The Dilemma

From Monday, May 4, 1913 through the rest of the week, Americans around the country awoke to headlines about the man with a strange name from Washington State. Newspapers in the 1900s were in their golden age. The powerhouse newsrooms, which would give rise to the Hearst Magazine empire and the Pulitzer Prize in a couple decades’ time, were all located on the East Coast. The American West was riddled with local newspapers, with circulations in the thousands and hundreds of thousands that serviced small towns and big cities alike. There were so many newspapers in print that readers could