Anywhere, Everywhere

Since February, newspapermen have been increasingly sure that William Randolph Hearst is, for the first time in his career, retrenching. The following deals are pertinent evidence :

He sold two tabloids, New York Daily Mirror and Boston Advertiser, to Alexander Pollock Moore, U. S. Ambassador to Peru, for a price which was said to be dirt cheap. (It was even hinted that this was a "dummy" sale and that Hearst privately remains the financial angel of the two tabloids.)

He killed his third tabloid, Baltimore American, by merging it with his full-sized Baltimore News. This was part of a complicated compromise with his Baltimore rivals, the Sun-papers, by which he allowed the Evening Sun to get Associated Press rights without paying him one cent. Hearst had not been known before as a man of compromises.

He discontinued his Oakland, Calif., Times.

He sold two magazines, Smart Set and McClure's, to James R. Quirk.

These deals have been cited as confirmation of the report that Hearst has ordered his general manager, Col. William Franklin Knox, to cut down expenses by $10,000,000 this year.

Hearst now has 24 newspapers, ten magazines, eight feature, news and film services, also the Cosmopolitan Book Corp. Indeed, there is no danger of the wolf growling at Hearst's door. Good Housekeeping alone is capable of buttering Hearst's bread and of satisfying his large passion for antiques. He may be old (65), but he is not yet ready to get out of journalism. Rather, he is trimming his properties, consolidating them, fertilizing the hardy ones, weeding out the weak ones; so that a banker can look at them and say: "They are a sound unit." But Hearst no longer cracks the whip that terrorized his rivals and upset the standards of journalism at the turn of the century. He is now willing to compromise, or to stand pat.

Coincidently, the first important biography of Hearst has appeared.* It depicts Hearst as a onetime Harvard student who "tried manfully to drink beer," as a devoted husband, "a keen student of the Bible," and, through his newspapers, "a world force," a man who "has shortened by a generation certain sorely needed social and political reforms . . . has awakened the public consciousness of the average citizen. . . ."

Some day, probably after Hearst has passed to the never-never land, his complete biography will be written. And it will contain many an amazing fact which Writer Winkler has, either deliberately or unknowingly, omitted.

There is, however, much of interest in Writer Winkler's book:

P:. "Should anything untoward happen to William Randolph Hearst, the staffs of the various Hearst papers would be running about like ants, for their morgues contain no biography of their owner. The proprietor has given orders that no biography of himself be prepared.

P:. "Hearst is a man of orderly disorder. He transacts most of his business by telephone and telegraph. He maintains no personal letter-file. His office is anywhere and everywhere he happens to be. He scribbles on the backs of envelopes, scraps of paper. He is an extremely indolent correspondent. In New York he has half a dozen luxuriantly appointed 'hideouts' to which he may repair when he desires privacy. . . ."

P:. The late Senator George Hearst, father of William Randolph, grizzly forty-niner, poker player, breeder of race horses and cattle, owned a little newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, which he regarded as a worthless joke. When Will returned from Harvard, ousted because of boyish pranks, he asked his father to give him the Examiner, and got it. Sensational features and crusades for the masses against "black" capitalists--these things young Hearst had observed in the methods of Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World; and he practiced them in San Francisco. Later, in 1895, when his father left him a $17,000,000 estate, he bought the New York Journal and set out to outdo Pulitzer.

P:.. Everyone knows of the terrific battle between Hearst and Pulitzer. Hearst lured the entire Sunday staff away from the World and also captured Arthur Brisbane when Pulitzer refused to let Brisbane write signed editorial comment.

P:. The work of Hearst in stirring up the Spanish-American War needs no reiteration. After the war, Hearst's Journal bitterly attacked President McKinley; one editorial said: "If bad institutions and bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then killing must be done." When President McKinley was assassinated, Hearst's enemies pointed to this editorial as a contributory cause of the assassination. Writer Winkler defends Hearst on the grounds that he knew nothing about the editorial until after it was printed.

P:. In 1902, Hearst was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives. "Evidence multiplied that he had touched the hearts and gained the confidence of a great multitude, and that he was beginning to be honestly taken as an unterrified champion of the poor and helpless," says Writer Winkler. Yet Hearst was never again elected to any other important public office, though he tried for senator and governor and, at one time, boomed himself for the presidency. The man who finally spiked the political guns of Hearst was Governor Alfred Emanuel Smith of New York.

P:. Hearst, 40 in 1903, is described "as a young dilettante whose whole time and attention was devoted to making more joyous the days of his lady fair. Hearst and Millicent Willson were like a couple of children in their love making." They were married on April 28 of that year. She was a musical comedy girl.

P:. Writer Winkler reminds readers at least three times that Hearst never touches alcohol, though as a good host he serves wine to his guests.

P:. Reading about Hearst may well become a national pastime. The man is like a character in a Greek myth; people have heard dozens of tales about him, suspect or imagine dozens more, know for a fact very few. Writer Winkler once worked for him and knows him as well as any man is permitted to know him.

*HEARST: AN AMERICAN PHENOMENON--John K. Winkler--Simon & Schuster ($4).