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to be joined by its sister morning paper, fought to gain the workingman’s pennies with blatant populism and the kind of sensationalist reporting that had worked so well for its owner in New York. Serious journals called the Hearst style “the new black plague” and an “unholy blot on the fourth estate—bawdy, inane and contemptible.” His reporters, the critics said, “mock at privacy and finger in glee all the soiled linen they can discover.” A cartoonist labeled Hearst the Wizard of Ooze.
    Hearst didn’t care. His newspapers served a larger purpose than gaining the favor of the intelligentsia or, for that matter, making money. Twice elected to the House of Representatives from New York, Hearst dreamed of the presidency. A Democrat, he supported the eight-hour day and woman suffrage, and so did his newspapers. His papers also vocally supported him, and he believed he had to have a presence in Chicago to build a serious national political organization. Hearst epitomized the “journalism of action” that seethed in Chicago like nowhere else, New York included. He emphatically was the Wizard of Ooze, but he also crusaded against the powerful and privileged. He dug out government corruption, and when he couldn’t find or invent proof, he screamed about it in editorials.
    When Hearst entered the Chicago market, the Tribune, fearful of yellow journalism’s appeal, fought to keep the new papers off the city’s newsstands, setting off more than a decade of violence that served as hands-on training for many of the thugs who later became beer runners during Prohibition. The hardball tactics in the circulation war reached their apex one day in 1912 when two of Hearst’s men jumped onto a streetcar at Washington and Wells and noticed that not one of the riders was reading a Hearst paper. The bullyboys snapped; they pulled out revolvers and pumped bullets into two men who were reading the Tribune. They then killed the conductor.
    By the 1920s, however, Hearst was in his seventh decade and had mellowed. Having lost bids for both the New York City mayoralty and the New York governorship, he had come to accept that he would never live in the White House. So instead he turned his attention to building an outrageously grand estate in California and pumping up the Hollywood career of his mistress, actress Marion Davies. This meant his newspapers were more important than ever. He needed cash flow—a lot of it. Politics and the boss’s aggrandizement no longer drove the papers’ news judgment. Drama did. Now more than ever, to secure their circulation goals, the two Hearst newspapers in Chicago sought to mold news to their liking, which meant the commonplace blown up bigger and better than in any of their competitors.
    Fortunately for Hearst, he had thought ahead by luring one of the city’s best editors, Walter Howey, from the Tribune shortly after coming into Chicago. Howey’s charge was, “Beat the Trib. That’s your only job. Just beat the Tribune. ” The ambitious editor planned on doing exactly that, by whatever means necessary. “Don’t ever fake a story or anything in a story,” Howey told one young reporter, summarizing his journalistic credo. “That is, never let me catch you at it.”
    It was one piece of advice everyone under Howey diligently followed. No one ever got caught at anything, as long as first-rate copy came in. In contrast to the Tribune ’s culture, the Hearst papers boasted such notoriously out-of-control reporters that their headquarters at Madison and Market, which the American and the Herald and Examiner shared, was known as the Madhouse on Madison Street, with no hyperbole intended. Editors at the two newspapers worked their reporters fourteen hours a day and told them daily journalism and marriage couldn’t coexist. Their crime reporters practically lived at police stations. They bribed officers to sit in on interrogations, and they sometimes took an active part, yelling at suspects,