by David Nasaw
When Coblentz relayed the Chief’s message to Louis Howe at the White House, Howe, according to Coblentz, “put Frank on the phone.” The president asked Coblentz to tell Mr. Hearst that there was nothing to worry about, that the NRA was not intended to curtail the freedom of the press. At this point in their relationship, Hearst trusted the president enough to take his word on the matter. Common sense dictated as well that Roosevelt was not about to enter into any protracted struggle with the newspaper publishers he so desperately needed to win to his side. Given the president’s reassurance, Hearst joined with his colleagues in drafting an NRA industry code. As added insurance against government interference in their First Amendment privileges, the publishers appended an explicit guarantee that the constitutional rights of a free press could not “be abridged by the application of a licensing system or the use of injunctions to suppress a newspaper.” On August 16, Hearst signaled his acceptance of the code by putting the Blue Eagle, the NRA logo, on the top of his front pages.26
Though he had festooned his papers with Blue Eagles, the Chief continued to worry about the precedent that had been established when the publishers agreed to cooperate with the NRA in setting prices and wage rates.
“Has it occurred to you,” he telegrammed Coblentz on September 9, 1933, “that the NRA is really another form of taxation on business? Business is also worried about turning the whole country over to the labor unions ... I think our experiment in Hitlerism is a failure ... As a seer and prophet ... I am bound to say that political complications may be looked for in 1934, and I am seriously worried about THAT.”27
In October, still only seven months into the Roosevelt administration, he went public with his criticisms. On October 29, he published an open letter to American newspaper publishers in which he called on them to expose and oppose the NRA as “a menace to political rights and constitutional liberties, a danger to American ideals and institutions, a handicap to industrial recovery and a detriment to the public welfare.” Two days later, he criticized it in another front-page editorial as “a measure of absolute State socialism [that was] not only not democratic [but] opposed to every fundamental conception of democracy and every principle of individual liberty on which democracy was based.... The blighting effect of the NRA policy,” he insisted, “has been so complete that a justifiable interpretation of the letters NRA would make them read appropriately, ‘No Recovery Allowed’...The people elected a Democratic Administration, not a socialistic dictatorship. The people approved the well considered proposals of the Democratic platform, not the theories of Karl Marx and the policies of Stalin.”28
Hearst’s language was intemperate, but then it had always been. He spoke in the hyperbolic rhetoric of newspaper headlines and cartoon captions. He did not mean his words to be taken literally; he scattered them like buckshot through his editorials in the hope that they would evoke in his readers the fear, distrust, and anger that he was experiencing.
The Chief was a true believer in the American dream which, for him, was founded on the twin pillars of representative democracy and free-market capitalism. His family history was testimony to the reality of that dream. His father had arrived in California with nothing but his native intelligence and capacity for hard work and, because of the existence of a free market, had amassed millions of dollars for himself and his family. His son, also through hard work and because of the free market, had been able to pyramid these millions into millions more. There had, in his father’s and his lifetimes, been a succession of economic downturns, depressions, and panics, but the nation and its people had survived every one of them, as it would this one. There was, he was convinced, nothing fundamentally wrong with the economy that a one-time infusion of capital through a public works program could not cure. What the economy did not need was the government tinkering with it. If gently and conservatively tended, it would recover and continue expanding, as it had always done in the past.
Roosevelt and his advisers declined to defend themselves against Hearst’s polemics. On the contrary, the president acted as if they remained the closest of friends and allies. Hearst was regularly invited to the White House for private discussions. When he was unable to make the trip himself, his editors were received and entertained in his place. The Chief responded to the president’s gestures of friendship and respect by periodically declaring in public that despite his criticism of the NRA, he remained a Democrat and Roosevelt supporter.
Together the president and the publisher played a game of political tit-for-tat, a game in which both were extraordinarily skilled. In early December of 1933, after Hearst had delivered a series of particularly bitter anti-New Deal editorials and radio addresses, Arthur Brisbane sent a “private” telegram to the president, suggesting that he listen to Hearst’s next radio broadcast and read the transcript in his newspapers the next morning. “You and millions of Americans will like Mr. Hearst’s tribute in his broadcast to your efforts for the people.” That same day, Brisbane delivered a separate letter to the White House, asking the president to reconsider a complicated trade provision about interest payments to American corporations in England, a provision that had a direct effect on Hearst’s magazine holdings there. Roosevelt responded promptly that he was having the matter looked into by the federal trade commissioners, the attorney general, and the acting secretary of the treasury.29
Time and again, this scenario was played out, with friendly editorials proffered in return for presidential favors and vice versa. In March of 1934, Hearst forwarded to his chief correspondent in Washington his plan to improve the nation’s inland waterways: “I would like to advocate this editorially.... Kindly see President about it to learn if he is inclined to approve it. There is no use shooting editorials unless project would meet with administration’s approval.”30
Never before had Hearst encountered a politician with the personal skills of a Franklin Roosevelt. But, then again, never before had Roosevelt encountered anyone as volatile—and powerful—as Hearst. In February of 1934, only two months after one of their friendly get-togethers at the White House, Hearst was back on the attack. In response to rumors circulating in Washington that Roosevelt was going to reject the NRA code that the publishers had agreed on and submitted to him six months earlier, Hearst linked the president to “the Mussolinis, the Hitlers, the Lenins and all of those who seek to establish a dictatorial form of government ... by repressing the press; because nothing is so fatal to their plans and ambitions as general public knowledge of their purposes and proceedings which free publication affords.” To emphasize the connection between Roosevelt’s New Deal and European fascism, the Hearst papers began publishing articles by Mussolini under headlines like “U.S. Abandons Individual Enterprise, Adopts State Control, Says Mussolini: Duce Sees Many Similarities Between NRA and Fascist Government Operation.”31
Roosevelt, of course, had no intention of curtailing the freedom of the press. In the end, he accepted the code submitted to him, but only after insisting that the clause guaranteeing freedom of the press that the publishers had appended to it was “pure surplussage.... The recitation of the freedom of the press clause in the code ... has no more place here than would the recitation of the whole Constitution or of the Ten Commandments.”32
The president was enraged at having been backed into a corner by Hearst and his colleagues. There had certainly been no excuse for Hearst’s name-calling. But when Roosevelt not only capitulated to the onslaught but forgave Hearst for it, he provided him with further proof that he could write whatever he chose and still enjoy the president’s favor.
Left to their own devices, Hearst and the other publishers might have found a way to live with the guidelines on maximum hours and minimum wages that the NRA code mandated. But the same law that had established the NRA had also explicitly declared, in Section 7a, that “employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing.” As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has written, Section 7a rai
sed more questions than it answered. Its meaning would “be determined in large part not by the words of the act but by the pressures management and labor could bring to bear on the process of interpretation.”33
On August 7, 1933, Heywood Broun, the oversized columnist for the World-Telegram, took up the challenge of Section 7a in his syndicated “It Seems to Me” column. Broun, with his tousled hair, tie askew, always rumpled suit, and inimitable prose style, had, by 1933, become one of the nation’s premier and arguably its most liberal columnist. He had begun his career on the sports desk at the Tribune and worked stints there as drama critic, war correspondent, and book reviewer before moving on to the World and its successor, the World-Telegram. In his column, Broun announced that “beginning at nine o’clock on the morning of October 1,” he was going to do the best he could to organize a newspaper writers’ union. “I think I could die happy on the opening day of the general strike if I had the privilege of watching Walter Lippmann heave a brick through the Tribune window at a nonunion operative who had been called in to write the current ‘Today and Tomorrow’ column on the gold standard.”
Newspapermen across the country responded to Broun’s announcement by forming local unions or “guilds.” In December of 1933, the first national conference of the American Newspaper Guild was convened in Washington. Heywood Broun was elected president, a position which he would hold until his death.
Hearst had in the past supported blue-collar newspaper unions and, in turn, been supported by them in his campaigns for political office. For the time being, he was unwilling to reverse himself and go on record against the Guild. “I do not like to discuss these labor problems,” he telegrammed T. V. Ranck in New York on December 19, 1933. “You are liable to offend some labor faction or offend the employers. Keep out of the whole mess.”34
Four days later, the Chief suggested that an offer be made to Broun to move his column to the Hearst papers. When T. V. Ranck, who was an editor at the New York American, protested that Broun was highly dangerous and refused to be edited, the Chief answered that Ranck had nothing to worry about as Broun’s columns would run in the Mirror. Broun chose in the end to remain at the World-Telegram.35
The Chief’s politics, at age seventy, were defined more by his opposition to internationalism, big government, and the income tax than by anti-communism. In mid-1933, disturbed that the government was devoting too much time to fighting communist subversion and ignoring homegrown American fascists, he directed George Young, publisher of the Los Angeles Examiner, to prepare
an editorial saying that fascism and communism are the two extremes of class government, equally tyrannous and equally opposed to our American form of democratic government, which is not government by class but government by the whole people. This government opposes communistic activities as threats against the American system. There is no reason why the government should not equally oppose fascist activities. In Los Angeles lately there have been fascist organizations created apparently with no opposition or objection on the part of the local government. But communistic demonstrations have been rigidly suppressed. I would like you to advocate either equal tolerance or suppression of fascism and communism by the government. And conclude by saying that if these disturbers and notoriety seekers want to wear some kind of distinctive shirts, they do not have to wear black shirts or brown shirts, as the state makes a very distinctive blue shirt [the color of prison uniforms] and it might insist on these folks wearing them.36
The Chief, who had long supported diplomatic recognition of Russia, applauded President Roosevelt and Russian foreign minister Litvinoff in November of 1933 for negotiating the agreements that laid a firm “foundation for hearty cooperation between the United States and Russia in the support of common causes, including the promotion of the peace of the world.”37
Through 1933 and into 1934, Hearst alternately and, it appeared, indiscriminately criticized President Roosevelt for flirting with “Hitlerism” and for proposing a “socialistic” NRA consistent with the “theories of Karl Marx and the policies of Stalin.”38 The only constant in his editorials was his fury.
By the spring of 1934, as the American Newspaper Guild’s organizing campaign reached his newspaper offices, Hearst’s anger was stretched to encompass his newspapermen who contemplated joining Heywood Broun in the Guild. “I think the most unfortunate thing that has occurred in Mr. Roosevelt’s MISDEAL,” Hearst told Tom White, the head of his newspaper division,
has been encouragement of the newspapermen to form guilds—and to support extreme radicalism. We are not only going to have trouble with the guilds interfering with the efficient conduct of the newspapers, but we are going to have eternal difficulty in keeping radical propaganda out of the papers, because every newspaperman as soon as he joins a radical guild becomes a radical propagandist....I hardly believe that communism will succeed in this country, but if it gets strong enough it will develop into the formation of a fascist organization, and that is very likely to succeed. Either communism or fascism is destructive to democracy, and there can be no freedom of the press except under liberal democracy. These jackass newspapermen do not realize that if we had either communism or fascism we would have suppression of newspaper development [and] limitation of newspaper activity, with the painful result of the newspapers being very much less important, very much less prosperous, and very much less liberal as employers. In fact, most of these enthusiastic theorists who are now advocating the abolition of our democracy would find themselves and their jobs abolished with it.39
The Hearst newspapers had always spoken with one voice, Hearst’s. A newspaper’s writers’ union would threaten that control by protecting writers who disobeyed his editorial dictates. On April 4, the same day that Hearst wrote White to complain about the Guild, Louis Burgess, an editorial writer and Guild member, was summarily fired from the San Francisco Examiner after inquiring when the paper was going to begin to adhere to the provisions of the NRA code. Six weeks later, Dean Jennings, another Guild member who worked as a rewrite man at Hearst’s San Francisco CallBulletin, was denied the right to schedule his vacation so that he could attend the first Guild convention.40
Because Hearst’s record on unionization had up to this point been so positive, even the Guild was taken unawares by the turnabout. According to Daniel Leab, the historian of the American Newspaper Guild, a resolution was offered at the 1934 national convention condemning Hearst for his opposition to the guilds: “For the record he was described as a ‘son of a bitch,’ but later in the convention the delegates adopted a less inflammatory substitute measure suggested by Hearst-employed newsmen, which attributed antiguild activities to the publisher’s subordinates and invited him to meet with guild representatives.”41
There was no reply from Hearst, who was at the time in Europe. When he returned in the fall, fifteen Guild members at Hearst’s San Francisco Call-Bulletin who had been advised to resign or be fired wrote directly to the Chief, calling on his “sense of fairness.” They too received no reply.42
Although the Hearst papers had never before paid much attention to communist subversion, in late March of 1934 as the Guild organizing drive reached the Hearst newspaper offices, they began publication of a frontpage series of articles by Ralph Easley on “Soviet Power in America.” Easley, the chairman of the National Civic Federation, was, when Hearst hired him, already notorious in journalistic circles for succumbing to the calls of kooks and cranks who made their living selling “secret” Soviet documents.43
His first story for Hearst was on the Department of Justice’s decision to disband its counter-subversive force of “thirty well-trained, undercover men.” Arthur Sulzberger of the New York Times and Geoffrey Parsons, the chief editorial writer at the Herald Tribune, had already turned the story down when Easley contacted Hearst with it. “If Mr. Hearst had not come into this situation,” Easley wrote T. V. Ranck, Hearst’s editorial manager, in early March, “nothing would have happened and our country would h
ave been in a very serious condition. At the right time and place, I intend to give you some further inside information.”44
Easley was soon afterward commissioned by Hearst, as he informed Milton Hershey, chairman of the board of the Hershey Chocolate Corporation and one of his chief supporters, to write a six-part series on “the radical situation in the colleges and schools [for] the Sunday editions of the Hearst chain of 26 papers. This series of six will be followed by ten articles on the industrial situation, showing the activities of the Third International in the labor unions, farmer organizations and so forth.”45
Ranck and Hearst collaborated on editing the Easley articles. “Easley articles on Communism are subject to careful and intelligent condensation,” the Chief wrote Ranck, two days before the first article was to appear, “but we must not lose the point of the articles. This is a crusade which we want to make effective.” The first article was published on March 25, 1934: “‘Soviet Power in America,’ Slogan of Communist Drive. Students Called to International Meet This Year. ‘National Student League a Funnel for Pouring Propaganda Into Schools and an Under-cover Tool in the Drive to Bolshevise American Youth,’ says Easley.” The following day, Easley’s second article appeared: “Communist Plan for May Drive to Seize All Property in United States Revealed.” Immediately below the headline, an editor’s note in italics reported that this was “the first of a series of news features showing the startling progress of Industrial Communism in the United States. All the facts to be presented in these articles were obtained from documents, publications of the Communist Party, and specific reports from secret agents.” The articles had precisely the effect Easley had hoped for. “The Hearst papers all over the country,” he joyfully wrote an associate in early March of 1934, “are stirring up the people on this Red situation pictured in my articles.” The National Student League, he was happy to report, had begun to picket the New York American building “to protest the attacks made upon the League in my articles—all of which plays on our side.”46