by David Nasaw
The following month, the Hearst papers refrained from attacking the Roosevelt administration or endorsing its Republican opponents in the midterm elections. In California, where the Democratic candidate for governor, Upton Sinclair—novelist, pamphleteer, utopian socialist, vegetarian, and pacifist—was running on the EPIC, “End Poverty in California,” program without Roosevelt’s support, the Hearst papers endorsed his Republican opponent. Compared with the other publishers in the state—especially Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times who led the attack on Sinclair—the Hearst papers’ coverage was rather muted. Hearst himself waited until October 23, two weeks before Election Day, to announce his rather tepid support for Sinclair’s Republican opponent, Frank Merriam. “Do not be too severe,” Hearst warned his California editors, “but continue as we have been mildly and logically pointing out that Sinclair is unfit, visionary, and almost foolish.” When it became clear that Sinclair was headed for defeat, the Chief urged his editorial writers and columnists to stop criticizing him. “Kill editorial, ‘Is Sinclair Honest,’” Hearst had Joe Willicombe telegram his Los Angeles editor the week before the election. “The Chief says it is too abusive. He thinks Sinclair is beaten and does not want to print abuse matter which might create sympathy and votes.”7
When Sinclair was “handsomely beaten by over 220,000,” the Chief proudly telegrammed Arthur Brisbane with praise for the voters of his home state: “People of California do not have to try the smallpox in order to realize that they do not like it. I think an actual experiment with Sinclair-ism would not merely have been expensive but would have been ruinous. As it is, we are well rid of him, thank heaven.”8
Though Sinclair had been soundly beaten in California, Democrats elsewhere were almost uniformly victorious. Hearst, still glowing from his visit to the White House, congratulated the president by telegram on his victory:
There has been no such popular endorsement since the days of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. It shows how faithful the American people are to the true spirit of Democracy and how safe American institutions are as long as the American Government is genuinely Democratic and rightfully mindful of the welfare of the plain people. Your equitable Democratic Administration prolongs indefinitely the life of the Republic and I believe your just and judicious measures will soon restore a National prosperity in which all will share with contentment and gratitude. The forgotten man does not forget.9
Concealed in this message of congratulations was a thinly disguised threat. Hearst’s use of adjectives like “genuine,” “true,” and “equitable” were intended to remind Roosevelt that he reserved the right to abandon him and the party at a moment’s notice should they or their programs cease to be “genuinely democratic.”
Although he had refrained from making any statements that might have harmed Roosevelt in these first midterm elections, the Chief was still quite shaken by the events of 1934. Everywhere he looked, including his own newsrooms and Hollywood, Hearst saw threats to the foundations of American democracy, capitalism, and the free press. On November 5, he instructed George Young, the publisher of the Los Angeles Examiner, to compose a series of editorials “to this effect ... If moving pictures are to be used for communistic propaganda, it will not be long before the American government will have to step in either to suppress such propaganda or to take over the film companies responsible for it and see that they are conducted on a patriotic American basis. The Hearst papers will not here specify the objectionable films, but it may be necessary to mention them and arouse the public to the danger of them and possibly stimulate the government to take action.”10
His implicit threat to campaign for federal censorship of moving pictures was too frightening to be ignored. Fred Beetson of the Hays Office called George Young only days after the first editorial was published to say that he and Mr. Breen, Hays’s chief censor, had sent copies of the Hearst editorial on Communism in Motion Pictures to each of the studios with a “warning that no pictures containing red propaganda would be tolerated.”11
While other newspapers merely complained against Communist subversion, the Hearst papers intended to take an active role in rooting it out wherever it existed. For almost four decades, the Hearst papers had “acted” where others only talked. But this time, instead of going after murderers, kidnappers, corrupt politicians, greedy businessmen, Wall Street tycoons, or international bankers and armament manufacturers, the Chief directed his editors and reporters to target ordinary citizens.
Following the lead of Ralph Easley, who had begun the previous March to report on Communist subversion in the schools and universities, Hearst directed his editors to “support the actions of the universities in throwing out ... Communists, and say, furthermore, that they ought to be thrown out of the country. Any one who plots to overthrow the government should forfeit his citizenship.”12
They did what he asked, unleashing in every city with a Hearst paper a witch-hunt for Communists that would continue almost unabated for the next twenty years. In a letter to his editors that he published as an editorial on his front pages Hearst claimed that the Communists, if not stopped in their tracks, were going to unleash a Fascist backlash: “I do not think there is any actual Fascist movement in the United States as YET.... The menace of Communism is what developed Fascism in Europe. There was no other cause for it—no other reason for it.... Fascism will only come into existence in the United States when such a movement becomes really necessary for the prevention of Communism. We must not let it become necessary. We must not allow the Communists to get control of the machinery of government.”13
The pressure on his editors to do the Chief’s bidding was enormous. From San Simeon, the Chief ruled his empire by telegram and telephone. He delivered the orders and expected them to be followed. Every day, his local editors knew, he read his newspapers cover to cover. Those editors who did not do his bidding were likely to be replaced or moved to a lesser city. Those who did were rewarded. The Chief did not ask questions as to means, he was interested only in the ends achieved.
The editors of Hearst’s Syracuse Journal, following the Chief’s instructions, sent two young reporters, one from Syracuse, the other borrowed from the Hearst paper in Rochester, to Syracuse University to expose the Communists that were supposedly lurking there. Working undercover, the two contacted Professor John Washburne of the School of Education on November 10, claiming that they were “Communists hoping to go to Russia next summer for study and ... wanted to take up a special course in Syracuse University along Communist lines.” After Washburne encouraged them to enroll at Syracuse, they met with him in his office. On November 22, they published a report of that meeting on the front page of the Syracuse Journal, alongside a photograph of the professor. Their story began on the first page and took up the entire second page. On page twelve, the Journal published a letter from Washburne denying that he had ever been “connected with any Communistic organization or activities.” Two days later, to protect itself from libel charges, the Syracuse Journal published a front-page editorial, “Syracuse University and ‘Liberalism’—If Communists Do Not Like Our Government, Let Them Go to Russia,” in which it made clear that it had not charged any professor with being a Communist or a Socialist, but had only reported that the university had done nothing to root out the Communist professors, students, and clubs on campus.14
In the weeks to come, Hearst witch-hunters, sometimes posing as students, sometimes admitting they were reporters, visited professors in Boston, Chicago, Syracuse, Madison, and New York City. On Thanksgiving Day 1934, Professor Sidney Hook of New York University was visited by a former student now working for the New York American who “said that he had been sent on this special assignment by the city editor to investigate Professor Hook’s radicalism, particularly his connection with the American Workers’ Party.” In mid-December, Professor George Counts and William H. Kilpatrick of Columbia University’s Teachers College were interviewed by Hearst reporters who questioned both men
about their positions on Communism, on revolution, student demonstrations on campus, and whether the Soviet experiment was a fit subject to be discussed in college classrooms.15
These interviews were then used, selectively of course, as evidence that the universities harbored un-American professors who believed it their right and duty to teach about Communism in their classrooms. Though men like Counts and Hook had little to fear from “exposure” in the Hearst press, many targeted by the Hearst papers feared, rightly, for their futures.
In Chicago, Hearst’s Herald-Examiner went after an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago, Frederick L. Schuman, who had delivered an address on Communism and liberalism before the Cook County League of Women Voters. In an editorial entitled “Schuman of Chicago,” the assistant professor was described 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.”16
The Herald-Examiner extended its attack against Schuman to the University of Chicago and its president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, who employed him. When Charles Walgreen, the owner of the drugstore chain, wrote Hutchins, with a copy to the Herald-Examiner, that he was withdrawing his niece because he was “unwilling to have her exposed to the Communist influences to which she is insidiously exposed,” the Illinois state legislature opened an investigation to see if there was cause for rescinding the University of Chicago’s state charter. The committee, after investigating, voted four to one against taking any action.17
While his editors and reporters were ferreting out Communists in the universities, Hearst took upon himself the task of enlightening his readers on the realities of life under Communist rule in the Soviet Union. On Saturday night, January 5, he arrived at the NBC studios in San Francisco to make his New Year’s radio broadcast. This time, instead of focusing on American politics and prosperity, he devoted his entire address to Soviet Communism. His speech was reproduced verbatim on the front pages of his newspapers the next morning, a Sunday, when circulation was at its peak.
Hearst claimed that “five to ten million Russian farmers” were dying of starvation annually, their meager harvests stolen to support the Red Army. He referred to wholesale assassinations of government officials and “so-called conspirators,” to people who had been shot in Moscow for stealing bread or sent to Siberia, and to the thousands of peasants who had been slaughtered by the Red Army or forced to flee to Afghanistan.
After assaulting his listeners and readers with facts and figures about assassination, starvation, despotism, and death in Soviet Russia, he brought the discussion back home, directly linking the Soviet Communists—and their campaign of murder and terror—to American leftists by asking “the free citizens of America” if they wanted “the cruel class rule of the proletariat in our country?...Do we want to see the violent overthrow of the entire traditional social order? Do any genuinely AMERICAN workers want to see the American working class led toward revolutionary class struggles?...Does anybody want the bloody despotism of Communism in our free America except a few incurable malcontents, a few sap-headed college boys and a few unbalanced college professors?”18
This was but the first of dozens of similar anti-Communist, anti-left, anti—New Deal editorials. To make sure their message was carried to the entire nation, the Chief directed Ed Coblentz and Tom White to buy space in non-Hearst newspapers and run his editorials as paid advertisements: “If my editorials are really useful, why not give them wide circulation outside of our own papers?...We could easily get eight or ten million more circulation for the articles, and perhaps this would help the papers.”19
The battle was soon joined. The Communist party and its front groups counterattacked with every weapon in their arsenals. Like Hearst, the Communists were not content with simply exposing the sins of their enemies in their newspapers and pamphlets. They organized People’s Committees Against Hearst, held rallies, and called for a boycott of all Hearst publications.20
Had the Communists been alone, their anti-Hearst activism might not have had much of an effect. But Hearst’s simultaneous assaults on New Dealers in general, the American Newspaper Guild, and university professors and students had succeeded in cementing an early Popular Front alliance against him. Non-Communist progressives like John Dewey and George Counts, socialists like Norman Thomas, anti-Communist liberals like Roger Baldwin of the ACLU, and labor leaders like Heywood Broun enthusiastically signed on to the boycotts.
While his opponents did not have access to the millions of readers Hearst spoke to each day, they had media outlets of their own. In leftist journals like Social Frontier, Common Sense, the New Masses, the Nation, and the New Republic, in Communist-front pamphlets and publications, and in student newspapers from New York to West Virginia to Texas, Hearst was accused of being an un-American bigot at best and the leading American fascist at worst.21
The mainstream press covered the campaign against Hearst with unusual gusto. There were in the New York Times alone in the first two months of 1935 no less than twelve different stories about anti-Hearst activities. In late February of 1935, Hearst’s opponents enjoyed a publicity breakthrough when they convened an “independent meeting” of educators at Atlantic City, dedicated to the Hearst problem. The keynote address, which was widely covered by the non-Hearst press, was delivered by Charles Beard, the former president of the American Historical Association, who declared Hearst to be an “enemy of everything that is noblest and best in our American tradition.” The day after Beard’s speech, 15,000 people assembled at a Communist-organized Friends of the Soviet Union rally at Madison Square Garden to attack Hearst again, this time for torpedoing the negotiations in Washington to reduce Soviet war debts.22
In mid-March, Coblentz informed the Chief from New York City “that the boycott, which is becoming more intense and widespread every day, is hurting our circulation.... Never a daypasses that the Radicals do not hold a meeting; not [only] in Union Square, but in school houses, meeting halls, etc., and ask for a boycott of our papers. They are working among the young, the Jews and the parent teachers’ organizations. We are countering, of course, with the American Legion organizations in the schools. As I said to you on the phone, it isn’t doing us any good at present insofar as circulation figures are concerned, but I think it will eventuate to our advantage.”23
The boycotts against Hearst’s newspapers were soon expanded to include his newsreels. At Williams College, then at Amherst, then elsewhere, students booed the Hearst newsreels—at Amherst, they drowned them out with cries of “We Want Popeye! We Want Popeye!”—and picketed the theaters that carried them, forcing theater owners to protect themselves by removing the name Hearst from the titles. By November of 1936, the boycott became serious enough to compel Hearst to change the name of his newsreel from Hearst Metrotone News to News of the Day.24
President Roosevelt, perhaps repaying the Chief for sitting out the 1934 midterm elections, not only refused to join in the attack but went out of his way to do favors for Hearst. On January 22, 1935, Roosevelt issued an administrative order overturning the decision by the National Labor Relations Board that had ordered Hearst’s San Francisco Call-Bulletin to reinstate Dean Jennings, the Guild delegate who had been forced to resign his position. The move infuriated Roosevelt supporters on the left and in the labor movement. Heywood Broun remarked caustically at a meeting of Guild members in February of 1935 that he now “pictured Roosevelt accompanying every decision with the statement, ‘I hope Mr. Hearst is not going to object to this.’”25
Hearst also received an unexpected endorsement in Fortune magazine, which was owned by his major publishing rival, Henry Luce. In 1935, Ralph Ingersoll, an editor at the magazine, had visited Hearst at Wyntoon to discuss a feature story on Hearst’s wealth. The Chief agreed to cooperate, researchers and writers were assigned, photographers dispatched, and the piece was all but ready for publication when Jack Neylan learned that the final ver
sion raised questions about the financial stability of the Hearst empire and its stock and bond issues. Neylan contacted Ingersoll, who was now managing editor, and convinced him to start all over again, using figures supplied by the Hearst organization. The rewritten version, Neylan reported to Hearst, was “not the type of article we would write or want at this particular juncture [but] judging it from the standpoint of what has been published and whispered over a long terms of years, by Standard Statistics, Poore’s Manual and other [financial] publications, it is infinitely better.”26
Though Neylan was probably exaggerating his role in the rewriting of the article, Fortune, for reasons we do not know, had done Hearst a great service by papering over the extent of his financial problems. In the introduction to the article, Fortune announced that it had had no intention of writing about “Hearst the man” or “Hearst the menace.” These subjects had already been extensively covered. “Our project is narrower than that and consists simply of adding up Mr. Hearst’s assets and his earnings, of estimating the corporate HEARST. And for this apparently arbitrary project we have a reason. All things considered, Mr. Hearst’s is the most extraordinary fortune in the world.”
The article went on to say that the reputation of Hearst as a “big borrower” was untrue. After valuing his assets and liabilities, Fortune estimated that Hearst’s net worth was in the neighborhood of $140,000,000. Coming from Fortune, a well-respected magazine, this “audit” of the Hearst finances went a long way toward calming the fears of the investment community and the public as to the health of the Hearst corporations. That it was largely based on fictional estimates supplied by Hearst and his advisers was not widely known. That it may have been rewritten at the request of Jack Neylan was not known at all. That it presented a highly inaccurate picture of the state of Hearst’s finances, especially his debts, would not be known for another two years.27
