Pregnant with possibilities of crime,And full of felons for all coming time,Your blood’s too precious to be lightly spiltIn testimony to a venial guilt.Live to get whelpage and preserve a nameNo praise can sweeten and no lie unshame.Live to fulfill the vision that I seeDown the dim vistas of the time to be:A dream of clattering beaks and burning eyesOf hungry ravens glooming all the skies;A dream of gleaming teeth and fetid breathOf jackals wrangling at the feast of death;A dream of broken necks and swollen tongues—The whole world’s gibbets loaded with de Youngs!
Pregnant with possibilities of crime,And full of felons for all coming time,Your blood’s too precious to be lightly spiltIn testimony to a venial guilt.Live to get whelpage and preserve a nameNo praise can sweeten and no lie unshame.Live to fulfill the vision that I seeDown the dim vistas of the time to be:A dream of clattering beaks and burning eyesOf hungry ravens glooming all the skies;A dream of gleaming teeth and fetid breathOf jackals wrangling at the feast of death;A dream of broken necks and swollen tongues—The whole world’s gibbets loaded with de Youngs!
Pregnant with possibilities of crime,And full of felons for all coming time,Your blood’s too precious to be lightly spiltIn testimony to a venial guilt.Live to get whelpage and preserve a nameNo praise can sweeten and no lie unshame.Live to fulfill the vision that I seeDown the dim vistas of the time to be:A dream of clattering beaks and burning eyesOf hungry ravens glooming all the skies;A dream of gleaming teeth and fetid breathOf jackals wrangling at the feast of death;A dream of broken necks and swollen tongues—The whole world’s gibbets loaded with de Youngs!
Pregnant with possibilities of crime,
And full of felons for all coming time,
Your blood’s too precious to be lightly spilt
In testimony to a venial guilt.
Live to get whelpage and preserve a name
No praise can sweeten and no lie unshame.
Live to fulfill the vision that I see
Down the dim vistas of the time to be:
A dream of clattering beaks and burning eyes
Of hungry ravens glooming all the skies;
A dream of gleaming teeth and fetid breath
Of jackals wrangling at the feast of death;
A dream of broken necks and swollen tongues—
The whole world’s gibbets loaded with de Youngs!
Let us go to Denver, where there lives another fighter and teller of truth, Ben Lindsey. I have made you acquainted with the “Denver Post,” and with one of its owners, Mr. F. G. Bonfils, who made his “pile” as a lottery-promoter, and went into partnership with another man. Now let Judge Lindsey introduce us to this other man:
The “Post” was then as independent as a highwayman. One of its proprietors, H. H. Tammen, had begun life as a bar-keeper, and he would himself relate how he had made money by robbing his employer. “When I took in a dollar,” Tammen said, “I tossed it up—and if it stuck to the ceiling, it went to the boss.” He had a frank way of making his vices engaging by the honesty with which he confessed them; and he had boasted to me of the amount of money the newspaper made by charging its victims for suppressing news-stories of a scandalous nature in which they were involved. He admitted that he supported me merely because it was “the popular thing to do”—it “helped circulation.” I knew it was a very precarious support, although the editorial writer, Paul Thieman, seemed to me an honest and public-spirited young man.
Or come to Kansas City, where William Salisbury is working on the “Times.” There is a fight on with the gas companies, which have formed a trust and doubled the price of gas. A solitary alderman named Smith has spoken against the ordinance.
When I returned to the “Times” office that night the city editor came up to my desk, sat down, and said, confidentially: “We’ll have to print a favorable story on this consolidation. I wouldn’t give much space to that man Smith’s remarks. I don’t know what the gas peoplehave done here in this office, but you can guess. They’ve bought the Council.”
Mr. Salisbury, you see, is only a reporter, so all he gets is gossip and suspicion. He notes that the Kansas City, Pittsburg & Gulf Railway is completing a line to Port Arthur, Texas; the railway company is advertising heavily in the “Times,” and he is sent to write up “a two-column interview upon the beauties of Port Arthur.” Again, he tells us:
I could write columns about Cuban revolutions, and anti-cigarette and anti-high hat laws. But there were things that I couldn’t write about at all, and other things that I had to write as the city editor told me, and as the owner or managing editor told him to tell me. These included street railway and paving and gas and telephone and other corporation measures, and anti-department store bills. And the City Hall reporters of the three other newspapers wrote of such things just as I did—from dictation.
Again, in Kansas City are great packing-houses, and the people of Kansas City think they should have cheaper meat. The newspapers take up the campaign, and Mr. Salisbury tells what comes of it:
I did some detective work. At the end of several days I found that all the packing-houses were represented at a meeting each week in the Armour Building, at Fifth and Delaware Streets. I gave a negro porter five dollars to show me the room. It was his business to bring the packers wine and cigars during the sessions at which they fixed the prices of food for millions of people. He pointed out the chairs in which each of them sat. He told me their names. He was willing to arrange for me to listen in the next room when the meeting was held again.
I returned to the “Times” office in a fever of excitement. I told what I knew. The managing editor consulted with the business manager. Then he came to me and said: “We won’t print any more meat trust stories for a while.”
Several days later I saw packing-house advertisements in all the newspapers. But none of the papers published any more news about the price of meat for a very long time.
I quote this story, and then I realize that I have got out of my classification; this isn’t a bribe, this is an advertisement! I can only plead that it is hard to keep to a classification, because those who are corrupting the press do not keep to it. They use various methods; and sometimes the methods shade into one another, so that only a legal expert could sort them out!
When is a bribe not a bribe? When it is an order for extra copies? When it is a share in a land deal? When it is a nomination for senator? When it is an advertising contract? For example, is this a bribe? Arthur Brisbane, the most highly paid and most widely read editorial writer in America, serves announcement to the public that he is going to follow with regard to the drama a policy of “constructive criticism”; he is going to tell the people about the plays that are really worth seeing, so that the people may go to see them. He writes a double-column editorial, praising a play, and two or three days later there appears in the “Evening Journal” a full-page advertisement of this play. Brisbane writes another editorial, praising another play, and a few days later there appears a full-page advertisement of this play. This happens again and again, and all play-producers on Broadway understand that by paying one thousand dollars for a full-page advertisement in the “New York Evening Journal,” they may have a double-column of the “constructive criticism” of Arthur Brisbane!
Or is this a bribe? There is a fight for lower gas-rates in Boston, and Louis Brandeis, now a Justice of the Supreme Court, makes a plea in the interest of the public. One Boston newspaper gives half a column of Brandeis’ arguments; no other Boston newspaper gives one word of Brandeis’ arguments; but every Boston newspaper prints a page of the gas company’s advertisements, paid for at one dollar per line!
If you will count these things as bribery, you are no longer at a loss for evidence. You discover that great systems of corruption of the press have been established; the bribing of American Journalism has become a large-scale business enterprise, which has been fully revealed by government investigations, and proven by the sworn testimony of those who do the work.
CHAPTER XLVIITHE BRIBE WHOLESALE
Every now and then some pillar of Capitalism is overthrown, and a mess of journalistic worms go wriggling to cover. For example, the “New Haven” scandal: Some five years ago the Interstate Commerce Commission revealed the fact that the band of pirates who had wrecked the great “New Haven” system had been paying four hundred thousand dollars a year to influence the press; and more significant yet, the president of the railroad swore that this was “relatively less than was paid by any other large railroad in the country!” The “New Haven” had a list of reporters to whom it paid subsidies, sometimes two hundred dollars in a lump, sometimes twenty-five dollars a week. It was paying three thousand dollars a year to the “Boston Republic.” “Why?” was the question, and the answer was, “That is Mayor Fitzgerald’s paper.” The agent of the road who had handled this money stated that “All the newspapers and magazines knew what it was for.” He had paid money to over a thousand papers, among them the “Boston Evening Transcript,” for sending out railroad “dope.” This “New Haven,” you understand, was the road which wrecked “Hampton’s” for refusing to be bought. It was a “Morgan” road.
It was the same way with the Mulhall revelations, brought out by a committee of the United States Senate. Here was the “National Association of Manufacturers” and the “Merchant Marine League,” spending enormous subsidies for propaganda with newspapers. When the La Follette Seamen’s Law was being fought in the Senate, it was shown that the great newspapers were distributing every year two million dollars for shipping advertisements, and they claimed and got their return in the form of bitter opposition to this bill. During the Life Insurance investigations in New York, it was shown that every one of these great financial enterprises maintained not merely an advertising bureau, but a “literary bureau.” The Mutual Life Insurance Company had employed a certain “Telegraphic News Bureau,” which supplied newspapers withpropaganda which they published as reading matter. For one item, supplied to about one hundred different papers, the agent had been paid over five thousand dollars. What the newspapers were paid was not brought out, but the agent testified that he had been paid one dollar a line, while the papers had been paid as high as five dollars a line. Also there was another agency, through which the Mutual Life was sending out what it called “telegraphic readers.” The big newspapers had special advertising agents to solicit this kind of paid material, and they had regular printed schedules of rates for publishing it.
In the same way Attorney-General Monnett of Ohio brought out that the Standard Oil Company maintained the “Jennings Advertising Agency” to distribute and pay for propaganda upon this contract:
The publisher agrees to reprint on news or editorial pages of said newspaper such notices, set in the body type of said paper and bearing no mark to indicate advertising, as are furnished from time to time by said Jennings Agency at the rate of —— per line, and to furnish such agency extra copies of paper containing such notes at four cents per copy.
In the same way the Standard Oil Company was shown to have paid from five hundred to a thousand dollars for the publication of a single article in Kansas newspapers. The Standard Oil had a subsidized press of its own—for example, the “Oil City Derrick”—and it had subsidized “Gunton’s Magazine” to the extent of twenty-five thousand dollars a year.
In the same way it was brought out by Governor Hunt of Arizona, during the recent great copper strike, that the mine-owners had been bribing the local newspapers in Greenlee County for printing “plate-matter” favorable to them. It was shown that the liquor lobby had maintained an enormous “slush” fund for the press. It was shown that the great public utility interests of the Middle West had maintained a publicity bureau to send out material against municipal ownership. It was shown that the high tariff interests had been maintaining a Washington bureau and sending out “news letters,” all paid for. It was shown that the railroad companies were doing the same thing; in a single office of their publicity department—that in Chicago—they had forty-three employes, and the manager stated to Ray Stannard Baker that before this bureau began its work, four hundred and twelve columns of matteropposed to the railroads had appeared in the newspapers of Nebraska, but after the bureau had been in operation for three months, in one week the newspapers of Nebraska had published two hundred and two columns favorable to the railroads, and only four columns against them!
And year by year, as the plundering of the people increases, this “bribe wholesale” becomes a greater menace; today, as I write, it has become a nation-wide propaganda. Testifying before the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry of the United States Senate, January 14, 1919, Frank Heney shows that to defeat the bill for government regulation of the packing industry now before Congress, Swift & Company alone are spending a million dollars a month upon newspaper advertising! Heney testifies that he has had an examination made of every newspaper in California, and every one has published the full-page advertisements of this firm. Senator Norris testifies that he has had an examination made in New York State, and has been unable to find a single paper without the advertisements—which, it is pointed out, are not in any way calculated to sell the products of Swift & Company, but solely to defeat government regulation of the industry. Armour & Company were paying over two thousand dollars a page to all the farm publications of the country—and this not for advertisements, but for “special articles”! J. Ogden Armour was put on the stand, and some amusement developed. He had given a banquet to the editors of these farm-journals; he did not expect this banquet to have any influence upon the advertising, but he did have a vague hope that both banquet and advertising might dispose the editors to look with less disfavor upon the Armour business!
Day by day the money-masters of America become more aware of their danger, they draw together, they grow more class-conscious, more aggressive. The war has taught them the possibilities of propaganda; it has accustomed them to the idea of enormous campaigns which sway the minds of millions and make them pliable to any purpose. They have been terrified by what happened in Russia and Hungary, and they propose to see to it that the foreign population of America is innoculated against modern ideas. They form the “Publishers’ Association of the American Press in Foreign Languages,” whose purpose it is “to foster unswerving loyalty to American ideals”—that is to say, to keep America capitalist. Then agroup of our biggest exploiters, headed by Coleman du Pont of the Powder Trust, buy the “American Association of Foreign Language Newspapers.” They give a dinner to the heads of all the newspaper advertising agencies, at the Bankers’ Club of New York, and explain that in future all advertising must be placed through this great association. So the massed advertising power of American corporations is to be wielded as a club, to keep the newspaper columns and the editorial columns of foreign language newspapers free from radicalism. So when there is a strike anywhere in the “Powder barony,” and Poles and Hungarians are being bayonetted and shot, the powder barons will know that Polish and Hungarian newspapers are printing no news of the shooting, and giving no encouragement to the strike.
I write the abovea priori; that is to say, I understand American Capitalism so well that I venture to guess what it plans to do with its foreign-language press machine. And six months later, as I am sending this book to the printer, I discover that I have guessed correctly! The great steel-strike is on, and the following appears in an Associated Press dispatch from Youngstown, Ohio:
Managers of five foreign language newspapers today decided to publish special editions of their papers explaining to their countrymen that if they are satisfied with present mill-conditions they should meet and vote on the question of returning to work.
And, on the other hand, if the foreign-language newspapers decide to get along without advertising, and to stand by the workers, what then? Then we denounce them as Bolsheviks, and demand deportation of their editors and publishers; we raid their offices and confiscate their lists and bar them from our mails. If necessary, some of our corrupt interests “frame up” evidence against them, and throw their editors and publishers into jail.
The above may sound to you an extreme statement. But as this book is going to press I come upon definite evidence of precisely such a case, and you will find it in full in the last chapter.
CHAPTER XLVIIIPOISON IVY
I have asked the difficult question, When is a bribe not a bribe? When it is “legitimate business”? When, for instance, the “New Haven” is discovered to have ordered 9,716 copies of the “Outlook” containing a boost of the “New Haven” system by Sylvester J. Baxter, a paid writer of the “New Haven”? You may read the details of this in “The Profits of Religion”; the president of the “Outlook” corporation wrote to me that the “New Haven” bought these copies “without any previous understanding or arrangement.” They are so naïve in the office of this religious weekly; nobody had the slightest idea that if they boosted some railroad grafters in peril of discovery, these grafters might come back with a big order! And right now, while the railroads are trying to get their properties back, and all their debts paid out of the public treasury, the spending of millions of dollars upon advertising is perfectly legitimate—it does not have the slightest effect upon newspaper editorial policy! When the miners of Colorado go on strike, and the Rockefellers proceed to fill every daily and weekly newspaper in the state of Colorado with full-page broad-sides against the miners, this of course is not a bribe; the fact that on the page opposite there will appear an editorial, reproducing completely the point of view of the advertisements—that is a pure coincidence, and the editorial is the honorable and disinterested opinion of the newspaper editor! When the United States Commission on Industrial Relations exposes the fact that these attacks on the miners contain the most outrageous lies, and that the thousand-dollar-a-month press-agent of the Rockefellers knew they were lies—it is a pure coincidence that very little about this revelation is published in the Colorado newspapers!
This last incident is so important as to deserve fuller exposition. The thousand-dollar-a-month press-agent of the Rockefellers was a gentleman by the name of Ivy L. Lee, and after the strikers had experienced his methods for a while, they referred to him as “Poison Ivy.” He took the publishedannual report of the Secretary-Treasurer of the United Mine Workers, which showed that the national vice-president of the union in charge of the Colorado strike had received a yearly salary of $2,395.72 and a year’s expenses of $1,667.20. He put these two figures together, calling it all salary, $4,062.92; and then he added the expenses again, making a total of $5,730.12; and then he said that all this had been paid to the national vice-president for nine weeks’ work on the strike—thus showing that he was paid over ninety dollars a day, or at the rate of thirty-two thousand dollars a year!
By the same method, he showed that another official was paid sixty-six dollars a day; that John R. Lawson had received $1,773.40 in nine weeks! Old “Mother” Jones was listed at forty-two dollars a day; the actual fact being that for her work as organizer she was paid $2.57 a day—and this not including the many months which she spent in jail for refusing to leave the strike-district! The “bulletin” containing these figures was published in all the newspapers, and was mailed out over the country to the extent of hundreds of thousands of copies; and when the miners exposed the falsity of the statements, “Poison Ivy” postponed correcting them until the strike was lost, and until he knew that the Walsh Commission was on his trail! Thirty-two separate “bulletins” this scoundrel sent out over the United States, and many of them were full of just such lies as this. If you want details, you may consult two articles by George Creel in “Harper’s Weekly,” for November 7th and 14th, 1914.
There are thousands of such press agents serving our predatory interests, but not often are we permitted to peer into their inmost souls, to watch them at their secret offices. The Walsh Commission was so cruel as to put “Poison Ivy” on the stand, and also to publish his letters to his master. An examination of these letters shows him performing functions not usually attributed to press-agents. We see him preparing and revising a letter for Governor Ammons to send to President Wilson. (You remember, perhaps, in my story of Governor Ammons, my charge that the coal operators wrote his lying telegram to the President? Maybe you thought that was just loose talk!) We see “Poison Ivy” arranging for the distribution of an enormous edition of a speech on the Colorado coal-strike by the “kept” congressmen of the coal-operators—the speech containing “Polly Pry,” with the slanders against“Mother Jones,” sent out under government frank! We see him following the newspapers with minute care; for example, calling Mr. Rockefeller’s attention to the fact that the Northampton, Massachusetts, “Herald” had used a part of his first bulletin as an editorial; also sending to Mr. Rockefeller an editorial by Arthur Brisbane, sneering at our “mourning pickets.” Finally, this remarkable press-agent claims that he persuaded the Walsh Commission not to come to Colorado till the operators had finished strangling the strike. That he actually did this, I cannot say. Perhaps it was just a coincidence that the commission delayed to come, and “Poison Ivy” was “stringing” Mr. Rockefeller, to make sure of that thousand dollars a month!
Would you like to be such a press-agent, and get such a salary as this? If so, you can find full directions, set forth by “Poison Ivy” himself in an address to the “American Railway Guild.” At this time he was prize poisoner for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and he explains that it is all a question of psychology. “Success in dealing with crowds, that success we have got to attain if we are to solve the railroad question, rests upon the art of getting believed in.” And our prize poisoner goes on to give concrete illustrations of how to get the railroads “believed in.” If you are opposing a “full crew” law, you will get “believed in” by changing the name of the measure to an “extra crew” law. If you are going into bankruptcy, you will get “believed in” by calling it a “readjustment of finances.” If you are fighting a strike, and one small group of the strikers demands a particularly large increase in wages, you will get “believed in” by so phrasing your statement as to make it appear that all the miners are making the same unreasonable demand as the little group. “Miners Ask One Hundred and Fifty Per Cent Increase in Wages,” cites “Poison Ivy.” He sent a copy of this brilliant production to Mr. Rockefeller, and on the strength of it got a considerable increase in wages himself!
CHAPTER XLIXTHE ELBERT HUBBARD WORM
The Egyptians had sacred beetles, and Capitalist Journalism has sacred insects of various unpleasant and poisonous species. There was one sacred worm which all Capitalist Journalism venerated, and the Walsh Commission broke into the temple where this worm was kept, and tore away the sacred veils, and dragged the wriggling carcass out into the light of day. This was Elbert Hubbard, alias “Fra Elbertus,” editor of the “Philistine,” “Roycroft,” and the “Fra,” founder of the “Roycroft Shops,” host of the “Roycroft Inn,” and patron saint of East Aurora, New York. That the “Fra” was one of the high gods of Capitalist Journalism you can surely not deny. He was the very personification of the thing it calls “Success”; his books were circulated by millions, his magazines by hundreds of thousands, and all the world of hustlers and money-makers read and gloried in him. He is gone now, but they still keep his image in their Pantheon, and the corporations water his grave by free distributions of “A Message to Garcia.” We are told to say nothing but good of the dead, but my concern in life is for the living, so I shall tell what I know about this sacred worm.
I have mentioned inChapter Vmy early experience with him. Prices were low in these days, and I am told that Hubbard got only five hundred dollars from the packers for his slashing of “The Jungle”: “Can it be possible that any one is deceived by this insane rant and drivel?” You may think that I cherish anger because of such violence to myself; you may not believe me, but I state the fact—I cherish anger because I tried to bring help to thirty thousand men, women and children living in hell, and this poisonous worm came crawling over their faces and ate out their eyes. And because again, and yet again, I saw this same thing happen! The wage-slaves of the Copper Trust went on strike, and this poisonous worm crawled over them and ate out their eyes. And then came the Colorado coal-strike—and the poisonous wormcrawled on its belly to the office of the Rockefellers, looking for more eyes to eat. Thanks to Frank Walsh, we may watch him and learn how to be a worm.
First, when an eye-eating worm approaches the great ones of the earth, it applies what it calls the “human touch”; it establishes itself upon terms of equality, it gives them a hearty hand-clasp, perhaps a slap on the back—if you can imagine such actions from a worm. Listen to “Fra Elbertus,” addressing young Rockefeller:
I had a delightful game of golf with your father on Saturday. How fine and brown and well and strong he is.
To which “Young John” responds with graceful cordiality:
Father has spoken of your visit to Tarrytown the other day, and of the good game of golf which you had together. He is indeed in the best of health.
These little amenities having been attended to, we proceed to the business in hand. Says the worm:
I have been out in Colorado and know a little about the situation there. It seems to me that your stand is eminently right, proper and logical. A good many of the strikers are poor, unfortunate ignorant foreigners who imagine that there is a war on and that they are fighting for liberty. They are men with the fighting habit, preyed upon by social agitators.
I am writing something on the subject, a little after the general style of my article on “The Copper Country,” in the “Fra Magazine” for May. I mail you a copy of the “Fra” today. I believe you will be interested in what I have to say about the situation in Northern Michigan.
Just now it seems very necessary that someone should carry on a campaign of education, showing this country, if possible, that we are drifting at present in the direction of I. W. W. Socialism.
Are you interested in distributing a certain number of copies of the “Fra” containing my article on the Colorado situation?
Also, what do you think of the enclosed booklets? I have distributed these on my own account up to the extent of nearly a million, but I have not the funds to distribute a million more as I would like to do.
Any suggestions from you in the line of popular education will be greatly appreciated.
“Popular education,” you perceive! The worm is a public worm, serving the public welfare, animated by a grand, lofty ideal, to protect “the poor, unfortunate, ignorant foreigners,” who are “preyed upon by social agitators”! Mr. Rockefeller,of course, appreciates this, and is grateful for the support of so noble and disinterested a worm; he writes:
Your letter of May 3rd is received. I thank you for your words of approval in connection with my stand on the question of the rights of the independent workers.
But of course, as a business man, Mr. Rockefeller has to be cautious. He has to know what he is buying. He will pay for the silk which a worm can make, but not until it is made.
I have looked over the number of the “Fra” which you have sent me with interest, and shall be glad to see the article which you are proposing to write regarding the Colorado situation.
Not too cordial; but the worm has written books on Salesmanship, explaining how you must not give up at one rebuff, but must come back again and again, wearing the other fellow down. He tries again:
On May 3rd I sent you a copy of the “Copper Country” number of the “Fra” magazine. Our friends up north have distributed a large number of these, sending the magazines out from here, duly blue-penciled.
I have upwards of a million names of members of Boards of Trade, Chambers of Commerce, Advertising Clubs, Rotarians, Jovians, school teachers, all judges, members of Congress, etc.
It seems to me that we could well afford to circulate a certain number of copies of the “Fra” containing a judicious and truthful write-up of the situation in Colorado.
“Judicious and truthful,” you note. Never would our noble worm write anything that was not truthful; while as for being judicious, it is a virtue desperately needed in this crisis, while agitators are parading back and forth in front of the entrance to Mr. Rockefeller’s office building! The judicious worm has observed our antics and their success and he tactfully reminds Mr. Rockefeller of this:
Just here I cannot refrain from expressing my admiration for the advertising genius displayed by those very industrious, hardworking people Bill Haywood, Charles Moyer, Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Lincoln Steffens and Upton Sinclair. They are continually stating their side of the controversy. I believe if we would state ours, not of course in the same way or with the same vehemence, that we would be benefiting the world to a very great degree.
The worm is all for benefiting the world; not for benefiting the worm—nor even for benefiting Rockefeller! But theworm is worthy of his hire, and would not cheapen himself and his advertising genius in the esteem of a business man. “The price of extra copies of the ‘Fra’ is $200 a thousand,” he writes. He proposes to charge Mr. Rockefeller twenty-cents apiece for magazines which he can produce and mail for ten cents apiece. In other words, he suggests that Mr. Rockefeller shall pay him two hundred thousand dollars, from which, after paying postage and wrapping, he will retain at least one hundred thousand!
But alas, it is notorious how the business man fails to appreciate genius! Mr. Rockefeller consults “Poison Ivy” Lee, whose advice is that the worm shall be allowed to go out to Colorado and see everything, but “have it distinctly understood that he is making this study entirely on his own initiative and at his own expense. If, after he has produced his article and you have read it, it seems to you something worth distributing, an arrangement for such distribution can be made with him.”
A cold, cold world for a public educator and prophet of judiciousness! These business men haggle, precisely as if Pegasus could be harnessed to a garbage-wagon! Says Mr. Rockefeller, writing to the president of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company in Denver:
I have not seen Mr. Hubbard nor given him any encouragement in this matter, other than as set forth in the above correspondence.
To which comes the reply from Denver:
Mr. Hubbard’s price for extra copies of his publication is to my mind high.... We can determine after he has produced his article whether or not we should go any further than we already have in enlarging its distribution.
There was more of this correspondence. It was printed in “Harper’s Weekly” under the title, “Elbert Hubbard’s Price”; the substance of the matter being summed up by “Harper’s Weekly” as follows:
Mr. Hubbard’s proposal, it will be seen, had two parts. 1. To sell his opinion. 2. Later on to make an “investigation” in support of that opinion.
CHAPTER LTHE PRESS AND PUBLIC WELFARE
As a result of the operation of all these forces, we have a class-owned press, representing class-interests, protecting class-interests with entire unscrupulousness, and having no conception of the meaning of public welfare. These words may seem extreme, but I mean them to be taken literally. When our press says “the public,” it means the property-owning class, and if in a newspaper-office you should assume it meant anything else, you would make yourself ridiculous. “We are not in business for our health,” is the formula whereby this matter is summed up in the “business-office” of our newspapers. It is only in the editorial columns that any other idea is suggested.
What kind of “public welfare” will you consider? Here, for example, is William Salisbury, working for the “Chicago Chronicle,” owned by a great banker. Was this banker working for the public welfare? He was working for his own welfare so diligently that later on he was sent to jail. Is Mr. Salisbury working for the public welfare? No, Mr. Salisbury is working for an actress, he tells us, and the actress is working for a diamond ring. Mr. Salisbury comes upon a “tip” that will earn him the price of the ring. A certain merchant has conceived the idea of a co-operative department store, an enterprise which might be of great service to the public; but if the big department-stores get wind of it, they will kill it. Mr. Salisbury takes the problem to his city editor, who consults owner Walsh over the telephone, and then tells Mr. Salisbury to write the story in full.
“The people who are getting this thing up are not advertisers,” he added. “The big department-stores are. Besides, Walsh doesn’t believe in co-operation or municipal ownership, or anything like that, so go ahead.”
I wrote two columns. All the other papers copied the story.
The co-operative department-store was not started. The owners of the big emporiums in the down-town district joined forces against it. They got an option on the only available building by greatly overbidding the small merchants. The latter, whose combined capital was less than the wealth of any one of their powerful rivals, gave up the fight in despair.
Thus was nipped in the bud by the frost of publicity a project which might have revolutionized trade—and all because an actress wanted a bracelet, and a reporter wanted a scoop, and a newspaper wanted to protect its advertisers.
But sometimes the “Chronicle” was merciful, as Mr. Salisbury lets us see. All the newspapers in Chicago were pouring ridicule upon John Alexander Dowie, a fake religious prophet.
When I returned to the office I offered to write of Dowie’s weeping about the birds. That was the only thing that struck me as unusual. Anything that would put Dowie in a ridiculous or unfavorable light was generally wanted by all the papers. But I was told to write nothing.
“We’ve just got orders to let up on Dowie,” said the city editor. “Mr. Walsh wants to increase the paper’s circulation among the Dowieites. Our political views have cost us subscribers lately, and we want to make up for it. If there is any good hot news about Dowie, of course we’ll print it, but not unfavorably.”
Maybe you distrust Mr. Salisbury. A man who could fake so much Journalism might fake one book! Very well; but here is one of the most eminent sociologists in the country, a man whose honor is not to be questioned—Prof. E. A. Ross of the University of Wisconsin. Writing in the “Atlantic Monthly” for March, 1910, Prof. Ross gives several pages of incidents of this sort. I quote:
On the desk of every editor and sub-editor of a newspaper run by a capitalist promoter now under prison sentence lay a list of sixteen corporations in which the owner was interested. This was to remind them not to print anything damaging to these concerns. In the office these corporations were jocularly referred to as “sacred cows.”
Nearly every form of privilege is found in the herd of “sacred cows” venerated by the daily press.
The railroad company is a “sacred cow.” At a hearing before a state railroad commission, the attorney of a shippers’ association got an eminent magnate into the witness chair, with the intention of wringing from him the truth regarding the political expenditures of his railroad. At this point the commission, an abject creature of the railroad, arbitrarily excluded the daring attorney from the case. The memorable excoriation which that attorney gave the commission to its face was made to appear in the papers as thecauseinstead of theconsequenceof this exclusion. Subsequently, when the attorney filed charges with the governor against the commission, one editor wrote an editorial stating the facts and criticizing the commissioners. The editorial was suppressed after it was in type.
The public-service company is a “sacred cow.” In a city of the Southwest, last summer, while houses were burning from lack of water for the fire hose, a lumber company offered to supply the firemen with water. The water company replied that they had “sufficient.”Neither this nor other damaging information concerning the company’s conduct got into the columns of the local press. A yellow journal, conspicuous in the fight for cheaper gas by its ferocious onslaughts on the “gas trust,” suddenly ceased its attack. Soon it began to carry a full-page “Cook with gas” advertisement. The cow had found the entrance to the sacred fold.
Traction is a “sacred cow.” The truth about Cleveland’s fight for the three-cent fare has been widely suppressed. For instance, while Mayor Johnson was superintending the removal of the tracks of a defunct street railway, he was served with a court order enjoining him from tearing up the rails. As the injunction was not endorsed, as by law it should be, he thought it was an ordinary communication, and put it in his pocket to examine later. The next day he was summoned to show reason why he should not be found in contempt of court. When the facts came out, he was, of course, discharged. An examination of seven leading dailies of the country shows that a dispatch was sent out from Cleveland stating that Mayor Johnson, after acknowledging service, pocketed the injunction, and ordered his men to proceed with their work. In the newspaper-offices this dispatch was then embroidered. One paper said the mayor told his men to go ahead and ignore the injunction. Another had the mayor intimating in advance that he would not obey an order if one were issued. A third invented a conversation in which the mayor and his superintendent made merry over the injunction. Not one of the seven journals reported the mayor’s complete exoneration later.
And the same thing has been done in every city where radicals of any sort have gained control. Says A. M. Simons, speaking at a conference of the University of Wisconsin:
The story of the administration of Milwaukee while it was in Socialist control was a caricature of the truth, so much so that it was found necessary to establish a weekly bulletin or press service, scarcely an issue of which did not contain a correction of some news agency story. Compare the story sent out about Mayor Shank and the public market in Indianapolis with the almost complete suppression of the fight against the ice trust by the Socialist interests in Schenectady.
One of the most incredible instances of news suppression in the interests of Big Business occurred early in 1914, during the hearings of the Interstate Commerce Commission. For three years the newspapers had carried on an elaborate campaign in favor of a five per cent increase in freight rates. Fifty million dollars a year was at stake, and the roads were spending millions in advertising their cause in the newspapers. The presidents of our biggest railroads appeared before the Interstate Commerce Commission to tell of the ruin which was threatened unless the increase were granted. The campaign was all worked out in advance, the “dope” for the newspapersprovided; but there came an unexpected hitch in the proceedings, caused by the appearance of a young man by the name of Thorne, a member of the State Railway Commission of Iowa. Mr. Thorne had the finances of all these railroads at his finger-tips, and he proceeded to cross-question the railroad presidents and tear their testimony to pieces. He showed that in twelve years the capitalization of the roads had been increased ninety-two per cent, and their dividends increased three hundred and fifty-nine per cent. In the year 1912 their dividends had been the greatest in history. In 1910 the Pennsylvania, the Baltimore & Ohio, and the New York Central had assured the Interstate Commerce Commission that they could not borrow money, yet in two years they had borrowed five hundred million dollars!
Mr. Thorne showed how in their reports just submitted they had padded their costs. Every locomotive had cost one hundred and twelve per cent more to maintain in 1913 than it had cost in 1912. Freight cars had increased thirty-three per cent in cost, despite the fact that iron and steel were cheaper. The Interstate Commerce Commission allowed Mr. Thorne to question all the railroad presidents, and not one of them could answer him. And what do you think the newspapers did with this most sensational incident? I take the facts from Charles Edward Russell, as follows: The “New York World” gave nearly a column to the testimony of the railroad presidents, and said not a word about Mr. Thorne! The “New York Times” gave a full column, and not a word about Thorne! The “Philadelphia Public Ledger” did the same, and the “Baltimore Sun”; the “Cincinnati Inquirer” gave half a column without mentioning Thorne, and the “Chicago Herald” the same. (This clipping marked, “By the Associated Press”!)
The hearings were continued. President Smith of the New York Central, a Vanderbilt property, took the stand. Mr. Thorne submitted figures showing that his road had made eleven per cent net profit, that it had put by an eleven-million-dollar surplus, that if its dividends had been properly figured they would have been fifty-four per cent. President Smith was absolutely helpless, dumb. And how do you think the New York newspapers treated that incident? The “New York World” gave it this headline: “Going to the Devil Fast, Says Head of New York Central.” And not a word about Thorne! Likewise the “New York Times” gave PresidentSmith’s testimony in full, and nothing about Thorne! The “Philadelphia Public Ledger,” the “Baltimore Sun,” the “Chicago Herald” the same. (“By the Associated Press”!)
And next day came the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. He, too, was helpless in the hands of Mr. Thorne; he admitted that he had made a stock allotment of forty-five million dollars; but again the same papers did not mention the matter. And next day came the vice-president of the “Baltimore & Ohio,” and the same thing happened. All over the country the newspapers were full of articles portraying a railroad panic, our greatest roads “going to the devil,” according to the sworn testimony of their officials—and never one word about State Railroad Commissioner Thorne of Iowa!
All these are positive acts; and now for a moment consider the negative—the good things that newspapers might do and don’t! I could write a volume dealing with plans and social possibilities known to me, whereby the life of mankind might be made over; but you might as well start to fly to the moon as ask a capitalist newspaper to take these things up. For example, the idea of a co-operative home, as tried at Helicon Hall; or the idea set forth by Edgar Chambless in his book, “Roadtown.” Did you ever hear of “Roadtown”? The chances are ninety-nine out of a hundred that you never did. If you are near a library, you may look it up in the “Independent,” May 5, 1910. I will say in brief that it is a plan which won the approval of the best engineers, to build a city in a way that would save seventy per cent of the necessary labor of mankind forever after, and increase by several hundred per cent the total of human happiness. You did not find this plan “boosted” by capitalist newspapers—because its inventor sternly refused all propositions to exploit it for profit, and insisted upon preserving the idea for the free use and benefit of humanity.
CHAPTER LITHE PRESS AND THE RADICALS
If you go into a New York club in the middle of August, you will be told in entire good faith that “everybody” is out of town. It is this “everybody” who is out of town in August that American Journalism knows and serves. Those who stay in town in August are “nobody,” and have to take their chances with the newspapers, as with everything else in capitalist society. Imagine yourself a poor devil, caught in a set of circumstances which cause the city editor of some newspaper, after five minutes consideration, to make up his mind that you are guilty of a crime! Trial by a city editor in five minutes, and execution in columns of illustrated slander—that is our American system of jurisprudence. In the city of Atlanta, a Jewish manufacturer of pencils was tried for rape and murder. He was quite evidently innocent, but it happens that the “poor whites” of the South are jealous of the commercial keenness of the Jews; the politicians of the South want the votes of these “poor whites,” and the “yellow” journals want their pennies; so this poor wretch was hounded by the newspapers for several months, and finally was hanged.
But it is for the poor devil become class-conscious, and protesting against injustice to his class, that our Journalism reserves its deadliest venom. It is when the Radical steps upon the scene that the hunting-pack joins in full cry. Then every prejudice, every hatred in the whole journalistic psychology becomes focused as by a burning-glass upon one centre. The hatred of the staff, men who have sold their honor, and take bold truth-telling for a personal insult; the hatred of the owner, whose life-time gains are threatened; the hatred of the advertiser who supports the paper, of the banker who handles its funds, of the politician who betrays the state to it—all these various hatreds mass themselves, they form what the foot-ball player knows as a “V,” they “rush” this enemy and bowl him over and trample him under their feet.
Any kind of radical, it makes no difference; anyone whoadvocates a change in anything, who expresses discontent with the system of legalized plunder and repression. Six or seven years ago Mrs. Pankhurst came from England in the interest of militant suffrage. The American people had read about Mrs. Pankhurst, and wanted to know what she looked like, and what she was going to do in America. A New York paper came out with a report to the effect that Mrs. Pankhurst, before being allowed to land in New York, had been required by the Federal authorities to give a pledge that she would not engage in militancy in America. This report was cabled to London, where it was hailed with glee by Mrs. Pankhurst’s opponents; Lloyd George made a speech about it, and this speech was cabled to America by the Associated Press, and thus widely spread in the American papers. Mrs. Pankhurst stated to me personally that she had been asked for no such pledge, and had given no such pledge, and that all her efforts to have this false report corrected by the New York newspapers and by the Associated Press had been in vain.
Such was the treatment of a “militant” leader. You say, perhaps, “Well, nobody cares about those militants.” If so, let us hear one of those who vehemently opposed “militancy.” I write to Mrs. Alice Stone Blackwell, and she replies:
For many years, the news carried by the great press agencies on the subject of woman suffrage was habitually twisted, and the twist was almost always unfavorable to suffrage. As editor for a long time of the “Woman’s Journal,” and later as one of the editors of the “Woman Citizen,” I had constant occasion to observe this, and I commented upon it repeatedly. The thing happened so often as to make it impossible to explain it as accident or coincidence.
As an extreme instance, take the following: Every time that the woman suffrage bill was defeated in the British House of Commons, the fact was promptly cabled to this country; but when the bill finally passed—an event which both friends and opponents of suffrage were awaiting with great interest—not one of the papers in the United States that are served by the Associated Press gave the news!
In my suffrage work, I learned beyond question that the news coming through the great press agencies was colored and distorted; and if this has been done on one subject, it has doubtless been done on others. A good many women, I think, learned a wholesome distrust of press reports during the suffrage struggle.
And now let us hear some radicals of the male sex. Hiram Johnson of California is a radical. In “Everybody’s Magazine” during 1908 there appeared an interview which had been submitted to him and printed with his corrections. Sixteennewspapers published on their front page the report that Governor Johnson had repudiated this interview; and when he declared that the report was false, they refused to correct it.
Charles Zueblin is a radical—a very quiet and conservative one, who lectures on municipal ownership to ladies’ clubs. I write to ask him what his experiences have been, and he tells me they are “too personal to be quoted.” He gives me one illustration, which I take the liberty of quoting:
The “Kansas City Journal” has pursued me every season I lecture there because it is an organ of the local public utilities. At one time they twisted some statement of mine in a report of a lecture which they headed: “Zueblin Believes Every Woman Should Marry a Negro.” There was no doubt this was done solely to queer other things that might be said which had no connection with this invention.
Senator La Follette is a radical—and here is a public man who has been almost wiped out by deliberate newspaper boycott. The story of what was done to La Follette in the 1912 presidential campaign can hardly be made to sound like reality; it is a plot out of an old-time Bowery melodrama. La Follette was a candidate for the Republican nomination. He was conducting a tremendous campaign all through the Middle West, and the Associated Press was suppressing the news of it. At an open conference of newspaper-men, held at the University of Wisconsin, the editor of the “Milwaukee Journal,” a strong capitalist paper, openly stated that the Associated Press was sending—“something, of course—but so little that it amounted to nothing.” But when the governor of the state made an attack upon La Follette—“Well, the Associated Press suddenly woke up, and sent out that entire address word for word!”
Nevertheless, La Follette was winning, and stood an excellent chance to get the nomination. He was invited to a dinner of the Periodical Publishers’ Association in Philadelphia, and at that dinner he told a little about the control of newspapers by the big advertising agencies—such facts as fill Chapter XLVII of this book. After the dinner was over the newspaper-men got together on the proposition, and decided that they would end the career of La Follette that night. They cooked up an elaborate story, describing how he had raged and foamed at the mouth, and rambled on and on for hours, until the diners had got up and left him orating to the empty seats and dinner-plates. It was evident, said the story, sympathetically,that La Follette was suffering from overwork and exhaustion; his mind was failing, and he would be compelled to retire from public life. After that, by deliberate arrangement, the Washington correspondents reported not a line of anything that La Follette wrote or said for a couple of years!
Again, during the war, they did the same thing to him. He made a speech before the Nonpartisan Convention in St. Paul, denouncing bitterly the war profiteers, who were being protected by our big newspapers. The Associated Press took this speech and doctored it, as a means of making La Follette odious to the country. They had to make such a slight change in it! La Follette said, “We had grievances against the German government.” And all the Associated Press had to do was to slip in one little word, “We hadnogrievances against the German government!” The whole country rose up to execrate La Follette, and the United States Senate ordered him placed on trial. When it came to a show-down, they discovered they had nothing against him, and dropped the case, and the Associated Press, after many months’ delay and heavy pressure from La Follette, finally admitted that it had misquoted him, and made a public apology.
And then La Follette came before the people for their verdict on his conduct. He carried the state by a vote of 110,064 to 70,813; but the big capitalist newspapers of Milwaukee deliberately held back the returns favorable to him, and on election night the story was telegraphed all over the country that the La Follette ticket had been overwhelmed. The leading Chicago newspapers reported the election of twenty out of twenty-six anti-La Follette delegates, and the repudiation of La Follette by “an overwhelming majority of Wisconsin voters.” Next morning there followed editorials in all the leading Wall Street organs, gloating over this defeat. And, as usual in newspaper practice, this first story got all the space that the subject was worth; the later news of La Follette’s victory was “buried.”