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17 pp., in pencil on plain cream paper, 10x8. Signed "William Randolph Hearst". A working manuscript with many passages lined through and some additions, titled in Hearst's hand "Americanism versus Communism".

Hearst lashes out at the New Deal and accuses the Roosevelt administration of being "more communistic than the communists themselves". In the summer of 1934, a longshoremen's strike had spread to other unions and resulted in some violence in San Francisco. Hearst used his influence to avert a general strike. Here he both tacitly congratulates himself and praises the patriotic values of Californians, at the expense of the Roosevelt administration's "Raw Deal". Hearst writes passionately about the dangers of a strike: "That the strike amounted to civil war was a fact already sufficiently familiar to San Franciscans. The newspapers of San Francisco had repeatedly denounced the strike not merely as rebellion but as revolution". Some of the most interesting passages are those that Hearst has lined through, for example: "Politicians like children should not play with fire. They may do much more than moisten and make uncomfortable their own political beds. They may set the whole civil structure ablaze and destroy the governmental roof which shelters them and also protects us..." He says of the New Deal, "'There are many good things and many new things...but the good things are not new and the new things are not good'". Hearst concludes with patriotic and historical reflections on American idealism, and to "Thank God the patriotic citizens of California have shown us the way." A wonderful, expressive working manuscript from a dramatic time in American political history, by one of the most influential shapers of public opinion. Full transcription available on request.