Making Money by Making Enemies

Almost anywhere in the U.S., the prospect of a new $5,000,000 college would bring nothing but cheers. Not in Colorado Springs, Colo. Last week businessmen in the pine-covered foothills of the Rockies were bitterly divided over the proposed construction of an institution to be called Rampart College. The school, complained one director of the Chamber of Commerce, would be about as welcome in Colorado Springs as "a skunk at a family picnic."

The reason for the ruckus is the donor: Raymond Cyrus Hoiles, 84, a crusty, rasp-voiced publisher from Santa Ana. Calif., who plans to use Rampart College to promote the same "libertarian" philosophy with which he force feeds the 252,712 buyers of his five-state chain of Freedom Newspapers.* Hoiles's foes say he is to the right of Herod; he is, they say, an anarchist who carries laissez-faire economics to its illogical extreme.

Red-Blooded Socialism. Hoiles, reports one Texas merchant after a long diet of the local Hoiles paper, is "against every damned thing on earth." In his papers, he has attacked Herbert Hoover and the National Association of Manufacturers as too leftwing, called all taxes "the theft of wages." argued that fire departments, public libraries, highways, and even the armed forces ought to be maintained strictly by voluntary contributions. His most splenetic outbursts are reserved for the public school system. When teachers try to argue with him, he snaps, "How can an inmate of a house of prostitution discuss chastity?"

Not surprisingly, Hoiles makes enemies wherever he goes. Shortly after he bought the McAllen Monitor in 1951, businessmen launched a four-month boycott that halved the paper's circulation to 8,000; in twelve years the Monitor (known locally as the McAllen Monster) has recovered only 6,000 of the loss. Colorado Springs Mayor William C. Henderson, 46, bars Hoiles's Gazette Telegraph from his home and office, once suggested taking "concerted action to remove this cancer from the community."

Despite such attitudes, Hoiles manages to turn a hefty profit; estimates of his wealth run as high as $35 million. Though he bleeds editorially for workingmen whose very bread "is snatched from their mouths by the tax collectors." his employees make so little themselves that they scarcely have to worry about taxes. He pays some printers $58 for a 40-hour week (v. $149 for 35 hours in Manhattan), rarely tops $100 for seasoned editors. With monopolies in all but two of his eleven towns, he has most advertisers over a barrel.

Hoiles's papers "don't seem too bad," said one ex-staffer, "just so long as you don't read the editorials." Their layout is usually clean, if undistinguished, and they play most stories straight. Stories concerning the old man's pet hates--municipal bond issues, school board elections, federal spending programs--are given top prominence. Reflecting his stern morals, some of the papers make a point of listing all people who are involved in divorce suits--even when their names are not at all newsworthy. Traffic violators are also invariably identified, and when Hoiles himself was nailed for speeding in the Rio Grande Valley, his papers front-paged the story. In any case, the formula seems to pay: his papers are first in circulation even where there is competition.

According to Hoiles. Nursing dollars is a lesson Publisher Hoiles learned early. He squirreled away his first two months' pay as a teen-aged Ohio farm hand, and bought a $13 gold watch that he still carries. After graduating from Mount Union (Ohio) Methodist College, he went to work for the Alliance Review as a $2-a-week printer's assistant; after 17 years he was manager with an annual salary of $10,000. He bought the Bucyrus Telegraph Forum in 1935, soon was able to ante up $750,000 for the Santa Ana Register, where he still has a shabby headquarters suite. Only six weeks ago he went after three Texas dailies, but Mrs. Oveta Culp Hobby's Houston Post outbid him by $750,000 (TIME, March 1).

Alongside his scattershot editorials, he prints just about any columnist who sees things according to Hoiles. Through the years he has given space to such professional anti-Semites as Gerald L. K. Smith, the late Upton Close and Joseph P. Kamp --and to one David Baxter, who often rails against the evils of "Romanism."

Libertarian Arts. To guard against backsliders on the staff of any of his papers, Hoiles periodically sends his top men off to his "Freedom School" in Colorado Springs for a reindoctrination course at the hands of a battery of right-thinking instructors. Founded with Hoiles's cash in 1956, the Freedom School is run by a glib, grey-haired ex-real estate agent and radio announcer named Robert LeFevre, who also edits the Colorado Springs paper. Long associated with far-right causes, LeFevre was the moving force in an oddball outfit called the Falcon Lair Foundation that was spawned in the late 1940s and proposed to avert World War III by three prayer sessions a day--one at 7:30 a.m., one at noon and one at 7 p.m.

Next month LeFevre and the Freedom School will play host to a batch of businessmen at a two-week session to examine how "the company whose top executives are positively oriented to profits and are thoroughly grounded in free market principles can weather the socialist storms besetting our economy." Itself quite positively oriented to profits, the school charges $350 a head, plus $175 for wives. Under LeFevre's guidance, besieged Rampart College promises more of the same, but stretched out in a sort of four-year libertarian arts program.

The fuss stirred up over the college bothers Raymond Cyrus Hoiles not one bit. He seems almost to enjoy it. Once he estimated that he has been consistently out of step with at least 95% of his readers. And this unpopularity does not perturb him either; he realizes that a journalist's job is not to make friends but to influence people. "Beware the newspaper reporter whom everybody loves," said an editorial in his Odessa American, "and the editor who is buried with public honors . . . who goes to his grave with a line of mourners from here to the Gulf of Mexico." For Raymond Cyrus Hoiles, that prospect is a remote one indeed.

* California: Santa Ana Register; Marysville-Yuba City Appeal-Democrat. Colorado: Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph. New Mexico: Clovis News-Journal. Ohio: Bucyrus Telegraph-Forum: Lima News. Texas: Brownsville Herald; Harlingen Valley Star; McAllen Valley Monitor; Odessa American; Pampa News.

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