88-year-old Publisher Wants People to Think

By TARA LANE

CNPA STAFF

Raymond Cyrus Hoiles, the 88-year-old president of the Freedom Newspapers, Inc. does not believe in taxes. Nor does he believe in compulsory public support of schools, the postal system, fire department or police force. He's been described as crusty, prejudiced, bitter, and even as one Texas public official said: "He's against everything."

But a visit to any one of his numerous offices located throughout California reveals quite a different man. Slight of build and be-speckled, Hoiles admits that he is sometimes irascible, but he is eager to "reason" about his views and even, on occasion, to alter them.

His views are carried into over 300,000 homes every day, and he is generous in supporting schools, lectures and publications which support his views. He invariably has a booklet or a pamphlet that he'll hand out to anyone interested in what he has to say. But even though he was singled out recently as a "Great Guardian Of Liberty" by the Free Trader, a British magazine devoted exclusively to free trade. Hoiles thinks of himself as a newspaper publisher first, and a political philosopher second.

Born on an Ohio farm in 1878, Hoiles worked his way through college by teaching. soliciting new subscriptions for the town paper and even borrowing $1,000 from a neighbor at four per cent interest and loaning it out at six per cent interest.

Having weighed the prospect of becoming either an electrical engineer or a printer's devil, Hoiles chose the latter and started work for his brother's paper at two dollars a week. "That's all I was worth," he remarked recently when recalling those days. "After all, I was learning a trade and being paid at the same time."

His business sense served him well, and soon he became business manager of the paper, and within a few years had purchased a third interest in the paper. Now on his feet, Hoiles continued buying and trading newspapers throughout the Ohio area.

As the result of an expose by Hoiles of an alleged paving contract corruption by his competitor, the two were plunged into one of the bitterest newspaper battles in Ohio history. It lasted for over three years and saw such gangland techniques used against Hoiles as house bombings and sticks of dynamite under the hood of a car. From the start it was obvious that the Ohio town couldn't support such violent competition, and an impasse was finally achieved in 1931 when Hoiles persuaded BrushMoore to take over his Ohio interests.

In 1935, Hoiles and his family moved to Santa Ana where he bought The Register and soon he and his children were managing several newspapers and radio and television stations in California, Texas, and New Mexico.

But there is more to Hoiles than just his knack for building a prosperous newspaper chain. Although stricken by several heart attacks, Hoiles has an appearance of a man in his 60s and often talks with such ruralisms as "Floridy" and "Canady." But RC as he his known to his associates, is not a man to compromise with principle.

"I was a scared cub reporter," an early associate recalls. "I had been writing news stories about a group of business men who had formed what constituted an anti-chain store organization. I was called to the front office and asked if the stories as they appeared in the paper were true and if I could vouch for them. I replied I could."

"Wait outside," was RC's only remark

"A few moments later five men, all managers of chain stores in the city and representing, at that time half or more than half of all of the advertising revenue of the paper stalked into Hoiles' office."

"The clamor that rose from the office went at an increasing crescendo until, even in the outer room, the Hoiles challenge flung in the teeth of his principal source of revenue was plainly heard: 'You can all take your advertising out of my paper. That's your business. But I'm running this paper, and I'll say what is to be printed in it as long as I'm running it, and if the stories are true, and we think that they are news they're going to run whether you like it or not.'"

The Hoiles philosophy stems from his deep-seated belief in a "universal single standard of right," which he often states in his column in the Freedom Newspapers. The crux of this concept is that what is right or wrong in the case of a single person is equally right or wrong for an entire group. In support of this idea, he often quotes Thomas Jefferson ("I know of but one code of morality, whether it be for men or nations.") In further argument. Hoiles says if it is wrong for one person to take from another, then it is equally wrong for the government, just because it represents many people, to do the same thing.

Two men out of a hundred have no right to force the 98 to support a school or a church, he says. "Neither do the 98 have the moral right to force the remaining two men to support a school or a church."

Because of these ideas and many others like them, he's been branded a Jew, an anti-Semite, a Catholic, an anti-Christ, a Communist, and a Fascist, but as he himself once remarked: "What I want to do mainly is get people to think."