Page 25
Click on image to return to catalog page
William Randolph Hearst I (1863 – 1951) was an American newspaper magnate.
Hearst was a leading newspaper publisher. The son of self-made millionaire George Hearst, he became aware that his father had received a northern California newspaper, “The San Francisco Examiner,” as payment of a gambling debt. Still a student at Harvard, he asked his father to give him the newspaper to run. In 1887, he became the paper's publisher and devoted long hours and much money to making it a success. Crusading for civic improvement and exposing municipal corruption, he greatly increased the paper's circulation.
His name is followed by Silent Film Actress and Hearst companion, Marion Davies. Davies is best remembered for her relationship with Hearst. Even during her career, her high profile social life often obscured her career.
Elizabeth Dilling Stokes (1894 – 1966) was an American anti-communist, anti-war activist and writer in the 1930s and 1940s, who was charged with anti-semitism and sedition in the Great Sedition Trial of 1944 She was also arrested twice for disorderly conduct.
The author of four political books, Dilling claimed that Marxism and "Jewry" were synonymous and admired both Adolf Hitler and Francisco Franco. She claimed many prominent figures were Communist sympathizers, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi, Franz Boas and Sigmund Freud. Dilling concluded that a growing elite sought to remake the United States as a communist state. Dilling proclaimed herself "abler than the men who were running the country." Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, a character in Sinclair Lewis' novel “It Can't Happen Here,” was based upon her.
Signing directly below Marion Davies, William Edward Dodd (1869-1940) was a historian who served as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's ambassador to Nazi Germany from 1933-1938.
Dodd was born in Clayton, North Carolina, and educated at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and at the University of Leipzig. As a student, he attended the University of Leipzig during the zenith of German liberalism. During the 1910s and 1920s, he was a professor of history at the University of Chicago.
He was a Jeffersonian democrat and Southern liberal. On October 5, 1933, Dodd gave a speech in Berlin in which he described the New Deal programs in the following way: "It was not revolution as men are prone to say. It was a popular expansion of governmental powers beyond all constitutional grants; and nearly all men everywhere hope the President may succeed."
As ambassador, Dodd tried to save the life of Helmut Hirsch, an German-American Jew who planned to bomb parts of the Nazi-Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, but to no avail. Roosevelt had chosen him because of his liberal democratic principles.
(c) 2008 R J Bender Publishing Co.