The Chief

by David Nasaw

  Hearst accompanied Easley’s “news” features with a series of editorials criticizing Congress for not launching a “systematic investigation” of Red infiltration and for not calling for a “loyalty requirement for public school teachers.” In May of 1934, the Chief outlined for Ed Coblentz an editorial he wanted written “saying that the thing to do with communists is to deport them.... They are chronic troublemakers. They are a destructive element purely, and we should get rid of them as we would of any vermin that are striving to undermine the foundations of our establishment....It is time to call in the cockroach man.”47

  Hearst’s seventieth year—and year one of the Roosevelt administration—ended much as it had begun, with Hearst attacking the New Deal and the president inviting him to the White House. After one of their get-togethers, Hearst sent the president as a present a “little silhouette of General Jackson” and an original Andrew Jackson letter. When FDR thanked him, the Chief sent a handwritten note and another present: “I am very pleased that you liked the little silhouette of General Jackson. I am sending another letter—an original—to go with it. This letter is not so lugubrious as the other and it relates to public affairs.... I have been doing a little work since I got back telling the business people how fine you are. I guess at your next election we will make it unanimous.” The note was signed “Faithfully, W. R. Hearst.”48 The gifts and visits notwithstanding, Roosevelt neither liked nor trusted Hearst. In May of 1934, he complained “vigorously” to Henry Stimson “of the dis-service which W. R. Hearst was doing to the country and the widespread influence which his papers in some twenty-two states ... could do in holding a club over the members of Congress.”49 Still, the president could not afford to antagonize the most powerful publisher in the nation. Only days after complaining to Stimson about Hearst, Roosevelt met with the publisher at the White House. The Chief was so charmed and reassured by the president that at an impromptu press conference held just before he sailed to Europe, he had nothing but praise for the man and his policies. “In virtual reversal of his former attitude,” the New York Times reported the next morning, “the publisher said he felt that every one should support the NRA and recovery measures so long as the measures did not ‘tell you to do something you can’t do.’ He said he was in sympathy with President Roosevelt.”50

  31. Hearst and Hitler

  AS HE DEPARTED on the Italian liner Rex for Europe in the spring of 1934, Hearst told the reporters assembled at dockside that he planned to “visit Italy first where he hoped to meet Premier Mussolini....He said he did not know if he would see Hitler, but he would like ‘very much’ to meet the German Chancellor.”1

  Hitler had been appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933. Less than two months later, the Reichstag, Germany’s national legislature, had passed an enabling law which gave him dictatorial powers. All month long, Nazi storm troopers, energized by Hitler’s accretion of power, had accelerated their violence against the Jews. On March 23, as the Reichstag voted itself out of existence, that violence reached new and frightening levels, setting off a round of protests in the United States, Europe, and Palestine.

  The Hearst papers reported in full on the Nazi violence and the growing anti-Nazi protest movement. Among the stories carried on the morning of March 24 were “Reich Assailed by Churchill for ‘Ferocity,’” “Veterans Hear [New York Mayor] O’Brien Attack Intolerance,” and “All Sections Join Fight on Nazi Violence: Christian Leaders to Speak at Jewish Protest Meetings.” There was also a front-page article with the headline “New Yorker, Beaten by Hitlerites, Describes Conditions in Germany,” a first-person account by Nathaniel'S. Wolf of Rochester, who had been “beaten in Berlin by Nazi Storm Troops.” The lead editorial was “‘Hitlerism’...The world is horrified at the reports which are coming out of Germany.... If Hitlerism means pillage, cruelty and oppression, as well as tyranny, it is doomed—and Germany perhaps with it.”

  Events continued to spiral out of control over the next few days. On March 27, the American Jewish Committee announced that it was organizing an international boycott against German goods. Hitler retaliated by announcing a German boycott against Jewish businesses in Germany. Under pressure from, among others, Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank, who urged him not to pursue an action that might further damage the already shaky German economy, Hitler restricted the boycott to one day.

  While the American press, including Hearst’s papers, criticized Hitler’s boycott of Jewish-owned businesses as it had the storm trooper violence that preceded it, less attention was focused on the laws that were passed the following month barring Jews from the civil service, discriminating against jurists and doctors, and limiting the number of Jewish students in German schools and universities.

  American reporters in Germany, including William Shirer and Karl von Wiegand of the Hearst organization, found it difficult to report on Nazi anti-Semitism. As Deborah Lipstadt, the author of Beyond Belief, has argued, they “felt sustained pressure both from readers and editorial boards, who wanted them to substantiate their information, and from the Nazis, who denied the veracity of their reports.” The all-too-common responses to early stories of violence or discrimination against Jews were that they were fabricated or exaggerated. Some blamed the violence on unruly mobs or accused the Jews of having “caused their own suffering.”2

  Still, given this situation, Hearst’s correspondents covered events in Germany as well as most American papers and better than many. On August 5, 1933, Karl von Wiegand reported on the complaints lodged by American journalists with the American ambassador, William Dodd, “against the manner in which German censors were delaying or refusing to pass news dispatches addressed to American agencies.” On Sunday, August 6, the March of Events section carried two anti-Nazi articles, one by the former premier of France Édouard Herriot, entitled “Hitler Wants Era of Peace to Prepare Scientifically for War, Says Herriot. Sees Ruin in Amazing Policies of German Chancellor”; the second by Hearst’s favorite European historian, Guglielmo Ferrero, who wrote of the danger posed by the “aggression of Nazis” in Austria. The following week, on August 14, 1933, the Hearst papers reported under a photograph of Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt that her letter protesting the persecution of Jews in Germany had been signed by “9,000 Non-Jewish U.S. Women.”

  In mid-August, Hearst, concerned that Karl von Wiegand was sending home too many anti-Nazi dispatches, directed his New York editors to rein him in: “Von Wiegand articles and cables seem too incendiary. Think he should be instructed to send generally interesting news without partisanship.”3 By “partisan,” Hearst meant critical. There was too much at stake to risk angering Hitler and losing access to him and his government. Still, the Chief, while warning von Wiegand, did not move him to another post, as he often did when he was displeased with his correspondents.

  In October of 1933, when Hitler dramatically took Germany out of the international disarmament talks in Europe and withdrew from the League of Nations, the Hearst papers greeted the event as predestined: “The world may regret Germany’s retirement from Geneva, but any world power that pretends to be surprised by this action insults the intelligence of thoughtful men everywhere. The course which Germany has taken has long appeared to be inevitable.”4

  Rather than condemning or questioning Hitler’s action, Hearst and Ranck, Hearst’s editorial manager, tried to get him to write about it for their Sunday papers. On December 19, Ranck informed Hearst that their Berlin office had cabled that “Hitler out of question to present Germany’s side League crisis unless we willing pay him as much as pay Mussolini. Frankly,” Ranck added, “do not believe he is worth as much as Mussolini. Do you? What would you think of Goering? Have informed Berlin article should be nine to ten hundred words.”5

  Hearst apparently agreed with Ranck. By 1934, Goering had replaced Hitler as the “German” insider/expert in the Hearst papers. Although Goering could not demand or expect the same fees as Hitler or Mussolini, he too was a tough bargainer, as Willi
am Shirer, who was a Hearst correspondent at the time, recalled in his memoirs: “We gave him a top price to begin with and he was always asking for more money for ensuing pieces. I must say he was genial enough about it, though persistent. ‘Come on,’ he would say. ‘Your Mr. Hearst is a billionaire, nicht wahr? What’s a thousand or two more dollars per article to him.’”6

  As the Chief had told reporters at the pier when he left for his 1934 summer tour of Europe, he hoped “very much” that he would get a chance to meet Hitler. But first he had to take his annual motor tour of the continent. Accompanied by Marion; his three older sons, George, Bill, Jr., John, and their wives; Harry Crocker, who had become something of a traveling secretary; and the usual complement of business associates and Marion’s Hollywood friends, Hearst toured the Spanish countryside in a caravan of seven open sedans. The group stopped off in Barcelona where everyone, except Marion and Hearst, went to the bull fights. Hearst had hoped to fly in the Graf Zeppelin from Spain to England, but was persuaded to use a chartered Fokker instead. The flight ended badly. According to Marion’s biographer, the plane, when it reached England, was forced to land “in a hilly pasture, making a belly landing and killing eight sheep.” Harry Crocker was deputized to find cars to drive the party to London. After a few days at the Savoy and a brief visit to Lord Mountbatten’s country estate, Hearst and his guests drove west to St. Donat’s, where they remained for a few weeks.7

  While Hearst paused at St. Donat’s, Hitler was making headlines in Germany. On June 30, 1934, in a sudden and brutal show of authority, he ordered the summary execution of his opponents within the Nazi party in what came to be known as the Night of the Long Knives, and then, citing the danger of internal dissension, proclaimed himself “responsible for the fate of the German nation,” with the right to act, unilaterally, on its behalf.8

  Like the rest of the American press, the Hearst papers harshly criticized the extralegal brutality with which Hitler had moved against his opponents. “I don’t see how we can support the revolutionists,” Hearst telegrammed Edmond Coblentz from St. Donat’s with editorial instructions. “You might say however that [it] is a lesson in despotism. The German democracy has been destroyed and now instead of having peaceful democratic methods to decide differences of political opinion the Germans must resort to revolution with all its violence and bloodshed and with the cruel execution of the defeated leaders. America must be careful how it jeopardizes its democracy.”9

  Hearst wanted his editors to use the occasion of Hitler’s coup to warn Americans against the dangers of despotism—in Germany and the United States. While he did not condone Hitler’s usurpation of power in Germany, he was not about to focus his editorial wrath on the leader who he believed was poised to undo the injustices and right the imbalances of power created by the Versailles Treaty. Instead he used the narrative of Hitler’s acceding to dictatorial powers as a cautionary tale for Americans. In mid-August, after the death of President von Hindenburg, German voters overwhelmingly approved Hitler’s proposal to merge the positions of Reich president and Reich chancellor into a new office of führer and Reich chancellor, giving him de jure as well as de facto dictatorial powers. Hearst’s editorial pages responded on August 29, 1934, by publishing an editorial cartoon of a swastika made of coiled fists. Over the swastika, in rainbowshaped lettering, was the word AUTOCRACY. Under it were masses of faceless creatures, marked GERMANY. “What lesson,” the caption read, “does the remorseless progress of autocracy convey to America? One lesson only: ‘Democracy with all its shortcomings, is still the ark of free government! America must be watchful and alert not to jeopardize its democracy! When we see what despotism is and does we should realize that liberty is the most precious possession of mankind!’”10

  Hitler’s revolution in Germany shared headline space that summer with news of labor unrest in the United States. In May, after local businessmen in Minneapolis attempted to break a teamsters’ strike by mobilizing their own “citizens’ army,” violence erupted and the National Guard was called. That same month, longshoremen in San Francisco went out on strike. On July 3, shipowners attempted to break the strike and open up the waterfront by piercing the picket lines with a caravan of strikebreakers escorted by seven hundred armed San Francisco policemen. The striking longshoremen fought back with “thrown objects—bricks, cobblestones, railroad spikes—and their fists.... The police responded with gunfire.” After a day off to observe July 4, the battle was renewed on “Bloody Thursday.” Two people died, thirty were wounded by bullets, dozens more were clubbed, stoned, and gassed. “The city became a camp, a battlefield,” the organizer and future novelist Tillie Olsen wrote of Bloody Thursday and the days that followed. “The screams of ambulances sent the day reeling, class lines fell sharply—everywhere, on streetcars, on corners, in stores, people talked, cursing, stirred with something strange in their breasts, incomprehensible, shaken with fury at the police, the papers, the shipowners.”11

  Hearst, at St. Donat’s, was kept informed of events in San Francisco by Jack Neylan who, on July 14, convened a meeting of the city’s newspaper publishers in his suite at the Palace Hotel. According to the California historian Kevin Starr, the publishers at that meeting agreed “to form a Newspaper Publishers Council to coordinate an antistrike campaign by the Bay Area press.... The bound volumes of the Bay Area newspapers published in mid-July 1934 reveal today just how blatantly the publishers and editors followed Neylan’s suggestion” that the strike had been taken over by subversives, led by Harry Bridges, the thin Australian in the white longshoreman’s cap, who on July 16 called for a general strike of all San Francisco workers. “San Francisco,” Starr writes, was depicted in the Examiner and the other San Francisco dailies “as a city on the verge of armed insurrection. Photographs of soldiers, tanks, and police are everywhere.... An Examiner photograph depicted a line of mounted police officers, wearing gas masks, prepared to sweep Cossack-like into any mob that might materialize.” Hearst, on vacation, learned all he knew about the strike from Neylan’s telegrams and the newspapers that were forwarded to him. Alarmed by the accounts he received, he contributed to the hysteria by cabling home an editorial praising the way the English had brutally smashed the 1926 general strike in London.12

  After only three days, the strike committee, frightened by the violence that had been unleashed, called off its general strike. Neylan telegrammed Hearst in triumph: “San Francisco crushed the general strike more thoroughly and promptly than London did [in 1926]. There has been no compromise of any character or description. As a San Franciscan you have a right to carry your head even higher than you did last week.”13

  Though the strike was over, the Red Scare that it evoked lasted much longer. The general strike in San Francisco which had been supported by the communists, combined with the violent clashes in Minneapolis and Toledo, at Kohler, Wisconsin, and elsewhere demonstrated vividly what could happen when an organized labor movement confronted an organized business community, supplemented by the police and/or the National Guard.

  Hearst, traveling in his fleet of black limousines through southern and central Europe but never out of touch with events in the United States, could not help but compare the situation at home with that in Europe. Hitler had argued, in the pages of the New York American and elsewhere, that Nazism and Fascism had been brought into being as an antidote to Communism. The Communists were not strong enough to seize control of anything for themselves—not even in San Francisco—but, Hearst feared, their revolutionary excesses might generate a homegrown fascist movement which, in the end, would destroy American democracy. “Fascist movements both in Italy and Germany were born to prevent Communism,” he cabled Ed Coblentz from London in September. “Communist movement and Communist atrocities are becoming very disturbing in America. Unless we want Fascist movement there to stop Communism, we must stop it through exposure and by arousing public to its dangers.... We must make powerful crusade against Communism and against revolution of all ki
nds if we want to retain our liberties.”14

  The danger posed by the New Deal was that its policies—especially Section 7a of the National Recovery Act, which recognized and protected labor’s right to organize—had provided a cover of legitimacy for radical unionists like Heywood Broun and Harry Bridges and the Communists who worked with them. If Communism was to be stopped before it spawned a Fascist counterrevolution, Hearst concluded, Roosevelt’s New Deal, which nourished it, had to be turned back. “The revolution in California against stable government and established order,” Hearst argued in a signed editorial published one week after the San Francisco general strike, “would never have occurred except for the sympathy and encouragement which the fomenters of the revolution were receiving or believed they were receiving from those high in the counsel of the Federal Administration. The fires of sedition had been lit by these visionary and voluble politicians.”15

  Although the Chief did not identify Roosevelt directly as one of the politicians who had fomented revolution, he had drawn a direct line from the strikers to the Communists and from the Communists to the Roosevelt administration. The title of his editorial was “Americanism vs. Communism.” It was to set the direction and the tone that Hearst and his newspapers would follow for the rest of the decade and the one to come.