U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [546]
excited;
his editorials hammered at malefactors of great
wealth, trusts, the G.O.P., Mark Hanna and McKinley so shril y 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 and stepping into the limelight
wearing a black frockcoat and a tengal on hat,
presidential timber,
the mil ionaire candidate of the common man.
Bryan made him president of the National Asso-ciation of Democratic Clubs and advised him to start a paper in Chicago.
After Bryan's second defeat. Hearst lined up with
Charles F. Murphy in New York and was elected to
Congress.
-472-His headquarters were at the Hol and House; the night of his election he gave a big free show of fire-works in Madison Square Garden; a mortar exploded and kil ed or wounded something like a hundred peo-ple; that was one piece of news the Hearst men made that wasn't spread on the front pages of the Hearst papers.
In the House of Representatives he was unpopu-lar; it was schooldays over again. The limp hand-shake, the solemn eyes set close to the long nose, the smal flabby scornful smile were out of place among the Washington backslappers. He was il at ease with-out his hired gang around him. He was happier entertaining firstnighters and footlight favorites at the Hol and House. In those
years when Broadway stil stopped at Fortysecond
Street,
Mil icent Wil son was a dancer in The Girl from
Paris; she and her sister did a sister act together; she won a popularity contest in the Morning Telegraph and the hand of
Wil iam Randolph Hearst.
In nineteen four he spent a lot of money putting
his name up in electric lights at the Chicago Conven-tion to land the Democratic nomination but Judge Parker and Wal Street got it away from him.
In nineteen five he ran for Mayor of New York
on a municipal ownership ticket.
In nineteen six he very nearly got the governor-ship away from the solemnwhiskered Hughes. There were Hearst for President clubs al over the country.
-473-He was making his way in politics spending mil ions to the tune of Waltz Me Around Again, Willie.
He managed to get his competitor James Gordon
Bennett up in court for running indecent ads in the New York Herald and fined $25,000, a feat which hardly contributed to his popularity in certain quarters. In nineteen eight he was running revelations about
Standard Oil, the Archbold letters that proved that the trusts were greasing the palms of the politicians in a big way. He was the candidate of the Independence party made up almost exclusively, so his enemies
claimed, of Hearst employees.
(His fel owmil ionaires felt he was a traitor to his class but when he was taxed with his treason he an-swered: You know I believe in property, and you know where I stand on personal fortunes, but isn't it better that I should represent in this country the dissatisfied than have somebody else do it who might not have the same real property relations that I may have?)
By nineteen fourteen, although he was the greatest
newspaperowner in the country, the proprietor of hun-dreds of square miles of ranching and mining country in California and Mexico,
his affairs were in such a scramble he had trouble
borrowing a mil ion dol ars,
and political y he was ratpoison.
Al the mil ions he signed away
al his skil at putting his own thoughts
into the skul of the straphanger
failed to bridge the tiny Rubicon between amateur
and professional politics (perhaps he could too easily forget a disappointment buying a firstrate writer or an
-474-embroidered slipper attributed to Charlemagne or the gilded bed a king's mistress was supposed to have
slept in).
Sometimes he was high enough above the battle to
see clear. He threw al the power of his papers, al his bril iance as a publisher into an effort to keep the country sane and neutral during the first world war; he opposed loans to the Al ies, seconded Bryan
in his lonely fight to keep