The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (Hardcover)

by Kenneth Whyte (Author)
Key Phrases: newspaper maker, reconcentration camps, yellow newspapers, New York, Park Row, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The conventional understanding of newspaper magnate Hearst as haunted megalomaniac, cynical purveyor of prurience and jingoistic instigator of the Spanish-American War gets a major challenge in this scintillating biographical study. Maclean's editor Whyte covers the years from 1895 to 1898, when Hearst took a revamped New York Journal to the top of the newspaper market by way of a bitter circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer's rival New York World. Whyte styles Hearst a brilliant and creative media entrepreneur with a gift for managing high-strung (and often drunken) subordinates, progressive politics and a sincere social conscience that animated his paper's crusading journalism. Even Hearst's agitation for war with Spain, Whyte contends, was more justifiable and journalistically responsible than is thought—and may have helped forestall a genocide in Cuba. Whyte considers the yellow journalism slur often hurled at Hearst a compliment; he finds the Journal to be a demanding, sophisticated read that used emotion and drama to draw readers into reporting of real significance. No slouch himself when it comes to colorful profiles and engrossing narrative, Whyte makes Hearst's rise an entertaining saga of newspapering's heroic age, when the popular press became an unofficial pillar of democracy. Photos. (Jan.)
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From Bookmarks Magazine
This work is not only a captivating biography of William Randolph Hearst but also a biography of the key figures in the press during that time and a history of U.S. journalism. Entertaining and well researched, Uncrowned Kingpleased the critics. Although the volume doesn't offer much in the way of new information—other revisionist biographies like David Nasaw's The Chief(2000) also debunk Hearst's sensationalist war in Cuba—Whyte buttresses his claims with solid, colorful research. Some readers may take issue with Whyte's sympathetic and admiring tone, but the author overlooks none of Hearst's flaws. Indeed, critics noted that one of the major flaws seemed to be that the book ended just after the Spanish-American War—and far too soon.
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 560 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; First Edition. 1 in number line edition (January 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582434670
• ISBN-13: 978-1582434674
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #327,942 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hearst, the human, November 28, 2008

By	Robert J. Morrow "HamiltonHomeReview.com" (Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews

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?

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Refreshing View of Hearst the Newspaperman, January 11, 2009

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An extraordinary look at William Randolph Hearst, January 30, 2009

By	Jerry Saperstein (Evanston, IL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

I suspect that most Americans have no idea of who William Randolph Hearst was. Some may know, vaguely, that he was the model for Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles' classic "Citizen Kane". But few of those people would know that Hearst as a model was greatly distorted in he movie. A few may remember that a Hearst descendant, Patti Hearst, was kidnapped by the so-called Sybmionese Liberation Army, and was later convicted of crimes committed while a prisoner of them. There have been a few biographies of Hearst, but Kenneth Whyte considers them shallow - and absolutely proves himself correct in this masterful work.

Hearst was the son of a 19th Century mining magnate and ultimately US Senator. Daddy was, to put it mildly, filthy rich. Both mom and dad were indulgent of young William, buying him a steam yacht and many other nifty toys. William dropped out of Harvard and took over the management of the San Francisco Examiner. George Hearst, like many rich men of the time, had bought a newspaper because newspapers were very prominent in the politics of the day.

Much to the surprise of everyone, except himself, William was quie successful in turning around the Examiner and he soon had his sights set on a bigger pond - New York.

By 1895, George Hearst had died and left his entire estate to his widow, Phoebe. William convinced mom to finance the purchase of one of the existing 48 daily newspapers in New York City. It certainly helped WRH that he came from a wealthy family, for he used $10 million of the family fortune to finance his newspaper adventures over the next few years - and that was when $10 million was the equivalent of several hundred million today. Consider this for scale, the most popular newspapers of the day sold for a penny or two a day, compared to the dollar or more a day you pay today (if you're one of the diminishing number of people who actually read newspapers).

Hearst bought the New York Journal, which was essentially a failing newspaper, and immediately started improving it with writers he hired away from competitors, massive promotion campaigns and stunts and what ultimately became a war between Hearst and the legendary Joseph Pulitzer, who owned the leading daily, the New York World.

Hearst had a dream, a vision that saw him owning newspapers throughout the country. To acheive this, he know he must first be successful in New York City.

Whyte spends most of the 466 pages of text on an excruciatingly detailed examination of Hearst and Pulitzer in the "yellow journalism" era they for the most part created. Just three years make up the bulk of the book, from Hearst buying the Journal in 1895 through the Spanish-American War in 1898. Along the way, Whyte demolishes the myth the Hearst literally created the war.

The depth of Whyte's research is breathtaking, as exemplified by 28 pages of footnotes plus a bibliography and literally thousands of citations within the text.

Although Whyte has a good, craftsman like writing style, the book is ponderous and moves slowly owing to the huge mass of detail. It took me about two weeks to work my way through the book, interspersing it with three others.

Even so, it "The Uncrowned King" is a very informative read. Not only do you gain perspective on a most remarkable man, William Randolph Hearst, but you also learn about the press titan who had better publicity, Joseph Pulitzer. There are detailed portraits of a few dozens of the most luminois journalists of the day as well.

All in all, "The Uncrowned King" is a valuable piece of American lore and very well worth reading.

Jerry