Pinback button promoting William Randolph Hearst for governor of New York, 1906. The Whitehead & Hoag Co., Newark, New Jersey.
While serving a second term as a U.S. Representative from New York, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst sought to govern the state. Running as a populist Democrat, the multi-millionaire Hearst counted on the working class readership of his New York Journal (the "monarch of the dailies") to turn out for him at the polls—and he did carry the Lower East Side. Had he won the election, Hearst (the inspiration for Orson Welles' Citizen Kane) might have loomed large in 20th century American politics; he already had his sights set on the White House. But it was not to be. Hearst lost to attorney Charles Evans Hughes, a future Republican presidential nominee and Supreme Court justice.
