from Daily Worker (January 22, 1935)
“Yellow Hearts in Frenzy of Anti-Communist Hysteria” (January 22, 1935)
Maxwell Bodenheim

YELLOW against a yellow version of red–Hearts levelling his soiled, Hollywood fingers, in mock, holy anger and dollar-bill patriotism, to arouse the workers of America into a poisonous hysteria against the only party sincerely fighting and struggling in their behalf, the Communist Party, U.S.A.

Hearst made a tour of Europe last summer and as all of the capitalistic newspapers admitted, staged a secret interview with Hitler in Berlin. No stenographers were present at this conference to plot new, repressive measures against the awakening workers in Germany and America, but it does not require much imagination to report part of the dialogue as follows:

HEARST: I will sell an anti-Communist program to the workers of America–how can I do it?

HITLER: Well, you can’t jail and torture the Communists as I have done. That may come later, but you must pave the way. the first step is to make a filthy scarecrow–a whiskered, horribly leering figure with a bomb in one hand, a knife in the other, and several teeth missing.

HEARST: Marvelous–and what else?

HITLER: We’ll get all the hacks in your country, pay them well, and instruct them to put their fangs into Lenin. Make them twist his teachings into a kind of anarchism. You know what I mean–claim that he told the workers to blow up the corner bank and assassinate the President, or kidnap him. Never mention the fact that he advocated mass action and an endless fight for the immediate, partial demands of the workers, to increase their morale, and rouse them to the final rebellion against the financial-monopolists draining the blood of their lives–I had to be careful about that, myself.

HEARST: O.K. Hitler, old sweet–I’ve got the line and I’ll follow it, don’t worry.

* * *

IT MUST be understood, however, that Hearst is only a puppet-figure. He is not wagging a one-man campaign against the interests of the awakening workers of America. Hearst is only the bad-boy, the rabid false-face of sinister interests. The finance-lords of this country empty him in the effort to twist the minds of the works and enrage them against their own flesh and blood, against the Communists living in your block and mine, braving police-terror on the picket-lines of one strike after another, leading the fight of the unemployed for decent insurance against torment and starvation, helping the veterans in their struggle for back-pay denied to them by a government able to expend a billion dollars for war-preparation–the lists of workers’ grievances and demands, if piled together, would surpass the height of the Empire State Building three to one.

And what is the answer to Hearst? Distortions, venom, the shriek of generalities, and foul vaporings, aimless inciting to hatred, to cover up the miserable lack of anything remotely resembling a constructive program to free the American workers, the plundered American middle-class, from he suavely veiled viciousness of Wall Street and ts cold-blooded attacks on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

* * *

THIS man, William Randolph Hearst, sitting in the hacienda of his vast ranch in California, sleekly intrenched, remote from the tortured needs of millions in factories, mines, mills, farms and offices, pretends to be a staunch defender of American men and women–the very man who opposed the right of his own reporters  to join a union advancing their interests, the man who spits sex-scandals and trivial divorce-cases into printed headlines throughout the land, the man who blazons the news of prize-fights and society-revels on his front pages and tucks the distorted report of a workers’ strike on page twenty-seven bottom corner.

Always a jumping-jack, Hearst flirted with scores of intrigues for favor–mock-crusades and blessings for and against Tammany Hall. Shouts against the futile League of Nations in behalf of American capitalistic isolation, fake rantings against Wall Street followed by eulogies of its leading figures–the typical twistings and squirming of a millionaire-demagogue veiling his profits beneath every attitude of “public welfare and betterment.”

When the government decreed the useless slaughter of American workers in the late World War, Hearst made a grandstand gesture of opposition, during the first few weeks and then recanted and peppered his lying sheets with little, American flags and frenzied exhortations against the “huns” who, allegedly, were planning to invade and capture the United States.

* * *

SEVENTEEN years later, however, this man journeyed to Germany to arrange an interview with the blood-thirsty oppressor of the very people whom he formerly maligned. This, too, is the man who dictated feigned shudders of disapproval against the Soviet Union and its elimination of a band of White Guard mercenaries hired to assassinate a beloved Soviet leader, Kirov, and sabotage the hard-won freedom of the Workers and Peasants Republics the man who has never lifted a whisper in support of Tom Mooney, in behalf of workers shot down in strikes throughout the country, int he cause of workers jailed and terrorized from Maine to California.

He does not dare to admit the truth about the Soviet Republics, where unemployment has been banished and security is the lot of every man and woman, because such a confession would rip the clothes from his hypocrisies and reveal a contrast overwhelming and enlightening to the workers and the equally crushed lower-bourgeoisie of the United States.

Hearst is not merely assaulting Communists–he is a menace to every vestige of liberalism and free-speech still practices within our land, and to oppose hi is to defend the right to breathe, the scant liberty which he befouls and assails in every possible manner.