After Bryan’s second defeat Hearst lined up with Charles F. Murphy in New York and was elected to Congress.
His headquarters were at the Holland House; the night of his election he gave a big free show of fireworks in Madison Square Garden; a mortar exploded and killed or wounded something like a hundred people; 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 unpopular; it was schooldays over again. The limp handshake, the solemn eyes set close to the long nose, the small flabby scornful smile were out of place among the Washington backslappers. He was ill at ease without his hired gang around him.
He was happier entertaining firstnighters and footlight favorites at the Holland House. In those years when Broadway still stopped at Fortysecond Street,
Millicent Willson 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
William Randolph Hearst.
In nineteen four he spent a lot of money putting his name up in electric lights at the Chicago Convention to land the Democratic nomination but Judge Parker and Wall 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 governorship away from the solemnwhiskered Hughes. There were Hearst for President clubs all over the country. He was making his way in politics spending millions 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 fellowmillionaires felt he was a traitor to his class but when he was taxed with his treason he answered:
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 newspaper-owner in the country, the proprietor of hundreds of square miles of ranching and mining country in California and Mexico,
his affairs were in such a scramble he had trouble borrowing a million dollars,
and politically he was ratpoison.
All the millions he signed away
all his skill at putting his own thoughts
into the skull 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 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 all the power of his papers, all his brilliance as a publisher into an effort to keep the country sane and neutral during the first world war;
he opposed loans to the Allies, seconded Bryan in his lonely fight to keep the interests of the United States as a whole paramount over the interests of the Morgan banks and the anglophile businessmen of the East;
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 Versailles 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 American flags at either end of the dateline and continually 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,
but Al Smith while he was still the sidewalks' hero rapped Hearst's knuckles when he tried to climb back onto the Democratic soundtruck.
In spite of enormous expenditures on forged documents he failed to bring about war with Mexico.
In spite of spraying hundreds of thousands of dollars into moviestudios he failed to put over his favorite moviestar as America's sweetheart.
And more and more the emperor of newsprint retired to his fief of San Simeon on the Pacific Coast, where he assembled a zoo, continued to dabble in movingpictures, collected warehouses full 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 banquethall and there spends his last years amid the relaxing adulations of screenstars, admen, screenwriters, publicitymen, columnists, millionaire editors,
a monarch of that new El Dorado
where the warmedover daydreams of all the ghettos
are churned into an opiate haze
more scarily blinding to the moneyless man
more fruitful of millions
than all 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 continues 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
advocating the salestax,
hissing dirty names at the defenders of civil liberties 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,
shrilling about the dangers of thought in the colleges.
Deport; jail.
Until he dies
the magnificent endlesslyrolling presses will pour out print for him, the whirring everywhere projectors will 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 storewindows, from the glasses of people he passed on the street, from the chromium rims of the headlights of automobiles. He wasn’t quite sure whether he had a hangover 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 photographs 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 broadcloth coat looked well anyway. The black eyes of the sodajerker were seeking his eyes out. “A heavy evening, eh?” Dick nodded and grinned. The sodajerker passed a thin red-knuckled hand over his patentleather hair. “I didn’t get off till one thirty an’ it takes me an hour to get home on the subway. A whale of a chance I got to…” “I’m late at the office now,” said Dick and paid and walked out, belching a little, into the sparkling morning street. He walked fast, taking deep breaths. By the time he was standing in the elevator with a sprinkling of stoutish fortyish welldressed men, executives like himself getting to their offices late, he had a definite sharp headache.