A THUMB-NAIL SKETCH
MANY years ago I lived in Oakland, California. One day as I lounged in my lodging there was a gentle, hesitating rap at the door and, opening it, I found a young man, the youngest young man, it seemed to me, that I had ever confronted. His appearance, his attitude, his manner, his entire personality suggested extreme diffidence. I did not ask him in, instate him in my better chair (I had two) and inquire how we could serve each other. If my memory is not at fault I merely said: “Well,” and awaited the result.
“I am from the San FranciscoExaminer,” he explained in a voice like the fragrance of violets made audible, and backed a little away.
“O,” I said, “you come from Mr. Hearst.”
Then that unearthly child lifted its blue eyes and cooed: “I am Mr. Hearst.”
His father had given him a daily newspaper and he had come to hire me to write for it. Twenty years of what his newspapers call “wage slavery” ensued, and although I had many a fight with his editors for my right to my self-respect, Icannot say that I ever found Mr. Hearst’s chain a very heavy burden, though indubitably I suffered somewhat in social repute for wearing it.
If ever two men were born to be enemies he and I are they. Each stands for everything that is most disagreeable to the other, yet we never clashed. I never had the honor of his friendship and confidence, never was “employed about his person,” and seldom entered the editorial offices of his newspapers. He did not once direct nor request me to write an opinion that I did not hold, and only two or three times suggested that I refrain for a season from expressing opinions that I did hold, when they were antagonistic to the policy of the paper, as they commonly were. During several weeks of a great labor strike in California, when mobs of ruffians stopped all railway trains, held the state capital and burned, plundered and murdered at will, he “laid me off,” continuing, of course, my salary; and some years later, when striking employees of street railways were devastating St. Louis, pursuing women through the street and stripping them naked, he suggested that I “let up on that labor crowd.” No other instances of “capitalistic arrogance” occur to memory. I do not know that anyof his other writers enjoyed a similar liberty, or would have enjoyed it if they had had it. Most of them, indeed, seemed to think it honorable to write anything that they were expected to.
As to Mr. Hearst’s own public writings, I fancy there are none: he could not write an advertisement for a lost dog. The articles that he signs and the speeches that he makes—well, if a man of brains is one who knows how to use the brains of others this amusing demagogue is nobody’s dunce.
If asked to justify my long service to journals with whose policies I was not in agreement and whose character I loathed I should confess that possibly the easy nature of the service had something to do with it. As to the point of honor (as that is understood in the profession) the editors and managers always assured me that there was commercial profit in employing my rebellious pen; and I—O well, I persuaded myself that I could do most good by addressing those who had greatest need of me—the millions of readers to whom Mr. Hearst was a misleading light. Perhaps this was an erroneous view of the matter; anyhow I am not sorry that, discovering no preservative allowable under the pure food law that would enablehim to keep his word overnight, I withdrew, and can now, without impropriety, speak my mind of him as freely as his generosity, sagacity or indifference once enabled me to do of his political and industrial doctrines, in his own papers.
In illustration of some of the better features of this man’s strange and complex character let this incident suffice. Soon after the assassination of Governor Goebel of Kentucky—which seemed to me a particularly perilous “precedent” if unpunished—I wrote for one of Mr. Hearst’s New York newspapers the following prophetic lines:
The bullet that pierced Goebel’s breastCan not be found in all the West.Good reason: it is speeding hereTo stretch McKinley on the bier.
The bullet that pierced Goebel’s breastCan not be found in all the West.Good reason: it is speeding hereTo stretch McKinley on the bier.
The bullet that pierced Goebel’s breastCan not be found in all the West.Good reason: it is speeding hereTo stretch McKinley on the bier.
The bullet that pierced Goebel’s breast
Can not be found in all the West.
Good reason: it is speeding here
To stretch McKinley on the bier.
The lines took no attention, naturally, but twenty months afterward the President was shot by Czolgosz. Every one remembers what happened then to Mr. Hearst and his newspapers. His political enemies and business competitors were alert to their opportunity. The verses, variously garbled but mostly made into an editorial, or a news dispatch with a Washington date-line but usually no date, were published allover the country as evidence of Mr. Hearst’s complicity in the crime. As such they adorned the editorial columns of the New YorkSunand blazed upon a bill-board in front of Tammany Hall. So fierce was the popular flame to which they were the main fuel that thousands of copies of the Hearst papers were torn from the hands of newsboys and burned in the streets. Much of their advertising was withdrawn from them. Emissaries of theSunoverran the entire country persuading clubs, libraries and other patriotic bodies to exclude them from the files. There was even an attempt made to induce Czolgosz to testify that he had been incited to his crime by reading them—ten thousand dollars for his family to be his reward; but this cheerful scheme was blocked by the trial judge, who had been informed of it. During all this carnival of sin I lay ill in Washington, unaware of it; and my name, although appended to all that I wrote, including the verses, was not, I am told, once mentioned. As to Mr. Hearst, I dare say he first saw the lines when all this hullabaloo directed his attention to them.
With the occurrences here related the incident was not exhausted. When Mr. Hearst was making his grotesque canvass forthe Governorship of New York the Roosevelt Administration sent Secretary Root into the state to beat him. This high-minded gentleman incorporated one of the garbled prose versions of my prophecy into his speeches with notable effect and great satisfaction to his conscience. Still, I am steadfast in the conviction that God sees him; and if any one thinks that Mr. Root will not go to the devil it must be the devil himself, in whom, doubtless, the wish is father to the thought.
Hearst’s newspapers had always been so unjust that no injustice could be done to them, and had been incredibly rancorous toward McKinley, but no doubt it was my luckless prophecy that cost him tens of thousands of dollars and a growing political prestige. For anything that I know (or care) they may have cost him his election. I have never mentioned the matter to him, nor—and this is what I have been coming to—has he ever mentioned it to me. I fancy there must be a human side to a man like that, even if he is a mischievous demagogue.
In matters of “industrial discontent” it has always been a standing order in the editorial offices of the Hearst newspapers to “take the side of the strikers”without inquiry or delay. Until the great publicist was bitten by political ambition and began to figure as a crazy candidate for office not a word of warning or rebuke to murderous mobs ever appeared in any column of his papers, except my own. A typical instance of the falsification of news to serve a foul purpose may be cited here. In Pennsylvania, a ferocious mob of foreign miners armed with bludgeons marched upon the property of their employers, to destroy it, incidentally chasing out of their houses all the English-speaking residents along the way and clubbing all that they could catch. Arriving at the “works,” they were confronted by a squad of deputy marshals, and while engaged in murdering the sheriff, who had stepped forward to read the riot act, were fired on and a couple of dozen of them killed. Naturally, the deputy marshals were put on trial for their lives. Mr. Hearst sent my good friend Julius Chambers to report the court proceedings. Day after day he reported at great length the testimony (translated) of the saints and angels who had suffered the mischance “while peacefully parading on a public road.” Then Mr. Chambers was ordered away and not a word of testimony for the defence (all in English), ever appearedin the paper. Instances of such fair-mindedness as this could be multiplied by the thousand, but all, I charitably trust, have been recorded Elsewhere in a more notable Book than mine.
Never just, Mr. Hearst is always generous. He is not swift to redress a grievance of one of his employees against another, but he is likely to give the complainant a cottage, a steam launch, or a roll of bank notes, if that person happens to be the kind of man to accept it, and he commonly is. As to discharging anybody for inefficiency or dishonesty—no, indeed, not so long as there is a higher place for him. His notion of removal is promotion.
He once really did dismiss a managing editor, but in a few months the fellow was back in his old place. I ventured to express surprise. “Oh, that’s all right,” Mr. Hearst explained. “I have a new understanding with him. He is to steal only small sums hereafter; the large ones are to come to me.”
In that incident we observe two dominant features in his character—his indifference to money and his marvelous sense of humor. He who should apprehend danger to public property from Mr. Hearst’s elevation to high office would err. Themoney to which he is indifferent includes that of others, and he smiles at his own expense.
If there is a capable working newspaper man in this country who has not,malgre lui, a kindly feeling for Mr. Hearst, he needs the light. I do not know how it is elsewhere, but in San Francisco and New York Mr. Hearst’s habit of having the cleverest (not, alas the most conscientious) obtainable men, no matter what he had to pay them, advanced the salaries of all such men more than fifty per cent. Possibly these have receded, and possibly the high average ability of his men has receded too—I don’t know; but indubitably he did get the brightest men.
Some of them, I grieve to say, were imperfectly appreciative of their employer’s gentle sway. At one time on theExaminerit was customary, when a reporter had a disagreeable assignment, for him to go away for a few days, then return and plead intoxication. That excused him. They used to tell of one clever fellow in whose behalf this plea was entered while he was still absent from duty. An hour afterward Mr. Hearst met him and, seeing that he was cold sober, reproved him for deceit. On the scamp’s assurance that he had honestly intendedto be drunk, but lacked the price, Mr. Hearst gave him enough money to re-establish his character for veracity and passed on.
I fancy things have changed a bit now, and that Mr. Hearst has changed with them. He is older and graver, is no longer immune to ambition, and may have discovered that good-fellowship with his subordinates and gratification of his lone humor are not profitable in business and politics. Doubtless too, he has learned from observation of his entourage of sycophants and self-seekers that generosity and gratitude are virtues that have not a speaking acquaintance. It is worth something to learn that, and it costs something.
With many amiable and alluring qualities, among which is, or used to be, a personal modesty amounting to bashfulness, the man has not a friend in the world. Nor does he merit one, for, either congenitally or by induced perversity, he is inaccessible to the conception of an unselfish attachment or a disinterested motive. Silent and smiling, he moves among men, the loneliest man. Nobody but God loves him and he knows it; and God’s love he values only in so far as he fancies that it may promote his amusing ambition to darken the door of the White House.As to that, I think that he would be about the kind of President that the country—daft with democracy and sick with sin—is beginning to deserve.