Hearst could not stop Roosevelt at the Democratic convention in 1932, but with control of delegations from his own state of California and from Garner’s home state of Texas, Hearst had enough influence to ensure Roosevelt picked Garner as his running mate. Hearst supported the ticket on the grounds that Roosevelt would turn out to be, in his words, “properly conservative.” Roosevelt won the election, and Garner nearly made it into the Oval Office when, in February 1933, an assassin narrowly missed murdering the president-elect. As it was, the rapprochement between Hearst and Roosevelt did not last the year. Soon the publisher decided the New Deal’s program of unemployment relief was “more communistic than the communists.” It was, Hearst said, “un-American to the core.”

With “AMERICA FIRST” at the center of his newspaper masthead, emblazoned above a stylized eagle clutching a ribbon reading, “AN AMERICAN PAPER FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE,” Hearst promoted the virtues of Nazism, whose “great achievement”—and a lesson to all “liberty-loving people”—was the defeat of communism. Hearst now saw communism everywhere—not only in the Roosevelt administration, but among college professors “teaching alien doctrines” and among striking union workers in San Francisco, against whom Hearst’s papers encouraged vigilante violence. In July 1934, during the San Francisco general strike, mobs broke the windows of residents in tradesmen’s neighborhoods, threatened them with violence, and told them to move; “police,” The New York Times drily reported, “said that not all the victims were radicals.” For his part, Hearst responded appreciatively: “Thank God the patriotic citizens of California have shown us the way.”