Durant Family Saga
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KIRKUS REVIEW

12/17/2019

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A historical novel, set largely in upstate New York’s Adirondack Park, about the troubled lives of real-life real estate investor William West Durant and his embittered sister, Ella.
Myers (Castles in the Air, 2016, etc.) continues the story of the Durants in this third book in her Durant Familty Saga trilogy. Thomas C. Durant was a railroad magnate who lost a fortune and died under a cloud—and intestate—in 1885. His son, William, assumed control of the family’s remaining assets and began new real estate and construction ventures in the Adirondacks. His sibling, Ella, who was somewhat of a bohemian, always felt financially shortchanged and ill-treated by her older brother—which caused litigation between the two. In the novel, told in the form of reminiscences of various characters, readers follow the arc of William’s career from his early days as a high roller (starting in 1892) to his impoverished life as an old man (circa 1931). In the end, not only has William lost all of his own wealth, but also money and land that Ella won in her final lawsuit—so they both end up losing. However, as William wrote to a friend in 1932, “I am poor, but I am happy, what more can most of us expect?” Myers writes with skill and has chosen well in deeply researching the Durant saga, which remarkably parallels Greek tragedy. It’s a truly engrossing story, and Myers does it justice. William is effectively portrayed as being more clueless than anything else, as he honestly doesn’t understand that he is treating his sister—and his wife, for that matter—very badly. He’s also obsessed with his camps in the Adirondacks, giving readers the impression that he sees the whole park as his personal fiefdom. That’s likely the reason why Myers uses the very clever gambit of telling the story from the perspective of William in his old age, when he’s “calm of mind, all passion spent,” and being interviewed by wealthy Harold Hochschild, who now owns William’s old camp, Eagle’s Nest. To compare William to the aged Oedipus is not so great a stretch.
A well-wrought, classically inspired riches-to-rags tale.

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Yellow Journalism and Fake News

2/23/2018

 
PictureWilliam Randolph Hearst 1904. Source: Wikimedia
I was reading a newspaper article about a divorce case in 1898 and was struck how it sounded like what editors call ‘purple prose’; or a flowery language that draws attention to itself. This type of writing was all the rage at the time, thanks to newspaper moguls William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.
Hearst inherited the San Francisco Examiner from his father in the 1880s. In 1896, while Hearst was trying to develop a readership on the east coast, he sent his cracker-jack reporter, Ambrose Bierce to investigate and verbally flay in the press railroad tycoon Collis P. Huntington.
Huntington — by then in his late 70s, had the misfortune of being one of the few men who built the transcontinental line and was still alive to testify about it to a newly formed Pacific Railway Commission. By the 1890s, the U.S. government was pushing for repayment of millions in bonds owed to them from the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroad companies.Huntington was flagrantly avoiding paying the money back, using intimidation and bribery to buy off members of congress so that he could ‘delay’ the repayment for the bonds another 75 years.Along comes Bierce, who startled the readership with his acerbic and prolific abuse of Huntington in the press. Calling Huntington a ‘inflated old pigskin’, and ‘promoted peasant’, he never let up, even when Huntington, in a historic scene Bierce relayed to the press, offered to bribe him to keep his mouth shut. Bierce famously told Huntington: “My price is seventy-five million dollars …. you may hand it to my friend, the Treasurer of the United States.”

PictureCartoon Caricature of Huntington from the San Francisco Examiner, 1896.
Randolph Hearst acquired the New York Journal and competed with Joseph Pulitzer, who owned the New York World, to hold readers’ interest. To keep their fans loyal, reporters for both papers wrote in a form now dubbed ‘Yellow Journalism’. Stories were embellished, crime and scandal became front page news.Hearst was so good at attracting readers with titillating headlines he is even credited with instigating a war between the U.S. and Spain in 1898. During the Cuban War for independence from Spain, Hearst’s papers agitated for intervention and reporters wrote outright lies about incidents involving Americans in Cuba, including that they were being rounded up at sent to concentration camps by Spanish authorities. The public ate it up, newspaper sales sky-rocketed. It all came to a head when the U.S. sent the USS Maine to the shores of Cuba, a show of force from the U.S. to protect American citizens living in Cuba from Spanish atrocities as reported in the papers. When an explosion of unknown origin blew up the Maine, the public were outraged. President McKinley was drawn into a civil war he was reluctant to engage in.

If any of this sounds familiar its because things haven’t changed too much since 1895. The more scandalous the headline and prominent the figure involved the more likely a reader will click on the headline in today’s digital world. It’s about money, not integrity. It takes an educated populous to know the difference when discerning the sources and intention of the journalist.


    Author

    Sheila Myers  Professor at Cayuga Community College in Upstate New York.

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