St. William
William Randolph Hearst. By Mrs. Fremont, Older. With• a foreword by Fremont Older. (Appleton. 15s.) MR. HEARST is now over seventy ; he plays tennis ; he plays the lord of the manor at St. Donat's and the grandee at San Simeon ; but he is old all the same, and not all Mrs. Older's naive enthusiasm and engaging candour can conceal that fact. Mr. Hearst's papers, his campaigns, his fears, his hopes all are marked by age, by irritation, by thwarted ambition, and possibly by a realisation that he is not as important a force in America today as he was thirty years ago. He is still an important figure. however, and even through this simple and incompetent effort in hagiography something of the real man can be seen. Fortunately, Mr. Hearst is frequently quoted, and whatever he says (and it is often nonsense) is marked by his personality ; it is never banal nonsense. Alas! much of what his biographer says is banal nonsense.
It is right to begin by pointing out that Mr. Hearst is a more complicated figure than he is usually thought to be in Europe. His record is chequered by good deeds as well as by bad, and by no means all his influence on the life uf America, or even on the newspapers of America, has been bad. Son of a very wealthy Californian Democratic senator, he has had, in his own odd way, a sense of the republic. Ile had a better back- ground than Northcliffe, and his political ambitions, his term in Congress, his candidacy for the mayoralty of New York (probably he won but was swindled out of his victory by
Tammany), his presidential ambitions, at least mark 1 ' off from his fellow press-lords in this country. his political power was not sought for in a corner. Only Lord Beaverbrook has been, to anything like the same extent, a public figure apart from his papers, though it is doubtful if in either case the simple politician would have gone nearly as far as the politician- cum-newspaper owner has done.
Nor have Mr. Hearst's political activities been humdrum. He began as a radical ; he supported Bryan in 1896 ; he fought Tammany and, what was still more dangerous, the great Californian railroad machine. He was no respecter of persons, and not many persons whom he assailed deserved respect. True all these attacks may have helped, in the long run, the papers that made them, but that was not evident at the time, and there is no reason to suppose that Mr. Ilearst was not sincere. lie is still sincere, but for different causes. The crusader for more humane and sensible penology has recently been behind an ignorant xenophobia that sees in the dangerous foreigner the cause of crime and makes of the Lindbergh exodus (for which Mr. Hearst's papers have some responsibility) a means of stirring up passions which a self-styled anti-Fascist ought to dislike. Mr. Fremont Older suggests, in his Introduc- tion, that Mr. Hearst was on his side in the Mooney affair. Did he stay on it ? What were his relations with Governor
Volph ? What are his relations with Governor Merriam ? Mrs. Older notes that, in his early days, Mr. Hearst was in -favour of a denhoc-ratic taxing policy and that later he -opfaiseil tax-free bonds. Now he wants the income tax replaced by a Sales tax, and has threatened California with the departure of her most famous native son if she doesn't stop trying to tax the niqi ! Mr. Hearst was unpopular because of his opposition to America's entry into the late war, and he has seen a great part of his countrymen come round to his point of view. But he was one of the chief makers of the war with Spain and he was, for a time, an advocate of a war with Mexico, and no propaganda for the Allies was more bellicose in spirit than that heating-up of hostility to Japan that has been a Hearst speciality.
Here we have Mr. Hearst as a patron of the arts, of the films as well as of painting (the comic story of the Venice exhibition is missing), as a patron of Oglethorpe University, as a victim of French malignancy (it is hard to say which behaved more foolishly, the French government or Mr. Hearst with his bleatings about the sanctity of an American passport). But how much is not here ! Where is the -detailed " inside story " of the last attempt at political office in 1922, defeated by the obstinate resentment of Al Smith, who could not understand that the great man praises and blames with the capriciousness of a sultan? For it is to be feared that all his life Mr. Hearst has been marked by the lack of self-control which marks the Sultan (so I am told) and the spoiled boy. At school, at college, as politician, as journalist, Mr. Hearst has allowed his great talents to be wasted, or at least made less effective than was necessary by his erratic judgement. Of course he has made vast sums of money, but he has always been rich and he has missed many things that even the owner- ship of San Simeon or power in Hollywood cannot compensate for. On the whole, Mr. Hearst deserved a better ending to his career- than this forcible-feeble epilogue, as he certainly
deserved a better biography than this ill-planned chronicle whose flagrant sins of omission make it a poor job even as whitewashing. Mr. Hearst is still formidable, but his great days are past. if there is fascism in America he may be its Hugenberg but no more. He may not even be that, for even the gratifying fact that I have been denounced myself in a Hearst paper as an enemy of American youth cannot shake my conviction that, in contemporary America. Mr. Hearst is a back-number.I). W. Baocix.
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