* William Randolph Hearst—­a young California millionaire who became the most powerful newspaper owner in the country.  His newspapers were published in all the large cities, and they appealed to the perishing middle class and to the proletariat.  So large was his following that he managed to take possession of the empty shell of the old Democratic Party.  He occupied an anomalous position, preaching an emasculated socialism combined with a nondescript sort of petty bourgeois capitalism.  It was oil and water, and there was no hope for him, though for a short period he was a source of serious apprehension to the Plutocrats.

** The cost of advertising was amazing in those helter- skelter times.  Only the small capitalists competed, and therefore they did the advertising.  There being no competition where there was a trust, there was no need for the trusts to advertise.

The whole middle class had not yet been exterminated.  The sturdy skeleton of it remained; but it was without power.  The small manufacturers and small business men who still survived were at the complete mercy of the Plutocracy.  They had no economic nor political souls of their own.  When the fiat of the Plutocracy went forth, they withdrew their advertisements from the Hearst papers.

Hearst made a gallant fight.  He brought his papers out at a loss of a million and a half each month.  He continued to publish the advertisements for which he no longer received pay.  Again the fiat of the Plutocracy went forth, and the small business men and manufacturers swamped him with a flood of notices that he must discontinue running their old advertisements.  Hearst persisted.  Injunctions were served on him.  Still he persisted.  He received six months’ imprisonment for contempt of court in disobeying the injunctions, while he was bankrupted by countless damage suits.  He had no chance.  The Plutocracy had passed sentence on him.  The courts were in the hands of the Plutocracy to carry the sentence out.  And with Hearst crashed also to destruction the Democratic Party that he had so recently captured.

With the destruction of Hearst and the Democratic Party, there were only two paths for his following to take.  One was into the Socialist Party; the other was into the Republican Party.  Then it was that we socialists reaped the fruit of Hearst’s pseudo-socialistic preaching; for the great Majority of his followers came over to us.

The expropriation of the farmers that took place at this time would also have swelled our vote had it not been for the brief and futile rise of the Grange Party.  Ernest and the socialist leaders fought fiercely to capture the farmers; but the destruction of the socialist press and publishing houses constituted too great a handicap, while the mouth-to-mouth propaganda had not yet been perfected.  So it was that politicians like Mr. Calvin, who were themselves farmers long since expropriated, captured the farmers and threw their political strength away in a vain campaign.