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Big Money

Page 46

by John Dos Passos


  Much I thought of you when I was lying in the death house—the singing, the kind tender voices of the children from the playground where there was all the life and the joy of liberty—just one step from the wall that contains the buried agony of three buried souls. It would remind me so often of you and of your sister and I wish I could see you ev ery moment, but I feel better that you will not come to the death house so that you could not see the horrible picture of three living in agony waiting to be electrocuted.

  The Camera Eye (50)

  they have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspapereditors the old judges the small men with reputations the collegepresidents the wardheelers (listen businessmen collegepresidents judges America will not forget her betrayers) they hire the men with guns the uniforms the policecars the patrolwagons

  all right you have won you will kill the brave men our friends tonight

  there is nothing left to do we are beaten we the beaten crowd together in these old dingy schoolrooms on Salem Street shuffle up and down the gritty creaking stairs sit hunched with bowed heads on benches and hear the old words of the haters of oppression made new in sweat and agony tonight

  our work is over the scribbled phrases the nights typing releases the smell of the printshop the sharp reek of newprinted leaflets the rush for Western Union stringing words into wires the search for stinging words to make you feel who are your oppressors America

  America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul

  their hired men sit on the judge’s bench they sit back with their feet on the tables under the dome of the State House they are ignorant of our beliefs they have the dollars the guns the armed forces the powerplants

  they have built the electricchair and hired the executioner to throw the switch

  all right we are two nations

  America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch

  but do they know that the old words of the immigrants are being renewed in blood and agony tonight do they know that the old American speech of the haters of oppression is new tonight in the mouth of an old woman from Pittsburgh of a husky boilermaker from Frisco who hopped freights clear from the Coast to come here in the mouth of a Back Bay socialworker in the mouth of an Italian printer of a hobo from Arkansas the language of the beaten nation is not forgotten in our ears tonight

  the men in the deathhouse made the old words new before they died

  If it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life talking at streetcorners to scorning men. I might have died unknown, unmarked, a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as how we do by an accident

  now their work is over the immigrants haters of oppression lie quiet in black suits in the little undertaking parlor in the North End the city is quiet the men of the conquering nation are not to be seen on the streets

  they have won why are they scared to be seen on the streets? on the streets you see only the downcast faces of the beaten the streets belong to the beaten nation all the way to the cemetery where the bodies of the immigrants are to be burned we line the curbs in the drizzling rain we crowd the wet sidewalks elbow to elbow silent pale looking with scared eyes at the coffins

  we stand defeated America

  Newsreel LXVII

  when things are upset, there’s always chaos, said Mr. Ford. Work can accomplish wonders and overcome chaotic conditions. When the Russian masses will learn to want more than they have, when they will want white collars, soap, better clothes, better shoes, better housing, better living conditions

  I lift up my finger and I say tweet tweet

  shush shush

  now now

  come come

  REPUBLIC-TRUMBULL STEEL MERGER VOTED

  There along the dreamy Amazon

  We met upon the shore

  Tho’ the love I knew is ever gone

  WHEAT OVERSOLD REACHES NEW HIGH

  Dreams linger on

  the first thing the volunteer firefighters did was to open the windows to let the smoke out. This created a draft and the fire with a good thirty mile wind right from the ocean did the rest

  RECORD TURNOVER IN INSURANCE SHARES

  AS TRADING PROGRESSES

  outside the scene was a veritable bedlam. Well-dressed women walked up and down wringing their hands, helpless to save their belongings, while from the windows of the upper stories there rained a shower of trunks, suitcases and clothing hurled out indiscriminately. Jewelry and bricabrac valued at thousands was picked up by the spectators from the lawn, who thrust the objects under their coats and disappeared

  BROKERS LOANS HIT NEW HIGH

  Change all of your gray skies

  Turn them into gay skies

  And keep sweeping the cobwebs off the moon

  MARKETS OPTIMISTIC

  learn new uses for cement. How to develop profitable concrete business. How to judge materials. How to figure jobs. How to reinforce concrete. How to build forms, roads, sidewalks, floors, foundations, culverts, cellars

  And even tho the Irish and the Dutch

  Say it don’t amount to much

  Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong

  STARSPANGLED BANDIT GANG ROBS DINERS

  MURDER BARES QUAKER STATE FANTASIES

  Poker Slayer Praised

  Poor little Hollywood Rose

  so all alone

  No one in Hollywood knows

  how sad she’s grown

  FIVE HUNDRED MILLIONS IN BANK DEAL

  Sure I love the dear silver that shines in your hair

  And the brow that’s all furrowed

  And wrinkled with care

  I kiss the dear fingers so toil worn for me

  CARBONIC BUYS IN DRY ICE

  GAB MARATHON RUN FOR GOLD ON BROADWAY

  the broad advertising of the bull markets, the wide extension of the ticker services, the equipping of branch brokerage offices with tickers, transparent, magnified translux stockquotation rolls have had the natural result of stirring up nation-wide interest in the stockmarket

  Poor Little Rich Boy

  William Randolph Hearst was an only son, the only chick in the richlyfeathered nest of George and Phebe Hearst.

  In eighteen fifty George Hearst had left his folks and the farm in Franklin County, Missouri, and driven a team of oxen out to California. (In fortynine the sudden enormous flare of gold had filled the west;

  the young men couldn’t keep their minds on their plowing, on feeding the swill to the pigs, on threshing the wheat

  when the fires of gold were sweeping the Pacific Slope. Cholera followed in the ruts of the oxcarts, they died of cholera round the campfires, in hastilybuilt chinchinfested cabins, they were picked off by hostile Indians, they blew each other’s heads off in brawls.)

  George Hearst was one of the few that made it;

  he developed a knack for placermining;

  as a prospector he had an accurate eye for picking a goldbearing vein of quartz;

  after seven years in El Dorado County he was a millionaire, Anaconda was beginning, he owned onesixth of the Ophir Mine, he was in on Comstock Lode.

  In sixtyone he went back home to Missouri with his pockets full of nuggets and married Phebe Apperson and took her back by boat and across Panama to San Francisco the new hilly capital of the millionaire miners and bought a mansion for her beside the Golden Gate on the huge fogbound coast of the Pacific.

  He owned vast ranges and ranches, raised cattle, ran racehorses, prospected in Mexico, employed five thousand men in his mines, on
his estates, lost and won fortunes in mining deals, played poker at a century a chip, never went out without a bag of clinkers to hand out to old friends down on their uppers,

  and died in Washington

  a senator,

  a rough diamond, a lusty beloved whitebearded old man with the big beak and sparrowhawk eyes of a breaker of trails, the beetling brows under the black slouch hat

  of an oldtimer.

  Mrs. Hearst’s boy was born in sixtythree.

  Nothing too good for the only son.

  The Hearsts doted on their boy;

  the big lanky youngster grew up solemneyed and selfwilled among servants and hired men, factotums, overseers, hangerson, old pensioners; his grandparents spoiled him; he always did everything he wanted. Mrs. Hearst’s boy must have everything of the best.

  No lack of gold nuggets, twentydollar goldpieces, big silver cartwheels.

  The boy had few playmates; he was too rich to get along with the others in the roughandtumble democracy of the boys growing up in San Francisco in those days. He was too timid and too arrogant; he wasn’t liked.

  His mother could always rent playmates with icecream, imported candies, expensive toys, ponies, fireworks always ready to set off. The ones he could buy he despised, he hankered always after the others.

  He was great on practical jokes and pulling the leg of the grownups; when the new Palace Hotel was opened with a reception for General Grant he and a friend had themselves a time throwing down handfuls of birdshot on the glass roof of the court to the consternation of the bigwigs and stuffedshirts below.

  Wherever they went royally the Hearsts could buy their way,

  up and down the California coast, through ranches and mining-towns

  in Nevada and in Mexico,

  in the palace of Porfirio Diaz;

  the old man had lived in the world, had rubbed shoulders with rich and poor, had knocked around in miners’ hells, pushed his way through unblazed trails with a packmule. All his life Mrs. Hearst’s boy was to hanker after that world

  hidden from him by a mist of millions;

  the boy had a brain, appetites, an imperious will,

  but he could never break away from the gilded apronstrings;

  adventure became slumming.

  He was sent to boardingschool at St. Paul’s, in Concord, New Hampshire. His pranks kept the school in an uproar. He was fired.

  He tutored and went to Harvard

  where he cut quite a swath as businessmanager of the Lampoon, a brilliant entertainer; he didn’t drink much himself, he was soft-spoken and silent; he got the other boys drunk and paid the bills, bought the fireworks to celebrate Cleveland’s election, hired the brassbands,

  bought the creampies to throw at the actors from the box at the Old Howard,

  the cannon crackers to blow out the lamps of herdic cabs with, the champagne for the chorines.

  He was rusticated and finally fired from Harvard, so the story goes, for sending to each of a number of professors a chamberpot with the professor’s portrait tastefully engraved on it.

  He went to New York. He was crazy about newspapers. Already he’d been hanging around the Boston newspaper-offices. In New York he was taken by Pulitzer’s newfangled journalism. He didn’t want to write; he wanted to be a newspaperman. (Newspapermen were part of that sharpcontoured world he wanted to see clear, the reallife world he saw distorted by a haze of millions, the ungraded lowlife world of American Democracy.)

  Mrs. Hearst’s boy would be a newspaperman and a Democrat. (Newspapermen saw heard ate drank touched horsed kidded rubbed shoulders with real men, whored; that was life.)

  He arrived home in California, a silent soft smiling solemneyed young man

  dressed in the height of the London fashion.

  When his father asked him what he wanted to do with his life,

  he said he wanted to run the Examiner which was a moribund sheet in San Francisco which his father had taken over for a bad debt. It didn’t seem much to ask. The old man couldn’t imagine why Willie wanted the old rag instead of a mine or a ranch, but Mrs. Hearst’s boy always had his way.

  Young Hearst went down to the Examiner one day and turned the office topsyturvy. He had a knack for finding and using bright young men, he had a knack for using his own prurient hanker after the lusts and envies of plain unmonied lowlife men and women (the slummer sees only the streetwalkers, the dopeparlors, the strip acts and goes back uptown saying he knows the workingclass districts); the lowest common denominator;

  manure to grow a career in,

  the rot of democracy. Out of it grew rankly an empire of print. (Perhaps he liked to think of himself as the young Caius Julius flinging his millions away, tearing down emblems and traditions, making faces at togaed privilege, monopoly, stuffedshirts in office;

  Caesar’s life like his was a millionaire prank. Perhaps W.R. had read of republics ruined before;

  Alcibiades, too, was a practical joker.)

  The San Francisco Examiner grew in circulation, tickled the prurient hankers of the moneyless man

  became The Monarch of the Dailies.

  When the old man died Mrs. Hearst sold out of Anaconda for seven and a half millions of dollars. W.R. got the money from her to enter the New York field; he bought the Morning Journal

  and started his race with the Pulitzers

  as to who should cash in most on the geewhizz emotion.

  In politics he was the people’s Democrat; he came out for Bryan in ninetysix; on the Coast he fought the Southern Pacific and the utilities and the railroad lawyers who were grabbing the state of California away from the first settlers; on election day in ninetysix his three papers in New York put out between them more than a million and a half copies, a record

  that forced the World to cut its price to a penny.

  When there’s no news make news.

  “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” he’s supposed to have wired Remington in Havana. The trouble in Cuba was a goldmine for circulation when Mark Hanna had settled national politics by planting McKinley in the White House.

  Hearst had one of his bright young men engineer a jailbreak for Evangelina Cisneros, a fair Cuban revolutionist shoved into a dungeon by Weyler, and put on a big reception for her in Madison Square.

  Remember the “Maine.”

  When McKinley was forced to declare war on Spain W.R. had his plans all made to buy and sink a British steamer in the Suez Canal

  but the Spanish fleet didn’t take that route.

  He hired the Sylvia and the Buccaneer and went down to Cuba himself with a portable press and a fleet of tugs

  and brandishing a sixshooter went in with the longboat through the surf and captured twentysix unarmed half-drowned Spanish sailors on the beach and forced them to kneel and kiss the American flag

  in front of the camera.

  Manila Bay raised the circulation of the Morning Journal to one million six hundred thousand.

  When the Spaniards were licked there was nobody left to heckle but the Mormons. Polygamy titillated the straphangers, and the sexlife of the rich, and penandink drawings of women in underclothes and prehistoric monsters in four colors. He discovered the sobsister: Annie Laurie, Dorothy Dix, Beatrice Fairfax. He splurged on comics, the Katzenjammer Kids, Buster Brown, Krazy Kat. Get excited when the public is excited;

  his editorials hammered at malefactors of great wealth, trusts, the G.O.P., Mark Hanna and McKinley so shrilly that when McKinley was assassinated most Republicans in some way considered Hearst responsible for his death.

  Hearst retorted by renaming the Morning Journal the American

  and stepping into the limelight

  wearing a black frockcoat and a tengallon hat,

  presidential timber,

  the millionaire candidate of the common man.

  Bryan made him president of the National Association of Democratic Clubs and advised him to start a paper in Chicago.

  After
Bryan’s second defeat Hearst lined up with Charles F. Murphy in New York and was elected to Congress.

  His headquarters were at the Holland House; the night of his election he gave a big free show of fireworks in Madison Square Garden; a mortar exploded and killed or wounded something like a hundred people; that was one piece of news the Hearst men made that wasn’t spread on the front pages of the Hearst papers.

  In the House of Representatives he was unpopular; it was schooldays over again. The limp handshake, the solemn eyes set close to the long nose, the small flabby scornful smile were out of place among the Washington backslappers. He was ill at ease without his hired gang around him.

  He was happier entertaining firstnighters and footlight favorites at the Holland House. In those years when Broadway still stopped at Fortysecond Street,

  Millicent Willson was a dancer in The Girl from Paris; she and her sister did a sister act together; she won a popularity contest in the Morning Telegraph

  and the hand of

 

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