U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [547]
for his pains he was razzed as a pro-German,
and when war was declared had detectives placed
among his butlers,
secretserviceagents ransacking his private papers,
gumshoeing round his diningroom on Riverside Drive
to investigate rumors of strange colored lights seen in his windows.
He opposed the peace of Versail es and the league
of victorious nations
and ended by proving that he was as patriotic as
anybody
by coming out for conscription
and printing his papers with red white and blue
borders and with little Amercian flags at either end of the dateline and continual y trying to stir up trouble across the Rio Grande
and inflating the Yankee Doodle bogey,
the biggest navy in the world.
The people of New York City backed him up by
electing Hearst's candidate for Mayor, Honest John
Hylan,
-475-but Al Smith while he was stil the sidewalks' hero rapped Hearst's knuckles when he tried to climb back onto the Democratic soundtruck.
In spite of enormous expenditures on forged docu-ments he failed to bring about war with Mexico. In spite of spraying hundreds of thousands of dol-lars into moviestudios he failed to put over his favorite moviestar as America's sweetheart.
And more and more the emperor of newsprint re-tired to his fief of San Simeon on the Pacific Coast, where he assembled a zoo, continued to dabble in
movingpictures, col ected warehouses ful of tapestries, Mexican saddles, bricabrac, china, brocade, embroidery, old chests of drawers, tables and chairs, the loot of dead Europe,
built an Andalusian palace and a Moorish ban-quethal and there spends his last years amid the re-laxing adulations of screenstars, admen, screenwriters, publicitymen, columnists, mil ionaire editors,
a monarch of that new El Dorado
where the warmedover daydreams of al the
ghettos
are churned into an opiate haze
more scarily blinding to the moneyless man
more fruitful of mil ions
than al the clinking multitude of double eagles
the older Hearst minted out of El Dorado County
in the old days (the empire of the printed word con-tinues powerful by the inertia of bigness; but this power over the dreams
of the adolescents of the world
grows and poisons like a cancer),
and out of the westcoast haze comes now and then
an old man's querulous voice
-476-advocating the salestax,
hissing dirty names at the defenders of civil lib-erties for the workingman; jail the reds, praising the comforts of Baden-Baden under the
blood and bludgeon rule of Handsome Adolph
(Hearst's own loved invention, the lowest common
denominator come to power
out of the rot of democracy)
complaining about the California incometaxes,
shril ing about the dangers of thought in the col-leges. Deport; jail. Until he dies
the magnificent endlesslyrol ing presses wil pour
our print for him, the whirring everywhere projectors wil spit images for him, a spent Caesar grown old with spending
never man enough to cross the Rubicon.
RICHARD ELLSWORTH SAVAGE
Dick Savage walked down Lexington to the office in the Graybar Building. The December morning was sharp as steel, bright glints cut into his eyes, splintering from store-windows, from the glasses of people he passed on the street, from the chromium rims of the headlights of auto-mobiles. He wasn't quite sure whether he had a hang-over or not. In a jeweler's window he caught sight of his face in the glass against the black velvet backing, there was a puffy boiled look under the eyes like in the photo--477graphs of the Prince of Wales. He felt sour and gone in the middle like a rotten pear. He stepped into a drugstore and ordered a bromoseltzer. At the sodafountain he stood looking at himself in the mirror behind the glass shelf with the gingeralebottles on it; his new darkblue broad-cloth coat looked wel anyway. The black eyes of the soda-jerker were seeking his eyes out. "A heavy evening, eh?" Dick nodded and grinned. The sodajerker passed a thin redknuckled hand