Power of Hearst

In Moscow and in Rome last week a Russian and an Italian thanked their stars that they work for William Randolph Hearst. The Red Dictatorship and the Black had each clapped into jail a native Hearstman: in Russia, faithful Translator and Legman Zachary Levovich Mikhailov; in Rome, longtime Bureau Chief Guglielmo Emanuel. The Russian was convicted of espionage, sentenced to be shot. The Italian was kept incommunicado in a cell for 52 days while his journalist friends thought he, too, had been jugged as a spy.

Last week Hearst anxiety about the faithful Bolshevik translator was communicated to the U. S. State Department which ordered "inquiries" in Moscow, the most that could be done since the man sentenced to be shot was no U. S. citizen. The moment this degree of U. S. interest was evinced. Russia's sensitive Dictatorship ordered a stay of execution and a brisk retrial of Hearstman Mikhailov by the Court of Appeals which altered his sentence from Death to eight years imprisonment.

To Rome from Berlin on cabled orders from Publisher Hearst himself hopped trouble-shooting Hudson ("Buzz") Hawley. He found rumors buzzing that Emanuel had been "shot in the back as a spy." These jittery reports proved baseless when Correspondent Emanuel defended himself wittily before a Fascist court in which he was accused of nothing more serious than "obtaining" information of a military character. This information had been innocently posted to Bureau Chief Emanuel by a minor Italian stringman acting on his own initiative in ignorance of present drastic Italian war news curbs. Admitting that he received this letter. Correspondent Emanuel chirped at the President of the Special Tribunal for Defense of the Realm: "If I should be so disrespectful of your office as to dare to punch you in the face, could the Honorable President say he had 'obtained' a punch in the face?"

Such wit brought immediate acquittal by the Fascist court and Signor Emanuel was soon out, good-humoredly twitting U. S. and British correspondents in Rome about the jitters into which his detention for 52 days had thrown them. He scoffed the story that Il Duce had taken offense because of rumors that Signor Emanuel had referred to him as "Banjo-Eyes." Describing himself as "a man who, whatever be his faults, has a good liver and a smiling character," irrepressible Guglielmo Emanuel flatly denied ever having called anybody banjo-eyed and vowed he had never before heard the expression. "My Scotch terrier Banjo," he said, "has very-beautiful and tender eyes and is not exophthalmic. ... I am temperamentally unsuited to jibing. I am not a 'Mussolini-baiter.' I dissented from Fascism and Mussolini as any sincere Liberal would do --that is, on political grounds and not on personal ones."

In Rome and in Moscow neutral observers felt that the Power of Hearst had speeded up both dictatorships in the direction of Justice.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.