The Press: Heyday

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As William Randolph Hearst sat down to dinner one evening last week he had good reason to reflect that of all his crowded, exciting 67 years, the year 1930, especially the Indian Summer weeks thereof, were among the most exciting and satisfactory he had ever known. His company this evening were of the most distinguished. The list next morning in the newspapers would begin "Former President & Mrs. Calvin Coolidge, Mr. & Mrs. Owen D. Young. . . ." And among the stags were Vincent Astor, Percy Rivington Pyne II, Charles E. Mitchell, Charles Hayden, William Rhinelander Stewart. It was a housewarming party to install Mrs. Hearst in the old Belmont estate at Sands Point, L. I., which Mr. Hearst bought several years ago. Soon he would be off again to his 30,000-acre suzerainty in California, trailing across the continent clouds of a glory peculiarly dear to a newspaper man. After dinner he gave his guests a taste of that glory—showed them a Hearst-Metro-tone newsreel of himself as he had appeared debarking from Europe in Manhattan the fortnight before, grinning broadly, waving his hat, clutching the Stars & Stripes.

Nothing could have pleased Mr. Hearst more than the episode which lay behind that triumphant return—his expulsion from France for inflammatory eloquence in Germany and because his henchman had filched a secret document pertaining to a projected Anglo-French naval agreement in 1928 (TIME, Oct. 22, 1928). That episode had put him where he loves to be, on the All-American defensive. It had given him an opening for a brilliantly sarcastic reply to France which he released as soon as he landed in England. It had made it seem appropriate for a swarm of disabled War veterans to join in and freshen up New York's rather overdone greeting ceremony and for Boston, on the occasion of its tercentenary, to give him a "Constitutional Big Stick" cut from an elm on Lexington Battlefield and to call him one of the three foremost defenders and upholders of Liberty and the Constitution (TIME, Sept. 29). It had furnished him a text for a national radio speech on the sanctity of the U. S. passport and had given his newshawks a standing heckle-question for the State Department: what was the U. S. going to do about the indignity suffered by its great citizen? The State Department up to last week was still replying: Nothing.

The year 1930 was the year in which Mr. Hearst sold his employes and the public a preferred stock interest in his publishing business, the world's largest (TIME, June 30, July 14). It was the year in which he got into the pulpwood business in Canada so that his press (25 newspapers, 12 magazines), which uses more newsprint than any other man's press, might be assured forever of low prices. It was the year that he hired Publisher George Henry Doran away from his own book firm to run the Hearst-Cosmopolitan Book Corp. But eclipsing all these milestones was that French business. Nothing like it had come to Mr. Hearst since the golden years when he was precipitating the Spanish-American war, getting the Panama Canal fortified, startling the nation with the Yellow Peril.