Hearst - Lord of San Simeon - Taschenbuch

Text extracted from opening pages of book: HEARST Lord of San Simeon HEARST Lord of San Simeon BY Oliver Carlson and Ernest Sutherland' Bates NEW YORK THE VIKING PRESS 1936 CONTENTS PAGE Introduction ix CHAPTER I. My Father Was a Great Man 3 n. California Background 16 in. The Early Life of Willie Hearst 36 iv. Owner of the San Francisco Examiner 48 v. The Accusations of Grove L. Johnson 63 vi. Owner of the New York Journal 74 vn. Owner of the Spanish-American War 92 vni. Absentee Congressman no ix. Millionaire Radical 132 x. Perennial Candidate 142 xi. Last of the Muckrakers 164 xn. Pacifist Patriot 176 xm. Patron of Hollywood 194 xiv. Outdemagogued Demagogue 202 vi Contents CHAPTER PAGE xv. Purveyor of Forgeries 220 xvi. Patriot Redivivus 231 xvn. American Fascist 249 xvin. Business Man Embattled 266 xix. The Hearst Business Empire 279 xx. Lord of San Simeon 304 Bibliography 315 Index 319 ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE The Parents of William Randolph Hearst 48 Hearst as The Yellow Kid 64 Hearst as The Yellow Peril 1 2 8 On the Hustings 1 44 After the Harvest 1 5 8 Reaping the Fruits of Anglophobia 1 86 Hearst in War-Time 1 90 As a Seditious Alien 1 92 Appraising Presidential Timber 232 Hearst before a Senate Inquiry 232 Hollywood Entertains 248 The Red Bogeyman 262 viii Illustrations BETWEEN PAGES The Hearst Business Empire 2 8 5-2 8 6 FACING PAGE Hearst Then and Now A View of San Simeon 38 INTRODUCTION BEFORE William Randolph Hearst shall pass into the limbo o forgotten things, he will doubtless be the subject of many biographies. An extraordinary person, with extraordi nary energy even for an American, he has combined in one a number of careers each of which would have sufficed forlesser men. As a capitalist, creating according to the authorized biog raphy by Mrs. Fremont Older the second largest fortune in the country, he and his methods would deserve special study as a significant part of the history of American Big Business j for this task, the ideal writer would be one familiar from the inside with such methods in other words, an honest Big-Business man. As a journalist, creating the greatest chain of newspapers in the world, Hearst would again deserve a special treatise 5 and in this case, the ideal writer would be an independent jour nalist. Once more, as a politician, an incendiary force in Ameri can life for forty years, Hearst demands particular considera tion, preferably by a disinterested politician. And even if all three such rarities could be found and their special tasks com pleted there would still remain the larger and more difficult problem of seeing the man as a whole and estimating the emo tional and other drives underlying all these special activities. There is, of course, no such thing as a definitive biography, for the simple reason that biographers, like their subjects, are products of their times. The obstacles in the way of even a sat isfactory biography of such a figure as Hearst are peculiarly evi dent because of the complexity of the issues involved and the x Introduction lack of such material as that mentioned above. Rather, however, than wait for their great-grandchildren to write a more ade quate life of Hearst by which time, it is to be presumed, he will be as unimportant for American life as the medieval Fug gers the authors have preferred to offer their interpretation to day when it is needed. Not being Big-Business men, journalists, or politicians, they have been compelled to take their material where they found it, using the customary methods of biographi cal research which they have found ample to explode a number of widely propagated Hearst myths. They do not pretend to greater objectivity than is to be found in a scrupulous adhe rence to the facts and in giving credit where credit is due. Their primary interest has been in understanding rather than in con demning, but they know no way of avoiding the implications of such descriptive terms as mendacity, hypocrisy, economic motivation, oth