Imperial Hearst

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.

Ferdinand Lundberg’s IMPERIAL HEARST was the basis for the screenplay CITIZEN KANE. Other bestsellers include MODERN WOMEN: THE LOST SEX (in collaboration) and the book for which he is most noted, AMERICA’S SIXTY FAMILIES. This book was embraced by New Deal leaders and helped to shape the destiny of the Roosevelt Administration in its early years.

During World War II, Lundberg was an economist with the
War Production Board and the War Shipping Administration.
After the war, he served the Twentieth Century Fund as editor and began teaching—first at Finch College, New York, and then as Adjunct Professor of Social Philosophy at New York University. His monumental study THE RICH AND THE SUPER-RICH was published in 1968. It became the number one best-selling book in the United States. It was translated and published in eight other countries and became number one in Germany for many months.

Mr. Lundberg completed his formal education at Columbia
University, where he was awarded the B.Sc. and M.A.