H.L. Mencken

The American Mercury/July, 1928

The Case of Hearst

Hearst, An American Phenomenon, by John K. Winkler. $4, 368 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Mr. Winkler is obviously too light a psychological grappler to get anywhere with Hearst. The man is simply beyond him, as George Washington was beyond Woodrow Wilson. Confronted, for example, by Hearst’s recent astounding volteface, whereby Dr. Coolidge has curiously acquired brains and old Andy Mellon has become a sort of Santa Claus, he can only observe humorlessly that ‘‘all this would indicate a growing conservatism of thought in an aging man who has vast properties to leave to his sons.’’ The theory, unluckily, is so banal that it fails to satisfy even its author, so he adds, “‘But I believe these quirks are just evidences of Hearst’s bland inconsistency.’’ It would be hard to imagine a schoolboy, or even a schoolmaster, doing worse.

Nor is Mr. Winkler much better when he tackles the other problems presented by the Hearstian psyche. He gives a workmanlike objective account of the man, but it never gets beneath the surface. The young Hearst who was expelled from Harvard for a too great exuberance of spirits seems to be quite as mysterious to him as the disintegrating Hearst who snoozes voluptuously beneath his California vine and fig-tree, diverted by the Rotarian platitudes of Polonius Brisbane and the soft gurgle of movie queens. Hearst is sixty-five. It is not, intrinsically, a great age. Men have done good work, and even immortal work, far later in life. But not journalists. Not newspaper men. The roaring Hoe presses grind the life out of even the sturdiest long before his kidneys give out. Hearst, professionally, has been moribund for years. What remains of him today is only a caricature of the man who, in the McKinley epoch, made journalistic history.

What he thinks of himself no one will ever know, for he is singularly reticent and even secretive, and men who have worked with him for a quarter of a century seem to be as completely baffled by him as Mr. Winkler. The two men who might have written satisfactory lives of him were Brisbane and Ambrose Bierce. Both have now joined the immortal dead, Bierce biologically and Brisbane spiritually. Bierce, in his last years, professed to hate Hearst powerfully, but all the while it was plain that he also admired him—a capital combination in a biographer. Brisbane, for the sake of posterity, should have quarreled with him ten or fifteen years ago; the result would have been a thrilling book, combining all the virtues of Boswell’s ‘‘Johnson’’ and the Bryce report of atrocities in Belgium. But now it is too late, for Brisbane appears to be growing forgetful—so forgetful, in fact, that he has forgotten all the lofty economic and socio-economic principles of his own youth and prime. I observe him applying a vaseline mop to such grotesque heroes as Andy Mellon and the late Judge Elbert H. Gary, and am filled thereby with a vast sadness. For I am growing old myself, and so I can remember when he operated upon fellows of that kind with very different weapons. It was a gaudy era, and, for one, I greatly enjoyed living in it.

The central fact about Hearst, I venture to suggest, is that there has always been far more innocence in him than guile—that he remains at sixty-five, as he was when he singed the whiskers of Pulitzer—a goatish and unsubtle college boy, eager only to have a hell of a time. Whoever tries to read any rationality into his journalistic theory will end with a dizzy ringing in the ears. There was no sense in his support of Bryan in 1896; it was simply a device to inflame Mousterian Man and give Pulitzer to sweat. Bryan himself, though designed by God to be fooled always, quickly got the measure of it and departed from the Hearstian embrace, his Bible clutched to his breast. Nor was there any sense in Hearst’s riotous brewing of war medicine in 1898—that is, journalistically—for the war cost him a great deal more than he got out of it, both in money and in prestige. He whooped it up simply because he was full of malicious animal magnetism, and eager for a bawdy show. Mr. Winkler tells how vastly he enjoyed his own modest share in the carnage. The only Spaniards he actually encountered were disarmed and half scared to death, but he leaped upon them with fearful hosannas and took them prisoner in the best manner of his own special commissioners.

His political career, now unhappily closed, was one long record of surprises and imbecilities. He got into politics by a sort of accident, and continued in a purely sportive spirit. It was often hard to determine which side he was on, and what he advocated. His cabinet of advisers consisted mainly of newspaper reporters trained in his own city-rooms: no doubt it amused him to observe how easy it was for these amateurs to alarm the professionals. Al Smith, who takes politics seriously, distrusted him from the start, and finally declared war to the death upon him. The history of his Independence League deserves to be written; I herewith commend the job to Frank R. Kent. This so-called party was simply a gigantic bladder attached to a string, and with it Hearst battered the heads of all the professional politicians. Life must have been extremely pleasant for him in those days; if he did not laugh himself to sleep every night, then I overestimate his intelligence. At St. Louis, in 1904, he actually came within reach of the Democratic presidential nomination. If the bluff of Alto B. Parker had been called, the convention might very well have turned to him. If would have been a colossal campaign: Hearst vs. Roosevelt. The two men had many things in common, but what they mainly had in common was their boyish delight in uproar, their naive lust to make sensations. Naturally enough, they became bitter enemies, and Roosevelt spent his last years denouncing Hearst. But he learnt more from Hearst, first and last, than he learnt from any other man save P. T. Barnum. At one time in his career at least a half of his policies were borrowed from the chromatic headlines of the New York Evening Journal.

I suspect that Hearst’s taste for violent rough-house survives to this day, but of late he has shown a lamentable falling-off in his old high ingenuity and enterprise. He really passed from the scene when the new tabloids began to break up his monopoly on dime-novel news. He should have invented the tabloid himself; it is a wonder, indeed, that he didn’t do it twenty-five years ago. As it was, the onslaught of the Daily News and the Graphic caught him at a bad time. He was trying to reorganize his business and cut down his losses, and the Huns were within his citadel before he knew it. By the time he came into action it was too late; his imitation tabloids were failures, and some time ago he sold them to the Hon. Alexander P. Moore, LL.D., Ambassador to Peru and relict of Lillian Russell. The transaction was mysterious, and is still the subject of suspicion in newspaper offices. The episode of the forged Mexican documents brought Hearst out of his California retirement, but only transiently, and, I am bound to add, ridiculously. The old steam was simply not there. The business was handled clumsily, and its net issue only called painful attention to the rustiness of the Hearst machine. Evidently there are no more Sam Chamberlains, Karl Deckers or James Creelmans in the Evening Journal office. A genuine Hearst paper cannot be run by bookkeepers; it demands men of action, with lush and florid imaginations.

Hearst deserves more and better of his country than he will ever get. It is the fashion to speak of him contemptuously, with dark references to matters that are nobody’s business. I think there is a great deal of envy in all this: not many Americans, even among millionaires, have ever been accused so beautifully. The dislike of the man that prevails in newspaper circles is only a smarting of old wounds. He shook journalism to its foundations, and exposed the incompetence of more than one highly smug newspaper proprietor. They were all imitating him by 1900, and they all show the marks of his teeth to this day. American journalism before his time was extremely ponderous and platitudinous. Even Pulitzer greatly fancied himself as a publicist, and showed plain traces of the messianic delusion. Even the old Sun labored under a sense of responsibility to the Flag and the Truth. Hearst upset all that by parodying it. He made a burlesque of the whole God-save-us scheme of things. He proved that what the populace really wanted was simply a roaring show—and he brought to the business of giving it that show a resourcefulness that was unparalleled and a daring that was stupendous. It was quite impossible for the old-fashioned papers to stand up to him; they had to follow him or perish. Thus he set them all to whooping and bawling, and the net result was a rapid decline in their old authority. The proletariat, taken to a palpable circus, became cynical, and it remains so to this day. Nothing remains sacred to it. It is still exploited, to be sure, but it no longer worships its exploiters. In 1895 the Sunday-school scholars of the land were yet being taught to venerate such heroes as Commodore Vanderbilt. Today that adoration is confined to a small caste of humorless fanatics—bishops, Washington correspondents, Rotarians. Hearst is probably the only rich man ever heard of in America who has really had a good time. Harvard tried hard to tame him, but failed dismally. The blood of adventurers ran in him, and he had a restless and iconoclastic soul. Instead of wasting his money upon hospitals and libraries and going in for social climbing, he poured his millions into yellow journals, and was presently enjoying all the thrills of a mad King. The populace swarmed after him; the politicians began to fawn over him; the money barons trembled at his name. Wasn’t that better than playing golf? Wasn’t it better than becoming an overseer of Harvard? Wasn’t it better than acting as banker to Elder Hays? I think it was. I believe that Hearst got his money’s worth, and that he doesn’t regret the cost today. That he was deceived, now and then, by his own buncombe, is probable; it is the human way. But he was not deceived very often. It was the show that kept him going, not any brummagem sense of duty. He reduced all solemn and highfalutin things, including especially patriotism, to a common level of clowning. In other words, he reduced them to their actual content of truth. I believe his career has been a very useful one, despite his obvious deficiencies. Cant is still the curse of America, but it is not quite the curse that it used to be. Today even Hearst himself cannot pump any dignity into Andy Mellon.

Pseudo-Science

THE NEW CRIMINOLOGY: A Consideration of the Chemical Causation of Abnormal Behavior, by Max G. Schlapp and Edward H. Smith. $4. 834 x 554; 325 pp. New York: Boni & Liveright.

The theory here is simple enough—simple, indeed, to the point of austerity. A criminal is not a criminal, but only a sick man. He kidnaps a child, holds up a Thom McAn shoe-shop or bumps off a policeman, not because he is a scoundrel, but because there is something the matter with his ductless glands: either they are not functioning enough or they are functioning too much. The thing to do with him, once his guilt of the lamentable acts laid against him is formally established, is to lodge him in hospital and set a posse of experts upon him. They will first determine precisely which of his glands is misbehaving, and then they will proceed to cure him. Cured, he will be turned loose. The jury which tries him will settle only the question of his guilt. The judge presiding will simply keep order in the courtroom. The whole business of disposing of the culprit will be left to the experts. Criminals will “be rated, not according to their crimes, but according to their defects, diseases, deficiencies and the like.”’

The only trouble with this theory is that it is nonsense. There is absolutely no reason to believe that any considerable proportion of criminals are afflicted with disorders of the ductless glands—that is, to any extent beyond the rest of us. And there is no evidence whatever that medicine can cure any considerable proportion of those who are. To turn the whole gang over to so-called experts—in the department of endocrinolgy, in fact, no such experts yet exist: there are only guessers and quacks—would be to reduce the administration of the criminal law to a Gilbert and Sullivan level, and put a high premium on crime. All of the cleverer criminals would fool the experts, and get away. All of the dumb ones would be converted into helpless laboratory animals, and exposed to all sorts of dubious and dangerous experiments.

The argument of the authors—one of them was a medical man and the other a writer of books of mysteries: both are now dead—is full of thumping non sequiturs. Because children with deficient thyroid glands commonly show a defective moral sense they conclude glibly that adults who show a defective moral sense are afflicted in some more or less similar manner. And because such children may be restored to normalcy by giving them thyroid extract they conclude that doses of the same or of some analogous medicament will restore gunmen, Prohibition agents and pick pockets to decency. Here logic is beaten, with clubs and thrown out to die. There is nothing worse in the literature of chiropractic. The amazing thing is that such nonsense should be taken seriously. But taken seriously it is, at least in certain quarters. In more than one state active efforts are being made to set up such hospitals of self-appointed ‘‘experts,” and soon or late, no doubt, they will be in full blast. Even in New York certain high officers of state are reported to be believers in the new magic.

That criminals are sometimes defectives is well known, but that all of them are, or even a majority of them, is certainly not true. Every time any large number of them has been examined they have turned out to be quite as intelligent as the average of the populace from which they come. Not a few tests, indeed, have shown them to be decidedly more intelligent than their jailers. If they differ from the normal it is only in the accentuation of qualities that, in crowded societies, tend to be dangerous —an excess of daring, a lack of respect for property, a distaste for honest labor, i.e., for slavery. Most of these qualities, in themselves, are not signs of inferiority: there are circumstances under which they bear a high value, as in times of war. The difference between a good soldier and a good criminal, in truth, is but little greater than the difference between a movie actor and a bird of paradise. The trouble with the criminal is that society has invented no way to utilize his propensities—that it tries absurdly to obliterate them by torturing him. As well try to cure a dry Congressman of his thirst by feeding him on pretzels.

A really rational criminology remains to be devised. The fact that it is still lacking is a lovely proof of the intelligence of the human race. It must be a criminology devoid of ready and hollow theorizing. It must not fall into the Lombrosan error of assuming that all criminals are alike, it must not try to dispose of them by converting them into something that they are not, and can never be. No policeman of any experience believes in the reform of genuine criminals, whether by persuasion or force. He knows that the most the system of punishments can accomplish is to make a given criminal harmless temporarily. My private belief, reached after years of powerful meditation, is that the only punishment worth anything at all is the capital variety. It begs the question, but it at least gets rid of the concrete criminal. His qualities, properly utilized, might be of immense value to society. But society is too stupid to utilize them, and so the only way to dispose of the menace that he presents is to convert him into a gaseous vertebrate, with wings of ether. In that character he can do no wrong.

Chronicles of Sin

TAMMANY HALL, by M. R. Werner. $5. 934 x 64; 986 pp. Garden City, L. I.: Doubleday, Doran & Company

THE GANGS OF NEW YORK: An Informal History of the Underworld, by Herbert Asbury. $4. 854 x 5 34; 382 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Tue transactions described in these volumes were nearly all in contempt of the law of the land, and many of them were also subversive of God’s holy ordinances; nevertheless, I confess frankly, though a baptized man, that I have greatly enjoyed treading of them. Both authors show an unashamed delight in them, and especially Mr. Asbury. In the past his historical researches have been in the field of Methodist theology, but here he turns without batting an eye to the dreadful doings of such sinister New Yorkers as Marm Mandelbaum, Kid Glove Rosie, Baboon Connolly, Monk Eastman, Paul Kelly, Lefty Louie and Gyp the Blood. The result is a chronicle of fascinating interest, and, it seems to me, of sober historical value. For the history of the gangs of New York is largely the history of Tammany Hall, and the history of Tammany is the history of the city. The Hall is now almost as virtuous as Bishop Manning or Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, but in its day it was full of sin, and out of that sin flowed a great deal of thrilling melodrama. The story that Mr. Asbury tells is worth a dozen novels of blood and thunder. He writes simply, clearly and with immense effectiveness. There is a pawky humor in him that makes even horrors charming. He has not devoted years of study to the Wesleyan demonology for nothing.

Mr. Werner’s volume is the best history of Tammany ever written, and by far. There are moments when the villainies he describes arouse him to something resembling indignation, but they are not many. In the main he keeps to an admirable historical calm, piling up his appalling facts scientifically, always with names and dates. The research behind his book must have been enormous; he has apparently examined and weighed all of the controversies that have roared around Tammany for a hundred years. Very sagaciously, he divides his chronicle into a series of elaborate character sketches of concrete men—Tweed, Croker, Honest John Kelly, A. Oakey Hall, Big Tim Sullivan, Peter B. Sweeny and Charlie Murphy. The thing never becomes a mere political diatribe; it is kept on the human plane, and the temptations of men are set forth as well as their crimes. The last chapters, dealing with the rise of Murphy, the Hearst and Hylan episodes, the impeachment of Sulzer, and the gradual “reform” of Tammany, are of special interest. Much of the matter in them is available in no other accessible form.

Both books are well illustrated. Mr. Asbury’s has a brief bibliography and a glossary of early gangster slang, but no index. Mr. Werner’s has a longer bibliography, and a good index.