U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [507]
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 Wil ie 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 dope-parlors, 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 mil ions away, tearing down emblems and traditions, making faces at togaed privilege, monopoly, stuffedshirts in office; Caesar's life like his was a mil ionaire prank. Per-haps 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 mil ions of dol ars.
-470-W. R. got the money from her to enter the New York fields 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 law-yers 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 mil ion 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'l furnish the war," he's supposed to have wired Remington in Ha-vana. The trouble in Cuba was a goldmine for circu-lation 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 revo-lutionist 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 al 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 un--471-armed halfdrowned 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 mil ion six hundred thousand.
When the Spaniards were licked there was nobody
left to heckle but the Mormons. Polygamy titil ated the straphangers, and the sexlife of the rich, and pen-andink drawings of women in underclothes and pre-historic 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 shril y 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 tengal on hat,
presidential timber,
the mil ionaire candidate of the common man.
Bryan made him president of the National Asso-ciation of Democratic Clubs and advised him to start a paper in Chicago.