt later picked up on, and he hated Hoover for not rescuing working people. And for the 50 years that he was a leftist, his major opponents were the socialists: he fought with the socialist party in New York, and with Tammany, for the votes of working people and won. And although he was fabulously wealthy, he was never part of society. He hated society, didn't join the right men's clubs, and those he did join he was thrown out of. He believed that he was a Jeffersonian, so I liked that.

What would you most like readers to take away from your book?

I want readers to take away from the book, and reviewers have picked this up, that Hearst is not Kane. Harold Evans wrote a piece in The New York Times in which he said that I had "rescued" Hearst from Kane, and then the film historian David Thompson wrote another piece in which he said that Nasaw had "rescued" Kane from Hearst, because now people can look at the Orson Wells film as a work of art, and not as a biographical study. And I wanted to rescue the 50 years of radicalism and progressivism that preceded his lunatic hard turn to the right. It's important to understand that capitalism in the first part of the 20th century and the later part of the 19th century--"the market rules" philosophy of Reagan as well as other Reaganism--has not always been hospitable to Americans, and that Americans from a variety of walks of life, rich as well as poor, have understood that unrestrained capitalism doesn't benefit anybody. Many leaders in our past have tried to regulate capitalism so that it worked better for the society at large instead of for a few individuals at the top. And I wanted readers to know that Hearst was one of those people, for a good part of his life.