Over break, I visited Hearst Castle, one of many homes of the famed publisher and politician William Randolph Hearst. On the tour, I learned several interesting facts about his life: at the time Hearst built the estate, he controlled 98 business in various industries such as forestry, mining, and ranching, not including his publishing interests.
The estate was built during the start of the Great Depression, though Hearst himself was still receiving a high income of somewhere around 100 million dollars (I think- and that's 1930s dollars too.) Later on, as Hearst's fortune went under, he slowly sold his land holdings (at one point he owned something like 40 miles or so of California coastline!) and his businesses. I don't know the details of how the Hearst Corporation turned its finances around but I know that his family is still deeply involved in corporate ownership and management (W.R.'s grandson, George R. Hearst Jr., is co-Chairman of the board of the privately owned corporation.)
The example of W.R Hearst fits well with many of the sociological traits that C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite underscores: Hearst was wealthy, college-educated, the son of a landholding millionaire mining engineer and businessman. I liked how Mills tried to debunk the idea of a power elite (back then) of immigrants or upwardly mobile lower middle class people by using statistical figures of mostly white, upper-middle class and highly educated shoe-ins for corporate executive positions. His critique of the "entrepreneur" and "bureaucrat" are especially biting, and he argues that most people incorrectly identify the entrepreneur as an individual who has "all the risks of life about him, soberly founding an enterprise" while in fact "[i]n 1950, a far more accurate picture of entrepreneurial activity of the corporate elite is the setting up of a financial deal which merges one set of files with another. The chief executives of today to do less building up of new organizations than carrying out of established ones." (133) Certainly W.R. Hearst wasn't a poor man starting from nothing when he began his publishing enterprises. He had social capital, connections, and financial means, and inherited the first paper he started from his father (who was also a Senator). I wonder how true Mills' idea of entrepreneurship as a somewhat marginal (as in, not making an enormous amount of money) way to start a business holds today in a world of startups, and in a world where we tack "social" onto the term and use it to promote small businesses in developing countries through microfinance and microcredit.
Finally, another major point I got from C. Wright Mills is that survival tactic (and money-bringing one) of the power elite, especially the business power elite, is to consolidate and diversify. Mills points that out in his description of the kind of lateral, industry-influencing decision making that corporate executives must partake in:
"on the higher levels, those in command of great corporations must be able to broaden their views in order to become industrial spokesmen rather than merely heads of one or the other of the great firms in the industry. In short, they must by able to move from one company's policy and interests to those of the industry. There is one more step which some of them take: They move from the industrial point of interest and outlook to the interests and outlook of the class of all big corporate property as a whole." (120-121)
Clearly Hearst Corp. exemplifies this idea: it has broadcasting, radio, newspaper, magazine, and interactive companies; space satellites; a ranch; real estate holdings; and philanthropies- you name it- all over the world.
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