The View from Xanadu: William Randolph Hearst and United States Foreign Policy

Sara Stratton teaches history at York University.

In this crisply written and engaging book, Ian Mugridge analyzes
newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst’s impact on American foreign
policy. Hearst’s influence was far-reaching; he owned papers in every
major American centre, and by the late 1930s, 30 million Americans were
reading his papers each day. As Mugridge makes clear, those Americans
were really reading Hearst’s opinion—he exercised an exacting
control over editorial content.

Hearst was consumed with preserving American idealism. This led him to
support the 1898 war with Spain, a brutal imperialist power that stifled
self-determination in Cuba. It did not, however, make him an unabashed
interventionist; in fact, it led him down the road to a principled
isolationism. The British, although allies in World War I, were taken to
task for their treatment of the Irish. Japan’s foreign policy was
attacked for its brutality and naked aggression, as was the domestic
policy of Nicholas II of Russia. Hearst’s stand on the Russian
Revolution was intriguing: although he felt it important to protect
American free enterprise, he did not think it was threatened by the
Revolution of 1917. Rather, he believed that the Bolshevik Revolution
was a reasonable response to social strain. It was only as the Soviet
dictatorship grew more brutal in the 1930s that Hearst began to view it
as a threat to American ideals. Ironically, at the same time he saw a
similar threat on the home front in the form of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Hearst’s “yellow journalism” was a victory of style over
substance; his belligerence has led us to believe that his isolationism
was selfish and xenophobic, when in fact it was based on the principle
that all nations should be respected and allowed to find their own way
in the world. Mugridge believes that had the United States followed
Hearst’s path, it would have had a much less tragic 20th century. That
is debatable; however, the argument makes good reading for Canadians,
who are often too glib in their dismissal of American overseas
interventions (or the reluctance to intervene) as shallow, self-serving
ventures.