FIVE HUNDRED MILLIONS IN BANK DEAL 1 страница

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 ex-
tension of the ticker services, the equipping of branch brokerage
offices with tickers, transparent, magnified translux stockquota-
tion rolls have had the natural result of stirring up nation-wide
interest in the stockmarket

POOR LITTLE RICH BOY

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;

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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 one-
sixth 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 Apper-
son 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.

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

The boy had few playmates; he was too rich to
get along with the others in the roughandtumble de-
mocracy 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 ice-
cream, imported candies, expensive toys, ponies, fire-
works 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 con-
sternation 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 miningtowns

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.

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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 softspoken and silent; he got the
other boys drunk and paid the bills, bought the fire-
works to celebrate Cleveland's election, hired the brass-
bands,

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 newspaperoffices. In New York he was taken
by Pulitzer's newfangled journalism. He didn't want
to write; he wanted to be a newspaperman. (News-
papermen 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 smil-
ing solemneyed young man

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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 dope-
parlors, 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. Per-
haps 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.

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W. R. got the money from her to enter the New York
fields 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 law-
yers 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 Ha-
vana. The trouble in Cuba was a goldmine for circu-
lation 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 revo-
lutionist 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 un-

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armed halfdrowned 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 pen-
andink drawings of women in underclothes and pre-
historic 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

and stepping into the limelight

wearing a black frockcoat and a tengallon hat,

presidential timber,

the millionaire 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 Holland House; the
night of his election he gave a big free show of fire-
works in Madison Square Garden; a mortar exploded
and killed 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
small flabby scornful smile were out of place among
the Washington backslappers. He was ill at ease with-
out 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 Conven-
tion 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 governor-
ship away from the solemnwhiskered Hughes. There
were Hearst for President clubs all over the country.

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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 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 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

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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 Amercian 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,

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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 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, 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 ban-
quethall and there spends his last years amid the re-
laxing 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 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

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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,

shrilling about the dangers of thought in the col-
leges.

Deport; jail.

Until he dies

the magnificent endlesslyrolling presses will pour
our 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 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-

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graphs 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 well 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 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 stand-
ing 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.

He'd hardly stretched his legs out under his desk when
the interoffice phone clicked. It was Miss Williams' voice:
"Good morning, Mr. Savage. We've been waiting for you
. . . Mr. Moorehouse says please step into his office, he
wants to speak with you a minute before the staff confer-
ence." Dick got up and stood a second with his lips pursed
rocking on the balls of his feet looking out the window
over the ashcolored blocks that stretched in a series of
castiron molds east to the chimneys of powerplants, the
bridge, the streak of river flashing back steel at the steel-
blue sky. Riveters shrilly clattered in the new huge con-
struction that was jutting up girder by girder at the corner
of Fortysecond. They all seemed inside his head like a
dentist's drill. He shuddered, belched and hurried along
the corridor into the large corner office.

J. W. was staring at the ceiling with his big jowly face
as expressionless as a cow's. He turned his pale eyes on
Dick without a smile. "Do you realize there are seventy-
five million people in this country unwilling or unable to

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go to a physician in time of sickness?" Dick twisted his
face into a look of lively interest. He's been talking to Ed
Griscolm, he said to himself. "Those are the people the
Bingham products have got to serve. He's touched only
the fringes of this great potential market.""His business
would be to make them feel they're smarter than the big-
bugs who go to Battle Creek," said Dick. J. W. frowned
thoughtfully.

Ed Griscolm had come in. He was a sallow long man
with an enthusiastic flash in his eye that flickered on and
off like an electriclight sign. He had a way of carrying his
arms like a cheerleader about to lead a college yell. Dick
said "Hello" without warmth. "Top of the morning,
Dick . . . a bit overhung I see. . . . Too bad, old man,
too bad."

"I was just saying, Ed," J. W. went on in his slow even
voice, "that our talkingpoints should be first that they
haven't scratched the top of their potential market of
seventyfive million people and second that a properlycon-
ducted campaign can eradicate the prejudice many people
feel against proprietary medicines and substitute a feeling
of pride in their use."

"It's smart to be thrifty . . . that sort of thing,"
shouted Ed.

"Selfmedication," said Dick. "Tell them the average
sodajerker knows more about medicine today than the
family physician did twentyfive years ago."

"They think there's something hick about patent medi-
cines," yelled Ed Griscolm. "We got to put patent medi-
cines on Park Avenue.""Proprietary medicines," said
J. W. reprovingly.

Dick managed to wipe the smile off his face. "We've
got to break the whole idea," he said, "into its component
parts."

"Exactly." J. W. picked up a carvedivory papercutter
and looked at it in different angles in front of his face.

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The office was so silent they could hear the traffic roaring
outside and the wind whistling between the steel window-
frame and the steel window. Dick and Ed Griscolm held
their breath. J. W. began to talk. "The American public
has become sophisticated . . . when I was a boy in Pitts-
burgh all we thought of was display advertising, the ap-
peal to the eye. Now with the growth of sophistication
we must think of the other types of appeal, and the eradi-
cation of prejudice. . . . Bingo . . . the name is out of
date, it's all wrong. A man would be ashamed to lunch
at the Metropolitan Club with a bottle of Bingo at his
table . . . that must be the talkingpoint. . . . Yesterday
Mr. Bingham seemed inclined to go ahead. He was balk-
ing a little at the cost of the campaign. . . ."

"Never mind," screeched Ed Griscolm, "we'll nail the
old buzzard's feet down yet."

"I guess he has to be brought around gently just as
you were saying last night, J. W.," said Dick in a low
bland voice. "They tell me Halsey of Halsey O'Connor's
gone to bed with a nervous breakdown tryin' to get old
Bingham to make up his mind." Ed Griscolm broke into
a tittering laugh.

J. W. got to his feet with a faint smile. When J. W.
smiled Dick smiled too. "I think he can be brought to
appreciate the advantages connected with the name . . .
dignity . . . established connections. . . ." Still talking
J. W. led the way down the hall into the large room with
a long oval mahogany table in the middle of it where the
whole office was gathered. J. W. went first with his con-
siderable belly waggling a little from side to side as he
walked, and Dick and Ed Griscolm, each with an armful
of typewritten projects in paleblue covers, followed a step
behind him. Just as they were settling down after a certain
amount of coughing and honking and J. W. was begin-
ning about how there were seventy five million people, Ed
Griscolm ran out and came back with a neatly drawn chart

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in blue and red and yellow lettering showing the layout
of the proposed campaign. An admiring murmur ran
round the table.

Dick caught a triumphant glance in his direction from
Ed Griscolm. He looked at J. W. out of the corner of his
eye. J. W. was looking at the chart with an expressionless
face. Dick walked over to Ed Griscolm and patted him
on the shoulder. "A swell job, Ed old man," he whispered.
Ed Griscolm's tense lips loosened into a smile. "Well,
gentlemen, what I'd like now is a snappy discussion," said
J. W. with a mean twinkle in his paleblue eye that
matched for a second the twinkle of the small diamonds
in his cufflinks.

While the others talked Dick sat staring at J. W.'s
hands spread out on the sheaf of typewritten papers on
the table in front of him. Oldfashioned starched cuffs pro-
truded from the sleeves of the perfectlyfitting double-
breasted grey jacket and out of them hung two pudgy
strangely hicklooking hands with liverspots on them. All
through the discussion Dick stared at the hands, all the
time writing down phrases on his scratchpad and scratching
them out. He couldn't think of anything. His brains felt
boiled. He went on scratching away with his pencil at
phrases that made no sense at all. On the fritz at the
Ritz . . . Bingham's products cure the fits.