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.