PART IITHE EXPLANATION
CHAPTER XXXVTHE CAUSES OF THINGS
I studied Latin for five years in college, and from this study brought away a dozen Latin verses. One of them is from Virgil: “Happy he who has learned to know the causes of things.” The words have stayed in my mind, summing up the purpose of my intellectual life: Not to rest content with observing phenomena, but to know what they mean, how they have come to be, how they may be guided and developed, or, if evil, may be counteracted. I would not have taken the trouble to write a book to say to the reader: I have been persecuted for twenty years by prostitute Journalism. The thing I am interested in saying is: The prostitution of Journalism is due to such and such factors, and may be remedied by such and such changes.
Here is one of the five continents of the world, perhaps the richest of the five in natural resources. As far back as history, anthropology, and even zoology can trace, these natural resources have been the object of competitive struggle. For the past four hundred years this struggle has been ordained by the laws and sanctified by the religions of man. “Each for himself,” we say, and, “the devil take the hindmost.” “Dog eat dog,” we say. “Do others or they will do you,” we say. “Business is business,” we say. “Get the stuff,” we say. “Money talks,” we say. “The Almighty Dollar,” we say. So, by a thousand native witticisms, we Americans make clear our attitude toward the natural resources of our continent.
As a result of four centuries of this attitude, ordained by law and sanctified by religion, it has come about that at this beginning of the twentieth century the massed control of the wealth of America lies in the hands of perhaps a score of powerful individuals. We in America speak of steel kings and coal barons, of lords of wheat and lumber and oil and railroads, and think perhaps that we are using metaphors; but the simple fact is that the men to whom we refer occupy in theworld of industry precisely the same position and fill precisely the same roles as were filled in the political world by King Louis, who said, “I am the State.”
This power of concentrated wealth which rules America is known by many names. It is “Wall Street,” it is “Big Business,” it is “the Trusts.” It is the “System” of Lincoln Steffens, the “Invisible Government” of Woodrow Wilson, the “Empire of Business” of Andrew Carnegie, the “Plutocracy” of the populists. It has been made the theme of so much stump-oratory that in cultured circles it is considered good form to speak of it in quotation marks, with a playful and skeptical implication; but the simple fact is that this power has controlled American public life since the civil war, and is greater at this hour than ever before in our history.
The one difference between the Empire of Business and the Empire of Louis is that the former exists side by side with a political democracy. To keep this political democracy subservient to its ends, the industrial autocracy maintains and subsidizes two rival political machines, and every now and then stages an elaborate sham-battle, contributing millions of dollars to the campaign funds of both sides, burning thousands of tons of red fire, pouring out millions of reams of paper propaganda and billions of words of speeches. The people take interest in this sham-battle—but all sensible men understand that whichever way the contest is decided, business will continue to be business, and money will continue to talk.
So we are in position to understand the facts presented in this book. Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters. Not hyperbolically and contemptuously, but literally and with scientific precision, we define Journalism in America as the business and practice of presenting the news of the day in the interest of economic privilege.
A modern newspaper is an enormously expensive institution. The day is past when a country printer could set up a hand-press and print news about the wedding of the village blacksmith’s daughter and the lawn-party of the Christian Endeavor Society, and so make his way as a journalist. Now-a-dayspeople want the last hour’s news from the battle-field or the council-hall. If they do not get it in the local paper, they get it in the “extras” from the big cities, which are thrown off the fast express-trains. The franchise which entitles a paper to this news from all over the world is very costly; in most cities and towns it is an iron-clad monopoly. You cannot afford to pay for this service, and to print this news, unless you have a large circulation, and for that you need complicated and costly presses, a big building, a highly trained staff. Incidentally you will find yourself running an advertising agency and a public employment service; you will find yourself giving picnics for newsboys, investigating conditions in the county-hospital, raising subscription funds for a monument to Our Heroes in France. In other words, you will be an enormous and complex institution, fighting day and night for the attention of the public, pitting your composite brain against other composite brains in the struggle to draw in the pennies of the populace.
Incidentally, of course, you are an institution running under the capitalist system. You are employing hundreds, perhaps thousands of men, women and children. You are paying them under the iron law of wages, working them under the rule of “the devil take the hindmost.” You have foremen and managers and directors, precisely as if you were a steel-mill or a coal-mine; also you have policemen and detectives, judges and courts and jailers, soldiers with machine-guns and sailors with battleships to protect you and your interests—precisely as does the rest of the predatory system of which you are a part.
And, of course, you have the capitalist psychology; you have it complete and vivid—you being the livest part of that system. You know what is going on hour by hour; you are more class-conscious, more alert to the meaning of events than anyone else in the capitalist community. You know what you want from your wage-slaves, and you see that they “deliver the goods.” You know what you are furnishing to your advertisers, and your terms are “net cash.” You know where you get your money, your “credit”; so you know “Who’s Who” in America, you know whom to praise and whom to hate and fear.
There are perhaps a dozen newspapers in America which have been built up by slow stages out of the pennies of workingmen, and which exist to assert the rights of workingmen. The ones I happen to know are the “New York Call,” the“Jewish Daily Forwards,” the “Milwaukee Leader,” the “Seattle Union Record,” the “Butte Daily Bulletin.” It should be understood that in future discussions I except such newspapers from what I say about American Journalism. This reservation being made, I assert there is no daily newspaper in America which does not represent and serve vested wealth, and which has not for its ultimate aim the protection of economic privilege.
I am trying in this book to state the exact facts. I do not expect to please contemporary Journalism, but I expect to produce a book which the student of the future will recognize as just. So let me explain that I realize fully the differences between newspapers. Some are dishonest, and some are more dishonest; some are capitalistic, and some are more capitalistic. But great as are the differences between them, and clever as are the pretenses of some of them, there is no one which does not serve vested wealth, which has not for its ultimate aim the protection of economic privilege. The great stream of capitalist prosperity may flow irregularly, it may have eddies and counter-currents, stagnant places which deceive you for a while; but if you study this great stream long enough, you find that it all moves in one direction, and that everything upon its surface moves with it. A capitalist newspaper may espouse this cause or that, it may make this pretense or that, but sooner or later you realize that a capitalist newspaper lives by the capitalist system, it fights for that system, and in the nature of the case cannot do otherwise. Some one has said that to talk of regulating capital is to talk of moralizing a tiger; I would say that to expect justice and truth-telling of a capitalist newspaper is to expect asceticism at a cannibal feast.
It would be instructive to take the leading newspapers of America and classify them according to the nature of their financial control, showing precisely how and where this control shapes the policy of the paper. There will be certain immediate financial interests—the great family which owns the paper, the great bank which holds its bonds, the important local trade which furnishes its advertising. Concerning these people you observe that no impolite word is ever spoken, and the début parties given to the young ladies of these families are reported in detail. On the other hand, if there are interestsaggressively hostile to the great family, the great bank, the important local trade, you observe that here the newspaper becomes suddenly and unexpectedly altruistic. It will be in favor of public ownership of the gas-works; it will be in favor of more rigid control of state banks; whatever its policy may be, you will, if you sit at the dinner-tables of the rich in that city, have revealed to you the financial interests which lie behind that unexpected altruism.
In the days of the ancient régime, nations went to war because someone made a slighting remark about the king’s mistress; and in our present Empire of Business you find exactly the same thing happening. I know of a newspaper which is still living upon the reputation it made by defending the strikers in a great labor struggle. The paper had never defended strikers before, it has never defended strikers since; but on this occasion it happened that the president of the corporation involved in the strike had remarked at a dinner-party that the owner of the newspaper was living with an opera-singer.
Some ten years ago I remember that the city of Chicago was torn wide open by a teamsters’ strike. Brickbats were flying, mobs were swarming in the streets, militiamen were stabbing people with bayonets. Some time afterwards there was an investigation, and it transpired that a certain labor-leader, Sam Parks by name, had been paid five or ten thousand dollars by a great mail-order house to call a strike on a rival mail-order house. And in precisely this way great newspapers quarrel, and the public has no idea what it means. I have heard a leading Hearst editor tell, quite simply and as a matter of course, how Mr. Hearst would come into the office at twelve o’clock at night and turn the batteries of the “New York American” and “Journal” upon the business and politics of August Belmont, because Mr. Belmont had slighted Mr. Hearst, or Mr. Hearst’s wife—I forget which—at a dinner-party. One year you would see Mr. Hearst printing a cartoon every day, showing “Charlie” Murphy, boss of Tammany Hall, in convict’s stripes; next year Mr. Hearst would make a deal with Tammany—and the other newspapers of New York would be showing Mr. Hearst in convict’s stripes!
Or come to the other side of the continent, and consider the “San Francisco Chronicle,” owned by “Mike” de Young.Here is a picture of Mr. de Young, drawn by one of his wage-slaves, a man who for many years has helped to run his profit-machine:
He uses much perfume, and is extremely conceited. He is author of the remark that no reporter is worth more than twenty dollars a week, or ever will be. He is a secret laugh-producer because of his inordinate love for the camera spotlight. Strangely enough, his likeness is seldom to be found in any paper except his own; the “Chronicle’s” camera men have standing instructions at public gatherings to pay as little attention to other men as possible and to concentrate on de Young. On his own paper everybody is Jones or Smith except himself. He must always be referred to as Mr. de Young. Owner of much valuable real estate near Golden Gate park, he made a vigorous fight to have the Panama-Pacific Exposition located in the park, hoping thereby to increase the value of his holdings. Defeated, he turned his wrath on the exposition officials, and denounces them at every opportunity. Mention of President C. C. Moore of the Exposition Company is forbidden in the columns of the “Chronicle.”
There are differences, of course, in the moral character of men. There are some men who do not take part in large-scale real-estate intrigues, and some who do not live with opera-singers; there are capitalists who pay their debts, and regard their word of honor as their bond. And there have been newspapers owned by such men, and conducted according to such principles. You could not buy the editorial support of the “Springfield Republican” or the “Baltimore Sun”; you could not buy the advertising space of these papers for the cheaper and more obvious kinds of fraud. But ask yourself this question: Is there a newspaper in America which will print news unfavorable to department-stores? If the girl-slaves of the local department-store go on strike, will the newspaper maintain their right to picket? Will it even print the truth about what they do and say?
Some years ago a one-time teacher of mine was killed by falling down the elevator-shaft of a New York department-store. I noted that my newspaper did not give the name of the department-store. As a matter of curiosity, I bought all the newspapers, and discovered that none of them gave the name of the department-store. It was not absolutely essential, of course; my one-time teacher was just as dead as if the name of the store had been given. But suppose the accident had taken place at the People’s House, owned by the Socialists—would all the newspapers of New York have withheld the name of the place?
In New York City one of the Gimbel brothers, owners of a Philadelphia department store, was arrested, charged with sodomy, and he cut his throat. Not a single newspaper in Philadelphia gave this news! This was in the days before Gimbel Brothers had a store in New York, therefore it occurred to the “New York Evening Journal” that here was an opportunity to build up circulation in a new field. Large quantities of the paper were shipped to Philadelphia, and the police of Philadelphia stopped the newsboys on the streets and took away the papers; and the Philadelphia papers said nothing about it!
And this department-store interest supervises not only the news columns, but the editorial columns. Some years ago one of the girl-slaves of a New York department-store committed suicide, leaving behind her a note to the effect that she could not stand twenty-cent dinners any longer. The “New York World,” which collects several thousand dollars every day from department-stores, judged it necessary to deal with this incident. “The World,” you understand, is a “democratic” paper, a “liberal” paper, an “independent” paper, a paper of “the people.” Said the “World”:
There are some people who make too large a demand upon fortune. Fixing their eyes upon the standards of living flaunted by the rich, they measure their requirements by their desires. Such persons are easily affected by outside influences, and perhaps in this case the recent discussions, more often silly than wise, concerning the relation of wages to vice, may have made the girl more susceptible than usual to the depressing effects of cheap dinners.
And do you think that is a solitary instance, the result of a temporary editorial aberration? No, it is typical of the capitalistic mind, which is so frugal that it extracts profit even from the suicide of its victims. Some years ago an old man committed suicide because his few shares of express-stock lost their value. The “New York Times” was opposing parcel-post, because the big express-companies were a prominent part of the city’s political and financial machine; the “New York Times” presented this item of news as a suicide caused by the parcel-post!
CHAPTER XXXVITHE EMPIRE OF BUSINESS
Let the reader not misunderstand my thesis. I do not claim that there exists in America one thoroughly organized and completely conscious business government. What we have is a number of groups, struggling for power; and sometimes these groups fall out with one another, and make war upon one another, and then we see a modern application of the ancient adage, “When thieves fall out, honest men come into their own.” If, for example, you had studied the press of New York City at the time of the life insurance exposures, you would certainly have concluded that this press was serving the public interest. As it happens, I followed that drama of life insurance with the one man in America who had most to do with it, the late James. B. Dill. Judge Dill ran a publicity bureau in New York for several months, and handed out the greater part of this scandal to the newspaper reporters. He told me precisely how he was doing it, and precisely why he was doing it, and I knew that this whole affair, which shook the nation to its depths, was simply the Morgan and Ryan interests taking away the control of life insurance money from irresponsible people like “Jimmy” Hyde, and bringing it under the control of people who were responsible—that us, responsible to Morgan and Ryan. The whole campaign was conducted for that purpose; the newspapers of New York all understood that it was conducted for that purpose, and when that purpose was accomplished, the legislative investigations and the newspaper clamor stopped almost overnight.
And all through this terrific uproar I noticed one curious thing—there was never in any single newspaper or magazine or speech dealing with the question the faintest hint of the one intelligent solution of the problem—that is, government insurance. I made several efforts to get something on the subject into the New York papers; I gave interviews—I have forgotten now to what papers, but I know that these interviews never got by the blue pencil. It took the emergency of war-time to force government insurance—and now the lobby ofthe private insurance companies is busy in Washington, trying to scuttle government insurance, as government telegraphs and telephones, government railroads, government shipping, government employment agencies, have all one by one been scuttled.
The thieves fall out; and also new thieves are continually trying to break into the “ring.” There is always an enormous temptation presented by our peculiar newspaper situation; our Journalism is maintaining a vacuum, with incessant pressure on the outside. The people want the news; the people clamor for the news; and there is always a mass of vitally important news withheld. The Socialist papers are publishing scraps of it, orators are turning it into wild rumor on ten thousand soap-boxes; if only the people could get it in a newspaper or a magazine, what fortunes they would pay! And of course there are wide-awake men in the world of Journalism who know this: what more natural than that one of them should now and then yield to the temptation to get rich by telling the truth?
The whole history of the American magazine-world is summed up in that formula. Some fifteen years ago our magazine publishers made the discovery of this unworked gold-mine; “McClure’s,” “Success,” “Everybody’s,” “The American,” “Hampton’s,” “Pearson’s,” the “Metropolitan,” even the staid and dignified “Century” jumped in to work this mine. Their circulations began to go up—a hundred thousand increase a month was not unknown in those days of popular delirium. Magazine publication became what it had never before been in American history, and what it has never been since—a competitive industry, instead of a camouflaged propaganda. Is it not a complete vindication of my thesis, that in a couple of years half a dozen magazines were able to build up half a million circulation, by no other means whatever than telling what the newspapers were refusing to tell? And is it not a proof of the pitiful helplessness of the public, that they still go on reading these same magazines, in spite of the fact that they have been bought up by “the interests,” and are filled with what one of their “kept” editors described to me, in a voice of unutterable loathing, as: “Slush for the women!”
For, of course, the industrial autocracy very quickly awakened to the peril of these “muck-raking” magazines, and set to work to put out the fire. Some magazines were offeredmillions, and sold out. Those that refused to sell out had their advertising trimmed down, their bank-loans called, their stockholders intimidated—until finally, in one way or another, they consented to “be good.”
“Success” refused to “be good”; it persisted in exposing Cannonism, and maintaining a “People’s Lobby” in Washington; so “Success” was put out of business. The “National Post” adopted a radical policy, and it was put out of business; likewise “Human Life,” edited by Alfred Henry Lewis; likewise the “Twentieth Century Magazine,” edited by B. O. Flower; likewise the “Times Magazine”—a monthly having nothing to do with the “New York Times,” but edited by a young man of means who naïvely supposed that he would be allowed to tell the truth to the people of New York. “Pearson’s” of the old régime was brought to ruin, and it survives in its new form by the defiant genius of one man, Frank Harris. “Harper’s Weekly” started out bravely, with Norman Hapgood as editor, and Charles R. Crane as “angel”; for two or three years it fought the advertising boycott, and then it died.
In the “Profits of Religion” I told in detail the story of how “Hampton’s Magazine” was put out of business. I did not intend to repeat this story, but it happens that I have just met my old friend Ben Hampton again, and have gathered fresh details. I will let him tell his own story:
Never in the history of magazine-publishing was there such a great success in such a short time as that of “Hampton’s.” This is not my conversation. It is simply the records of the American News Company. We had, I think, 425,000 circulation, and we broke all records for the same length of time. No other magazine ever succeeded with an investment as small as ours. When they took the magazine away from me I think we had nearly thirty thousand dollars a month advertising.
But it is a peculiarity of magazines that when they grow too fast they lose money for a time. You have contracted for a year to publish advertisements, based on a circulation of a hundred thousand copies. If, three months later you have four hundred thousand circulation, you are giving four times as much as you were paid for; also, you have to have four times as much paper and press-work, for which you do not get returns until three months later. Hampton put in all his fortune and his wife’s, and then he started selling stock to hisreaders. He had just got by the difficult place; his printing-company and the bank which owned the printing-company had audited his books, and the bank-auditor had certified that in the first four months of 1911 the magazine “had earned a profit of not less than three thousand and not more than seven thousand dollars per month.”
Yet they put “Hampton’s Magazine” out of business! Hampton had started Charles Edward Russell’s articles exposing the “New Haven” swindle—two or three years before the truth broke out, you understand. An agent from the “New Haven” came to inform him that if he started this publication, he would be put out of business. I now learn for the first time the name of this agent—Sylvester J. Baxter. Readers of the “Profits of Religion” will give a start of recognition: the same gentleman who contributed that wonderful boost of the “New Haven” to the “Outlook,” organ of the Clerical Camouflage! And the “Outlook” pretended not to know that this was an official boost of the “New Haven,” and to have been astonished when the “New Haven” ordered a big edition of this issue!
Let Ben Hampton tell the rest of the story:
A nice young man got a job in our accounting department. He was one of the finest fellows we had ever had around. He was willing to work days and nights, and he did work days and nights, and one night when he was working, he took a copy of our list of stockholders. Of course, we did not find this out for months. In the meantime, a man and a woman, working separately, visited all our stockholders they could reach and told them I was robbing the Company. They said I had a large estate in the Adirondacks and a home in the Fifth Avenue district of New York City. At that time Mrs. Hampton and I were having a time to buy clothing for the children. We were drawing almost no salary from the magazine, and we had put all our money in the undertaking. In fact, we were near the line of desperation, we were so hard up.
Something like twenty brokers on the Wall Street curb began to advertise our five dollars par stock at four dollars, down to three dollars a share. We sent to them and offered to buy the stock and were never able to buy one share. One of the brokers afterwards admitted to us that they had none of the stock, and that they were paid to do the advertising.
All these methods, of course, created confusion in the minds of our stockholders, and practically killed our efforts to raise thirty thousand dollars, which was the insignificant sum of money needed to pay off our paper bill. We were entitled to a line of credit of three hundred thousand dollars at the paper makers. We owed the paper maker, I think, about forty thousand dollars and he notified usarbitrarily on a Monday that we would have to pay the bill Wednesday, or he would decline to furnish paper for the current edition, which was then on the press.
When I saw trouble coming I got together a committee of my stockholders in New York City, and a group of about a dozen men endorsed three notes of ten thousand dollars each. The net worth of these dozen men was over two million dollars. We took the notes to one bank in New York City. The bank accepted them. We checked against them, and got money on them, and the next day were notified we would have to take the notes out of the bank.
Of course you say this is an illegal proceeding, and can’t be done. I assure you it was done. We were thrown out of that bank, after the bank had accepted our paper, and after we had checked against it. The manager of the bank told me that he was powerless—that the “down-town” folks had thrown us out. Several other banks that had loaned me money for ten years told me that they could not do anything for me now—that I was in bad “down-town.”
One banker who flatly said he would loan us money whether Morgan’s crowd wanted him to or not, was put out of business himself within a few months. This man’s name is Earle. He was then running the Nassau Bank. I do not know whether Earle would tell his story or not, but the way the Morgan crowd drove him out of the banking business was one of the coldest-blooded things I ever heard of. They punished him for trying to accept perfectly good banking-paper to help me out of my crisis.
The foregoing facts are dictated hurriedly but there are some points in them that I believe you will want. Of course you know the finish of the properties. Within ten days after the thing began to close in on me, I had to turn my affairs over to the lawyers, and then a group of people appeared who were said to be the “International Correspondence” group of Scranton, Pa. They brought in letters from bankers, etc., showing they were very reputable and high-classed, and I had the choice of going into the hands of the receiver, or letting them take the property. They paid me just money enough so I could get my stock out of hock. The rest of the money they were to pay me was evidenced by a contract. I turned the contract over to my attorneys for protection of my preferred stockholders. Within a few weeks’ time we became convinced that the fellows who had taken over the property intended to loot it. The bookkeeper told me they took one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars out of the property in a few months, and took the books down to the East River and threw them off the bridge.
The result of it all was that I worked with the United States Government and had the crowd indicted. In time we brought them to trial. The trial lasted four or five weeks. We literally could not prove anything. We did prove that “Hampton’s Magazine” was a valuable piece of property and that it was making money, but we could not prove that the fellows who got it were crooks. All the records were destroyed. The result was, the judge threw the case out of court, after it had been in court for four or five weeks, and we never got back any of the money. Of course, the property in the meantime had been ruined.
I have told about several of the magazines which consented to “be good.” I have shown the pitiful plight of the “American,” and the miserable piffle they are publishing. And what is the meaning of it? The meaning was given in an item published in the “New York Press” early in 1911, when the “American Magazine” was taken over by the Crowell Publishing Company. The “Press” stated that this concern was controlled by Thomas W. Lamont, of J. P. Morgan and Company, and declared “The ‘American’ will do no more muck-raking.” In answer, the “American” in its next issue made a statement, haughtily announcing that the same editors, John S. Phillips, Ray Stannard Baker, Ida Tarbell and Finley Peter Dunne were remaining in charge, and that “the policy of the magazine will be unchanged.” To a discussion of this, my own language is inadequate; I have to employ the vocabulary of my son, a student in high school: “The poor boobs!” Four years these editors stuck it out, and then they quit, and a couple of young fellows who had been their office-clerks are now the “editors” of the “American Magazine”—which boasts a million circulation, and fifty-eight thousand lines of advertisements per month! Now, as I write, I learn that this Crowell Publishing Company has purchased “Collier’s,” and we shall see the same thing happening to our “National Weekly”!
In the same tragic way, my old friend Ridgway, who published the “Condemned Meat Industry,” is out of “Everybody’s,” and a new and wholly “tame” staff is in charge, acceptable to the Butterick Publishing Co. In the same way S. S. McClure was turned out of his magazine, which once published Ida Tarbell’s exposure of Standard Oil, and now publishes the solemn futilities of Cleveland Moffett, and anti-Socialist propaganda by the unspeakable Newell Dwight Hillis. It happened the other day that I was glancing over a back number of “McClure’s,” and my eye was caught by the opening instalment of a serial, announced in this style:
At last! A great new novel by the author of “The Broad Highway.” “BELTANE THE STRONG,” by JEFFREY FARNOL, who also wrote “The Amateur Gentleman” and “The Money-Moon.” This is no ordinary story. Many novelists would have written three books, some six, in the time Jeffrey Farnol has given to this tremendous love-tale of Beltane and Lady Helen. The result is the finest thing of its kind “McClure’s” has ever printed—by all means the novel of the year.
And opposite this is a full-page pink and purple illustrationof a misty, mystical girl in a thrilling state of semi-nudity, with this quotation:
Breathless and as one entranced he gazed upon her: saw how her long hair glowed a wondrous red ’neath the kisses of the dying sun; saw how her purpled gown, belted at the slender waist, clung about the beauties of her shapely body: saw how the little shoe peeped forth from the perfumed mystery of its folds—and so stood speechless, bound by the spell of her beauty.
“The perfumed mystery of its folds!” Such is the perfumed garbage now being fed to the American public in the name of Sam McClure!
Or take the “Metropolitan,” which a few years ago announced itself as a Socialist magazine. We were all tremendously thrilled by the idea that the money of Harry Payne Whitney was to be used to bring about Social Justice in America; but then we saw the “Metropolitan” suppress its exposé of Rasputin at behest of the embassy of the late Tsar; now we see it turning over its editorial columns to Gen. Leonard Wood, to be used in a propaganda for universal military training! In this greatest crisis of history, the people’s cause is left without a single champion in our popular magazines. There are only the Socialist papers, and two or three radical weeklies of limited circulation; the rest is Barbarism.
In every newspaper-office in America the same struggle between the business-office and the news-department is going on all the time. The business of getting the news involves “hustle,” and young brains are constantly being brought in, and these young brains have to be taught the discipline of special privilege, and sometimes they never entirely submit. They have powerful arguments on their side. “You want circulation, don’t you? What’s the use of a paper without circulation? And how can you get circulation if you let the fellow around the corner have this ‘scoop’?” So the owner of the paper has to get busy and make a gentleman’s agreement with the other papers to suppress the news; and sometimes it turns out that the other fellow isn’t a gentleman, and there is a row, and the live young “hustlers” get their way for a while, and the public gets a bit of the news.
Various stages of this struggle are exemplified by different newspapers, or by the same newspaper at different times. You may see a staid old family organ—say the “NewYork Tribune,” owned by a rich capitalist, Whitelaw Reid, who publishes it as a side issue to gratify his vanity, taking his pay in the form of an ambassadorship. The circulation of such a paper will go steadily down. But then perhaps the old man will die, and his sons will take charge, and his sons won’t feel like paying out twenty or thirty thousand dollars a month, and will get a “live newspaper man” to “put life into” the paper; or perhaps they will sell out to people who have less money, and will be tempted to give the public a little of what it wants.
The fundamental thing that the public wants is, of course, enough to eat. Modern society is complex, and there are thousands of public issues clamoring for newspaper attention, but in the final analysis all these questions boil down to one question—why is the cost of living going up faster than wages and salaries? So the spectre of “radicalism” haunts every newspaper office. The young publisher who wants to make money, the “live newspaper man” who wants to make a reputation, find themselves at every hour tempted to attack some form of privilege and exploitation.
So come “crusades.” The kind of crusade which the newspaper undertakes will depend upon the character of circulation for which it is bidding. If the paper sells for three cents, and is read by bankers and elderly maiden aunts, the newspaper will print the sermons of some clergyman who is exposing the horrors of the red-light district, or it will call on the district attorney to begin prosecuting the loan-sharks who are robbing the poor, or it will start a free ice fund for babies in the tenements. Any cause will do, provided the victims are plunderers of a shady character—that is, small plunderers.
Or perhaps the newspaper is a popular organ. It sells at a low price to the common people. In that case it may go to extremes of radicalism; it may clamor for government ownership, and attack big public service corporations in a way that seems entirely independent and fearless. You say: “Surely this is honest journalism,” and you acquire the habit of reading that newspaper. But then gradually you see the campaign die down, the great cause forgotten. The plundering of the public goes right on, the only thing that has been changed is that you, who used to be a reader of the “World,” are now a reader of the “Journal”; and that is the change which the “Journal” had in mind from the outset. You will see the“Journal” tabulating the amount of advertising it publishes each week or each month, and boasting that it is greater than the “World” publishes; and maybe you feel proud about that, you like to be in the boat with the best fishermen—even though you are there as a fish.
Anyone who is familiar with the newspaper-world can think of a score of publications to which the above statement would apply. There exists a chain of one-cent evening papers scattered over the country, the Scripps papers, catering to working-class audiences. They were founded by a real radical and friend of the people, E. W. Scripps, and for a decade or two were the main resource of the workers in many localities. Now E. W. Scripps is a sick man, out of the game, and his eldest son, who runs the papers, is a young business man, interested in the business management of a great property; so in one city after another you see the Scripps papers “toned-down.” They espouse the cause of strikers no longer. The other day I was staggered to find them dragging out that shop-worn old bugaboo, the nationalization of women in Russia! In the Seattle strike the Scripps paper, the “Star,” “scabbed” on the strike, and its editorial attitude won it the name, the “Shooting Star.”
Or take the “New York World.” This paper was built up by one crusade after another; it was the people’s friend for a generation. Today it is a property worth several million dollars, living on its reputation. It still makes, of course, the old pretenses of “democracy,” but when it comes to a real issue, it is an organ of bitter and savage reaction, it is edited by the telegraph and railroad securities in which the Pulitzer fortune is invested. The “New York World’s” opinion of the “Plumb plan” is that of a Russian grand duke discussing Bolshevism.
Or the Hearst papers. They too have been made out of the pennies of the masses; they too have lured the masses by rainbows of many-colored hopes. They still ask for government ownership—when they happen to think of it; but they lie remorselessly about radicals, and exclude the word Socialism from their columns, except when some Socialist is sent to jail. They support Sinn Fein and twist the lion’s tail, because it brings in the Irish-Catholic pennies; but the one revolution in which their heart is really engaged is the one which is to make Hearst’s Mexican acres into American acres.
CHAPTER XXXVIITHE DREGS OF THE CUP
I would call the reader’s attention to the fact that in this book I am dealing with our standard magazines and newspapers, the ones which are considered respectable, which all ladies and gentlemen accept as they accept the doctor’s pills and the clergyman’s sermons, the Bible and the multiplication table and Marian Harland’s cook-book. I have not made my case easy by dwelling on the cultural content of the “mail order” and “household” publications, of which there are scores with a circulation of a million or more; or of the agricultural papers of the country, whose total circulation amounts to tens of millions. How I could freeze your blood if I were to summarize the contents of the “Ladies’ World,” the “Gentlewoman,” the “Household Guest,” “Home Life,” the “Household,” “Comfort,” the “Home Friend,” “Mother’s Magazine,” “Everyday Life,” the “People’s Popular Monthly,” the “Clover Leaf” weeklies and the “Boyce” weeklies, the “Saturday Blade” and the “Chicago Ledger”! If I were to tell about the various “Family Story Papers,” which are left in area-ways for servants! Or the “fashion-papers,” the “Butterick Trio,” with close to two millions, the “Woman’s World,” with two millions, and “Vogue,” the “Delineator,” the “Parisienne,” the “Ladies’ Pictorial,” “Needlecraft” with their half million or more. Or the “fast” papers, which cultivate a taste for perfumed smut—and which I will not advertise by naming! Or the papers of the sporting and racing and gambling worlds, down to the “Police Gazette,” with its “leg-shows” and illustrated murders!
Also the local papers, the small dailies, the weeklies and semi-monthlies and monthlies by the thousands and tens of thousands! If you wish to get a complete picture of American Journalism, you must take these into account; you must descend from the heights of metropolitan dignity into the filthiest swamps of provincial ignorance and venality. Hardly a week passes that someone does not send me a copy of some country paper which calls for the stringing-up of Socialists tolamp-posts, and denounces highly educated Bolshevik leaders in editorials with half a dozen grammatical errors to the column.
And if you go to the small town in Pennsylvania or Arkansas or Colorado, or wherever this paper is published, you find a country editor on the level of intelligence of the local horse-doctors of Englewood, New Jersey, and Tarrytown, New York, whose proceedings I have described in this book. Frequently you find this editor hanging on by his eye-teeth, with a mortgage at the local bank, carried because of favors he does to the local money-power. You find him getting a regular monthly income from the copper-interests or the coal-interests or the lumber-interests, whatever happens to be dominant in that locality. You find him heavily subsidized at election-time by the two political machines of these great interests. His paper is used to print the speeches of the candidates of these interests, and five or ten or fifty thousand copies of this particular issue are paid for by these interests and distributed at meetings. Campaign circulars and other literature are printed in the printing-office of this newspaper, and of course the public advertising appears in its columns—a graft which is found in every state and county of the Union, and is a means by which hundreds of millions of dollars are paid as a disguised subsidy by the interests which run our two-party political system.
Our great metropolitan newspapers take a fine tone of dignity, they stand for the welfare of the general public, they are above all considerations of greed. But the conditions under which these small-town newspapers are published do not permit them to pretend to such austerity, or even to conceive of it. They are quite frankly “out for the stuff”—as everybody else they know is “out for the stuff.” For example, the “Tarrytown News,” which jumped on me with its cloven hoofs, declaring that my home had been raided as a “free love” place. This “Tarrytown News” explained quite honestly why it was opposed to allowing agitators to come to Tarrytown and denounce the Rockefellers. And why was it? Because the Rockefellers stood for religion and the home, the Constitution and the Star-Spangled Banner and the Declaration of Independence? No, not at all; it was because the Rockefellers carried a payroll in Tarrytown of thirty thousand dollars a month!
The average country or small-town editor is an entirely ignorant man; the world of culture is a sealed book to him. His idea of literature is the “Saturday Evening Post”—only as a rule he doesn’t have time to read it. His idea of art is a lithograph of the President and Vice-President with a stand of flags. His idea of music is “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean.” He has an idea what is good for his readers; “optimism” and “boost,” “cheer-up” stuff, “mother, home and heaven” stuff, “sob” stuff, “slush for the women.” He has no money to pay writers, of course; he doesn’t even set type, except for local news. He gets his “filler” in the form of “boiler-plate,” sent practically free from Washington and New York—this matter containing fiction, poetry, “special stories,” novelty and gossip of the sort his readers find entertaining. What difference does it make if sandwiched in between this reading matter is the poison propaganda of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association, of the tariff-lobbyists, the railroad-lobbyists, the liquor-lobbyists, the whole machine of capitalist graft and greed?
Several years ago I had a brilliant and wonderful idea. I was finishing “King Coal,” and thought that I had an excellent serial, timely, and full of swift incident. I ascertained that there were seventeen thousand weekly newspapers in America; surely among this number must be a few hundred which would like to give their readers the truth about labor conditions in a basic American industry! I would build up a little syndicate of my own, I would market my future books, and perhaps those of other writers! I prepared a circular, outlining the plan, and offering the entire serial for some nominal sum, ten or fifteen dollars, plus the cost of the plates from which the printing would be done. I prepared a sample sheet, containing the first half-dozen chapters of “King Coal”; you may consult the volume and satisfy yourself as to whether they are interesting chapters. I sent out the offer to thousands of weeklies, and waited for replies. How many do you think I got? I didn’t keep a record, but you could have counted them on your fingers, without your thumbs!
No, the editors of country and small-town newspapers are not giving their readers the truth about labor conditions in basic American industries. They know, as the phrase is, “which side their bread is buttered on,” and they keep that side up with care. I have said that there are fortunes to bemade by giving the news to the people; I must qualify the statement by explaining that it must be done on a large scale, and you must have capital to keep you going until you reach the people who can understand you. If you try it on a small scale, and without capital, you are crushed before you get your head out of the mud. And you know that, and govern yourself accordingly. The other day I had a call from the editor of a small newspaper, out here in this broad free West, about which you read in romances. The editor explained that he hadn’t dared to write and order my books; he couldn’t afford to let a check, payable to me, go through his bank; he called personally, and would carry the books home in his trunk!
Also this chapter would be incomplete without mention of the swarm of “house organs,” published by big industrial concerns for the edification of their employes. According to the “New York Times” (Oct. 26, 1919), there are three hundred and seventy-five such publications in America, many with circulations running into thousands. During the war seventy-three were started in the shipyard industry alone. “During the past spring and summer they multiplied like bacteria.” And the “Times” tells admiringly of the subtle arts whereby slave-labor is cajoled and idealized: “saying it in ragtime ... jazz variations to the vast delight of its reading public ... a Diamond Dick sort of tale ... the story has punch ... all as intimate as the small town weekly” ... and so on through columns of poison prescriptions. They trap the poor devils in their homes:
The woman’s page is one of the most carefully thought out departments, on the theory that the influence of the family is counted on to sway the man from radicalism. Fully half of this group of publications is sent to the man’s home by mail, to give the wife first innings. In this particular magazine the woman’s page is fairly crawling with babies....
You hardly notice the propaganda even when you’re looking for it with a microscope, but it is there. It is in the weave and the woof, rather than in the conspicuous pattern. You find it in similes, “like soap in the home of a Bolshevik. Some novelty!” The agitator is taken down from the dignity of his soapbox throne and flippantly advised to bathe.