Big Money (60 page)

 

now their work is over      the immigrants haters of oppression lie quiet in black suits in the little undertaking parlor in the North End      the city is quiet      the men of the conquering nation are not to be seen on the streets

they have won why are they scared to be seen on the streets? on the streets you see only the downcast faces of the beaten      the streets belong to the beaten nation      all the way to the cemetery where the bodies of the immigrants are to be burned      we line the curbs in the drizzling rain we crowd the wet sidewalks elbow to elbow silent pale looking with scared eyes at the coffins

we stand defeated America

when things are upset, there's always chaos, said Mr. Ford. Work can accomplish wonders and overcome chaotic conditions. When the Russian masses will learn to want more than they have, when they will want white collars, soap, better clothes, better shoes, better housing, better living conditions

 

I lift up my finger and I say tweet tweet

              
shush shush

                   
now now

                        
come come

 

REPUBLIC-TRUMBULL STEEL MERGER VOTED

 

There along the dreamy Amazon

         
We met upon the shore

Tho' the love I knew is ever gone

 

WHEAT OVERSOLD REACHES NEW HIGH

 

Dreams linger on

 

the first thing the volunteer firefighters did was to open the windows to let the smoke out. This created a draft and the fire with a good thirty mile wind right from the ocean did the rest

 

RECORD TURNOVER IN INSURANCE SHARES
AS TRADING PROGRESSES

 

outside the scene was a veritable bedlam. Well-dressed women walked up and down wringing their hands, helpless to save their belongings, while from the windows of the upper stories there rained a shower of trunks, suitcases and clothing hurled out indiscriminately. Jewelry and bricabrac valued at thousands was picked up by the spectators from the lawn, who thrust the objects under their coats and disappeared

 

BROKERS LOANS HIT NEW HIGH

 

    
Change all of your gray skies

              
Turn them into gay skies

And keep sweeping the cobwebs off the moon

 

MARKETS OPTIMISTIC

 

learn new uses for cement. How to develop profitable concrete business. How to judge materials. How to figure jobs. How to reinforce concrete. How to build forms, roads, sidewalks, floors, foundations, culverts, cellars

 

And even tho the Irish and the Dutch

    
Say it don't amount to much

    
Fifty million Frenchmen can't be wrong

 

STARSPANGLED BANDIT GANG ROBS DINERS

 

MURDER BARES QUAKER STATE FANTASIES

 

Poker Slayer Praised

 

Poor little Hollywood Rose

         
so all alone

No one in Hollywood knows

         
how sad she's grown

 

FIVE HUNDRED MILLIONS IN BANK DEAL

 

Sure I love the dear silver that shines in your hair

    
And the brow that's all furrowed

         
And wrinkled with care

              
I kiss the dear fingers so toil worn for me

 

CARBONIC BUYS IN DRY ICE

 

GAB MARATHON RUN FOR GOLD ON BROADWAY

 

the broad advertising of the bull markets, the wide extension of the ticker services, the equipping of branch brokerage offices with tickers, transparent, magnified translux stockquotation rolls have had the natural result of stirring up nation-wide interest in the stockmarket

William Randolph Hearst was an only son, the only chick in the richlyfeathered nest of George and Phebe Hearst.

In eighteen fifty George Hearst had left his folks and the farm in Franklin County, Missouri, and driven a team of oxen out to California. (In fortynine the sudden enormous flare of gold had filled the west;

the young men couldn't keep their minds on their plowing, on feeding the swill to the pigs, on threshing the wheat

when the fires of gold were sweeping the Pacific Slope. Cholera followed in the ruts of the oxcarts, they died of cholera round the campfires, in hastilybuilt chinchinfested cabins, they were picked off by hostile Indians, they blew each other's heads off in brawls.)

George Hearst was one of the few that made it;

he developed a knack for placermining;

as a prospector he had an accurate eye for picking a goldbearing vein of quartz;

after seven years in El Dorado County he was a millionaire, Anaconda was beginning, he owned onesixth of the Ophir Mine, he was in on Comstock Lode.

In sixtyone he went back home to Missouri with his pockets full of nuggets and married Phebe Apperson and took her back by boat and across Panama to San Francisco the new hilly capital of the millionaire miners and bought a mansion for her beside the Golden Gate on the huge fogbound coast of the Pacific.

He owned vast ranges and ranches, raised cattle, ran racehorses, prospected in Mexico, employed five thousand men in his mines, on his estates, lost and won fortunes in mining deals, played poker at a century a chip, never went out without a bag of clinkers to hand out to old friends down on their uppers,

and died in Washington

a senator,

a rough diamond, a lusty beloved whitebearded old man with the big beak and sparrowhawk eyes of a breaker of trails, the beetling brows under the black slouch hat

of an oldtimer.

 

Mrs. Hearst's boy was born in sixtythree.

Nothing too good for the only son.

The Hearsts doted on their boy;

the big lanky youngster grew up solemneyed and selfwilled among servants and hired men, factotums, overseers, hangerson, old pensioners; his grandparents spoiled him; he always did everything he wanted. Mrs. Hearst's boy must have everything of the best.

No lack of gold nuggets, twentydollar goldpieces, big silver cartwheels.

The boy had few playmates; he was too rich to get along with the others in the roughandtumble democracy of the boys growing up in San Francisco in those days. He was too timid and too arrogant; he wasn't liked.

His mother could always rent playmates with icecream, imported candies, expensive toys, ponies, fireworks always ready to set off. The ones he could buy he despised, he hankered always after the others.

He was great on practical jokes and pulling the leg of the grownups; when the new Palace Hotel was opened with a reception for General Grant he and a friend had themselves a time throwing down handfuls of birdshot on the glass roof of the court to the consternation of the bigwigs and stuffedshirts below.

 

Wherever they went royally the Hearsts could buy their way,

up and down the California coast, through ranches and mining-towns

in Nevada and in Mexico,

in the palace of Porfirio Diaz;

the old man had lived in the world, had rubbed shoulders with rich and poor, had knocked around in miners' hells, pushed his way through unblazed trails with a packmule. All his life Mrs. Hearst's boy was to hanker after that world

hidden from him by a mist of millions;

the boy had a brain, appetites, an imperious will,

but he could never break away from the gilded apronstrings;

adventure became slumming.

He was sent to boardingschool at St. Paul's, in Concord, New Hampshire. His pranks kept the school in an uproar. He was fired.

He tutored and went to Harvard

where he cut quite a swath as businessmanager of the
Lampoon
, a brilliant entertainer; he didn't drink much himself, he was soft-spoken and silent; he got the other boys drunk and paid the bills, bought the fireworks to celebrate Cleveland's election, hired the brassbands,

bought the creampies to throw at the actors from the box at the Old Howard,

the cannon crackers to blow out the lamps of herdic cabs with, the champagne for the chorines.

He was rusticated and finally fired from Harvard, so the story goes, for sending to each of a number of professors a chamberpot with the professor's portrait tastefully engraved on it.

He went to New York. He was crazy about newspapers. Already he'd been hanging around the Boston newspaper-offices. In New York he was taken by Pulitzer's newfangled journalism. He didn't want to write; he wanted to be a newspaperman. (Newspapermen were part of that sharpcontoured world he wanted to see clear, the reallife world he saw distorted by a haze of millions, the ungraded lowlife world of American Democracy.)

Mrs. Hearst's boy would be a newspaperman and a Democrat. (Newspapermen saw heard ate drank touched horsed kidded rubbed shoulders with real men, whored; that was life.)

 

He arrived home in California, a silent soft smiling solemneyed young man

dressed in the height of the London fashion.

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 Willie 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 dopeparlors, 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 millions away, tearing down emblems and traditions, making faces at togaed privilege, monopoly, stuffedshirts in office;

Caesar's life like his was a millionaire prank. Perhaps 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 millions of dollars. W.R. got the money from her to enter the New York field; 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 lawyers 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 million 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'll furnish the war,” he's supposed to have wired Remington in Havana. The trouble in Cuba was a goldmine for circulation 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 revolutionist 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 all 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 unarmed half-drowned 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 million six hundred thousand.

 

When the Spaniards were licked there was nobody left to heckle but the Mormons. Polygamy titillated the straphangers, and the sexlife of the rich, and penandink drawings of women in underclothes and prehistoric 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 shrilly 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