“Patron Saint” of the Independents

Abstract On the night of November 12, 1906, six days after the election of Charles Evans Hughes as governor of New York, the successful candidates of the Independence League and the Democratic state ticket honored William Randolph Hearst with an impressive banquet at Delmonico’s. They surely had ample reasons to do so. Because the just concluded contest for leadership in New York had far-reaching political ramifications-the winner being a likely contender for the presidential nomination in 1908-Hearst had attracted considerable attention from national periodicals, whose editors had, in turn, assigned prominent journalists to evaluate his life and ideas. Although James Creelman, who was no longer an employee of the American, wrote a favorable appraisal in Pearsons Magazine, Hearst suffered scathing criticisms in a four-part series by Frederick Palmer in Colliers and by Lincoln Steffens in The American Magazine, so much so that Hearst advised his mother that “those articles are outrageous Don’t read them.