Art Young: His Life and Times on William Randolph Hearst

“Perhaps no editor has been so guilty of stirring up the baser passions of human beings as [|Hearst]. Often in his early years as an editor and publisher, he did some political arousings on the side of the workers. It helped him get circulation. Gradually, however, he evolved a policy which prevailed over all liberal doctrines that he might advocate-devoting his publications to the will of the big moneyed interests to have and to retain everything that they possessed and to insure their hopes of getting more through their 'superior intelligence'”

“Slacker had come into the language as a term of frequent use. Bundles of Hearst newspapers had been burned in Times Square because Hearst was slow in swinging to the Allied cause but in a few weeks he had swung, and American flags were printed all over his daily sheets. So-called pro-Germans were being tarred and feathered by mobs in the West. Frank Little of the I.W.W. executive board had been lynched by business men in Butte, Montana. And new and appalling tales of cruelty to conscientious objectors were coming out of the prisons where they were confined.”