Who was William Randolph Hearst and how did he get so powerful?
The classic rags to riches story belonged not to him but to his father, George Hearst. The elder Hearst, who started out in life with nothing, became a multimillionaire mine owner and rancher. His silver mines in Nevada’s legendary Comstock Lode were estimated to be worth about $400 million long before the turn of the 20th century. George Hearst William Randolph Hearst was born on April 29, 1863, in San Francisco, the only child and heir of George Hearst and Phoebe Apperson Hearst, who doted notoriously on her son. In 1887, at 23 W.R. became proprietor of the San Francisco Examiner which his father accepted as payment for a gambling debt. In Citizen Kane, Kane takes over ownership of a fictitious San Francisco newspaper almost as a lark; something he thinks will be fun to do. In real life, the situation was not much different. When Hearst took over the Examiner, it was more from a sense of adventure than one based on work experience. Hearst quickly turned the flagging newspaper’s fortu
