Hearst

IT is now over thirty years since the acrid Godkin, driven to angry despair by the appearance of a new journalistic method and by the success of what seemed to him a new and vicious force in American life, burst out that ‘nothing so disgraceful as the behavior of these two newspapers in the past week has ever been known in the history of journalism.’ Not long ago, when one of those ‘two newspapers’ finally passed from the national scene, it was amid an almost universal sorrow; and only a casual voice recalled that much which really underlay the greatness of Pulitzer’s World had also caused it, a generation ago, to be excluded from polite homes or deposited (with the tongs) upon the fire. Mr. Godkin’s spiritual descendants were among the first to grieve over the death of the World. Did they stop to ask themselves, one wonders, how they would feel about the disappearance of the other target of Mr. Godkin’s denunciation? William Randolph Hearst and his New York American are still very much alive. When they, in turn, come to their mortal end, will the event be received with similar lamentation?

Perhaps it will. Pulitzer and Hearst were very different men, yet the younger learned the whole secret of his peculiar method from the elder and seems still, as he converts the American into a curious simulacrum of its dead rival, to be willing to follow in his footsteps. ‘Give the public what it wants’ — in order to make it take what is good for it.

In their several ways Mr. Pulitzer and Mr. Hearst have been the two great protagonists of that powerful and subtly working principle — a principle, incidentally, which has attracted many lesser practitioners. The consequences of its application in our national life are still obscure; whether it will prove to have been a tonic or a poison the future must decide. But no one can study our times without considering its effects, and one cannot study them without a study of Mr. Hearst.

I

The bitter rage which Mr. Godkin poured out upon the youthful proprietor of what was then the New York Journal merely opened a chorus of execration which has ever since pursued that tall and elusive figure. For thirty years the name of Hearst has been anathema. One might let it go at that — save for a curious and often unnoticed fact. The chorus has been continuous; the voices have not been. The attacks of one period have been based on reasons precisely opposite to those which produced the assaults of the year before, while gentlemen who have damned Mr. Hearst in one decade can often be found adopting his policies (and appropriating the credit for his labors) in the next.

For thirty years the American people have misunderstood Mr. Hearst and what he was doing to them. The combination in a single man of great genius, great wealth, and total freedom from the particular sort of cowardice which wealth usually generates is of such rare occurrence that it is perhaps asking too much of his contemporaries that they should understand him. The effort, indeed, was so great that for years people preferred to believe that Hearst simply did not exist at all, and the legend that he is a mere creation of brilliant subordinates is not wholly dead even today.

It is, of course, a legend. The genius has been attested by nearly everyone who has written seriously of him, from Bierce, who saw him as an ‘unearthly child,’ down to Lincoln Steffens, who has given a final verdict that Hearst ‘ is so far ahead of his staffs that they can hardly see him.’ Those who have known him have countless stories to illustrate his extraordinary quickness of mind, his grasp of detail, his cynically astute intelligence which closes upon its object ‘like a steel trap.’ The fortune inherited from his Forty-Niner father was a very large one. Hearst took it for granted, poured it out like water over a dam (‘Money,’ he once said, ‘is simply power in cold storage’), and has seen it many times increased.

The courage is a less simple quality. Sometimes it has been a mere gamin’s capacity for reckless mischief-making; sometimes it has been the ruthless expression of a lonely and monumental egotism; but sometimes it has seemed the genuine courage of a genuine conviction. Whatever its nature, its existence is apparent in nearly every step of that breath-taking career. From the moment when he lightly tossed the whole of his mother’s fortune into the task of beating the World, down through his countless irresponsibilities and inventions to his bold effort to keep the United States out of the European War, the things which William Randolph Hearst has not been afraid to do make up a staggering catalogue.

His equipment was unusual, and the youthful Mr. Hearst found for it an unusual employment. The career which he chose for himself was partly a natural expression of the strange age in which he came to maturity, of the conflicts, crudities, and upheavals of the middle eighties. It was a time inviting originality, braggadocio, and brick throwing, and Mr. Hearst was very much a product of his time. But more directly he was a product of Joseph Pulitzer.

It was in the fall of 1882 that Hearst came East to his pyrotechnic career at Harvard, and it was in May 1883 that the first issue of Pulitzer’s World appeared, to open possibilities for pyrotechnics upon a scale grander and more exciting than anything offered by mere undergraduate devilry. The whole method was outlined almost from the beginning; Pulitzer dedicated his first issue to ‘ the cause of the people rather than that of the purse-potentates,’ while the platform which he announced a week later (calling for taxation of ’large incomes’ and attacking ‘privileged corporations’ and ‘corrupt officeholders’) remains the basis of the Hearst editorial pages to this day. The sensational stories and headlines, the emphasis on crime and sex, the journalistic ‘crusades’ against ‘boodle’ aldermen, grasping capitalists, and other convenient enemies of the people, were to come soon after. At Harvard, young Mr. Hearst read upon his Jefferson and Jackson, and flooded his rooms with copies of the World. He watched the spectacular rise of the paper and of Mr. Pulitzer. ‘ I thought I saw,’ as he gently confessed to Lincoln Steffens many years later, ‘the principles underlying his methods.’

It is easier to see them now than it was then. Original, sensational, shocking, and impudent, ‘ yellow journalism ’ commanded first a huge circulation based upon giving the common man what he wanted; this in turn it employed in fighting popular battles, championing the popular grievances, manufacturing idols or upsetting them, and generally exasperating all the better elements — upon the highest moral plane.

‘God grant,’ as Mr. Pulitzer exclaimed on the dedication of his new building, ‘that the World may forever strive toward the highest ideals’; and the World readers, as they absorbed some particularly titillating headline, naturally echoed the sentiment. But, curiously enough, Mr. Pulitzer really did have ideals. From this encumbrance Mr. Hearst was singularly free. Unattracted by the barren business of being a rich man’s son, untrammeled by convention, coldly reckless, and with a monumental egotism behind his placid eyes, he saw here the means for an incomparable expression of his peculiar personality, and the chance for a career of Napoleonic proportions. The materials were ready to his hand; to their exploitation Mr. Hearst now addressed himself with a boldness, a realism, and a brilliance that were to surpass the model.

II

Through the autumn of 1895 the front page of the New York Morning Journal, though running to rather heavy type and a preoccupation with crime, had not departed greatly from the conventional. On the morning of November 7, however, there was a difference.

On the entire page there was only a single, and comparatively modest, head: ‘An International Wedding. How the Duke of Marlborough and Miss Consuelo Vanderbilt Were Married.’ But, running from the upper left to the lower right-hand corner, a splendid drawing of the wedding procession consumed about two thirds of the total space. What was left was taken up by the leading paragraphs of Julian Ralph’s admirable story of the magnificent occasion — written for those who did not participate. The whole of the next three pages was devoted to accounts and lavish illustrations of the wedding; not until page 5 did the regular news of the day appear. It was a gorgeous splash; the explanation might have been found in the editorial-page ‘masthead,’ where in demure type there appeared for the first time the single name: ‘ W. R. Hearst.’ Thus did Mr. Hearst, at the age of thirty-two, announce his arrival upon a national stage.

He had spent ten years in California testing his powers and perfecting the technique — an episode compounded of rowdy exuberance and cold enthusiasm for the wonderful instrument he was learning to use. The story of what was to follow is well enough known. It began, of course, in the epic battle with Mr. Pulitzer. Mr. Hearst cynically opened the struggle by buying away Brisbane, Goddard, Carvalho, Outcault, the whole of the World’s Sunday staff. It was a short cut; having taken the method, he took the men as well.

With his strange, deceptive calm he then led them into a campaign of sensationalism, scurrility, and technically brilliant journalism that can have had few parallels. The flavor is in the slogans: ‘You Can’t Get More Than All the News; You Can’t Pay Less Than One Cent,’ ‘While Others Talk the Journal Acts.’ The new colored comic section was ‘eight pages of iridescent polychromous effulgence that makes the rainbow look like a lead pipe.’ The Journal’s foreign correspondents were not correspondents but ‘ special commissioners.’ The Journal’s owner taught his staff to care less for facts than for news, and his editorial writers to care less for reason than for effect; and in this connection it is curious to note that he described his rival as ‘a journalist who made his money by pandering to the worst tastes of the prurient and horror loving, by dealing in bogus news . . . and by affecting a devotion to the interests of the people while . . . sedulously looking out for his own.’

The first aim, and in these years perhaps the only one, was circulation, for circulation is at once the basis and the justification of the whole idea. But Mr. Hearst had a shrewder and higher estimate of what people want than he is always credited with. He knew that merely to pile sex on sensation is not enough, and he was careful to use real originality, brilliance, and good writing.

Three weeks after his opening splash with the Journal Mr. Hearst was printing Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Devil and the Deep Sea’ in the Sunday issue, and Mark Twain, Edgar Saltus, Stephen Crane, were only the first of the long line of distinguished literary men whose names have never ceased to decorate his pages. He poured out the money, seized upon every mechanical and technical improvement, and was inexhaustible in his own invention. The joyous task of creation and of beating Pulitzer was doubtless enough in itself for his flippant energies, and when he flung the Journal to the support of Bryan and free silver, in 1896, it may have been chiefly because he realized that Pulitzer, in standing for gold, had opened a fine strategic opportunity. On the day after the election his morning edition alone printed 956,000 copies. It was an extraordinary triumph.

But it was not only circulation which he had achieved. Using the pencil of Davenport and the imagination of Alfred Henry Lewis, he had plastered Mark Hanna with the dollar marks which may never be entirely erased from that statesman’s memory. Bryan was not elected, but he came near to it; and the intense bitterness of an electoral campaign which is possibly our closest approach to a class struggle was in part due to the curious genius of Mr. Hearst. The editor saw that he had not only reduced the polite to the last extremes of terror; he had also evoked in the common man a sense of grievance and injustice that could form an enormous reservoir of power. It was power to correct abuses, to right wrong, to restore ‘ democracy ’ — but it was power first of all.

In San Francisco he had tried out his crusades against grafting politicians and bribing corporations on a local stage. He was now working in a national limelight, and his ambition rose to his opportunity. In 1897 he proclaimed the ‘new journalism,’ and seemed actually to play with a vision of newspapers as popular institutions of a wholly novel type. It was to be their business not merely to report but to act, even to govern; and while his papers exploded with banner heads and big type, he sent his agents into the courts to use on behalf of the ‘people’ the injunction process that had been the prerogative of the ‘interests,’ or converted his reporters into detectives to accomplish what public officers were unwilling or unable to do. It was all, of course, a circulation stunt. But it was something else. W. R. Hearst would not have hesitated to improve upon the Constitution, and who can doubt that he half believed himself to be doing so?

III

Almost immediately chance was to open an even larger field for a test of the new journalism. The Cuban insurrection which had broken out in 1895 was proving both picturesque and dramatic and was seizing upon the restless imagination of the time. Mr. Hearst and the Journal plunged joyfully into the conduct of our foreign relations. War sentiment was drummed up with an inventiveness, a wildness, a ‘satanism,’ as Mr. Godkin called it, surpassing anything that had gone before. Evangelina Cisneros was metamorphosed into ‘the Cuban Girl Martyr’ and rescued bodily from the Spanish Government. ‘An American Newspaper,’ the Journal cried, ‘Accomplishes at a Single Stroke What the Best Efforts of Diplomacy Failed Utterly to Bring About in Many Months’ — while others talked, the Journal was acting, even in the international sphere.

It boomed circulation — but here, as elsewhere, it is difficult to suppose that Hearst was governed only by an ulterior motive. The propaganda could not have been so shrewdly telling unless its author had half believed it himself, or believed in the end toward which it was directed. Mr. Hearst cannot have been taken in by the wild charges he hurled against the Spaniards or the bloody colors in which he presented the Cuban issue. Yet he must have been convinced that war was desirable. Possibly his mind really responded to the democratic altruism of the campaign to ‘free Cuba’ — or possibly he believed, with other statesmen, that ‘this country needs a war.’ Whatever he thought, he did his best to provide one.

There would probably have been a war without Mr. Hearst, but he lent material assistance. With his enormous headlines, with his utter recklessness of suggestion, invention, and exaggeration, he helped to fan opinion into a fiercer emotional heat, perhaps, than it has ever known. When the war did come, Mr. Hearst offered a ship to the Navy if he could go as captain, and when the Navy looked with a not unnatural alarm upon the proposal, he chartered his own fleet and rushed to the scene of action. An interesting photograph survives showing Mr. Hearst, after the naval battle of Santiago, ‘capturing’ Spanish sailors from the beach, while he actually appeared under fire at El Caney with ‘a straw hat with a bright ribbon on his head, a revolver at his belt, and a pencil and notebook in his hand.’ The high point, however, was his order to his European representative to sink a blockship in the Suez Canal to prevent the passage of a Spanish fleet. This was, indeed, a new concept of the function of journalism.

In peace no less than in war Mr. Hearst’s quick and ingenious mind was to find continuing opportunities for hammering upon the great drum which he had perfected. But the war had confirmed him in another aspect of the Hearst policies. The war had been a naïve outburst of a new, democratic nationalism, and Hearst, like Theodore Roosevelt, had been one of its most effective voices. His shrieking patriotism, his bumptious irreverence toward Europe, and in particular his hostility to Great Britain, have been the natural expressions of this raw national selfconsciousness. Mr. Hearst did not invent it. In the field of policy, in fact, Mr. Hearst never seems to have invented anything; the political philosophy which he has trumpeted for forty years was merely taken from the air around him. He established his ‘primacy of the sewer’ (it has for years been a stock phrase of his enemies) as an obvious way of giving the people what they wanted; his attacks on wealth, on corruption, on the ‘trusts,’ were an equally uncritical expression of the popular grievances of the time, and his blatant patriotism of the popular enthusiasms. But for each aspect of the method the dawn of the twentieth century was to open admirable opportunities.

Of the new imperialism Mr. Hearst was one of the loudest mouthpieces; and when, in the spring of 1900, Mr. Hay incautiously concluded a treaty with Great Britain which would have forbidden us to fortify the projected Panama Canal, Mr. Hearst added his most brutal artillery to the barrage of patriotic rage which overwhelmed the unhappy Secretary. There was an excoriating cartoon by Davenport that showed Hay and McKinley, in footmen’s livery, humbly addressing Pauncefote as ‘M’lud’; and, as far more polite sources echoed the sentiment, the treaty collapsed. That summer in New York there was a traction scandal; and Hearst joyously led the newspaper denunciation which ripped the ' ice trust ’ to pieces and forced it to cut its rates in half. The 1900 campaign, with Bryan running as an antiimperialist as well as a free-silverite, might have raised difficulties for a less adroit editor; for Mr. Hearst it was necessary only to forget about the imperialism and once more to parade Senator Hanna in his dollar marks and ‘Willie’ McKinley as his tool.

The campaign of 1900 was less exciting than that of 1896, but the Hearst press, if anything, was more so. With Mr. Hearst calm and invisible at its centre, the whirlwind roared, and the young men whom he had trained exploited to the utmost the juvenile irresponsibility of the Hearst method. The climax came after the election in the Evening Journal’s editorial cry that if ‘bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done.’ Even Hearst paused at that, and suppressed the sentiment as soon as he saw it; apparently he did not suppress Bierce’s lines in the morning Journal conveying the ‘warning’ that the bullet of a Kentucky assassin was

Six months later McKinley was dead. In the shock of the tragedy the nation turned to find an object for its revenge — and it found Mr. Hearst.

The polite, of course, had long grieved over Mr. Hearst’s treatment of ‘human interest,’ and the more privileged had felt a distinct annoyance at the betrayal, by a wealthy man, of the class to which he so evidently should have belonged. More old-fashioned minds had comprehended, with a deeper instinct, the violence of the new force which Hearst was using, the depth of the transformation which might be wrought in the national life and ideals by these new arts of propaganda, battering publicity, and mass emotion. But philosophical doubt seldom counts for much in our affairs. Mr. Hearst’s most striking effort had been his contribution toward the war; this was an end which the most eminent could applaud and (though perhaps a little shocked by the size of his headline type) they had not hesitated to avail themselves of the emotional power which he generated.

Here, however, was something else. To the horror over the assassination of McKinley there was added the bitterness of partisanship, and gentlemen who had seen nothing really wrong in the exploitation of mass emotion to win a foreign war abruptly discovered the dangers of mass emotion employed to stir up the masses. ‘It is doubtful,’ says Mr. Hearst’s biographer, ‘if any American has ever faced a wilder storm of abuse.’ Throughout the nation Hearst was burned in effigy with fagots made of his bundled papers. ‘Every scoundrel like Hearst and his satellites who for whatever purposes appeals to evil human passion,’Mr. Roosevelt privately burst out, ‘has made himself accessory before the fact to crimes of this nature.’ And Senator Lodge replied, ‘Amen’; the Journal was an ‘efficient cause in breeding anarchists and murder.’ The man who had done so much to take the nation into its crusade of three years before was all at once detected as a mere demagogue and panderer to base emotion. The Hearst campaigns, it was realized, were simply cynical bids for circulation; the Hearst policies were only skillful instruments for making money for Mr. Hearst.

Well, no doubt they were. But a singular thing had happened. Whatever the origin of the policies, Mr. Hearst had come to believe in them himself.

IV

The man of action is rarely a philosopher, and the most skillful popular leaders have always, throughout history, owed their hold over the popular mind to the fact that they shared it themselves. For all his cynical realism, one cannot believe that W. R. Hearst is an exception. ‘I don’t think,’he told Steffens, ‘that my papers are so bad’; and the interviewer realized the naïve honesty of the revealing sentence. Mr. Hearst, Steffens thought, ‘was a man who was in deadly earnest.’ And he was, in his peculiar way. His mild eyes concealed a Napoleonic egotism, and he proposed to fulfill it by giving the people, in a larger sense, what they wanted. Uncritically, he assumed this to be ‘good government,’the suppression of ‘privilege,’the uprooting of graft and corporate extortion — they were the slogans of the times, and to this extent, perhaps, he was taken in by his own propaganda. ‘He thinks he is a democrat,’one of his former subordinates has said. ‘The fact is, there was never a greater autocrat in the world.’ The trouble with us was that we were not democratic. Mr. Hearst would make us be democratic, and would make us like it.

According to Creelman, he had been already, ‘in a furtive and half-hearted way, a candidate for second place on the ticket with Mr. Bryan in 1900. But . . . even Mr. Bryan looked upon the matter as a jest.’ Mr. Bryan did not understand the deadly earnestness of this soft-spoken young gentleman not yet out of his thirties. The fact was that Mr. Hearst had been developing the possibilities of his method. The mere newspaper uproar was satisfactory enough for his younger triumphs; but it had its weaknesses, as the McKinley debacle showed, and its limitations. It might elect men to office; it could not make them the agents of Mr. Hearst’s imperial purposes.

But his experience as president of the National Association of Democratic Clubs in 1900 had taught him, as Creelman said, ‘that political organizations are, after all, largely made up of noise and boasting and that most of the men who do the real work among the voters can be controlled by anyone with boldness enough to proclaim himself leader and pay for the printing, music, and red fire.’ In his papers he already had the framework of such an organization ready-made. Mr. Hearst turned to seek office for himself.

Throughout the next decade he was to be bombarded with charges of a mere vulgar and grasping ambition. The public, like Mr. Bryan, was incapable of imagining the limitlessness of an egotism which made ambition in that sense as impossible to Mr. Hearst as a greed for riches would have been; while the fact that the editor did not hesitate to use for his own advancement nearly every device which he had denounced in more ordinary politicians was to add considerably to the difficulty of understanding him. His response to the McKinley catastrophe appeared to be impudent, but it was also superb. He changed the name of the Journal to the American and got Tammany to give him a seat in Congress!

His first serious effort was for nothing less than the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1904. Where other men had to buy their machines, Mr. Hearst simply converted his newspapers and their staffs into one of his own. His employees became his political managers; his papers for the first time blazoned the name of William Randolph Hearst in sonorous capitals across the nation, and amid the ‘roaring passion’ which they worked up he effortlessly collected the delegates not only from a dozen of the lesser states but from Illinois as well. The ‘new journalism’ had stepped into a startlingly new rôle, and had appeared in still another way as a new menace to our institutions.

Mr. Hearst, of course, was not nominated, but he was the runner-up; and when in the following year he entered with equal coolness into an independent campaign for the mayoralty of New York, he was not elected only because Tammany gravely counted him out. His actual plurality, Tammany men have said, was about 20,000. Mr. Hearst, however, was as patient as he was indefatigable. The year after, 1906, he blandly re-allied himself with Tammany to become candidate for governor, and made a whirlwind campaign through the state denouncing bossism, corruption, and the corporations. Even the brilliant discovery that his own papers were actually a corporation failed to stem the tide which his shrewd and effective sarcasm, to say nothing of his personal organization and liberal finances, set in motion.

Mr. Roosevelt, who years before had campaigned for the same office, likewise denouncing bosses and likewise as the nominee of one of them, was ‘horrified’ to hear of ‘Hearst’s strength on the East Side among laborers; and also even among farmers.’ Incredible as it might seem, not only the common man but intelligent and upright liberals (Samuel Seabury, now in his turn exposing corruption in New York on the old plan, was one of them) were in the ranks behind this strange people’s advocate who used every trick of the ancient game in the people’s name.

Hearst by this time had added to his chain of papers and entered the magazine field. ‘ Sewer journalism,’ nationalistic hullabaloo, or even a certain amount of corporation baiting might be no more than mildly disreputable. Now, for a few dread moments, there dawned the possibility that a single man might, merely by picking up a string of papers and manufacturing a personal party, actually usurp the politician’s prerogative and run the country as he pleased. Mr. Roosevelt himself was sooner or later to advocate nearly all that Hearst had urged; he was even to use much of the Hearst method and to trade, perhaps more heavily than he realized, upon the ideology which Hearst had drummed into millions of minds. But Mr. Roosevelt had obeyed the conventional rules; here was an irresponsible outsider, threatening, as Steffens said, ’to “do things.”' It was a menace. ‘The one chance for Hughes,’ Mr. Roosevelt concluded, ‘consists in making it evident that he is a real reformer and Hearst merely a sham; that corrupt corporations have to fear more from Hughes a great deal than from Hearst.’ This was eventually accomplished by sending Elihu Root into the state to revive the McKinley assassination scandal; the editor was not elected Governor of New York.

V

Again it was a high point, and again Mr. Hearst was to show his ability to learn. Off and on for another sixteen years he was to be a candidate for office; he was to pursue his curious relationship with Tammany through all its devious intricacies; he was even, in 1922, to permit the bizarre suggestion that he might become the Presidential candidate of a third party to be organized by Mr. John F. Hylan and Mr. William Hale Thompson. But much of this activity seems to have been directed less toward getting Mr. Hearst into office than toward swinging a club over those who were to get into office. It was still another form of experimentation with the wonderful machine of power which he had created.

The ‘Hearstism’ which had awakened so deep a dread in 1906 had proved to be an illusory danger, and for a time the processes of democracy appeared to be safe from this singular democrat. Perhaps it was the method that had unsuspected defects; perhaps it was his own character. But there are more subtle avenues to power than the winning of elections. In the 1908 Presidential election he suddenly produced the stolen Archbold letters (an old and tried device) to torture many eminent souls. His introduction to the batch he read in New York not only was an example of his skillful touch; perhaps it was also a true summary of his own simple motives: —

Information has been delicately conveyed to me that ... if I make another damaging disclosure the whole power of the Standard Oil Company will be exercised against me. I say farewell to my friends, therefore, because I am going to read the letters.

In the first place I do not like being bluffed. In the second place I think I am doing a citizen’s duty. In the third place there are a great many matters on the Standard Oil Company’s books which ought to be brought to light, and I am in hopes that a good, hard fight will bring them to light and will send some of the corrupters of our government to jail.

By running again for Mayor of New York in 1909 he defeated the Fusion candidate, but returned the Fusion Board of Estimate, thus at one stroke rebuking the local Democracy for having knifed him in 1906 and leaving the Fusionists with an uneasy sense that it was to Mr. Hearst, quite as much as to the purity of their own principles, that they owed the victory. In 1912 he was (according to one of Colonel House’s letters) a tentative candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination; but, the hope proving a fantastic one, he turned to the task of defeating Mr. Wilson by his support of Champ Clark. The narrowness of the margin by which he lost has led some to say that this was the high-water mark of his political power, and it is a curious reflection that it took Mr. Bryan, a second great practitioner of a similar method, to checkmate him.

But Mr. Hearst was unmoved, and his experiments became even stranger. In New York the amazing figure of Mr. Hylan appeared suddenly as the editor’s puppet candidate for the mayoralty which he himself had been unable to secure. The campaign was bitter, but Mr. Hylan was elected; and the people of New York were to have the eight years of his administration in which to reflect upon the singular workings of our democratic institutions. The pure beauty of the demonstration was, however, to be clouded. The war had intervened, to overtake Mr. Hearst with an ironic debacle.

For twenty years Mr. Hearst, with others, had been industriously pumping the bellows of jingo patriotism. Like others, he had elevated the ark of the Monroe Doctrine, he had thumbed his nose at England, he had believed in the great dogma of a nationalist America, isolated and untrammeled. But unlike others, he continued to believe in it. For all his intelligence, Mr. Hearst seems to have been unequal to that suppleness of mind whereby other patriots suddenly discovered that the ancestral injunction to avoid entanglements required us to plunge into a purely European war, and as the ‘associate’ of Great Britain, the one people against whom we had been traditionally the most careful to assert our independence. Mr. Hearst could not be de-bamboozled; he turned all his journalistic brilliance toward the logical development of the simple theme upon which he had been harping for two decades, and as a result the waves of wrath broke over him. He was a traitor; he was a seditionist; he was even a pro-German.

It is difficult not to conclude that Mr. Hearst — in the public mind the unprincipled yellow journalist, the shrewd, the calculating, and unmoral self-seeker — was actually entrapped by the simplicity of his own convictions.

The battle, it must be admitted, reads a trifle curiously to-day. There is something strange in finding the friends of good government, in 1917, demonstrating their own fitness to administer New York City by the argument that Mr. Hylan was assisting a submarine campaign in the English Channel. Mr. Hearst’s exposures of Allied propaganda seem less than criminal in the light of present-day knowledge; while his suggestion that Germans were human beings does not appear to have been quite so blasphemous a perversion of the facts as it was represented to be.

There are even some who now think that the grounds upon which Mr. Hearst sought to keep us out of war were more realistic than those upon which we went into it. But the astute editor was simply overwhelmed by the ferocity of the nationalistic emotionalism which he himself had done so much to build up. Again there were bonfires fed with Hearst papers, as there had been fifteen years before; it became almost a crime to buy a copy of them and (in right-thinking communities) a disqualification for public office to permit their sale. Frankenstein was imperiled — in fact he was very nearly destroyed — by his own mass monster.

Nearly, but not quite. He trimmed in time; he supported the war, and turned to meet the onslaught with a characteristic lack of scruple. He assailed his enemies with no less violence, and even greater scurrility, than they had used against him. His papers joyously doubled their sensational content, and by other arts redressed the balance of the circulation figures, so that Mr. Hearst was permitted to claim a triumphant vindication at the hands of the public.

The sequel was curious. The war came to an end; so did the war fervor. The American people—especially those who had been loudest in denunciation of the traitorous editor — now discovered that they were tired of Europe and that the injunction about entangling alliances really did mean what it said after all. Mr. Hearst’s bitter assaults upon President Wilson and the League were more consistent than some others, for they were based on precisely the same principles as had dictated his pro-Germanism; by this time, however, the principles had become respectable. The most eminent statesmen tacitly accepted Mr. Hearst’s assistance (even though hesitating to acknowledge it), and in the great work of defeating the Versailles Treaty Mr. Hearst exerted a commanding influence.

Again, however, and for still another reason, a picture of William Randolph Hearst as a public enemy had been fixed firmly in the public mind, and when from 1919 onward the egregious Al Smith set himself to remove the Hearst blight (and the Hearst interference) from the affairs of Tammany, he did not hesitate to capitalize the fact. When the Governor damned the editor as a ‘Bolshevik’ because he had urged, in 1918, that we recognize the Soviet government (‘We are in [the war] for democracy,’ he had had the temerity to write, ‘then for heaven’s sake why not recognize a democratic government?’) the argument was not entirely above question. And when Hearst, from those Olympian heights to which he was more and more removing himself, flung back the contemptuous answer: ‘I have no intention of meeting Governor Smith, publicly or privately, politically or socially. . . . In conclusion let me say that if you gentlemen are going to hire Carnegie Hall every time my papers expose rascally politicians, you would better take a long-term lease on the property,’ the dialectic honors were possibly more nearly even than they appeared at the time. Mr. Smith, however, succeeded in slaying the dragon; Mr. Hearst was finally eliminated from New York politics, and by methods which he himself had every reason to understand. But by that time did he really care very much?

VI

Where twenty or thirty years ago Mr. Hearst was a terror of success, it has been the fashion of recent years to damn him as a failure. All his political efforts were written in the sand; his great chain of papers has never ruled the nation; his properties are said to be less prosperous than they once were; the New York American, which he intended as his monument, has become a heavy liability, and even the ‘primacy of the sewer’ has passed to other hands.

It is a fitting postscript to the long cry of contradictory abuse which has followed him that to-day he should be criticized, by no less a prophet than Mr. Mencken, because he has grown ‘too respectable’ and now ‘repudiates the philosophy of a lifetime and, led by the platitudinous Brisbane, sets up as a Babbitt in his declining years.’

It is true that the undergraduate boisterousness, the extraordinary fertility in sensation, of the Spanish War days have long since faded from the pages of the Hearst press. The picturesque effectiveness of Winsor McKay bears small relation to the terrific brutality of Homer Davenport; and ‘Prohibition’ or ‘Gangster’ or the anonymous ‘Corrupt Politician’ is a less interesting target than a flesh-and-blood Hanna, a Murphy, a McKinley, or a Hay. Some say it is because Hearst has grown too old and his properties too vast; he is no longer able to transmit his own malicious genius to the multitudinous proconsuls whom he has been forced to appoint over his empire.

But there are enough stories of his close attention to the way they administer it, of the colossal telephone tolls he rolls up as he dispatches his meticulous orders daily from the throne at San Simeon, to cast doubt upon the theory. So also one cannot too readily accept another explanation: that since the Hearst properties were reorganized and put under a heavy load of bonded debt they have lost the financial independence that was the corner stone of their early recklessness. As Mr. Brisbane himself once remarked (but this was some fifteen years ago), ‘ the editor with his heart in Wall Street ceases to be yellow. He takes on a superior dull golden hue.’

There may be something in it; but Mr. Hearst was never quite that sort of man.

Those who emphasize the change in the Hearst papers forget that there has been an even more profound change in the times. The slashing exuberance is dead, but so is the national mood which produced it and made it effective. We could not now be hurried into Cuban intervention by big headlines, doctored news, and juvenile ‘fakes’ which would not mislead even a child in the publicity-battered age of today.

In 1905, it was easy to believe that salvation lay in the exposure of local corruption, in tearing to shreds the silk-hatted ‘malefactors of great wealth’ (the phrase, one must remember, is not Mr. Hearst’s), and in dragging corporations into court to answer under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. But we face the problems of 1932 with a more critical and less confident spirit. As Mr. Brisbane lays wreaths upon the respectable brow of Mr. Coolidge, he doubtless does so in the shrewd knowledge that his public will eat it up much more readily than if he flayed that statesman as a ‘ tool of Wall Street.’

Mr. Hearst has continued to ‘ expose ’ and even to ‘crusade.’ He it was who laid bare the ‘power lobby’ with its professors on the pay roll, and he campaigns for government ownership of utilities now as he has done for forty years. The activities of the horse doctor Doyle, which have proved to be one of the most powerful levers in the hands of those now investigating Tammany corruption, were first uncovered by the New York American. These and other similar efforts he continues to wrap in the sensationalism of crime and sex, and he continues his cynical disregard for logic and intellectual honesty as he puts his arguments in the striking, the effective form rather than the reasonable one. But there is a hollowness about it. It no longer rings the bells of terror and dismay among the ‘interests,’ while even Mr. Hearst cannot quite convince the nation that the ‘power trust’ is real.

Is it impossible that he is embarking upon still another experiment? His Napoleonic ambition — to mass the reserves of power in the common man and to use them, from his autocratic throne, to bestow upon the people what they want — does not appear to have changed. But he does seem to be adjusting his methods to the changed conditions of the present. Mr. Hearst in his time has tried the brass bands of massed publicity; he has tried seeking office for himself; he has tried the chain newspaper and syndicated editorial page; he has tried placing puppets in offices which he himself could not attain.

Though he has had some success with each, they are all now more or less obsolete, and it is said that Mr. Hearst to-day operates chiefly through the more subtle arts of the Congressional or legislative lobby. It is the modern way. To detect his hand in our national affairs one now has to look more closely than in the past, but may it not be that it actually wields more genuine power than ever before?

Perhaps Mr. Hearst is a failure; perhaps what he stood for has been discredited. Yet are those to whom his name is a summation of all evil quite sure of just what he does stand for? Not long ago he was able to summon none other than the editor of the Boston Transcript to be his chief mouthpiece.

Mr. Hearst may be a failure. But Mr. Hearst is still only sixty-eight.

VII

For that reason, if for no other, one cannot yet compose an epitaph upon his staggering career. Even now it is difficult to understand precisely what William Randolph Hearst has done to us.

Obviously the ‘ menace’ — in its crudely immediate aspects — was less menacing than it appeared to be. Even in the purely technical field of newspaper publication it is doubtful whether the Hearst influence has been as deep as is often assumed. Hearst-trained men do not flood the offices of other papers; indeed, the victims of his imperious dismissals frequently achieve only a moderate success when they go elsewhere. The characteristic Hearst make-up can be found in few other journals, and, as has recently been pointed out, our great metropolitan dailies show no traces of the Hearst approach in their handling of either news or editorials.

Even the big headlines can hardly be ascribed to Mr. Hearst. His stupendous heads in the Spanish War period were not generally imitated, while present-day headlines are simply the result of a natural development that can be traced steadily through American newspapers from the Revolutionary War on down.

Mr. Hearst may have prepared the way for the modem tabloid (a far baser product, and really out of the Hearst method, as his own failure with it showed), but on the other hand he probably deserves much of the credit for the generally better writing, wider range of interest, more artistic approach, and more human sympathy which distinguish the great papers of to-day from those of thirty years ago. Mr. Hearst seems to have realized sooner than his contemporaries that a good newspaperman should also be, in a larger sense of the term, an artist, and to him we may owe much of the improvement which our dailies show over the stodgy sheets of the past. We may — the point is arguable.

But to the present writer it seems likely that the future will see Mr. Hearst’s influence upon his times to have been wider than any mere question of newspaper technique, more subtle than the immediate consequences of his political manipulation. He has performed some social jobs of importance, such as assisting to curb the arrogance of great wealth, or reminding the dictatorial (other than himself) that this country cannot be run in the interests of a class or even in the interests of what any one class believes to be righteous and desirable. He has played a great part in shaping the political and economic ideas of two decades of our history. He has had a powerful voice in at least two of the historic decisions of his country — the entry into the Spanish War and the rejection of the Treaty of Versailles. But more than that, he has assisted to develop and confirm in the American mind an attitude toward itself and toward the world in which it lives which is at once of far-reaching importance and of at least questionable value.

William Randolph Hearst has been one of the great exponents of the doctrine of giving the people what they want as a moans to power and achievement. Essentially, it is the doctrine of the man of action, a doctrine in which the end justifies the means, a doctrine in which effect, achievement, bigness, and results are the things that matter. He has colored an age with Jacksonian democracy; and in doing so has helped to break down, or to prevent the upbuilding of, those absolute standards of public morality and reasoned thought which some believe to be the goals of civilized society. His has been a doctrine of America first, rather than of America as a gracious institution for individual well-being and happiness; a doctrine of cant and get ahead, of ballyhoo and publicity, of adroitness and emotionalism, rather than honor. In short, there is reason to believe that the intellectual thuggery of the Hearst newspapers and the Hearst method has helped to create those national moods and attitudes of which gangsterism — in many walks of American life — is an expression.

And yet the final doubt must, of course, remain. The Hearst papers were by no means the only voices urging us on to prize effect and mass emotion. Many more respected men than Mr. Hearst have traded on his campaigns or quietly modified their own attitudes to accord with the gospels which he was preaching; while from the moment in which he turned over the pages of Mr. Pulitzer’s World in his rooms at Cambridge, Mr. Hearst has learned quite as much from others as he has ever taught them. One cannot be sure. Is William Randolph Hearst a cause — or is he only an effect?