The Chief

by David Nasaw

  Roosevelt was, for the first time, returning Hearst’s fire with fire of his own. As Harold Ickes noted in his diary on August 27, the breach between Hearst and the administration was now complete.46

  Hearst responded by delegating Bainbridge Colby, a conservative Democrat who worked for him as an editorial writer, to convene a conference of leading Democrats to discuss the formation of a new “Jeffersonian Democratic” party to replace Roosevelt’s “Socialist-Democratic” party. When asked who might lead the new party as its presidential candidate in 1936, Hearst suggested Al Smith, the same man whom he had attacked the year before as the puppet of Wall Street plutocrats.47

  The Chief’s third-party plans were stillborn when the anti-Roosevelt Democrats he had hoped would join him stayed away. The best way to dethrone Roosevelt, he now concluded, was to run a credible Republican against him. Hearst had been checking into the credentials of the governor of Kansas, Alfred Landon, as a possible contender since the summer of 1935, when Richard Berlin, the head of his magazine division, wrote Landon that Damon Runyon and Adela Rogers St. Johns had been assigned to write articles about him and his wife for Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping, respectively. According to Landon’s biographer, Donald McCoy, Hearst investigators combed the state over the next few weeks checking through local newspaper files and visiting the governor. On December 10 three private railway cars arrived in Topeka with Hearst, Paul Bloch of the Bloch newspaper chain, and Eleanor Patterson, the publisher of Hearst’s Washington Herald. Brisbane and Marion Davies were also in the party. The New York Times reported the next morning that “after luncheon in the rambling old frame home which serves as the Executive Mansion, Mr. Hearst exclaimed [of Governor Landon]: I think he is marvelous. To say I am favorably impressed puts it very mildly.”48

  By February, the Chief had taken direct control of the Landon campaign. Henceforth, he informed his editors across the country, “all recommendations to the Governor or his managers, regarding general policies or particular acts, shall be sent to me as a clearing house, so that I can prevent confusing and contradictory advices, and also that I can make sure that I agree with the policies recommended.”49

  Hearst’s support, as Republican leaders whispered privately and Fortune magazine asserted publicly in March, was a decidedly mixed blessing. Landon was committed to running a moderate, progressive campaign; Hearst was only interested in scorched-earth, blame-Roosevelt-for-everything, anti-Communist hysteria. There was little room for compromise. In May of 1936, Hearst embarrassed Landon by running his own pro-Landon slate of delegates in the California primaries. When Landon declined to repudiate Hearst’s support, his principal Kansas booster and adviser, William Allen White, made his displeasure public: “Professionally, Hearst is a form of poison. Politically, he has degenerated into a form of suicide. Whoever ties up with him begins to smell lilies and attract the undertaker.” By midMay, according to a report in Newsweek, the “Landon lieutenants made little secret of the fact that they had come around to White’s way of thinking” and were trying to find a way to “‘throw’ Hearst off the Landon band-wagon.”50

  Hearst’s unpopularity was having a direct impact on his newspapers. Had the Hearst papers spoken with more than one voice, as did, for example, the Scripps-Howard papers which syndicated both Heywood Broun on the left and Westbrook Pegler on the right, they might have been able to weather the storm more easily. Unfortunately, the Chief now allowed no voice but his own. If on other issues he had once permitted alternate viewpoints to be expressed in his pages, he demanded that his newspapers—and all other media outlets—present only his “American” viewpoint. During the 1936 presidential campaign, when the CBS radio network gave fifteen minutes of air time to Earl Browder, the candidate of the Communist party, the Chief was enraged. The next day, his newspapers carried an anti-CBS editorial and published a cartoon in color that showed Bill Paley, the founder and owner of the network, on a soapbox waving a red flag.51

  The Chief was, his editors feared, becoming so obsessed with his antiCommunist, anti—New Deal crusade that he was damaging his own credibility and that of his newspapers. Arthur Brisbane was, according to Moses Koenigsberg, so worried about the effects of Hearst’s anti—New Deal editorials on the readers of the Mirror, who voted Democratic and were fans of the president, that he persuaded the Chief “to devote much space to the President’s birthday ball ... whose proceeds were distributed to the welfare of infantile paralysis victims. This sop, it was hoped, would prevent the complete alienation of vast groups of Roosevelt supporters who read Hearst papers.”52

  T. V. Ranck, the editor in charge of the March of Events Sunday section, warned that the Sunday papers had become so “crowded with features” that there was little space left “for active news.” He suggested that the Sunday papers devote less space to multipart “communist features” and more to articles on less controversial topics like “reciprocal treaties.” Hearst did not agree. Instead of reducing the number of Russian horror-story features, he signed up new series by known anti-Communists like Isaac Don Levine, and unknown ones like an “eye witness” former party member named Andrew Smith.

  On more than one occasion, T. V. Ranck and other editors were forced to intervene—gently—to avoid acute embarrassment. In mid-May of 1935, they told Hearst that the photographs of Russian famine victims he wanted to publish—first in his newspapers, then in book form—had been doctored. It was already too late. The Hearst papers had, by this time, published so many faked photographs of purported victims of Soviet violence that a sketch in the left-wing musical revue, Parade, featured a Hearst reporter photographing a hungry American family to illustrate a story of Russian famine.53

  As Tom White, perhaps his most trusted newspaper associate, warned Hearst in January 1936, under the pretext of communicating the sentiments of Jewish leaders, his all-out war against New Dealers and Communist agents was alienating precisely those groups that had steadfastly supported him for a half century. The bitterness of his attacks on Felix Frankfurter as a Communistic New Dealer had, White suggested, created the false impression among some that the Chief was anti-Jewish.54

  Hearst responded immediately that he would not temper his criticism of Frankfurter or any of Roosevelt’s other advisers: “I do not think that any man should be attacked because of his race or religion, or that he should be immune from attack because of race or religion.”55

  Two weeks after White’s warning, the issue of anti-Semitism surfaced in a slightly different context. When Hearst indicated an interest in publishing a highly favorable interview with Hitler, his editors in New York telegrammed their reservations. “While the Hitler material will doubtless be interesting,” T. V. Ranck wrote the Chief in San Simeon, “both Coblentz and I feel publication of sympathetic interview by us might do very serious harm at this time.” Hearst answered that he did not “care whether it does any serious harm or not. If the interview is an important news item we are going to print it. We are running an American newspaper not German paper or a Jewish paper or any other kind of paper. We are printing the news.” While his editors in New York dared not contradict the Chief, they were determined not to publish the interview. The next day, Ranck telegrammed from New York that because of questions about the “copyright situation, both the legal department and T. J. White feel we should not take chance on the interview ... Am greatly distressed.” This time Hearst did not object.56

  In late February 1936, Edmond Coblentz, who had been running the New York American, provided the Chief with his progress report:

  The daily American has won many new readers and it has lost many readers. Among our new readers are many thousands we call the better class, who approved your policies and were thereby attracted to the paper in the first instance. The loss of circulation is in the districts inhabited by the poorer class of Jews, largely in the Bronx and Brownsville in Brooklyn. A survey of the individual dealers shows that we have lost between twenty and twenty-five thousand copies in the
se radical Jewish centres. All due, of course, to the vicious campaign that has been carried on by the Communists. This situation can be overcome in time.... The survey shows further that the Times, and the Times only, increased in circulation in the spots where we show losses.

  Coblentz concluded that Hearst’s “editorial policies appeal, and appeal strongly to intelligent, patriotic Americans,” implying that “poor Jews” did not belong to this category. Unfortunately, this was a group that had always supported the Hearst papers and whose loss he could ill afford.57

  In late April, Hearst, recognizing the negative impact of his editorial policy on circulation among those groups that were joining Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, telegrammed Coblentz from New York that he was “going to cut down on political editorials and try to get a little more variety of topics into the papers. It has gotten so that everybody knows about what they are going to see on the editorial page every day. Besides, I think continual harping along on one string loses effectiveness. I suggest that we have enough variety of editorial to make the occasional exposure of Administration fallacies effective ... Probably people are tired of attacks. I think I myself am tired of reading them.”58

  Hearst’s troubles with the working-class and left-of-center readers that had always been the mainstay of his circulation were exacerbated in February of 1936 when he catalyzed a newspaper strike in Milwaukee by refusing to let the editor of his Milwaukee News negotiate a contract with the local chapter of the American Newspaper Guild. The Guild leadership welcomed the strike. As the Guild Reporter explained to its readers in March of 1936, Hearst was particularly vulnerable to a newspaper strike because “his papers are based on mass circulation. They must have the confidence of the masses to survive. The workers can make him change his labor policies or destroy him.”59

  Heywood Broun and the Guild seized the opportunity that Hearst gave them to bring attention to their struggle by organizing a Citizens Committee which called for a national boycott of the Hearst papers. John Dewey, Robert Sherwood, Dorothy Thompson, Sinclair Lewis, Edna Ferber, and a variety of other prominent leftists and liberals enlisted as members; Eugene O’Neill contributed to the strike fund; Charles Beard declared his support.60

  “It must be admitted,” Broun wrote in his Nation column, “that William Randolph Hearst has done much to unify labor. He has provided in himself the full and perfect symbol for the anti-labor movement.” Hearst was indeed the perfect enemy for the developing Popular Front coalition of New Dealers, unionists, and leftists. He even looked the part: immense, jowly, unspeakably rich, a villain as unscrupulous as the ones in Frank Capra’s movies, a “robber baron” as avaricious as the ones Matthew Josephson wrote about in his best-selling 1934 book on an earlier generation of American villains.61

  In mid-August, the Guild called a second strike against a Hearst paper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The Seattle Guild had the support of local labor leaders, including the Teamsters Union boss Dave Beck, who dispatched pickets to persuade the mechanical unions to stay off the job in solidarity with the striking guildsmen. Hearst had no choice but to close down publication in Seattle. Two weeks later, he authorized a settlement in Milwaukee. Even the Chief could only afford to fight one strike at a time.62

  In March of 1936, the president had signaled that it was “open season” on Hearst by ridiculing him, by name, during a press conference. Asked if he had clamped a censorship on his administration, the president, Newsweek reported, “snapped back his answer: Preposterous! The correspondent must have read that in a Hearst paper!” Following on the president’s comments, congressional Democrats who, with their president, had sat on the sidelines during the first rounds of attacks, joined the battle. Senator Hugo Black of Alabama released a series of telegrams to and from Hearst which he had subpoenaed in an investigation of Western Union lobbying which had nothing to do with the publisher. Though Hearst—and the ACLU—protested that Black had no right to release private communications, the damage had been done. In one of the telegrams, Hearst referred to Representative John J. McSwain of South Carolina as a “Communist” who ought to be impeached. Newsweek reported that McSwain, on being informed of Hearst’s attack, immediately took to the floor of the House to roar epithets at the “fiend of San Simeon.” His blast was seconded by fellow Democrats in the House and Senate. Senator Minton of Indiana, in a slightly veiled attack on Hearst’s private life, claimed that not only would Hearst “not know the Goddess of Liberty if she came down off her pedestal and bowed to him, he probably would try to get her telephone number.”63

  Hearst filed suit against Senator Black and the members of his committee for unwarranted seizure of his property—the telegrams. Black responded by asking Congress for an additional $10,000 to continue his investigation. When the vote was called on Black’s request for more funding, “not a dissenting voice piped up in the Senate.”64

  By 1936, Hearst had become so immense a figure of controversy that three biographies were published. In March, Ferdinand Lundberg enlarged upon the damning portrait he had written for the leftist journal Social Frontier in Imperial Hearst, which was first published by the Equinox Cooperative Press, then republished by the Modern Library in 1937. In April 1936, Viking published Hearst: Lord of San Simeon by Oliver Carlson and Ernest Sutherland Bates, who had earlier attacked Hearst in a series of articles in Common Sense. As an antidote to these portraits, Cora Older, a writer who was married to Fremont Older, Hearst’s long-time San Francisco editor, published William Randolph Hearst: American, also in 1936.

  The most critical of the biographies—and the one that would, in the end, secure the most attention—was Lundberg’s. Charles Beard wrote the preface:

  Unless we are to believe in the progressive degradation of the American nation, we are bound to believe that Hearst’s fate is ostracism by decency in life, and oblivion in death. Odors of his personality may linger for a time ... but they will soon evaporate in the sunlight of a purer national life. Even school boys and girls by the thousands now scorn his aged image and cankered heart.... The verdict of the American spirit has been rendered in tones which even he cannot mistake. It goes with him to the vale of shadows.65

  By the late summer of 1936, these demonic representations of Hearst had reached so deeply into the nation’s psyche that Roosevelt and his advisers recognized that the worst thing that could be said of Alfred Landon was that he was supported by Hearst. Roosevelt authorized Harold Ickes to tie Landon to Hearst in a series of national radio broadcasts. The response to his broadcasts convinced Ickes, as he wrote in his diary on August 30, that there was “more widespread anti-Hearst feeling among the people than there has been for a great many years, if ever. I am told that when his name appears on the screen in some movie theaters, he is hissed, and there are anti-Hearst clubs being organized in some parts of the country.”66

  Hearst, vacationing in Europe, remained in touch with his editors through the final stages of the 1936 campaign season. He had, in the heat of the election campaign, returned to his editorial attack mode and directed his editors to go after Roosevelt with no holds barred. In mid-September, Ed Coblentz wrote him from New York with a progress report: “I know that you will be pleased to know that our campaign against Communism is bearing fruit. We are carrying stories every day reporting the anti-Communist activities of patriotic organizations, church organizations, and civic and commercial bodies.” Coblentz had that day secured a document issued by the Comintern in which Earl Browder, the head of the American Communist Party, had “outlined the official policy of the Communists of America in support of Mr. Roosevelt. It is a damning document. We will print it with facsimiles, and instruct all our papers to display it vigorously.”67

  The charge that Browder and the Comintern were, as H. L. Mencken put it, “rooting for Roosevelt,” was, the president believed, so potentially dangerous that he directed his press secretary to rebut it the day before it was scheduled for publication. “My attention,” Stephen Early inform
ed the press, “has been called to a planned attempt led by a certain notorious newspaper owner to make it appear that the President passively accepts the support of alien organizations hostile to the American form of Government. Such articles are conceived in malice and born of political spite.... The American people will not permit their attention to be diverted from real issues to fake issues which no patriotic, honorable, decent citizen would purposely inject into American affairs.”68

  The effect of Roosevelt’s preemptive strike was to publicize the story even more. Hearst answered Early’s charges in a cable from Amsterdam that was reprinted on his front pages: “The President has issued a statement through a secretary. He has not had the frankness to say to whom he refers in the statement.... Nevertheless, since his conglomerate party of Socialists, Communists, and renegade Democrats has consistently, and rather ridiculously, tried to make me an issue in their muddled campaign, I think I am justified in assuming that I am the object of the statement.” Hearst denied that he had ever claimed that the president had “willingly or unwillingly” solicited or received the support of the Communists, only that he deserved it because since his election he had “adopted the platform of the Karl Marx Socialists in almost every word and letter.” If further proof were needed of FDR’s devotion to Communism and the Soviet Union, it could be found in his recognition of the “bloody dictatorship of Stalin in Moscow,” a recognition which, the Chief failed to mention, he had strongly endorsed.69