The Press: First to Last

In distorting the shape of U.S. journalism, the late William Randolph Hearst wielded no instrument with more effect than the American Weekly, his peculiar contribution to Sabbath reading. A supplement parasitically attached to Hearst's Sunday papers, and purveying what detractors called "the three Cs" (crime, concupiscence and corruption), the Weekly scored a conspicuous financial success in a newspaper barony frequently awash in red ink. Right up to the Chief's death in 1951, the Weekly, with nearly 10 million circulation, made money. But last week, the businessmen who now govern the remnants of Hearst's empire were jettisoning American Weekly clients right and left in a desperate effort to keep the supplement afloat.

Since January, the Weekly has pulled out of Sunday newspapers in five cities. It will shortly disappear from 21 more, in a deliberate retrenchment that will reduce its circulation from 8,544,535 to 4,000,000. When this is done, the Weekly will survive only in Chicago's American and nine Hearst Sunday papers—which will continue to take it because they have no choice. Having failed to remain first in a field of its own creation, Hearst's supplement' will henceforth run a distant last.

Science & Sex. First or last, the Weekly has left its indelible thumb smudge on the newspaper scene. It was created in 1896 as the American Sunday Magazine, Popular Periodical of the New York Journal for use as a weapon in the mortal struggle between Hearst's Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's World. Pulitzer brandished a Sunday supplement of his own, the Sunday Magazine—but he had to do without the help of his imaginative Sunday editor, Morrill Goddard, 30, whom Hearst had hired away earlier that year, along with the World's entire Sunday staff.

Goddard edited the Hearst supplement according to his conviction that readers' tastes were not much above Pithecanthropus level: "The habits of savagery have been welded into the mind and body of man for ten thousand centuries, while it is only sixty centuries that he has had more or less leisure and opportunity to develop the finer things of life." Asking himself what a literate Neanderthal might enjoy, Goddard answered the question every Sunday, with stories about sex ("The Outrageous French Bathing Suits"), sex cum science ("Science Explains Why Chorus Girls Are Suffering from a Love Famine"), sex cum violence ("Beat Her Lover to Death in Her Vengeful Fury"). The miracles of science were revealed to the supplement's caveman readers, who were told that kisses carried a real electrical shock, that an aggressive vegetable ruled Mars, and that the earth gained weight as it flew through space collecting the debris of "dead and worn out suns, worlds and moons."

Hearst himself loved the American Weekly more than its readers did. It was his pet. Not until 1917, when an underling suggested that Hearst was missing a large source of revenue, did the supplement begin to carry advertising. And when non-Hearst newspapers begged the Chief to let them carry the Weekly too, Hearst turned them all down. His selfishness turned out to be a serious mistake.