PART IIITHE REMEDY
CHAPTER LXIICUTTING THE TIGER’S CLAWS
Every day the chasm between the classes in America grows wider; every day the class struggle grows more intense. Both sides become more conscious, more determined—and so the dishonesty of American Journalism becomes more deliberate, more systematic. And what is to be done? It must be evident to any sensible man that the conditions portrayed in this book are intolerable. Mankind will not consent to be lied to indefinitely.
William Marion Reedy discussed the question ten years ago, and his solution was pamphleteering. We must return to the custom of the eighteenth century, printing and circulating large numbers of leaflets, pamphlets and books. And for the past ten years we have been doing this; the Socialist party, for example, is a machine for the circulating of pamphlets and leaflets, and the holding of public meetings to counteract the knaveries of the capitalist press. There are innumerable other organizations which serve the same purpose: the “People’s Council,” the “Civil Liberties Bureau,” the “International Workers’ Defense League,” the I. W. W. groups, “The Rand School,” the “People’s College,” the “Young People’s Socialist League,” the “Intercollegiate Socialist Society.” But, obviously, this can only be a temporary solution. The workers of the country are in the condition of a frontier settlement besieged by savage Indians. They defend themselves with such weapons as they find at hand; but sooner or later, it is evident, they will organize a regular force, and invade the woods, and be done with those Indians once for all.
Take the Moyer-Haywood case, the Mooney case, the Ludlow massacre, the Bisbee deportations; and consider what happens. For days, for weeks, perhaps for years, the Associated Press and its thousand newspapers prepare a carefully constructed set of falsehoods, and twenty or thirty million copies per day of these falsehoods are sold to the public. Whereupon men and women of conscience all over the country are driven to protest. They call mass-meetings, they organizea new league and raise defense funds, print leaflets and pamphlets and devise a system of house-to-house distribution, call big strikes and parades of protest; by this prodigious mass of effort they succeed in conveying some small portion of the truth to some small portions of the population. Is it not obvious that society cannot continue indefinitely to get its news by this wasteful method? One large section of the community organized to circulate lies, and another large section of the community organized to refute the lies! We might as well send a million men out into the desert to dig holes, and then send another million to fill up the holes. To say that William Marion Reedy, after a study of our journalistic dishonesty, could find no better solution of the problem than pamphleteering, is merely to say that bourgeois thought is bankrupt.
The first remedy to which every good American takes resort is the law. We pass fifty thousand new laws in America every year, but still we cling to the faith that the next thousand will “do the business.” Let us have laws to punish the lying of the press!
I, as a good American, have thought of laws that I would like to see passed. For instance, a law providing that newspapers shall not publish an interview with anyone until they have submitted the interview and had it O.K.’d; or unless they have obtained written permission to quote the person without such O.K.
Also, a law providing that when any newspaper has made any false statement concerning an individual, and has had its attention called to the falsity of this statement, it shall publish a correction of the statement in the next edition of the publication, and in the same spot and with the same prominence given to the false statement.
For example, the press sends out a report that the Rev. Washington Gladden is about to resign his pulpit. His mail is full of letters from people all over the country, expressing regret. Says Dr. Gladden:
The trouble with such a report is that you can never get it corrected. I have done my best to get such correction, but in this I have signally failed. Anything which discredits a man is “good stuff,” which most newspapers are ready to print, provided it is not actionable; any correction which is made of such a report is not so apt to find a place on the wires, and is pretty sure to be blue-pencilled by the telegraph editors.
It happens, while I am preparing this book for the printer, that I visit a friend, and mention what I am doing; he says: “There was one newspaper story which almost caused me to despise you. I wonder how much truth there was in it.” He explains that he was in Chicago in the early days of the war, attending a conference of the People’s Council, and in a Chicago newspaper he read that I had denounced Emma Goldman to the government, and had turned over some of her private letters to the government.
I tell my friend what happened. An insane man had threatened my life, and I had applied to the Los Angeles police department for permission to carry a revolver. They promised to keep secret my application, but within half an hour there were two newspaper reporters after me. I refused to talk about the matter; so, as usual, they made up a story. It happened that I had given to the chief of detectives what information I had as to the insane man’s past conduct; among other things, that he had caused a disturbance at a meeting of Emma Goldman’s. That was the way her name came in, and the only way. I barely know Emma Goldman, having met her twice at public meetings; I knew nothing whatever about her activities at this time, and had no letters from her in my possession. I now have one, for immediately I wrote to her to say that the published story was false, and she replied that I need not have worried; she had known it was false.
Now, I sent a denial of that story to every newspaper in Los Angeles, and also to the Associated Press; but my denial went into the waste-basket. And why? At this time the capitalist press was engaged in hounding Emma Goldman to prison; the lie was useful to the hounders, so it stood, in spite of all my protests.
Obviously enough, here is a gross injustice. Common sense dictates a law that any newspaper which prints a false statement shall be required to give equal prominence to a correction. The law should provide that upon publication of any false report, and failure to correct it immediately upon receipt of notice, the injured party should have the right to collect a fixed sum from the newspaper—five or ten thousand dollars at least. At present, you understand, the sum has to be fixed by the jury, and the damages have to be proven. If the “Los Angeles Times” calls Upton Sinclair an “Anarchist writer,” if the “Chicago Tribune” calls Henry Ford an “Anarchist,” it isup to the plaintiffs to prove just how and to what extent they have been damaged. The newspaper has the right to question their character and reputation, to examine them about every detail of their lives and opinions. Was Upton Sinclair justified in divorcing his wife? Does Henry Ford know how to read? If not, then it is all right to call them “Anarchists.”
Also there is the problem of the Associated Press, the most powerful and most sinister monopoly in America. Certainly there will be no freedom in America, neither journalistic freedom nor political freedom nor industrial freedom, until the monopoly of the Associated Press is broken; until the distributing of the news to American newspapers is declared a public utility, under public control; until anyone who wishes to publish a newspaper in any American city or town may receive the Associated Press service without any formality whatever, save the filing of an application and the payment of a fee to cover the cost of the service. Proceedings to establish this principle were begun a year ago by Hearst before the Federal Trade Commission. Hearst had been barred from getting the “A. P.” franchise in certain cities, and I venture to guess that his purpose was to frighten his enemies into letting him have what he wanted. At any rate, he found himself suddenly able to buy the franchises, so he dropped his proceedings against the “A. P.” The attorney in this case was Samuel Untermyer, who writes me about the issue as follows:
If the prevailing opinion is right, the monopoly of the Associated Press over the news of the world is complete. Unless the courts will hold, as I think they will, when the question comes before them, that news is a public utility; that the Associated Press is engaged in interstate commerce, using the cables, telegraph lines and telephones and that it is, therefore, bound to furnish its service on equal terms to all who choose to pay for it. If that is not the law, it should be the law, and can readily be made the law by Federal legislation. Until this is done, the monopoly of the Associated Press will continue intolerable.
I have fought it for years and thus far in vain, but I shall continue to fight until it is broken. The little clique that controls the Associated Press is in turn under the complete domination of a few of the most narrow-minded and reactionary of the great capitalists of the country. If our Government fails to stand the strain of these terrible times and if revolution and bloodshed follow—which God forbid!—the responsibility will rest at the doors of men like Gary and lawbreakers like the U. S. Steel Company who lack all vision and sense of justice.
Also there should be a law forbidding any newspaper tofake telegraph or cable dispatches. At present, this is a universal custom in newspaper offices; the most respectable papers do it continually. They clip an item from some other newspaper, rewrite it, and put it under a “telegraphic headline.” They will take the contents of some letter that comes to the office, and write it up under a “London date-line.” They will write their own political propaganda, and represent it as having come by telegraph from a special correspondent in Washington or New York. In “Harper’s Weekly” for October 9, 1915, there was published an article, “At the Front with Willie Hearst.” Mr. Hearst’s “Universal News Bureau” was shown to be selling news all over the country, purporting to come from “more than eighty correspondents, many of them of world-wide fame.” Every day, if you read this “Universal Service,” you became familiar with the names of Hearst correspondents in London, Paris, Vienna, Rome, Berlin, Petrograd. All these correspondents were imaginary persons; all this news was written in the Hearst offices in New York, being a re-hash for American afternoon papers of the news of the London morning papers. This is obvious fraud, and the law should bar it, precisely as it bars misbranded maple syrup and olive oil and strawberry jam.
Such laws would help; and I could suggest others that would help; nevertheless, the urging of such laws is not the purpose of this book. It is a problem of cutting the claws of a tiger. The first thing you have to do is to catch your tiger; and when I undertake the hard and dangerous job of invading a jungle and catching a tiger and chaining him down, am I going to be content with cutting off the sharpest points of the beast’s claws, and maybe pulling one or two of his teeth? I am not!
CHAPTER LXIIITHE MENTAL MUNITION-FACTORY
A solution that comes at once to mind is state-owned or municipal-owned newspapers. This is the orthodox Socialist solution, and is also being advocated by William Jennings Bryan. Fortunately, we do not have to take his theories, or anyone’s theories; we have facts—the experience of Los Angeles with its public paper, the “Municipal News,” which was an entire success. I inquire of the editor of the paper, Frank E. Wolfe, and he writes:
The “Municipal News”? There’s a rich story buried there. It was established by an initiative ordinance, and had an ample appropriation. It was launched in the stream with engines going full steam ahead. Its success was instantaneous. Free distribution; immense circulation; choked with high-class, high-rate advertising; well edited, and it was clean and immensely popular.
Otis said: “Every dollar that damned socialistic thing gets is a dollar out of the Times’ till.” Every publisher in the city re-echoed, and the fight was on. The chief thing that rankled, however, was the outgrowth of a clause in the ordinance which gave to each political party polling a three per cent vote a column in each issue for whatsoever purpose it might be used. The Socialist Labor Party nosed out the Prohibitionists by a fluke. The Socialists had a big margin in the preceding elections, so the Reds had two columns, and they were quick to seize the opportunity for propaganda. The Goo-goos, who had always stoutly denied they were a political party, came forward and claimed space, and the merry war was on. Those two columns for Socialist propaganda were the real cause for the daily onslaught of the painted ladies of Broadway (newspaper district of Los Angeles). There were three morning and three evening papers. Six times a day they whined, barked, yelped and snapped at the heels of the “Municipal News.” Never were more lies poured out from the mouths of these mothers of falsehood. The little, weakly whelps of the pornographic press took up the hue and cry, and Blanche, Sweetheart and Tray were on the trail. Advertisers were cajoled, browbeaten and blackmailed, until nearly all left the paper. The “News” was manned by a picked staff of the best newspaper men on the coast. It was clean, well edited, and gave both sides to all controversies—using the parallel column system. It covered the news of the municipality better than any paper had ever covered it. It was weak and ineffective editorially, for the policy was to print a newspaper. We did not indulge in a clothes-line quarrel—did not fight back.
The “News” died under the axe one year from its birth. They used the initiative to kill it. The rabble rallied to the cry, and we foresaw the end.
The paper had attracted attention all over the English-reading world. Everywhere I have gone I have been asked about it, by people who never dreamed I had been an editor of the paper. Its death was a triumph for reaction, but its effect will not die. Some day the idea will prevail. Then I might want to go back into the “game.”
City-owned newspapers are part of the solution, but not the whole part. As a Socialist, I advocate public ownership of the instruments and means of production; but I do not rely entirely upon that method where intellectual matters are concerned. I would have the state make all the steel and coal and oil, the shoes and matches and sugar; I would have it do the distributing of newspapers, and perhaps even the printing; but for the editing of the newspapers I cast about for a method of control that allows free play to the development of initiative and the expression of personality.
In a free society the solution will be simple; there will be many groups and associations, publishing their own papers, and if you do not like the papers which these groups give you, you can form a group of your own. Being in receipt of the full product of your labor, you will have plenty of money, and will be surrounded by other free and independent individuals, also receiving the full product of their labor, and accustomed to combining for the expression of their ideas. The difference is that today the world’s resources are in the hands of a class, and this class has a monopoly of self-expression. The problem of transferring such power to the people must be studied as the whole social problem, and not merely as the problem of the press.
Fortunately there are parts of America in which the people have kept at least a part of their economic independence, and have gone ahead to solve the problem of the “kept” press in true American fashion—that is, by organizing and starting honest newspapers for themselves. The editor of the “Nonpartisan Leader,” Oliver S. Morris, has kindly written for me an account of the experiences of the Nonpartisan League, which I summarize as follows:
The League commenced organization work early in 1915 in North Dakota. By the summer of the next year it had forty thousand members, yet no newspaper in the state hadgiven, even as news, a fair account of the League’s purposes. Every daily paper in the state was filled with “gross misinformation and absurd lies.” So the League started a little weekly paper of its own. With this single weekly, against the entire daily press of the state, it swept the primaries in June, 1916.
Then the League decided to have a daily paper. The “Courier-News” of Fargo had been for sale, but the owners would not sell to the League. The League went ahead to start a new paper, actually buying machinery and taking subscriptions; then the “Courier-News” decided to sell, and its circulation under League ownership now exceeds the total population of Fargo.
The League at present has weekly papers in seven states, with a total circulation of two hundred thousand, and another weekly, the “Nonpartisan Leader,” published in St. Paul, with a circulation of two hundred and fifty thousand. It is starting co-operative country weekly papers, supervising their editorial policy and furnishing them news and editorial service; over one hundred of these weekly papers are already going. There is another League daily in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and one at Nampa, Idaho. Finally, the League is going ahead on its biggest venture, the establishment of a daily in Minneapolis. This paper is to be capitalized at a million dollars, and the stock is being sold to farmer and labor organizations throughout the state. Says Mr. Morris: “Many wealthy professional and business men, disgusted with the controlled press, have purchased stock, and are warm boosters for the League publications.” Also he says:
One of the chief results of the establishment of a League press is a different attitude on the part of many existing papers. With competition in the field, many publishers who have hitherto been biased and unfair have been forced to change their tactics. Few of these papers have gone over to the League side of political and economic questions, but they have been forced at least to print fair news reports on both sides of the question in their news columns, reserving their opposition to the movement for their editorial columns. That, of course, is fair enough. The menace of the controlled press in America is due to the fact that as a rule this press does not confine its arguments and opposition to the editorial columns, but uses the news columns for propaganda, and, failing to print the news, printing only a part of it, distorting it or actually lying, sways opinion through the news columns.
Such is the procedure in places where Americans are free.But what about our crowded cities, with their slum populations, speaking forty different languages, illiterate, unorganized, and dumb? Even in these cities there have been efforts made to start newspapers in the interest of the people. I know few more heroic stories than the twenty-year struggle to establish and maintain the “New York Call.” It began as a weekly, “The Worker.” Even that took endless campaigns of begging, and night labor of devoted men and women who earned their livings by day-time labor under the cruel capitalist grind. At last they managed to raise funds to start a daily, and then for ten years it was an endless struggle with debt and starvation. It was a lucky week when the “New York Call” had money enough to pay its printing force; the reporters and editors would sometimes have to wait for months. A good part of the space in the paper had to be devoted to ingenious begging.
The same attempt was made in Chicago, and there bad management and factional quarrels brought a disastrous failure. At the time of writing, there are Socialist dailies in Butte, in Seattle, and in Milwaukee, also a few foreign-language Socialist dailies. There are numerous weeklies and monthlies; but these, of course, do not take the place of newspapers, they are merely a way of pamphleteering. The people read falsehoods all week or all month, and then at last they get what portion of the truth the “Appeal to Reason” or the “Nation” or the “Liberator” or “Pearson’s” can find room for. In the meantime the average newspaper reader has had his whole psychology made of lies, so that he cannot believe the truth when he sees it.
There are a few millionaires in America who have liberal tendencies. They have been willing to finance reform campaigns, and in great emergencies to give the facts to the people; they have been willing now and then to back radical magazines, and even to publish them. But—I state the fact, without trying to explain it—there has not yet appeared in America a millionaire willing to found and maintain a fighting daily paper for the abolition of exploitation. I have myself put the proposition before several rich men. I have even known of cases where promises were made, and plans drawn up. My friend Gaylord Wilshire intended to do it with the proceeds of his gold-mine, but the gold-mine has taken long to develop. I had hopes that Henry Ford would do it, when I read of his purchase of the “Dearborn Independent.” I urged the matterupon him with all the eloquence I could muster; he said he meant to do it, but I have my fears. The trouble is his ignorance; he really does not know about the world in which he finds himself, and so far the intellectual value of the “Dearborn Independent” has been close to zero.
So our slum proletariat is left to feed upon the garbage of yellow journalism. Year by year the cost of living increases, and wages, if they move at all, move laggingly, and after desperate and embittered strife. In the midst of this strife the proletariat learns its lessons; it learns to know the clubs of policemen and the bayonets and machine-guns of soldiers; it learns to know capitalist politicians and capitalist judges; also it learns to know Capitalist Journalism! Wherever in America the workers organize and strike for a small portion of their rights, they come out of the experience with a bitter and abiding hatred of the press. I have shown you what happened in Colorado; in West Virginia; in Paterson, New Jersey; in Calumet, Michigan; in Bisbee, Arizona; in Seattle, Washington. I could show you the same thing happening in every industrial center in America.
The workers have come to realize the part which the newspapers play; they have come to know the newspapers as the crux of the argument, the key to the treasure-chamber. A modern newspaper, seen from the point of view of the workers, is a gigantic munition-factory, in which the propertied class manufactures mental bombs and gas-shells for the annihilation of its enemies. And just as in war sometimes the strategy is determined by the location of great munition-factories and depots, so the class-struggle comes to center about newspaper offices. In every great city of Europe where the revolution took place, the first move of the rebels was to seize these offices, and the first move of the reactionaries was to get them back. We saw machine-guns mounted in the windows of newspaper-offices, sharp-shooters firing from the roofs, soldiers in the streets replying with shrapnel. It is worth noting that wherever the revolutionists were able to take and hold the newspapers, they maintained their revolution; where the newspapers were retaken by the reactionaries, the revolution failed.
In Petrograd the “Little Gazette,” organ of the “Black Hundreds,” became the “Red Gazette,” and has remained the “Red Gazette.” The official military organ, the “Army andFleet,” became the “Red Army and Fleet.” The “Will of Russia,” organ of Protopopov, last premier of the Tsar, became the “Pravda,” which means “Truth.” In Berlin, on the other hand, the “Kreuz-Zeitung,” organ of black magic and reaction, became for a few days “Die Rothe Fahne,” the “Red Flag”; but, alas, it went back to the “Kreuz-Zeitung” again!
Will it come this way in America? Shall we see mobs storming the offices of the “New York Times” and “World,” the “Chicago Tribune,” the “Los Angeles Times”? It depends entirely upon the extent to which these capitalist newspapers continue to infuriate the workers, and to suppress working-class propaganda with the help of subservient government officials. I personally am not calling for violent revolution; I still hope for the survival of the American system of government. But I point out to the owners and managers of our great capitalist news-organs the peril in which they place themselves, by their system of organized lying about the radical movement. It is not only the fury of resentment they awaken in the hearts of class-conscious workingmen and women; it is the condition of unstable equilibrium which they set up in society, by the mass of truth they suppress. Today every class-conscious workingman carries about with him as his leading thought, that if only he and his fellows could get possession of the means of news-distribution, could take the printing-offices and hold them for ten days, they could end forever the power of Capitalism, they could make safe the Co-operative Commonwealth in America.
I say ten days, and I do not speak loosely. Just imagine if the newspapers of America were to print the truth for ten days! The truth about poverty, and the causes of poverty; the truth about corruption in politics and in all branches of government, in Journalism, and throughout the business world; the truth about profiteering and exploitation, about the banking graft, the plundering of the railroads, the colossal gains of the Beef Trust and the Steel Trust and the Oil Trust and their hundreds of subsidiary organizations; the truth about conditions in industry, the suppression of labor-revolts and the corrupting of labor movements; above all, the truth about the possibilities of production by modern machinery, the fact that, by abolishing production for profit and substituting production for use, it would be possible to provide abundance forall by two or three hours’ work a day! I say that if all this legitimate truth could be placed before the American people for ten successive days, instead of the mess of triviality, scandal, crime and sensation, doctored news and political dope, prejudiced editorials and sordid and vulgar advertisements upon which the American people are now fed—I say that the world would be transformed, and Industrial Democracy would be safe. Most of our newspaper proprietors know this as well as I do; so, when they read of the seizing of newspaper offices in Europe, they experience cold chills, and one great newspaper in Chicago has already purchased half a dozen machine-guns and stored them away in its cellar!
For twenty years I have been a voice crying in the wilderness of industrial America; pleading for kindness to our laboring-classes, pleading for common honesty and truth-telling, so that we might choose our path wisely, and move by peaceful steps into the new industrial order. I have seen my pleas ignored and my influence destroyed, and now I see the stubborn pride and insane avarice of our money-masters driving us straight to the precipice of revolution. What shall I do? What can I do—save to cry out one last warning in this last fateful hour? The time is almost here—and ignorance, falsehood, cruelty, greed and lust of power were never stronger in the hearts of any ruling class in history than they are in those who constitute the Invisible Government of America today.
CHAPTER LXIVTHE PROBLEM OF THE REPORTER
One important line of attack upon Capitalist Journalism occurred to me some five years ago, after the Colorado coal-strike. I have saved this story, because it points so clearly the method I wish to advocate. You will find the story in “Harper’s Weekly” for July 25, 1914; “Hearst-Made War News,” by Isaac Russell.
You remember how Hearst “made” the war with Spain. Sixteen years later, in 1914, Hearst was busy “making” another war, this time with Mexico. President Wilson, trying to avoid war, had arranged for arbitration of the difficulty between Mexico and the United States by delegates from Argentine, Brazil and Chile. This was the Niagara Conference, and to it the “New York American” sent an honest reporter. It did this, not through oversight, but because the usual run of Hearst reporters had found themselves unable to get any information whatever. One Mexican delegate had taken the card of a Hearst reporter, torn it to pieces, and thrown the pieces into the reporter’s face. The delegates for the United States refused to talk to the Hearst representatives, the other newspaper-men refused to have anything to do with them. So the managing editor of the “New York American” selected Mr. Roscoe Conklin Mitchell, a man known to be honest.
Mr. Mitchell came to Niagara, and got the news—to the effect that all was going well at the conference. He sent a dispatch to that effect, and the “New York American” did not publish this dispatch. Day by day Mr. Mitchell sent dispatches, describing how all was going well at the conference; and the “American,” which was determined that the Conference should fail, doctored these dispatches and wrote in false matter. Mr. Mitchell had to explain to the delegates and to the other reporters how he was being treated by his home office. On two occasions Mr. Mitchell forced the “American” to send up another man to write the kind of poisoned falsehoods it wanted; and on each occasion thesemen were forced to leave, because no one would have anything to do with them, they could get no information. Finally, in the midst of Mr. Mitchell’s dispatches, the “New York American” inserted a grand and wonderful “scoop”: “President Carranza’s Confidential Message to the Mediators.” Mr. Mitchell had sent no such dispatch, and upon inquiry he learned that the document was a fake; no such “confidential message” had been received from President Carranza. So Mr. Mitchell wired his resignation to the “New York American.”
The managing editor of the “American” protested. “Please be good soldier and good boy,” he telegraphed. Again he telegraphed: “Come home comfortably, be philosophical. Good soldiers are patient, even if superior officers make mistakes. Be resigned without resigning.” When the news of Mitchell’s resignation reached the other reporters, they formed an impromptu committee and rushed in automobiles to his hotel to congratulate him. The American delegates to the convention held a reception, during which the head of the delegation made to Mr. Mitchell a speech of congratulation. Summing up the story, Isaac Russell puts this question to you, the reader: Will you leave it to the men on the firing line, the reporters, to fight out alone the question of whether you are to receive accurate information concerning what is going on in the world? Or will you help to find means whereby both you and your agent, the reporter, may be less at the mercy of the unscrupulous publisher, who finds that lying and misrepresentation serve his personal ends?
Isaac Russell, you recall, was the reporter for the “New York Times” who had stood by me through the struggle over the Colorado coal-strike. This struggle was just over, and both Russell and I were sick and sore. Russell was fighting with his editors day by day—they objected to his having written this “Hearst-made War News,” by the way, and took the first opportunity thereafter to get rid of him. Russell had word of an impending break between Amos Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt, and wrote it up. Gifford Pinchot, brother of Amos, made a furious denial, whereupon the “Times” fired Russell. But very soon afterwards Amos Pinchot broke with Theodore Roosevelt!
Russell and I talked over the problem of the reporter and the truth. Must a reporter be a cringing wretch, or else a man of honor in search of a job? Might not a reporter be amember of an honored profession, having its own standards, its sense of duty to the public? Obviously, the first trouble is that in his economic status the reporter is a sweated wage slave. If reporting is to become a profession, the reporters must organize, and have power to fix, not merely their wage-scale, but also their ethical code. I wrote an article calling for a “reporters’ union,” and Russell began to agitate among New York newspaper-men for this idea, which has now spread all over the country.
What would be the effect upon news-writing of a reporters’ union? What assurance have we that reporters would be better than owners? Well, in the first place, reporters are young men, and owners are nearly always old men; so in the newspaper-world you have what you have in the world of finance, of diplomacy, of politics and government—a “league of the old men,” giving orders to the young men, holding the young men down. The old men own most of the property, the young men own little of the property; so control by old men is property control, while control by young men would be control by human beings.
I have met some newspaper reporters who were drunken scoundrels. I have met some who were as cruel and unscrupulous as the interests they served. But the majority of newspaper reporters are decent men, who hate the work they do, and would gladly do better if it were possible. I feel sure that very few of the falsehoods about Helicon Hall would have been published if the reporters who accepted our hospitality had been free to write what they really thought about us. I know that throughout our “Broadway demonstration” a majority of the reporters were on our side. They took us into their confidence about what was going on in their newspaper offices; they went out of their way to give us counsel. Again and again they came to my wife, to plead that our mourning “stunt” was “petering-out,” and could we not think up some way to hold the attention of the public? Would not my wife at least rescind her request that they omit descriptions of that white military cape? After the last assault upon the street speakers in Tarrytown, it was a reporter who warned my wife that the situation was getting out of hand; the authorities would not listen to reason, there was going to be violence, and she had better persuade me to withdraw.
I have before me a letter from C. E. S. Wood, poet and lawyer:
You doubtless know more newspaper men than I do, but I know a great many—fine fellows personally; themselves writhing in the detestable position of moral bandits, the disgrace of which they feel as keenly as any, and yet economic determinism keeps them there. They are in a trap. They are behind the bars, and as the thief said to Talleyrand, or some minister of France, “One must live.” I know of no other profession that deliberately trains its neophytes to lying and dishonor, which makes it a part of the professional obligation to ruin man or woman by deliberate lies; which never honestly confesses a mistake, and never has the chivalry to praise an adversary.
And again, William Marion Reedy:
To one who has lived all his life in cities, to one who has spent most of his days and nights with the men who write the great daily papers of the cities, it is perfectly evident that ninety out of one hundred editorial writers on the press today are men who are in intellectual and sympathetic revolt against present-day conditions. You will find the average editorial writer a Socialist, and as for the reporter, he is most likely to be an Anarchist. The reason of this is plain enough. The men who make the newspapers are behind the scenes—they see the workings of the wires—they note the demagogy of politicians, they are familiar with the ramifications by which the public service corporations control the old parties down to the smallest offices, and even at times finance reform movements, which always stop at the election of some respectable figurehead or dummy, but never proceed to any attack upon the fundamental evils of our social and economic system. It is my firm belief that were it not for the capitalists at the head of the great daily newspapers, if it were possible for the men who write the news and the editorials of all the newspapers in the United States, to take absolute charge of their publications and print the news exactly as they see it, and write their views exactly as they feel them, for a space of three days, there would be such a revolution in the United States of America as would put that of France to shame. The only possible reason why this might not occur is that the editorial writers and reporters actually believe in nothing—not even in the various remedies, rational or wild-eyed, which occasionally, in private, they proclaim.
And here is another letter, written by Ralph Bayes, for many years city editor of the “Los Angeles Record,” and now laid up in a sanitarium with tuberculosis.
I wonder as you gallop gaily along the way, throwing rocks in gypsy-like abandon at the starched and frilled little children of privilege—I wonder whether you will give your readers just one glimpse of the tragedies that are the lives of the men hired by the system to do the work you condemn. It isn’t merely that we journalists must prostitute our own minds and bodies in answer to the call of thatinexorable tyrant, our collective belly. Every man who toils and sweats for a wage is perforce doing the same thing. The bitterness of our portion is this precisely: that we are hired poisoners, whose lot it is to kill the things we love most. To kill them, not as bold buccaneers in a stand-up fight, but to slay them artfully, insidiously, with a half-true headline or a part suppression of fact. In my ten years of experience on various sheets as reporter, editor and Associated Press representative, I have come to know the masses with whom I had to deal. Their intellects were the pawns with which I must learn to play the editorial game. I knew for instance, sitting at my desk, just how many extra papers I could sell with a scare-line on a police scandal. I knew to how many men on the street the filthy details of some married woman’s shame would prove a lure to buy. And as I watched the circulation rise or fall, day by day, like a huge beating pulse, I became familiar, somewhat, with the mental processes of the average human animal. It was my tragedy, as it is the tragedy of the majority of my fellows, that this knowledge, acquired always at a tremendous cost of our life’s energies, must be used not for the uplift, but for the further enslavement, the drugging of the minds of men. How many times have I sat at my desk, and in apparently heartless fashion, cut the big truth out of the stuff that honest reporters wrote. Sometimes there were other moments in my life, as in the lives of the rest of my kind, when there were opportunities for sly sabotage—when we thought by the ridiculous speciousness of our alleged facts, to make the pseudo-truths which we pretended to propound stand forth in their gaunt shamelessness for the things they actually were. Do you remember Harwood, of the “Los Angeles Times”? If I were only with you now, I could point out to you in that daily concatenation of lies, a few truths about things, peering covertly through the mass of corruption, and seeming almost to be holding their figurative noses in disgust. How we used to chuckle when he would succeed in passing a sly sentence—a word—over the sleepy night editor at the desk! Poor intellectual Pierrots that we were! Literary Pantaloons!
But out of the tragedy of my own experience, and out of the tragedies of the experiences of the fellows I have known, I can glimpse a great light ahead. For I’m an optimist, you see. I was talking the other day to the editor of one of the sheets which poison public opinion in Phoenix, Arizona. He is a thoroughly fine, and likable chap, but I had always known him for an ultra-conservative—a kept man entirely. The conversation drifted to Russia, and to my utter astonishment he quite frankly, but confidentially, told me that he didn’t believe a word of the dispatches put forth by the Associated Press—the Associated Press which hitherto had been Almighty God to him. I glanced at him curiously, and then: “You’re not a radical?” I said, dubiously. “I don’t know what I am,” he replied. “I’ve lost my perspective and I haven’t anchored to any economic philosophy as yet, but sometimes my thoughts are so bitter that I’m afraid of them. I’ve just seen a man sent to jail for twenty days,” he continued. “He had been in town but half an hour, and his only crime was that he couldn’t obtain work and that he had run out of money. God,” he said, “some day I may be that man. I feel his feelings now, and Imust hide them or lose my job.” Poor fellow, his wife is dying of tuberculosis, and he is almost distracted with the burden of his financial troubles.
It was just another journalistic tragedy I had seen, but joy burst in upon me as I listened to him talk. “Things aren’t so bad after all,” I thought, “for the press, at least, isn’t any more rotten or venal than the rest of the system.” In the editorial rooms of the country there are good fellows and true, sheer tired of the daily assassination in which they participate. Their fine delusions are spent. Their faith in the old is waning. And when the big day comes, I think you will find the press full ripe—riper perhaps than most of our institutions—for the change.
On page149I stated that the publisher of the “New York Times” gave a dinner to his staff, and my friend, Isaac Russell, corrected me, saying: “WE REPORTERS PAID FOR THAT DINNER.” Now let me give you another glimpse into a reporter’s soul:
I can understand it now. We were trying to get together in an association, but the big bosses always got in, and Mr. Ochs always came TO OUR DINNER, and always made the principal speech, and always dismissed the gathering after vaudeville stunts by “old vets.” I remember that at that dinner I PAID, but sat away at the foot of a horseshoe table, and the BIG GUNS of the “Times” all sat around the center of the horseshoe, and the big guns thundered and sent us away—me boiling, that we writers had to sit mute and dumb at our own dinner, and could never talk over our affairs—the bosses rushed so to every gathering we planned.
I wish you could print the menu card for that dinner—the illustration on the cover. I kept it as the most humiliating example I ever saw of the status of the news-writer.... The illustration showed Adolph S. Ochs as a man with his coat off wielding a big sledgehammer. He was knocking one of those machines where you send the ball away up in the air, and get a cigar if the bell rings at the top of the column. Well, a little figure stood behind the redoubtable plutocratic owner of the “Times.” This little figure was labeled “THE STAFF.”
“STAFF” WAS FLUNKEYING IT FOR OCHS—holding the great man’s hat and coat, if you will—while he hit the circulation ball a wallop!
CHAPTER LXVTHE PRESS SET FREE
Some years ago Allan Benson told me of his troubles as an honest journalist; I asked him to repeat them for this book, and he answered:
I doubt if my experiences as a daily newspaper editor would serve your purpose. When I was a daily editor I edited. I printed what I pleased. If I could not do so, I resigned. I didn’t resign with a bank account to fall back upon—I resigned broke.
I am sorry that I struck my friend Benson in an uncommunicative mood. It doesn’t in the least interfere with my thesis to learn that some editors resign; it is plain enough to the dullest mind that it doesn’t help the public when an honest man resigns, and a rogue or a lickspittle takes his place.
I am not one of those narrow radicals who believe that the pocket-nerve of the workers is the only nerve, or even the principal nerve, by which they will be moved to action. I know that the conscience of newspaper men is struggling all the time. Now and then I come on a case of truth-telling in a capitalist newspaper, which cannot be explained by any selfish, competitive motive. What does it mean? If you could go inside that office, you would find some man risking the bread that goes into his children’s mouths, the shoes that go onto their feet, in order that the knavery of Capitalist Journalism may be a little less knavish; going to his boss and laying down the law: “I won’t stand for that. If that goes in, I go out.” As a rule, alas, he goes out—and this reduces the inclination of others to fight for honesty in the news.
One purpose of this book is to advocate a union of newspaper workers, so that they may make their demands as an organization, and not as helpless individuals. Events move fast these days; while I write, I learn that there is already a “News-Writers’ Union” in Boston, and one in New Haven; there is one being formed in Omaha, one in Louisville, one in Seattle, one in San Francisco. In Louisville the “Courier-Journal” and “Times” served notice on their staff that joining the union would automatically constitute resignation. In SanFrancisco, I am told by an editor of that city, the movement “was carried through swiftly and silently at the start, the evening papers being one hundred per cent organized, the morning papers about fifty per cent.” Then the publishers got wind of it, and held a secret meeting in the St. Francis Hotel. “That fearless backer of organized labor and the rights of the working classes, to wit: William Randolph Hearst, preferred to carry out his great program of betterment without consulting his handmaidens and bondmen.” The “Chronicle,” the paper of “Mike” De Young, took the same stand; so—
Upon the morning after the meeting every man on both papers who had signed the charter roll of the proposed association was told to recant with bended knee, or to go forth and earn his bread with a pick and shovel. Some did and some did not—all honor to the latter.... It is certain that the publishers of the morning papers will fight to the last ditch.
My informant goes on to tell about his own position. You remember the immortal utterance of President Eliot of Harvard, that the true “American hero” of our time is the “scab.” How does this true “American hero” feel about himself? Listen:
And I? Well, old man, I somewhat shamefully admit that I am at present guarding my bread and butter, and looking to the future with one eye on the boss’s and my own opportunities, and in my heart damning the conditions that make me an undoubted renegade. I am drawing a little better than forty per, am in the best of standing, being now —— and with the possibility of being its head shortly, and with certain advancement coming in both pay and rating. Now what the deuce? Shall I tell Polly to support us and get in on the big game, or shall I eat my bitter bread?...
I do know this, that there is going to be no present big success of the union movement, that whoever joins it too prominently is going to fight the owners for the rest of his life, and that the union can do me myself no good at all from any standpoint.
You will remember that in my story of the “Los Angeles Times” I mentioned a young reporter, Bob Harwood, who had told me of the “Times” knaveries. Harwood is now in San Francisco, where you may have another glimpse of him.
Bob told ’em all to go to hell, and is now organizing actively. There is an addition coming to the Harwood family shortly. Why comment further?
And then, let us see what is happening on the other side of the continent. In New Haven the “News-Writers’ Union”goes on strike, and while they are on strike, they publish a paper of their own! In Boston the “News-Writers’ Union” declares a strike, and wins all demands. Incidentally they learn—if they do not know it already—that the newspapers of Boston do not publish the news! They do not publish the news about the News-Writers’ strike; when the strike is settled, on the basis of recognition of the union, not a single Boston newspaper publishes the terms of the settlement!
In every union there is always a little group of radicals, occupied with pointing out to the men the social significance of their labor, the duty they owe to the working-class, and to society as a whole. So before long we shall see the News-Writers’ Union of Boston taking up the task of forcing the Boston newspapers to print the truth. We shall see the News-Writers’ Union taking up the question: Shall the “Boston Evening Transcript” permit its news-columns to be edited by the gas company, and by “Harvard Beer, 1,000 Pure”? We shall see the union at least bringing these facts to public attention, so that the “Transcript” can no longer pose as a respectable newspaper.
I quote one paragraph more from my San Francisco letter:
All three evening papers, I am told, are one hundred per cent organized; a charter is on the way from the I. T. U. and the movement has the full backing—or is promised the full backing—of the A. F. of L. and the local labor organizations. Just what that is worth is yet to be learned.
This man, you see, is groping his way. He doesn’t know what the backing of organized labor is worth. But the newspaper-men of Boston found out; they won because the type-setters and the pressmen stood by them. And the New York actors won because the musicians and the stage-hands stood by them. And this is the biggest thing about the whole movement—the fact that workers of hand and brain are uniting and preparing to take possession of the world. One purpose of this book is to urge a hand-and-brain union in the newspaper field; to urge that the news-writers shall combine with the pressmen and type-setters and the truckmen—one organization of all men and women who write, print and distribute news, to take control of their own labor, and see to it that the newspapers serve public interests and not private interests.
What I ask at the very outset is a representative of the News-Writers’ Union, acting as one of the copy-readers ofevery newspaper. This man will say, in the name of his organization: “That is a lie; it shall not go in. This news-item is colored to favor the railroad interests; it must be rewritten. Tonight there is a mass-meeting of labor to protest against intervention in Russia. That meeting is worth a column.” Such demands of the copy-reader will, if challenged, be brought before a committee of the workers of the paper—the workers both of hand and brain. If any demand is not complied with, the paper will not appear next day. Do you think that lying about the labor movement would continue under such conditions?
I recognize the rights of the general public in the determining of news. I should wish to see a government representative sitting in all councils where newspaper policy is laid down. The owner should be represented, so long as his ownership exists; but unless I mis-read the signs of the times, the days of the owner as owner are numbered in our industry. The owner may best be attended to by a government price-fixing board, which will set wages for newspaper work and prices of newspapers to the public at a point where interest, dividends and profits are wiped out. So the owner will become a worker like other workers; if he is competent and honest, he will stay as managing director; if he is incompetent and dishonest, he will go to digging ditches, under the eye of a thoroughly efficient boss.
Little by little the workers of all industrial nations are acquiring class-consciousness, and preparing themselves for the control of industry. In America they seem backward, but that is because America is a new country, and the vast majority of the workers have no idea how the cards are stacked against them. I have just been reading an account of the general strike in Seattle, the most significant labor revolt in our history, and I observe how painfully chivalrous the Seattle strikers were. Because they did not permit the capitalist papers of their city to be published, therefore they refrained from publishing their own paper! This was magnificent, but it was not war, and I venture to guess that since the Seattle strikers have had the capitalist newspapers, not merely of their city, but of all the rest of the world telling lies about them, they will be more practical next time—as practical as those they are opposing.
How all this works out, you may learn from the Syndicalistmovement of Italy—only, of course, Capitalist Journalism has not allowed you to know anything about the Syndicalist movement of Italy! The glass-workers were beaten in a terrific strike, and they realized that they had to find a new weapon; they contributed their funds and bought a glass-factory, which they started upon a co-operative basis. When this factory had its product ready for sale, strikes were called on the other factories. By applying this method again and again, the union broke its rivals, and bought them out at a low price, and so before the war practically the entire glass-industry of Italy was in the hands of co-operative unions, and the glass-workers were getting the full value of their product.
The same thing was being done before the war by the agricultural workers in Sicily. The strikers had been shot down by the soldiery, their own brothers and sons; they bought several estates and worked them co-operatively, and when harvest-time came there was labor for the co-operative estates, and there were strikes against the absentee landlords, who were spending their time in Paris and on the Riviera. So the landlords made haste to sell out, and the agricultural unions were rapidly taking possession of the land of Sicily.
The same methods were recently tried out in the newspaper field by strikers in the Argentine Republic; I quote from an account in the “Christian Science Monitor,” a Boston newspaper which gives fair accounts of radical happenings abroad, and which may some day give fair accounts of radical happenings in America. The “Christian Science Monitor” is interviewing a United States embassy official, just returned from Buenos Aires:
An incident of the latter strike shows the unique control, as Mr. Barrett puts it, that they exercise over the newspapers. During the seventy-three days the port was closed, the only goods handled were shipments of newsprint. The newspapers represent the workers. If a paper dares to send to its composing-room an item opposed to the interest of the labor element, the compositors probably will refuse to put it in type. If they do set it up and it appears, the paper can expect no more newsprint from the docks.
I hear the reader says: “These strikers don’t represent the public; they represent themselves. You are only substituting one kind of class-interest for another.” Ah, yes—dear reader of capitalist opinion!
This at least you admit; the class represented by the strikers is vastly larger than that represented by the owners; we are that much nearer to democracy. But you demand one hundred per cent pure democracy—dear reader of capitalist opinion!
Well, the workers offer you the way; they cheerfully permit all owners to become workers—either of hand or brain—and to receive their full share with all other workers of hand or brain; whereas, in the nature of the case, the owners do not welcome the workers as owners, and are doing all in their power to make sure that no one shall be owners but themselves. This is the fundamental and all-determining fact about the class struggle, and the reason why he who serves the interest of the workers is serving the interest of all society, and of the Co-operative Commonwealth which is to be. To the argument that the taking of power by the workers is the substitution of one kind of class tyranny by another kind of class tyranny, the answer, complete and final, is that there is no need of the capitalist class as a class and that the world will be a happier place for all men when the members of that class have become workers, either of hand or brain. When that has been done, there will be no classes, therefore no class tyranny, and no incentive to class lying. Thus, and thus only, shall we break the power of the capitalist press—by breaking the power of capitalism. And so it is that I, an advocate of pure democracy, am interested in this story from the Argentine Republic, and tempted to cry to the American dockers, the American typographers, the American news-writers: “Help! Help against the lying, kept press!”
And as I am reading the final proofs of this book, I hear the answer to my cry. I read the following in the “New York Times”:
Boston, Oct. 28.—Pressmen employed by the Chapple Publishing Company, Ltd., on discovering in a cartoon in “Life” which is being printed here during the New York strike, what they considered a reflection on organized labor, suspended work and refused to return until the objectionable cartoon was taken out. The cartoon was eliminated, and the men returned to work.
The drawing depicts a room apparently meant to typify conditions existing in a city tenement district. The artist portrays a man beating his wife over the head with the leg of a chair. The woman is shown lying on the floor; the man has one knee on her body and one hand clutching her throat. A child about two years old is shown in bedwatching the scene. Its face is expressive of horror. Another child, evidently a little older, is stretched on the floor, face downward. At the door is standing a patrolman in full uniform. He is talking with a captain of police, who has rushed on the scene with drawn revolver. The patrolman with hand upraised says: “It’s all right, Captain, he’s got a union card.”
You may think my remedy drastic; but, honestly, do you think that any remedy could be too drastic for an infamy such as this?
Here, as everywhere, the salvation of the world rests upon you, the workers of hand and brain. I took up half this book telling how the capitalist press lied about one man; you said, perhaps, that I liked to be in the “limelight”; anyhow, I was only one writer-fellow, and it didn’t matter to you what the newspapers did to a writer-fellow. But now I make my appeal for yourself, for your wives and your children. I have shown you how this knavish press turns the world against you; I have shown how it turns you against yourself—how it seduces you, poisons your mind, breaks your heart. You go on strike, and it plays upon your fears, it uses your hunger and want as weapons against you; it saps your strength, it eats out your soul, it smothers your thinking under mountain-loads of lies. You fall, and the chariot of Big Business rolls over you.
These men who own the world in which you struggle for life—what is it that they want? They want power, power to rule you. And what is it that you want? You want power to rule yourself. Between those two wants there is eternal and unending and irreconcilable war—such is the class struggle, and whether you will or not, you take your part in it, and I take mine. I, a writer-fellow who wants to write the truth, appeal to you, the laboring fellows of hand and brain, who want to read the truth, whomustread the truth, if civilization is not to perish. I cry to you: “Help! Help against the lying, kept press!”
I cry to you for the integrity of your calling, for the honor and dignity of Journalism. I cry to you that Journalism shall no longer be the thing described by Charles A. Dana, master-cynic of the “New York Sun,” “buying white paper at two cents a pound and selling it at ten cents a pound.” I cry to you that Journalism shall be a public ministry, and that you who labor in it shall be, not wage-slaves and henchmen of privilege, but servants of the general welfare, helping yourfellow-men to understand life, and to conquer the evils in nature outside them, and in their own hearts. Why cannot the men and women of this great profession form a society with a common mind and a common interest and a common conscience, based upon the fact that they are all necessary, they have each, down to the humblest office-boy, their essential part in a great social service?
By the blindness and greed of ruling classes the people have been plunged into infinite misery; but that misery has its purpose in the scheme of nature. Something more than a century ago we saw the people driven by just such misery to grope their way into a new order of society; they threw off the chains of hereditary monarchy, and made themselves citizens of free republics. And now again we face such a crisis; only this time it is in the world of industry that we have to abolish hereditary rule, and to build an industrial commonwealth in which the equal rights of all men are recognized by law. Such is the task before us; go to it with joy and certainty, playing your part in the making of the new world, in which there shall be neither slavery nor poverty, in which the natural sources of wealth belong to all men alike, and no one lives in idleness upon the labor of his fellows. That world lies just before you, and the gates to it are barred only by ignorance and prejudice, deliberately created and maintained by prostitute journalism.