Background
Karl Henry von Wiegand was born on September 11, 1874, in Hesse, Germany, into a family of farmers who immigrated to Iowa when he was one year old. He ran away from home at fifteen and lived briefly in California.
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Karl Henry Von Wiegand
Edit ProfileCareer
Von Wiegand began his journalistic career in 1899, while a telegraph operator in Ash Fork, Arizona, working as a local stringer for California newspapers. He soon moved to Los Angeles and then to San Francisco, where he was a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner. He went to work for the Associated Press in time to cover the 1906 earthquake. In 1911, Roy Howard hired him away and sent him to Berlin for United Press. Except for brief visits, he never lived in the United States again.
The Turkish-Italian war of 1911, was the first of the twelve wars von Wiegand covered, but it was World War I that made his by-line famous. He managed to reach the scene of the fighting swiftly, and by the end of 1914 had filed dispatches from both the eastern and western fronts. Von Wiegand's journalistic strengths stemmed both from his breathless, smell-of-battle style "As I write this in the glare of a screened automobile headlight several hundred yards behind the German trenches" and his extraordinary German connections.
On November 20, 1914, he was granted an exclusive interview with Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, a feat that helped United Press gain 103 new clients in one year. For the rest of his life, von Wiegand regaled friends with a quote from the prince that he had not used in the story: "My dear Wiegand, you must tell Papa that we have lost the war. Every time I attempt to tell him, he gets furious at me. "
Von Wiegand moved to the Pulitzers' New York World in 1915. The next year, he broke the story of the German decision to wage unrestricted submarine warfare, and the German ambassador to the United States warned the Foreign Office that William Randolph Hearst "was rather hurt that on Wiegand's account the World gets all the important interviews. " During the 1930's, von Wiegand covered wars in China, Ethiopia, and Spain, but he realized that the biggest news was breaking in Berlin.
He had first met Adolf Hitler in 1921, and his strong news connections with high Nazis again created rumors about undue friendliness toward his subjects. But both his correspondence and his dispatches reflect a disgust with Nazi attitudes toward Jews. Warning of disaster, he urged the creation of a homeland for German and Austrian Jews in Africa. Late in 1934, Hearst, adopting a friendlier posture toward Hitler, ordered von Wiegand to move his base to Paris, and placed his dispatches under his personal censorship.
Von Wiegand soon returned to Berlin, though, and maintained his news connections he was one of two reporters inside the Fahrerhaus when the Munich pact was signed. After covering the German invasion of France, von Wiegand went to the Orient, expecting the expansion of the war there. They returned to the United States in 1943, and by 1944 had gone to Europe to report from Spain.
He died of pneumonia in Zurich in 1961 at the age of 86.
Achievements
Views
Quotations: "The war has loosed upon Europe the most powerful imperialistic force since Napoleon totalitarian, Communist Russia. "
Personality
Such connections, and the resulting stories, fueled rumors that von Wiegand was a German propagandist, although he himself complained bitterly of German censorship. In 1917, when the World (whose editorial stance was staunchly anti-German) sent Herbert Bayard Swope to Berlin to balance von Wiegand, the affronted correspondent helped soothe Hearst's feelings by quitting the World and going to work for him.
Over the next twenty years, von Wiegand was Hearst's "news generalissimo" on the Continent, acquiring the title chief foreign correspondent of the Hearst newspapers. In the 1920's he flew 1, 000 miles, sitting on mail sacks in an open cockpit, to cover the Riff War in Morocco, and reported on civil war in China and rebellion in Syria. On behalf of Hearst, he organized and reported the first round-the-world zeppelin flight in 1929.
The trip both reflected and cemented the closeness of his ties with his employer; when the zeppelin reached Los Angeles, Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies, took von Wiegand to her beach house for a few hours' rest. Early in his prominence, he had separated from his wife. He was accompanied on the zeppelin flight by Lady Grace Drummond-Hay, a British correspondent with whom he lived until her death in 1946.
At the age of sixty-seven, he stood so close to the Japanese bombs falling on Manila that his eyesight was damaged, and he was virtually blind when he and Drummond-Hay were captured by the Japanese occupying forces. After two weeks in Santo Tomas concentration camp, they were released for medical reasons, and his vision was partially restored by surgery in Shanghai.
A Hearst editor later conceded that von Wiegand was "a shade to the right of William McKinley, " and von Wiegand's praises of Spain's Francisco Franco and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser eventually embarrassed the home office, which took his dispatches off the wire and air-mailed them to the remaining Hearst newspapers. Nevertheless, he retained the title of chief foreign correspondent of the Hearst papers, and continued to roam the world until his death in Zurich, Switzerland.
For twenty years, until he was upstaged by the Shirers and the Murrows, von Wiegand was probably the best-known American reporting from Europe, yet he has rapidly been forgotten. One reason is that he never wrote a book; despite numerous publishers' inquiries about his memoirs, he was always interrupted by a war somewhere.
Another was probably that he worked for William Randolph Hearst. This made him subject to "the Chief's" impulses, and it shaped his reporting. Von Wiegand "always sees news in terms of scare headlines on pink- or peach-tinted newsprint, " observed a journalist in 1933. His reputation has proved to be as evanescent as the headlines.
Connections
Von Wiegand married Inez Royce in California; they had four children.
