With his genius for journalistic showmanship, Hearst quickly turned the Examiner into a phenomenon. Within a few years, it had gone from albatross to cash cow, becoming the second most profitable newspaper in the United States.1
In the meantime, Hearst had come into a fortune from his ever-indulgent mother, who sold her shares in the fabled Anaconda mine and gave the money to her son. Now a multimillionaire on his own, he set out to realize a long-cherished dream. In 1895, he laid out a pittance for a moribund paper, the New York Journal, bought an apartment in Manhattan, and proceeded to challenge his mentor, Joseph Pulitzer, for newsstand supremacy.
Over the next few years, the two men engaged in a furious competition for readers. With his bottomless pockets, Hearst launched a raid on his rival’s workforce, at one point hiring away the entire staff of Pulitzer’s Sunday edition in a single piratical swoop.2Determined not simply to entertain readers but to “convulse [them] with excitement,”3 he took the sensationalistic tactics pioneered by Pulitzer and raised them to a frenzied new level. HAD FOUR WIVES; FIENDISH PARENTS; ALIVE IN A COFFIN; and TOTS BURNED TO DEATHwere just a few of the front-page headlines in the weeks after Hearst took control of the Journal.4
His newly designed Sunday supplement offered even racier fare: lavishly illustrated features on sex, crime, and a dizzying array of oddities, all conveyed in a breathless, believe-it-or-not tone. Typical of these offerings was an article about the unspeakable rituals ostensibly performed by members of a Cuban serpent cult:
SNAKES ARE THEIR GODS
CUBAN DISCIPLES OF THE DEVIL HAVE HIDEOUS
MIDNIGHT ORGIES
ALONE IN THE MOONLIGHT
SAVANNAHS THEY DISPORT
THEMSELVES LIKE FIENDS
BEAUTEOUS SINUOUS MULATTO GIRLS AT THE “DANCE OF THE ADDER” IN THE WITCH DOCTOR’S VILLAGE
EATING SNAKES TO WARD OFF EVIL5
Few things, of course, were better for circulation than a good, juicy homicide. Not content with merely describing murders in the most graphic possible detail, Hearst found ways to insert his paper into the investigations. He organized a “murder squad” of crime reporters to do their own detective work, ran regular articles taunting the police for their inefficiency, and enlisted the help of the public in solving crimes.
When a dismembered male torso and a portion of thigh washed up in the East River in June 1897, for example, Hearst turned the atrocity into a contest, trumpeting a “$1,000 Reward for Solution.” He ran a page-one drawing of a man’s body—resembling one of those butcher charts that indicate the different cuts of beef—so that readers could more easily visualize which limbs were still missing. And he assigned thirty crack reporters to the case, who managed to track down the killers while the police were still groping for clues.6
Mutilation-murder, however, wasn’t the emblematic crime of the Gilded Age. Our own fascination with serial killers reflects the obsessive anxieties of our particular era: issues having to do with moral breakdown, the dangers of sex, and the profound vulnerability of our bodies.7 In the age of Pulitzer and Hearst, the American public was afflicted with a different set of concerns. At a time when people could never be certain of what they were putting into their bodies—when medicines were made of strychnine and arsenic, bakers preserved their dough with sulfur of copper, babies consumed “swill milk” from cows fed on distillery waste, and soldiers received rations of “embalmed beef”—the knife-wielding psycho wasn’t the boogeyman that haunted the imagination of the American public.
It was the poisoner.