Hearst’s journalistic ethics were probably never more clearly exposed than during the national election campaign of 1936. It is true that eighty per cent of the newspapers in the United States spread slanders and calumnies against the President. But the Hearst organs pulled all the stops and thundered vilification with all the resources at their command. The President was portrayed as a lunatic, a wastrel arid a cartoonist’s version of a frothing Communist. Picture and text described him and his advisers as dangerously radical, malicious and altogether feeble-minded. The Hearst press did not hesitate to attribute the source of Roosevelt’s social legislation to Moscow. Nor did consistency deter Hearst from charging plagiarism from Hitler and Mussolini. His newspapers shouted denunciation and abuse. Sound familiar? This work is the only complete exposition of the financial, political and social results of the career of William Randolph Hearst.

""Imperial San Francisco" provides a myth-shattering interpretation of the hidden costs that the growth of San Francisco has exacted on its surrounding regions, presenting along the way a revolutionary new theory of urban development".--"Palo Alto Daily News". 86 photos.

First published in 1999, this celebrated history of San Francisco traces the exploitation of both local and distant regions by prominent families—the Hearsts, de Youngs, Spreckelses, and others—who gained power through mining, ranching, water and energy, transportation, real estate, weapons, and the mass media. The story uncovered by Gray Brechin is one of greed and ambition on an epic scale. Brechin arrives at a new way of understanding urban history as he traces the connections between environment, economy, and technology and discovers links that led, ultimately, to the creation of the atomic bomb and the nuclear arms race. In a new preface, Brechin considers the vulnerability of cities in the post-9/11 twenty-first century.

At the turn of the century, New York City's Germans constituted a culturally and politically dynamic community, with a population 600,000 strong. Yet fifty years later, traces of its culture had all but disappeared. What happened? The conventional interpretation has been that, in the face of persecution and repression during World War I, German immigrants quickly gave up their own culture and assimilated into American mainstream life. But in Translating America, Peter Conolly-Smith offers a radically different analysis. He argues that German immigrants became German-Americans not out of fear, but instead through their participation in the emerging forms of pop culture. Drawing from German and English newspapers, editorials, comic strips, silent movies, and popular plays, he reveals that German culture did not disappear overnight, but instead merged with new forms of American popular culture before the outbreak of the war. Vaudeville theaters, D.W. Griffith movies, John Philip Sousa tunes, and even baseball games all contributed to German immigrants' willing transformation into Americans. Translating America tackles one of the thorniest questions in American history: How do immigrants assimilate into, and transform, American culture?

Alexander Pantages was 13 when he arrived in the U.S. in the 1880s, after contracting malaria in Panama. He opened his first motion picture theater in 1902 and went on to build one of the largest and most important independently-owned theater chains in the country. At the height of the Pantages Theaters' reach, he owned or operated 78 theaters across the U.S. and Canada. He amassed a fortune, yet he could not read or write English. In 1929 he was convicted of sexually assaulting a 17-year-old dancer--a scandal that destroyed his empire and reduced him to a pariah. The day his grandest theater, the Pantages Hollywood, opened in 1930, he lay sick in a jailhouse infirmary. His conviction was overturned a year later after an appeal to the California State Supreme Court, but the question remains: How should history judge this theater pioneer, wealthy magnate and embodiment of the American Dream?