William Randolph Hearst

Chapter 17: Farewell: Lord of San Simeon

The reader, if he is a layman to whom American journalism is a closed field, or the reviewer trained to ask for a presentation of "the other side" in every book he reads, may by now be somewhat shocked by the tragic pictures of our great publishers. Is there no good news at all, they may ask. Is there no hope for a better day and a better press?

The answer is that there is really cause for optimism. It is the answer based on the case history of William Randolph Hearst, the first of the great press lords, ruler of a $220,000,000 domain, against whom an enlightened people has at last voiced its anger and disgust. From California to New York, labor and liberals, the unions and the universities, notable men including the President and Senators and the head of the Society of Newspaper Editors, hundreds of organizations and thousands of men and women who are the leaders of the intelligent minority, have taken a forthright stand against Hearst. There has been a great boycott of his newspapers, his magazines, his newsreels and his radio stations. There has been repudiation in Congress, in the press, on the platform and from the pulpit. The episode is one of the most heartening in the history of American journalism.

For more than a generation Hearst posed as "the friend of the people" and many believed him. The Hearst communication system reached at least 30,000,000 people--he claimed that many readers for his newspapers, and many more millions for his magazines, newsreels and radio broadcasts. His power was supposedly tremendous. But less than five years ago, certain leaders made the charge that Hearst actually is the enemy of the people. In recent days he has been called the nation's No. 1 enemy, a place previously held by Al Capone and Dillinger. The latter two, the reader need not be reminded, were connected with bootlegging and murder, whereas Mr. Hearst has been connected merely with influencing the minds of the common people.

It is of course difficult to say just when the counter-attack began. It must not be forgotten that Hearst has been repudiated before; he was twice hanged in effigy by angry mobs, once when a demented person shot President McKinley after the Hearst papers had published vicious editorials against the President, and a verse about the bullet which had shot a governor speeding its way to Washington; the second time when he espoused the German cause before Wilson led his pacifist nation into the useless World War. These popular uprisings against Hearst did not affect his empire. Nothing is as fickle as the public, nothing as forgetful, nothing as easily misled. But the third, or present attack on Hearst, is made up of something more than emotion and hysteria.

It is first and most important of all, a labor union attack, in which American Federation of Labor, C.I.O., and independent labor organizations are united. It is also an attack from the schools and colleges of the country. It was in 1936 an attack from political leaders also, but that is the sort of reaction which may mean absolutely nothing in the end. The strength of the war against Hearst is the labor and intellectual union against him.

The most important individual blow was that struck by two private citizens, Bernard J. Reis, the certified public accountant and author of an enlightening book on crooked finances called "False Security," and Paul Kern, civil service commissioner of New York City. Mr. Hearst had applied to the Securities and Exchange Commission for permission to float $22,500,000 in bonds for Hearst Publications and $13,000,000 for Hearst Magazines. Mr. Reis, who can read financial statements between the lines better than most men, objected to a lot of things. He did not like Hearst Publications listing as assets $38,000,000 for good will, franchises, reference libraries; he did not like the fact that four Hearst magazines lose money and six dailies made less in 1936 than ten years earlier; he particularly questioned the financial record of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Chicago Evening Examiner; he did not like circulation losses on six newspapers which he suspected were due to the growing boycott.

Reis and Kern, two public-spirited citizens, filed a brief. They claimed in it that if the money were raised by S.E.C. permission most of it was to be used to purchase a castle in Wales, at a half million more than its assessed valuation, and the good will of a magazine they claimed was losing money; they also charged that the registration statement failed to disclose the fact almost four million dollars were intended to repay loans which Hearst personally guaranteed. They were joined by Labor Research Association in a protest which alleged that profits of Hearst Magazines, Inc., were diverted to holding companies and through them to Mr. Hearst.

No public hearings were held. The application for the bond issues was withdrawn. And so in 1937 Hearst began a series of consolidations of newspapers in which many were killed off, and a general retrenchment in which thousands of employees were fired. On December 31, 1937, most the newspapers of the country suppressed the fact that there was a trial in United States District Court in New York in which a receiver for Hearst Consolidated Publications, Inc., was asked and also an accounting. The plaintiff was a stockholder named Rudolph Kohlroser.

Another turning point in Hearst history was his victory in 1934 when the San Francisco general strike was defeated. It will be remembered that the press--with the exception of the Scripps-Howard News--conspired to smash labor as well as the strike, and that the news columns of the California papers generally lied and perverted the news and that false issues were created, and the public fooled into believing that a Red revolution was under way when what really mattered was an attempt of working people to better themselves.

The San Francisco publishers won. They were led by James Francis Neylan, the Hearst attorney, acting directly on instructions received by cable from Mr. Hearst. The press announced it was a victory for public opinion, for the people, as against the Reds, but the labor unions passed resolutions for a boycott. Hearst was singled out for marked attention. The "I Don't Read Hearst" sticker was ruled off letters by order of Postmaster General Farley but it could not be ruled out of people's minds. In Bridges' seamen's union it is a crime to be caught dead or alive with a Hearst paper in one's possession. As a result you will find Bridges called a Moscow agent in the Hearst newspapers.

By 1936 there was a Peoples Committee Against Hearst functioning and Oswald Garrison Villard reported 112 American Federation of Labor unions were members of the trades-union committee fighting the publisher. The Farmer Labor Progressive Federation, meeting in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, passed a resolution to boycott Hearst in which he was called "Labor's Enemy No. 1." In numerous meetings in Seattle pending the Post-Intelligencer strike Hearst was known as American Menace No. 1. On May 7, 1936, the officers of the United Automobile Workers of America placed all Hearst papers on the "unfair to labor list." Typical of all resolutions was the Detroit one accusing Hearst papers of having "consistently used every unfair and slanderous method of undermining the organized labor movement."

The year 1935 marked the height of the Hearst Red-baiting campaign in the universities. It must be remarked here and now that there is no Red teaching in the schools and colleges of the United States, but the institutions of learning of our country still attempt to give their students a liberal education. It is inconceivable that they should do anything else. No school can supply an anti-liberal education, or a Fascist education, as these terms are contradictory. Liberalism and education are one, and all Hearst did was to call liberal education "Red" education.

To this day the Hearst press is filled with Red-baiting articles and attacks upon such notable Americans as Prof. Charles A. Beard, Prof. George S. Counts, of Teachers College; Prof. E.A. Ross, of the University of Wisconsin; Prof. Frederick L. Schuman, of Chicago. Hearst reporters in numerous instances have been sent as students to interview professors or to take courses for the purpose of writing Redbaiting articles. When these reporters found nothing to write about they falsified. In several cases they later confessed.

In the case of Professor Schuman he protested misrepresentation in a report in the Chicago Herald-Examiner and incidentally informed the editor that some quotations on dictatorship which all the Hearst papers attributed to Lenin were probably false as there was no trace of them in the collected works of the Russian leader. Hearst ordered an investigation. Charles Wheeler was sent. He conceded misquoting the Chicago professor and admitted the invention of the Lenin quotation. Professor Schuman asked him how such things could be and quotes Wheeler's reply: "We just do what the Old Man orders. One week he orders a campaign against rats. The next week he orders a campaign against dope peddlers. Pretty soon he's going to campaign against college professors. It's all the bunk but orders are orders."

Charles Wheeler, Hearst reporter, appeared to be a decent fellow. But shortly afterward Professor Schuman delivered a lecture which Wheeler covered for the Hearst press. This item is described by Professor Schuman as containing statements which were purely products of Mr. Wheeler's imagination.

"On March 16, 1935," continues the professor, "the Herald-Examiner--with Hearst papers elsewhere copying--published an editorial, "Schuman of Chicago," which took out of their context two of Mr. Wheeler's misquotations and presented them as evidence that I am making a 'direct challenge to American institutions in the name of Communism.'...the editorial described me as one of 'these American panderers and trap-baiters for the Moscow mafia' who should be investigated by Congress and 'gotten rid of' as a 'Red.'

"This is but one of numerous instances of slanderous and libelous attacks upon American educators in the Hearst press. This strategy is exactly comparable to that of the Nazi press in Germany between 1920 and 1933. Mr. Hearst has evidently been taking lessons from Goring, Goebbels, Rosenberg and Hitler. No individual can defend himself effectively from these assaults. If American universities and colleges are to be spared the fact which has befallen such institutions in Germany, if American scholars and educators are to be protected from Fascist bludgeoning of this type, if American traditions of freedom are to survive, Mr. Hearst must be recognized as the propagandist and forerunner of American Hitlerism and must be met with a united counter-attack by all Americans who still value their liberties."

In 1936 the American Federation of Teachers passed a resolution demanding a boycott of Hearst as "the outstanding jingoist of the country" and a "constant enemy of academic freedom," and finally and more important, as the "chief exponent of Fascism in the United States."

The 1936 political campaign also had something to do with the universal discredit in which Hearst found himself in November of that year. However, politics make strange bedfellows, and politicians pass from bed to bed without public disapproval. There is for example a certain Alfred Emanuel Smith, a reactionary, a member of the American Liberty League, a millionaire, a Red-baiter, a discredited liberal. In his youth he was on the other side of the fence. He was not rich, he was liberal, he was one of the courageous politicians who denounced the Red-baiting of the Lusk committee and the expulsion of the five Socialists from the New York state legislature. And, on the night of October 29, 1929, in Carnegie Hall, Manhattan, he said of Publisher Hearst:

"I know he has not got a drop of good, clean, pure red blood in his whole body. And I know the color of his liver and it is whiter, if that could be, than the driven snow." He continued to denounce the Hearst newspapers for publishing "deliberate lies," and for "the gravest abuse of the power of the press in the history of this country." For thirty minutes Governor Smith of the State of New York denounced the publisher who was such a power in Tammany Hall, and concluded by asking the people of "this city, this state, and this country...to get rid of this pestilence that walks in the darkness."

Today Millionaire Smith and Millionaire Hearst have everything in common and each other's endorsement.

Perhaps another of the little group of leading Democratic politicians of that era will not emulate Smith the renegade. Franklin Delano Roosevelt who once had the support of Hearst, was forced in the 1936 campaign to issue a statement against "a certain notorious newspaper owner" who tried to "make it appear that the President accepts the support of alien organizations hostile to the American form of government. These articles are conceived in malice and born of political spite. They are deliberately framed to give a false impression--in other words to 'frame' the American people..."