Rage Against the Machine: The 1906 New York Gubernatorial Race
Hearst at a supporters rally
The 1906 New York gubernatorial race was one for the ages: The current president stepping in for a future presidential candidate, a propaganda war, and one of America’s most flamboyant demagogues. But when the results came in, 1906 would prove to be a year where the votes were decided on a clash between the old machine politics and the new power of media, with all the same petty grudges and self-interest as the old ways. My interest was piqued in this race after writing about J.R. Brinkley, a snake oil doctor who pioneered broadcast radio use for campaigns and also fought against the party and medical establishment, which eventually led to his downfall. Rewinding to the beginning of the century, we see a lot of the same feelings of populist sentiment boiling over, spilling into all the political races.
To start, 1904 was a good year for candidates who were favored by the common man. Theodore Roosevelt, promising a square deal for all, was swept into office by a nearly 20-point popular vote win and New York stayed Republican, this time by 11%. Though it had started to transition from a tossup to a Republican state in national elections, New York’s gubernatorial contests remained stubbornly close. Frank Higgins’s 5 point win that year was attributed to Roosevelt, but the Democratic candidate was widely considered to be weak.
D-Cady Herrick was the lieutenant of the long-time boss of Albany County, the one purplish dot located in central eastern upstate New York. Herrick was originally the DA of the county and dispensed patronage, eventually taking a high paid position that allowed more time to dedicate to party activities. After his boss helped Grover Cleveland win the presidential convention and was appointed Secretary of the Treasury in 1885, Herrick took over the machine himself. By the time he decided to run for governor, he had the stench of a corrupt backroom dealer. Even worse politically, his close ties to the upstate Albany machine meant that his rivals in downstate New York City were not as inclined to help him. The map below shows the 1904 results and where the votes were coming from.
New York’s tight races came because Democratic strength in the few New York City counties held most of the voting population while Republican strength was upstate, especially around Albany and Rochester. Out west, the city of Buffalo was highly contested and held a lot of votes. Herrick may have controlled Albany County, but he still lost it in the end by 9% as the presidential ticket lost it by 14%. However, the downstate Democratic bastions of New York and Kings County were not strong enough wins to tip the state. Still, the result was not the worst that could have happened given the political environment and Democrats eagerly looked forward to the midterm election only two years later.
The downstate Democrats were in a state of, for lack of a better word, disarray, mostly focused because of the on-again, off-again relationship of the machine and the most well-known infamous politician ever elected to the House. In 1902, two men ascended to power in New York City on a tenuous partnership. The first was Silent Charles Murphy.
Charles Murphy came from a poor family and saved enough to buy a bar called Charlie’s Place in New York City. Most customers found that he made an excellent bartender who was always willing to listen, but he never seemed to talk back much. One story to add to the legend is that whenever he was asked what time it was, Murphy would open his pocket watch and show it directly to the questioner. He started as a district leader, sending handwritten notes reminding Democrats to turn out on Election Day and swiftly rising up the ranks of the corrupt political organization Tammany Hall due to his hard work and delivering local wins. After his boss and a lot of the upper ring fell during a bribery investigation by a new mayor in 1901, Murphy would ascend to power as part of a triumvirate but swiftly muscled out the other two leaders. He would use his newfound organizational skills to put a loyal man, George McClellan Jr, back in the mayoral office and reclaim the power for the machine. The new boss, now christened, “Silent Charlie Murphy,” got to work rebuilding the power Tammany Hall once had.
The other man was the energetic William Randolph Hearst, one of America’s richest men and the publisher of tabloids across the nation. Hearst was largely seen as a pusher of yellow journalism, and it’s widely believed that his sensationalist headlines helped push the US into the Spanish-American War after the sinking of the USS Maine. He frequently would exaggerate or make up headlines to incite anger and he was a polarizing figure in the nation – hated by the elites and establishment, as well as other publishers and journalists, but with a huge fanbase among his wide readership. His papers would lean in that direction too, fighting for worker’s rights and pillorying the rich. Later on, Orson Welles would model Citizen Kane after his life and recently the movie “Mank” featured Hearst and his political ambitions prominently. Hearst originally did not seem to want to enter politics and had moved east from his San Francisco office, but he soon began to dream of the presidency. Realizing that he had to make nice with the Tammany Hall machine, he struck a deal with Charlie Murphy to use his coverage to support Democrats and in return was elected to the US House in 1902. Hearst ended the night in typical fashion as he rented most of Madison Square for a party, but poorly stored fireworks exploded and killed 18 people. The lawsuits would tie him up for years and it blunted some momentum. He tried to use this post as a launching pad for the 1904 Democratic presidential nomination, and actually took 20% of the delegates in the first round but was a distant 2nd to the eventual nominee. He settled to run for the House again, though accounts from the time show that his fellow representatives would joke that he was often absent from DC and failing to perform his duties, missing all but four of the 200 roll calls in his first year. He found time, however, to at least write up bills that would fail, but pushed for more railroad regulation, an 8-hour work day, and telegraph nationalization.
Hearst also made political moves in his private life. In 1903, Hearst married Millicent Veronica Wilson, a 21-year-old chorus girl. In Hearst Over Hollywood, author Louis Pizzitola finds evidence that her mother ran a Tammany Hall-connected brothel near City Hall at the time. Hearst wanted to be president, but he knew he would need a bigger post to get there. He eyed the New York City mayoralty, and that would mean taking on his once-ally, Silent Charlie.
Hearst began his mayoral campaign by diametrically opposing Tammany Hall and founding his own party, called the Municipal Owner’s League. He wouldn’t jump in until October and initially the party machine didn’t consider him a threat. Hearst, however, began to hold rallies in public where the working class would lift him up on their shoulders and parade him around. Election Day was extraordinarily violent with beatings at polling places and ballot boxes shaken down. Allegedly when someone told Charles Murphy that it would be a tight race, Murphy responded, “I don’t care. We win.” And he was not wrong. Democratic incumbent McClellan won by 3,000 votes but by most estimates, Hearst had about 50,000 more ballots. A court tried to intervene to get 6,000 ballot boxes counted for a recount, but Tammany would not hand them over and they were in public view on the street, ballots flying away in the breeze. The chart below shows that even though New York City’s population was booming, both years William Randolph Hearst ran for mayor against Tammany Hall saw no increase in the official number of counted ballots.
New York was still the largest state and the patronage and power a governor wields was extremely important at the time for each party to control. It made sense that with Teddy Roosevelt, a former New York governor himself, in the White House, focus would be heavy on this race in the 1906 cycle. When Frank Higgins declined to run again for health reasons, state Republicans went looking in their weak bench for someone to run. Roosevelt, a bit of a populist himself but still to Hearst’s right, went hard again the media mogul, proclaiming, “He preaches the gospel of envy, hate and unrest…He is the most potent single influence for evil we have in our life.”
Roosevelt needed a strong contender against Hearst and he found one in the full-bearded Charles Evans Hughes. Hughes was a law professor, a progressive for common-sense reforms like the president, but not an all-out populist like Hearst. He burst onto the scene only in 1905 as the counsel to the New York state house and senate when they investigated the utility companies and the life insurance industry. Seeing that he needed a reformer to run, Roosevelt personally appealed to Hughes and he cleared the field of any challengers.
Democrats actually had some other reasons to be optimistic about the race, more than the normal midterm year. Republicans may have won the 1904 gubernatorial race, but they only did so with just over 50%, and a large chunk of the vote going to third parties. While the Protestant-heavy Prohibition party was still on the ballot, it would likely continue to take away votes from the Republican party as they were opposed to the immigrant and Catholic heavy appeals of the Democrats. The Socialists and Socialist Labor parties had begun to fall in popularity as the national organization faded away and Hearst was already pitching a lot of the same ideas as they did, anyway. The biggest change was that the populist People’s Party, a Democratic offshoot modeled after William Jennings Bryan, had failed to reach the threshold before to be on the ticket. The map below shows that the People’s Party did best in parts of Western New York but especially the Democratic strongholds in the city.
The Democrats hoped that the combinations of third parties both on and off the ballot and appeal to Socialist drains in the city would produce more voters for them this time around than two years before. Hearst, in a stand of defining himself as not your typical Democrat, took the MOL party line from his mayoral race and put the entire Democratic ticket on the new Independence League Party.
The campaign was a rollicking affair and each side believed it had the edge in the race. Hearst, seeking allies, began by pleading forgiveness and publicly allying himself with the Tammany ally and one-time mayoral opponent George B. McClellan Jr. While McClellan made an alliance for the sake of the party and promoted him in New York County, the rest of the city’s establishment was more uneasy. Silent Charlie Murphy did not throw public support behind Hearst and tensions remained high between them. In an extraordinarily brazen move, William Randolph Hearst pulled a coup in Kings County, electing 17 of the 23 members of the Executive Committee under the Independence League party line instead of the Democrats. William Randolph Hearst himself presided over the meeting.
Though he made an appearance in Kings and was known for flashy displays such as dressing up as Santa and handing out toys to kids in a Christmas parade, he did not like to campaign in person. He instead relied on his extensive network of newspapers to promote his candidacy. This dependence also opened up a weakness where rival newspaper chains would throw their full support behind Hughes and dominated certain localities like Albany, where Hearst did not show up to combat some extreme charges. This was an age where slander and fake news was abundant in even reputable sources and Republicans were determined to play dirty as Hearst made up stories of support from citizens and touted his ideas. President Roosevelt personally intervened, sending an aide to spread the message that the assassin of former President McKinley had been inspired to murder by a Hearst magazine. In a game of telephone, this then got mixed up and reported that the assassin, Leon Czolgosz, who was in actuality an anarchist, was instead carrying a Hearst newspaper with an anti-McKinley editorial when he took the fatal shots. This lie appears to be so commonly accepted now that in several of my sources for this research, it popped up not only as a truth, but also first reported a decade before, when the assassination happened, and not originating in 1906.1 This would severely damage Hearst’s standing among Republicans still mourning the loss of McKinley.
In the end, the results were very similar to 1904, with Hughes beating out Hearst by about 4% while barely taking a majority. The chart below shows the number of votes everyone received, and you can see Hearst was the only Democrat to lose. Though he got the most Independence League votes which allowed the rest of the ticket to win on the fusion ballot, he fell way behind the other Democrats while Hughes outran the other Republicans.
The next set of maps shows the overall results and the change in the percentage margin since 1904.
The margin change in the final results shows that the changes were very regional, and I’ll go point by point to what could have caused this. The first thing to notice is the Hearst did well in the Western upstate counties where the People’s Party was strong in 1904. Downstate was split where Hughes made gains in Long Island and the red dot in Kings County, but Hearst made progress in Queens and New York City where he allied with the machine. The black circle shows Monroe County where the city of Rochester is, and that moved hard to Hearst. The green circle is Albany County and while the 1904 Democratic was from there, this movement was substantially to Hughes. One huge difference between these cities is that Hearst owned the local newspapers but in Albany the media apparatus was part of Gannett, a rival. Positive and negative press probably led to these trends in between the two years. The next set of maps looks at the change in the votes cast and the net vote change in the margin from 1904.
As is typical for a non-presidential year, turnout dropped across the board. Every county saw less votes than 2014 except for one: Queens County, where turnout actually increased by 10%. Hearst’s makeup with George McClellan seemed to pay dividends as parts of the city mobilized votes for him. However, Hearst’s very public takeover in Kings County pissed off the machine there enough that it saw a huge vote margin change in favor of Hughes, netting the Republican nearly 9,000 votes in that county alone.
How do we know that this was a personal rebuke of Hearst by Charlie Murphy and not simply a Republican gain in that county and downstate as a whole? Well, the rest of the Democratic statewide ticket won, and the map below compares the votes for Hearst compared to his Lieutenant Governor candidate Lewis Chanler. To really examine the effect, I only looked at the total votes received on the Democratic party line and not the combined total with the Independence League ticket. Hearst’s stronger areas are in orange while Chanler is in blue.
The effects here are extremely stark. Hearst did better upstate, especially around Rochester and Buffalo, which were discussed above. Chanler did mildly better in Duchess County, highlighted in the black outline, because he was from there. But where Hearst really fell behind the ticket was downstate, with Chanler regularly doing double digits better. This is even more evident where Hearst completely broke with the machine in Nassau and Kings counties. Kings County alone was an over 15,000 vote difference along the Democratic line between the two candidates. The Independence League ticket also received zero votes in all of the downstate counties except for Nassau where Hearst received a lot of votes on that line. I believe it just wasn’t an available option there and in the one place where it was, Hearst received nearly 4% of his total votes in the county. The map below shows the counties where Hearst’s party was an option and then what share of his total vote came from that line.
Not only did Hearst lose votes in total from making enemies of the Tammany Hall, but not having the Independence League as an option on the ballot because of machine interference may have deprived him of thousands of votes. In 1906, Silent Charlie Murphy would have the last laugh as he delivered victory for everyone except Hearst, who was hung out to dry because he decided to take a scattered approach to making peace with the people who had denied him mayor. Hearst would also make other mistakes, such as an overreliance on media coverage which hurt him in the one upstate metropolis of Albany where he did not make improvements.
Though Tammany Hall is most associated with Boss Tweed in history books thanks to the proliferation of editorial cartoons, it would be Charles Murphy that brought the machine from the brink of collapse into a new renaissance until his departure in 1924. The machine would control politics in the city for decades to come, delivering several senators, the popular reign of Al Smith, and countless city officials and representatives. Though its influence would eventually wane, Murphy proved that in 1906 it paid to cross the machine and grudges were not so easily waved away. This race would blunt Hearst’s momentum and he would make several more quixotic runs for office, garnering less and less support each time. The Independence League Party had some success in various New York races and a close third with 20% of the vote in a Massachusetts governor’s race and organized a 1908 presidential convention. Pushing a patriotic version of populism, it couldn’t shake the image that it was a puppet of William Randolph Hearst, as depicted in the cartoon below, and quickly fizzled out after receiving 1% of the vote nationally in the 1908 election.
Charles Evan Hughes would become a governor known for measured reforms and eventually was nominated as a Supreme Court Justice. He would leave six years later to run for president against Woodrow Wilson in the hotly contested 1916 election. Hughes would clearly not learn the Hearst’s lesson of flattering key figures a decade before as Hughes skipped a meeting with the powerful and temperamental Governor Hiram Johnson of California during a campaign tour. Hughes would go on to lose in a heartbreaker to Wilson by only 23 electoral votes, and would have won if he carried California, but instead it was a loss by only 3,773 votes out of nearly a million cast.
The results here show very localized effects of party machines and newspaper coverage and is some of the clearest effects of this as any historical election I’ve seen. The lesson here is that every election is a constant tightrope between your own ego, the egos of others, strategy, and ideology and they collided in fantastic fashion in New York in 1906 with self-inflicted political fireworks that could only have been caused by the titan William Randolph Hearst.
References:
https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1489
https://www.ourcampaigns.com/PartyDetail.html?PartyID=1790
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/story-william-randolph-hearst-run-nyc-mayor-article-1.791828
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/hearst-president
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015065116777&view=1up&seq=369&size=125
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Evans-Hughes
https://www.albanyinstitute.org/tl_files/pdfs/library/Herrick%20Family%20Papers.pdf
Fascinating. It seems unlikely that you did all this work for this one post. Is there a larger project of which this is a part?Report