sum, and more, he got
back from the middle class in payment for advertising. The source of his
financial strength lay wholly in the middle class. The trusts did not
advertise.** To destroy Hearst, all that was necessary was to take away
from him his advertising.

* 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