first, to clear your mind of all prepossessions, then go to the enemies and the friends of your subject. Take all that they all give you of charges, denials and boastings; see the man himself; listen sympathetically to his own story; and, to reduce to consistency the jumble of contradictions thus obtained, follow his career from birth through all its scenes, past all the eye-witnesses and documents to the probable truth. This sounds long and hard, and it is long, but it isn't hard with ordinary men. They live in few places and are well known to many willing witnesses.
Not so with Mr. Hearst. We can't take that course in his case. He lives nowhere. He has residences, but no home. He has many businesses: mines, ranches and, in five cities—San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles—he has one or two newspapers; also he has two magazines; but he has no place of business; no office. In each of the five cities where he has newspapers, he has a career, and in others besides; for he is busy everywhere politically. And yet he goes rarely to Boston; he has visited Los Angeles but once since his paper was started there; and in none of these other places has he either many friends or many enemies who know him. You can learn all about his agents, but of Mr. Hearst—nothing.
The Silence of Mr. Hearst
It is really amazing, when you come actually to inquire, to find how few human beings have come in personal contact with the man and, stranger still, to discover how few of those who have met him are able to give you any definite impression of his personality. There is a reason for this.
Arthur Brisbane, the editor of Hearst's New York Evening Journal arranged to have Mr. Hearst meet socially some of the judges of the State of New York. Mr. Brisbane's purpose was to have his chief know and be known to all the leading men of the state and the dinner to the judges was to have been a beginning. It was the end. Mr. Hearst and the judges met, and there was conversation; but it was Mr. Brisbane who talked, he and the judges. Mr. Hearst sat silent, a mute listener. His friends say Mr. Hearst is shy before strangers. Very well then, how about his intimate friends? In the first place he has no intimates, apparently. He has employees; he has lieutenants; he has relatives; and most of these are his friends. What is more, these friends of his admire him beyond all reason; at any rate no two of them admire him for the same reason. Indeed, as they describe him, no two seem to be talking about the same man. They all relate anecdotes to illustrate their conception of their chief, but their stories are principally of what they said to him; there is very little of what he said to them. All they all agreed upon was that, even to them, "Mr. Hearst does not say much."
The Brisbane Theory of Hearst
The silence of Mr. Hearst is the trait which has contributed largely to the theory that Hearst isn't Hearst. In New York, where we know Arthur Brisbane, the brilliant editor of Hearst's Evening Journal, we praise or we blame him for the success of Hearst. It is said that the New York judges went away from Mr. Brisbane's dinner with the impression that Brisbane was Hearst. A big Wall Street operator offered Brisbane a handsome stock tip on the theory that he was all there was of Hearst. We have seen what the Evening Post had to say on this subject, and Mr. Jerome opened his campaign for the governorship with a demand upon Hearst to go and ask Brisbane what the Hearst movement stood for.
New York forgets that Hearst—or somebody—had made the San Francisco Examiner a success before he came to New York and retained Arthur Brisbane. And New York, in its provincialism, probably doesn't know that Hearst—or somebody under that name—had played a pretty effective part in politics in California before he came East. Tom Williams is the man they used to talk most about in San Francisco, but "the Good Tom," as they called him, had made the Examiner an expense to George Hearst, the father, before he made it pay for William Randolph, the son.
Tom Williams isn't known in Chicago. They sometimes read, but they don't see, Arthur Brisbane out there, so you hear nothing of Williams and little of Brisbane in Chicago. You don't hear much of Hearst either. Chicago has a great deal to do with
