Public Figure, Private Life
Supporters in Pulpits and Press
William Randolph Hearst with his son.*
Not all quarters in the pulpits and the press joined in the “Eddy-bashing” which hounded her. For one, the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst took no part in it. There was a personal reason for that.
Hearst’s infant son had been born with what was diagnosed as a closed pylorus. Hopelessly ill, the child was wasting away “to an actual skeleton,” according to his father. At that critical point Christian Science came into the Hearst mansion. His son was healed overnight, as Hearst tells it, and years later went on to run the family newspapers “considerably better than his father can” (William Randolph Hearst, Los Angeles Examiner, July 17, 1941). Following that healing, Hearst, Sr., issued orders that his papers were not to publish attacks on Mrs. Eddy or her religion. Indeed, they ran articles that supported her.
Bronson Alcott
Other supporters included the noted author and social reformer Bronson Alcott, father of the author of Little Women; Red Cross founder Clara Barton; famed journalist Arthur Brisbane; and pioneering investigative reporter Sibyl Wilbur, who wrote the first biography of Mrs. Eddy.
* Hearst photo, courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
