The Imperial Self in American LifeStephen J. Whitfield
From Columbia Journal of American Studies Vol. 4, No. 1 2000
The most authentically American media mogul was William Randolph Hearst, with his confident reply to a telegram from the artist whom he sent to Cuba to depict the Spanish atrocities that would foment American support of the rebellion. To Frederick Remington, who saw no need for belligerency, Hearst responded: "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." [31] As publisher of the New York Journal and a couple of dozen of other newspapers, plus half a dozen magazines and a couple of wire services and, as the largest user of paper in the world, Hearst embodied as much as anyone the imperial self, with his unstoppable appetite for collecting things, his habit of assuming that human relations were based on self-interest, his limited capacity for friendship or intimacy, even his way (near the end of his life) of playing tennis in which he would return the-ball only if it was hit directly at him.
The British aesthete John Ruskin could be classified as anti-American after declaring in 1871 that he could not "even for a couple months, live in a country so miserable as to possess no castles." [32] Hearst refused to be miserable, and therefore built one of his own, up the Pacific coast from Santa Barbara at San Simeon, on an estate half the size of the state of Rhode Island. A private road six miles long led up to the castle, which was so gaudy that one guest, George Bernard Shaw, remarked: "This is the way God probably would have done it if He'd had the money" Hearst, who slept in a giant bed once belonging to Cardinal Richelieu, liked to incorporate whole rooms from Europe in his own buildings, and sometimes went to fantastic lengths to bring things home sight unseen. As the Grand Acquisitor, he bought a tenth-century Spanish cloister, to be dismantled stone by stone. Twice workers in Segovia were repulsed by angry villagers who felt that their community was being robbed of its most precious site. But they were defeated, as Hearst ensured that 21 miles of railway were built to connect it to the nearest line. A sawmill was built to cut the wood for 10,700 crates in which to pack the stones; but after arriving in New York, they gathered dust, with no one quite knowing what Mr. Hearst wanted to do with it. The zoo at San Simeon housed the biggest private collection of wild animals in the United States. Hearst also fancied himself suitable Presidential timber and considered other political offices--though he served in Congress and was narrowly defeated for the governorship of New York early in the century--only as stepping stones. But he failed to achieve what one talented journalist, Ambrose Bierce, called Hearst's "amusing ambition to darken the door of the White House." Bierce noted that his former employer "has not a friend in the world. Nor does he merit one, for ... he is inaccessible to the conception of an unselfish attachment or a disinterested motive. Silent and smiling, he moves among men, the loneliest man. Nobody but God loves him and he knows it." [33]
The general who most fully embodied the imperial self was the preposterous George S. Patton, who wore custom-made silk khaki shirts in combat in the First World War, after which he wrote General Pershing that "war is the only place where a man really lives." [34] Patton exemplified the elitism that disdained the masses (which Frank Lloyd Wright spelled as "them asses"),[35] and insisted that "the few must run the many for the latter's own good. To hell with the people" At the age of 24 (in 1909), he wrote his parents of his desire to become either President or dictator, but had to settle for the flamboyant and swashbuckling command of the Third Army in the Second World War. General Patton wore ivory-handled revolvers on each hip, even though the only person he had ever shot with a handgun was himself, in the leg, when he stomped too hard and the hair-trigger automatic strapped to his waist accidentally fired. Practicing in the mirror making ferocious faces, he made it hard for posterity to tell whether he was a little boy playing soldier or a soldier playing little boy Patton apparently believed in his own immortality--or at least that he could not die until his "mission" had been fulfilled. During the Sicilian campaign in 1943, he wrote his wife: "I love wars and am having a fine time." He once presented a speaker to his troops by announcing: "Men, 1 want to introduce you to the noblest work of God--a killer." [36]
Stephen J. Whitfield holds the Max Richter Chair in American Civilization at Brandeis University. He is the author of eight books, including most recently A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (1988), The Culture of the Cold War (1996), and In Search of American Jewish Culture (1999). Professor Whitfield is also the editor of A Companion to 20th-Century America (2004).