Over the years, I’ve found that you can just cross out the name “william randolph hearst” and replace with “ruppert murdoch”. That perhaps does not follow precisely with this piece. And I don’t know what Murdoch’s ‘rosebud’ moment would have been.
And then Hearst saw Hitler. He at once told him (by his own account) that he did not approve of dictatorships. Hitler thereupon explained that his dictatorship had arisen from democracy, first by a narrow victory, than a three fourths majority, then a four fifths majority, so that he “must not allow a small minority to interfere with the will of the majority.” Even so, Hearst repeated he was opposed to autocracy. So he did not, so far as we know, explain the new Americanism and tell how the San Francisco strike had been smashed. But he came away from Hitler and Hitler’s Germany with a clear idea which he expouned in an interview on landing, 9-28-34:
“The fascist party of Italy was organized to quell the disturbances and disorders of Communism. The fascist party of Germany was organized for the same purpose. It was intended to and very likely did prevent Germany from going Communist and cooperating with Soviet Russia. This is the great policy, the great achievement which makes the Hitler regime popular with the German people, and which enables it to survive very obvious and very serious mistakes.” […] […] […]
Having established this basis for fascism, Mr. Hearst launched his winter campaign against academic freedom and the Communist meanace. […] This was just the time when the suppression of crime was a national theme. Agents of the Department of Justice were shooting down “public enemies.” Hearst was shooting them down intellectually, sending spies to college professors trying to trap them into sympathetic statements about Russia. The story of this espionage in the universities has been adequately told. It is noteworthy that for all his campaign for more money for elementary education, he has no use for academic freedom. “Academic freedom is a phrase taken over by the radical groups as a new camouflage for the teaching of alien doctrines.” […]
Ostensibly he was still fighting fot he old democracy, but he was not thinking about it. The most revealing flash into his real mind came in an interview he gave a French correspondent about the Phillipines. (12-17-34) “If we had a system of government of the date of the aeroplane, or even the automobile, we never should have abondoned the Phillippines.” Now what system of government dates with the aeroplane? At any rate not democracy. “Our nation for the first time begins to shrink,” he grieved, “and when a nation begins shrinking there is no knowing when it will stop. Only decadent nations contract; vigoroug nations expand. Japan is expanding.”
Japan’s government is near fascism. Hitler would never abandon the Philippines. Hitler’s Germany is expanding, not contracting. But America, which expanded under the democracy of Hearst’s youth, now is “decadent.” That is, unless it can be rejuvenated, like Germany and Italy.