It was good fun for Mr. Hearst to do this. Watching his newspapers, what has struck me most is the sheer audacity of them. Audacity is his characteristic quality, and it is a characteristic American quality—it places him among our national treasures, along with Mark Twain, and P. T. Barnum, and Buffalo Bill, and the Mississippi steamboats with the “nigger on the safety-valve.”
I am told by friends of Mr. Hearst that his instinct from the start was for democracy. If so, so much the better; but it is not necessary to my hypothesis. A newspaper has to have editorial opinions; and they had best be opinions that please its readers. If we are to publish a paper for the masses to read, we must also voice the hopes and the longings of the masses.
So Mr. Hearst turned traitor to his class. He seems to have done this instinctively, and without pangs. I find, what is very singular and striking, that the members of his own class hate him, not only publicly, but personally. It seems to have pleased him to defy all their conventions. I was told, for example, that when he first came to New York, he made himself a scandal in the “Tenderloin.” I was perplexed about that, for the members of our “second generation” are generally well known in the Tenderloin, and nobody calls it a scandal. But one young society man who had known Hearst well gave me the reason—and he spoke with real gravity: “It wasn’t what he did—we all do it: but it was the way he did. He didn’t take the trouble to hide what he did.”
I have made clear in this book my belief that the masses are driven to revolt by the pressure of stern and ruthless economic force. They were ignorant and helpless, and among our men of wealth and power there was no one to help them—there was no one among all our intellectual leaders to voice their wrongs. They were left to help themselves—so what more natural than that it should occur to some enterprising young millionaire to leap into the breach? There was endless excitement and notoriety to be won—and at the end, perhaps, power of a new and quite incredible sort.
You will observe that I am taking, deliberately, the lowest possible view. I am dealing with material conditions and picturing a material remedy for them. My point is, that whatever he may be personally, Mr. Hearst is mortgaged, body and soul, to the course to which he has given himself; not only his public reputation, but his entire fortune, is in his newspapers, and the public is the master of his newspapers. He has conjured a storm which he cannot possibly control—he must play out to the end the part he has chosen.
It is very curious to observe how his rôle has taken hold of him and changed him. I am told that when he first came to New York he wore checked trousers and fancy ties; and now he wears the traditional soft hat and frock coat of our statesmen. And also, I think, the rôle has changed his character. For this struggle is a real one, it is a struggle of the people for life; the cause is a cause of truth and justice, and the man does not live who can do battle for it as Mr. Hearst has done, and not come to take fire with the passion of it. The man does not live who can make the enemies Mr. Hearst has made, and not take a real and vital interest in the task of bringing them to their knees. I believe that Mr. Hearst is to-day as sincere a man as we have in political life.
It may be, of course, that some one else will get the Democratic nomination in 1912; that matters not at all in my thesis—the one thing certain is that it will be some man who stands pledged to put an end to class-government. Following it there will be a campaign of an intensity of fury such as this country has never before witnessed in its history.
Let us outline in a few words the situation as it will then exist.
In the first place there will be two or three million—perhaps five or ten million—men out of work. They will have been out for a year or two, and have had plenty of time to work up excitement. They may have forced Congress to provide them some temporary employment—which will, of course, be the first taste of blood to the tiger. They will certainly have been waging strikes of a violence never before known—they will have been shot down in great numbers, and they may have done a great deal of burning and dynamiting. That some particularly conspicuous individual like Mr. Rockefeller or Mr. Baer may have been assassinated, seems more than likely; that a “Coxey’s Army” of much larger size will have marched on Washington, seems quite certain.
When I was in Chicago, just after the last “Beef Strike,” I met half a dozen labour leaders who told me an interesting story. Chicago has the most thoroughly revolutionary working-class of any city in the country, and towards the end of this strike they were deeply stirred, and there had been several conferences in which a complete program had been laid out for an “anti-rent strike.” On a certain day, all the working people of Chicago were to refuse to pay rent until the meat-packers gave in. The project was nipped by the settlement of the strike, but it only waits a new occasion to be put into effect. By the time which we are picturing here, it will quite certainly have spread east and west to the two oceans, so that not half our city population will be paying any rent for their homes at this time.