The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism

The particular kind of radical who is most disliked by our newspapers is of course the Socialist. The Socialist meets the class-consciousness of the newspapers with another class-consciousness, almost as definite and aggressive. The Socialist is noisy; also the Socialist has a habit of printing pamphlets and leaflets, thus trespassing on newspaper profits. Every newspaper differs in the names it puts on its “son-of-a-bitch list,” but every newspaper agrees in putting the most conspicuous Socialists on its “son-of-a-bitch list.” The Hearst newspapers pose as friends of the people; they print a great deal of radical clamor, but there is a standing order in all Hearst offices that American Socialism shall never be mentioned favorably. All newspapers have a rule that if any Socialist get into trouble, it shall be exploited to the full; when Socialists don’t get into trouble often enough to suit them, they make Socialists out of people who do get into trouble. Says Max Sherover:

When the King of Greece was shot by an insane and irresponsible man, the “New York Times” and hundreds of other papers ran the headline: “King of Greece Assassinated by a Socialist.” And although it was proven conclusively that the assassin hadn’t even heard of Socialism, none of these papers saw fit to retract their lie.

When the great novelist, David Graham Phillips, was shot by one Goldsborough, every paper in New York knew that Goldsborough not only was not a Socialist, but had often spoken against Socialism. They also knew that the latter had a personal grievance against the author. Notwithstanding these facts, the “New York World” and other papers came out with headlines: “David Graham Phillips Shot by Socialist.” None of the papers retracted that lie.

When Theodore Roosevelt was shot at in Milwaukee, the Associated Press sent broadcast the news that a Socialist had assaulted the Colonel. Though it was proven by the evidence of the assailant’s own statement that he was an affiliated member of a Democratic organization in New York, that he had always voted the Democrat ticket, the “New York Evening Telegram” ran the headline: “Roosevelt Shot by Socialist.” This the “Telegram” never retracted.

Perhaps the most tragic illustration of this kind of thing was the “Chicago Anarchists.” There were one or two Anarchists among them; the rest were Socialists, perfectly innocent working-class educators, who were railroaded to the gallows by public hysteria, deliberately incited by the newspapers of Chicago. Finley Peter Dunne, creator of “Mr. Dooley,” was a reporter on one of these newspapers, and ten or twelve years ago he narrated to me some of the things he had witnessed, the most outrageous inventions deliberately cooked up. His voice trembled as he told about it. I asked him why he did not write the story, and his answer was that he had often tried to write it, but was blinded by his own tears.

The same thing was done in the Debs railway strike of 1893. Every act of violence that was committed was hailed by the newspapers of the country as part of a terrorist campaign by the labor-unions. Therefore the public permitted Grover Cleveland to smash this strike. Afterwards Cleveland’s commission of investigation put the chief of police of Chicago on the witness-stand, and heard him testify that the Railway Managers’ Association had hired “thugs, thieves, and ex-convicts” as their deputies, and that these men had set fire to freight-cars, and had cut the hose of the Chicago firemen.

It would not be too much to say that American capitalist newspapers sent Eugene V. Debs to jail in 1893 and made him into a Socialist. And now in 1919, when he is sent to jail again, they help to keep him there! On the day that he is sent to prison, they spread wide an interview to the effect that he will call a general strike of labor to get himself out of jail; and this interview is quoted by the Attorney-General as reason for refusing amnesty to Debs. But Debs gave no such interview. He denied it as soon as he saw it, but of course you did not see his denial, unless you are a reader of the Socialist papers.

The “Appeal to Reason” is preparing to have a suit brought against the Associated Press on this issue. It reprints a letter from Debs to the general manager of the Associated Press, written in 1912, protesting against a false story to the effect that the “Appeal” is suspending publication. This report, obviously a great injury to the “Appeal,” the Associated Press refused to deny. Says Debs:

Am I to infer from your letter that the Associated Press aims to deal fairly, honestly and justly with all people, to disseminate the truth, and taboo what is false? I happen to know differently by personal experience. If there is in this country a strictly capitalist class institution it is the Associated Press.

Pardon me if I give you just an instance or two of my personal experience. During the heat of the Pullman strike, when the Pullman cars were under boycott, the Associated Press sent out a dispatch over all the country that I had ridden out of Chicago like a royal prince in a Pullman Palace car while my dupes were left to walk the ties. A hundred witnesses who were at the depot when I left testified that the report was a lie, but I could never get the Associated Press to correct it. This lie cost me more pain and trouble than you can well imagine, and for it all I have to thank the Associated Press, and I have not forgotten it.

During the last national campaign, at a time when I was away from home, the Associated Press spread a report over the country to the effect that scab labor had been employed to do some work at my home. It was a lie, and so intended. I had the matter investigated by the chief union organizer of the district, who reported that it was a lie, but I was never able to have the correction put upon the wires. That lie is still going to this day, and for that, and still others I could mention, I have also to thank the capitalistically owned and controlled Associated Press.

You might think this a pretty small lie for a big organization like the Associated Press to bother with; but if you think that, you do not know the Associated Press. Hardly ever do I mention this organization to a radical that I do not hear a new story, frequently just such a petty and spiteful story as the non-union labor in the home of Eugene Debs. In Pasadena lives my friend Gaylord Wilshire, and I mention the Associated Press to him, and he laughs. “Did I ever tell you my story of York, Pennsylvania?” “What did you do in York, Pennsylvania?” “Nothing,” says Wilshire; “that’s the story.” It appears that he was on a Socialist lecture-tour, and the schedule was badly arranged, the trains were late, and so he cut out York, Pennsylvania, and on the date in question was up in Maine. But the Associated Press sent broadcast over the country a detailed report that the editor of “Wilshire’s Magazine” had spoken in York, Pennsylvania, had denounced the courts, had offered ten thousand dollars for a debate with Mark Hanna, and had been mobbed by the citizens of York!

You will say, perhaps, that this must have been a mistake. Yes, but how comes it that the Associated Press makes all its mistakes one way? Why is there never a mistake favorable to a Socialist? Why does not the Associated Press report that Gene Debs has rescued a child from drowning; or that Gaylord Wilshire has been awarded a gold medal by a chamber of commerce; or that Upton Sinclair has been made a bishop of the Episcopal Church for writing “The Profits of Religion”?

One of the most interesting illustrations of newspaper lying about Socialists occurred during a May-day meeting in Union Square, New York, a few years ago. It is interesting because we may go behind the scenes and watch the wires being pulled. It appears that police arrangements for this meeting were in charge of Chief Inspector Schmittberger, an old-style Tammany clubber; but he could not handle the affair in the usual fashion of the New York police, because the administration of Mayor Mitchel had ordained “free speech.” Schmittberger had his clubbers hidden in an excavation of the subway, ready to sally forth when the meeting gave excuse. But the meeting did not give excuse, and some of the policemen grew impatient, and sallied out without orders and started clubbing. My friend Isaac Russell, who was reporting the day’s events for the “New York Times,” was standing by Schmittberger’s side, and heard him shout to these unauthorized clubbers. Says Russell:

I ran beside Schmittberger into the fracas, and he yanked and pulled cops over backwards to break up the thing. And finally he got them under control, and then gave them fits for acting without orders.

Russell, being an honest man, went back to the “Times” office, and wrote a story of how the New York police had been seized by a panic, and had broken out without orders; and that story went through. But it happened that up in the editorial rooms of the “Times” somebody was writing the conventional “Times” editorial, denouncing the Socialists for their May-day violence, and praising the police for their heroism. It never occurred to the editorial writer that the news editors could be so careless as to pass a story like Isaac Russell’s! So next day here was this comical discrepancy, and an organization of magazine editors, the “Ragged Edge Club,” invited Isaac Russell to come and explain to them the war between the news columns and the editorial columns of the “Times”! Russell was called up before his boss and, as he says, “roasted to a frazzle” for having written the truth. Arthur Greaves, city editor of the “Times,” told him that he had “got off all wrong in that situation.” But Russell’s job was saved—and how do you think? The police commissioner of New York came out with a formal statement, denouncing the police, and saying that they had acted contrary to his orders!

Or take the experience of A. M. Simons, reporting an International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart, Germany, for the United Press, supposed to be a liberal organization. Simons received a dispatch from the London headquarters of his organization:

Wire three hundred words on probable split of Congress into Bebelists, Herveists, and Laborites.

And Simons continues:

Now, there was not a single human being in that congress that ever dreamed there would be a split. The particular question on which they were supposed to split was passed by a unanimous vote. I sent a straight news story out. At the close I put these three words: “Split talk rot.” Judge of my surprise when I landed in New York to find that that story of the split of the Socialist Congress had been carried over the United Press wires to the paper I was serving!

And now, as this book is going to press, on November 11th, 1919, the Associated Press sends from the town of Centralia, Washington, a series of dispatches telling how I. W. W. members fired from windows of their meeting hall upon an Armistice Day parade of returned soldier-boys. The dispatch does not say directly that the firing was done in cold blood; it simply tells in elaborate detail about the firing, and says not one word about incidents occurring before the firing. It leaves it to be assumed that the firing was done in cold blood, and the whole country does assume that, and a perfect frenzy seizes the returned soldiers and the government authorities; they raid I. W. W. meeting rooms in a hundred places, and beat up the members and throw them into jail. And I who understand the infamies of our Journalism wait patiently, knowing that in due course the truth will begin to leak. And sure enough, three days later comes an Associated Press dispatch from Centralia, Washington, mentioning, quite casually and incidentally, that Dr. Frank Bickford, one of the marchers, testified at the coroner’s inquest that “the former soldiers attacked the I. W. W. hall before any shots were fired.” And the Hearst service reports the same news with the comment that “no special significance was attached to this testimony”!

Later: It appears that the soldiers were battering in the door, and the first shots were fired through it.

There is a whole field of problems connected with our sex-nature which we are only beginning to explore. Metchnikoff has told us something. Freud and Jung have told us more; but long after we have solved our economic problems we shall still be seeking knowledge about sex. And meantime men and women grope blindly, and are betrayed into entanglements and misunderstandings and cruel miseries. If they happen to be ordinary, respectable citizens, they keep these things under cover. If they are radicals, trying to square their preaching and their practice, they will get into weird and awful predicaments, and then there will be sport for predatory Journalism!

I have told you the stories of Maxim Gorky, of George D. Herron, of Upton Sinclair. How many such stories would you care to hear? Would you care to hear about Charlotte Perkins Gilman? About Thorstein Veblen? About Jack London, Reginald Wright Kauffman, Clarence Darrow? About Marion Craig Wentworth, Mary Ware Dennett, Gaylord Wilshire, Oscar Lovell Triggs, George Sterling? This that I am giving you is not a list of the vital spirits of our time; it is merely a list of persons of my acquaintance who happen to have been caught upon the hook of an unhappy marriage, gutted, skinned alive, and laid quivering on the red-hot griddle of Capitalist Journalism.

I will tell you a story told to me only the other day. The man asks me not to give his name; he is trying to forget. Poor fellow, as he talks about it, I see the color creep into his forehead, I see his hands begin to shake—all the symptoms I remember so well! I ask him: “Do you start in your sleep, as if someone had touched a live nerve? Do you cry aloud, and carry on long discourses through the night?”

A few years ago this man was a popular “extension” lecturer in Chicago; anywhere in the Middle West he chose to go he could have a couple of thousand people to listen to him. He was unhappily married; his wife was living with another man, and desired a divorce. When this happens in Chicago, they usually agree upon the charge of “cruelty”; their friends, and likewise all Chicago newspaper editors, perfectly understand that this is a conventional charge, having no necessary relation to the facts. I have quoted the case of Mr. Booth Tarkington, returning from Europe and saying to the newspaper reporters, with a smile, “When one’s wife accuses one of cruelty, no gentleman would think of replying.” The reporters all understood what that meant, and the public which read it appreciated Mr. Tarkington’s tact. Mr. Tarkington, you see, is a novelist whose work involves no peril to the profit system; therefore Mr. Tarkington’s wife could charge him with “cruelty,” without Mr. Tarkington’s reputation being destroyed and the sale of his books wiped out. A recent item sent out by Mr. Tarkington’s publishers—Messrs. Harper & Brothers, with the eight hundred thousand dollar mortgage reposing in the vaults of J. P. Morgan & Company—stated that they had sold a total of 1,324,900 copies of Mr. Tarkington’s novels.

But it was entirely different with this Chicago lecturer; this man, you see, was a Socialist, and therefore a menace to mortgages. In a lecture-room the question came up of a teacher who had switched a child; the speaker remarked playfully that the cave-man had been accustomed to inflict discipline with a club, and that boys, according to biology, were in the cave-man stage of development. So next day the readers of a yellow journal in Chicago read a scare headline about a “highbrow” society lecturer who was preaching “cave-man philosophy” to his students, and applying “cave-man treatment” to his wife, so that she was divorcing him for cruelty! Half a dozen such yarns at this were piled in quick succession upon the head of this Socialist lecturer, with the result that his career was ruined.

By way of contrast, let me tell you about another man—proprietor of a great department-store in New York. I will not name him; he is a worm, poor in everything but money. It happened that through mutual friends I knew about his private life; he kept numerous mistresses, and flaunted them boldly on the “Great White Way,” starting them on showy theatrical careers, and otherwise making himself a joke to the “Tenderloin.” This man’s wife divorced him for his infidelities; and what do you think happened? What did the newspapers do? Not a line about the matter in any newspaper of New York City!

To some of the rules which I lay down in this book there are exceptions. It is sometimes possible for a radical to be quoted honestly by a capitalist newspaper; it is sometimes possible to get news unfavorable to the profit-system into the most reactionary sheet. But to the following two rules there is no exception anywhere:

Rule 1. Any proprietor of a department-store anywhere in America may divorce, or be divorced, with entire immunity so far as concerns the press.

Rule 2. No radical in America can divorce or be divorced without being gutted, skinned alive, and placed on the red-hot griddle of Capitalist Journalism.

I will tell you about another Chicago Socialist whom I have mentioned—Oscar Lovell Triggs. Fifteen or twenty years ago Triggs was the most popular man in the faculty of Mr. Rockefeller’s University of Chicago; they had to get extra-sized class-rooms for his lectures, and so there was jealousy of him—camouflaged, of course, as opposition to Socialism. Triggs was so indiscreet as to live in a radical colony in Chicago. He was asked to give an interview on some subject or another, and the reporter, going down the hallway of the community building, made note of the fact that in the next room there hung some silk stockings and a pink kimono. So he went off and wrote a cunningly devised and highly suggestive story about silk stockings and a pink kimono in the room adjoining that of the Chicago college professor.

Here was a scandal, of course; and Triggs was expected to fight it. But, as it happened, Triggs was unhappily married, his wife was living with an artist in Paris, and desired a divorce. Any divorce lawyer will tell you that men who are thus caught on the hook are prone to strange and reckless rushes. Triggs, whose wife wanted a divorce, decided that this story would serve as well as anything. A friend who lived in the building at the time, and knew Triggs intimately, assures me that there was not a word of truth in the insinuations, there was nothing between Triggs and the young lady of the silk stockings and the pink kimono. Nevertheless, this most popular professor of literature was driven out of the university, and set to work as a common laborer on a California chicken-ranch.

I write to ask him to verify the details of this story; I ask him to be heroic, and let me tell the story, in the interest of the public welfare. He gives the permission, adding the following comment:

In this statement, you speak of only one detail—the last one. But the real story involves what amounted to a conspiracy against me in the two years preceding my retirement from the university. This consisted in so reporting lectures and statements that a very quiet and reasonable scholar came to be regarded as a “freak professor.” No one could stand up against this kind of attack and retain a position in a conventional university. I never could get to the bottom of it. It is a poor way to treat human material, but so be it.

Maybe you distrust the radicals; they are all “free lovers,” you say; they deserve their marital unhappiness, they deserve exposure and humiliation. Well, then, suppose I tell you about some respectable person? Suppose I tell you about the President of the United States, secure in the sanctity of the White House? Will that convince you?

You didn’t happen to know that the “Scandal Bureau” had prepared a story on Woodrow Wilson! The “interests,” which wanted war with Germany and Mexico, had a scandal all ready to spring on him toward the end of the 1916 campaign. They had the dynamite planted, the wires laid; all they had to do was to press the button. At the last moment their nerve failed them, they did not press the button. I was told why by a prominent Republican leader, who was present in the councils of the party when the final decision was made. This man pounded on the table and declared: “I’d have said I’d sooner vote for the devil than for Woodrow Wilson, but if you start a dirty story on the President of the United States, I’ll vote for Woodrow Wilson, and one or two million Americans will do likewise.”

Their nerve failed them; but some steps they had already taken, and you may trace their footprints if you are curious. There were dark hints in many newspapers, and if you saw the Washington correspondence of London papers during the fall of 1916, you found more than hints. For example, here is James Davenport Whelpley, a well-known journalist, writing in the “Fortnightly Review,” one of the most dignified of English monthlies:

Another issue has come to the fore in the American political campaign quite unusual in American politics.... With all the freedom that is given to the American Press, and with all the pernicious intrusion into private affairs that finds expression in the columns of American newspapers, it has been many years since the personality of a candidate has played any part in the publicity work of a campaign, no matter how great the temptation may have been to use material at hand. In reading American newspapers today, however, much can be gleaned from between the lines. Something seems to be struggling against precedent and unwritten rules for clear expression, and that something finds itself articulate in the communications of man to man.

And then Mr. Whelpley goes on to tell about “elections being won and lost at the last moment by psychological waves which have swept across the national mind, swamping on their way the political hopes of one or the other candidate.” So Mr. Whelpley is unable to predict the re-election of Woodrow Wilson!

More definite even than this, there was a story in “McClure’s Magazine,” which had already gone to press, and could not be recalled. “McClure’s,” now a tool of the “interests,” was conducting a raging campaign for “preparedness,” and Wilson stood in the way. The story was called “That Parkinson Affair,” by Sophie Kerr, and was published in the issue of September, 1916—just when the scandal was ready to be sprung. It is ostensibly a piece of fiction, but so transparent that no child could fail to recognize it. It is the vilest piece of innuendo in American political history, and remains on our library shelves as a monumental example of the depths to which our predatory interests have been willing to drag their “kept” magazines.

When the big magazines were bought up by the “interests,” we were solemnly assured that the purpose was to put an end to “scandal-mongering.” But now it appears that the purpose was not to lay the “muck-rake” on the shelf, but merely to turn it against the friends of human progress!

You guess that this chapter will show how the press exploits crime for its profit; and that sounds tiresome, you know all about that. You know how the yellow journals take up murder cases and divorce cases and sexual irregularities, and carry on campaigns of scandal, lasting for months. You know how they send out their amateur sleuths, and work up a case against some one, and make it a matter of journalistic prestige that this person shall be hounded to jail.

No; this chapter does not deal with the crimes which the press exploits, nor yet with the crimes which it invents. I could tell a hilarious anecdote of a group of New York reporters assigned to the immigration service, shy of news and bored to death, who cooked up a tale of an imaginary murder by an imaginary Austrian countess, kept all New York thrilled for a week, and “got away with it.” But all that is comparatively nothing. The theme of this chapter is the crimes which the press commits.

What is a crime? The definition is difficult; you have to know first who commits it. Many things are crimes if done by workingmen, which are virtuous public services if done by great corporations. It is a crime when workingmen conspire to boycott; but it is no crime when newspapers do it, when advertisers do it. It is a crime when an individual threatens blackmail; but when a great newspaper does it, it is business enterprise. For example, in Los Angeles there was started a municipal newspaper, which was thriving. Gen. Harrison Gray Otis of the “Times” sent agents to various advertisers to notify them that if they continued to advertise in this paper they would be boycotted, blacklisted, and put out of business. So the big advertisers deserted the municipal paper.

I have told in this book about many crimes committed by newspapers against myself; not metaphorical crimes, but literal, legal crimes. It was a crime when a Philadelphia reporter broke into my home and stole a photograph. It was a crime when the “New York Evening Journal” sent forged cablegrams to Dr. James P. Warbasse and Mrs. Jessica Finch Cosgrave. It was a crime when the newspapers of New York bribed a court-clerk to give them the testimony in my divorce case. Any lawyer will tell you that these things are crimes, yet they are a recognized part of the practice of American Journalism, and follow logically and inevitably from the competitive sale of news.

Nietzsche says of the soul of man that it “hungers after knowledge as the lion for his food.” Just so the yellow journals hunger after news, and just so their proprietors hunger after profits. When profits are at stake, they stop at nothing. I have quoted Hearst’s telegram to Frederick Remington: “You make the pictures and I’ll make the war.” I have told of Hearst’s ruffian conduct towards myself in the case of Adelaide Branch. Do you think that a man who would commit such acts would stop at anything? When Hearst ventured to run for governor of New York State, his enemies brought out against him a mass of evidence, showing that he had deliberately organized his newspapers so that the corporations which published them owned no property, and children who had been run down and crippled for life by Mr. Hearst’s delivery-wagons could collect no damages from him.

Mr. Hearst poses as a friend of labor, but he keeps his newspapers on a non-union basis, and when his employes go on strike, he treats them as other corporations treat their strikers. And all newspaper corporations do the same. I could name not one, but several cities in which newspapers have hired thugs to break the strikes of newsboys; or where they have hired strikes against their rivals. During the Colorado coal-strike the “Denver Express” was publishing the truth about the strike, and the other newspapers organized a boycott of the dealers who handled the “Express.” When the “Express” hired its own newsboys, mysterious gangs of rowdies appeared, and beat up these newsboys and scattered their papers in the streets. And no interference from the police, no line about these riots in any Denver newspaper—except the “Express,” which could not get distributed!

Wherever you dig in the cellars of these great predatory institutions, you find buried skeletons. I have dragged some of them into the light of day; I would drag others—but the test here is not what I know to be true, but what I can prove in a court of law. And it is so easy for a great newspaper to buy witnesses; so easy for a great newspaper to terrorize witnesses! I came upon one typical story that I could prove, and prove to the hilt; I prepared to tell the story, with names and places and dates, but while I was collecting the evidence, a friend of the victim exclaimed: “You will ruin him! You will set the newspaper after him again!”

This man, a former city official, an honest public servant, had been deliberately ruined by a newspaper conspiracy, and brought to utter despair. The thing happened six years ago, and only now is he beginning to recover his practice as a lawyer. If now I revive this story, he will take up his morning paper and read something like this: “The defendant was represented by John Jones, who a few years ago was indicted—etc.” Or: “The striking carpenters have retained John Jones, who was once city prosecutor, and concerning whom several witnesses testified—etc., etc.” Shall I inflict this upon a man, in spite of his wishes? I thought the matter over from many angles, and decided to ask the reader to accept the story on my word. Really, it is too incredible a story to be an invention! Listen:

John Jones, city prosecutor, caused the arrest of the proprietor of a great and powerful newspaper for printing salacious advertisements. He forced this newspaper to make abject public apology, and to promise reform. Later he caused the arrest of the proprietor for criminal libel; whereupon this proprietor set out to “get” the city prosecutor. The paper had a “literary editor,” a man who has since become well-known as a critic and novelist, author of perhaps a dozen books. At this time his salary was thirty dollars a week, and he was told by the proprietor of the newspaper to go and “get” John Jones, using either wine or women.

A woman was brought on from the Middle West, a woman just one month under twenty-one, which is the “age of consent” in the state in question. This woman sought a city position from John Jones, came to his office, threw her arms about his neck, and screamed. Instantly the door was broken in, and it was made known that “sleuths” had bored a hole through the office-wall, and were prepared to testify that they had seen John Jones committing a crime with this woman under age.

Now, I hear you say, with a knowing smile, “That’s the story John Jones tells!” No, reader, I assure you I am not so naïve; I did not get this story from John Jones, I did not get it from any friend of John Jones. It happens that I know the “literary editor” fairly well, and I know a dozen of his friends. To one of these, an intimate friend of mine, this “literary editor” told the entire story. Two friends of mine were present at a club dinner, when the man was confronted by accident with his victim, and admitted what he had done, and begged pardon for it. It was his “job,” he said—his “job” of thirty dollars a week! And that is how I came on the story!

I go over in my mind the newspapers concerning which I can make the statement that I know, either from direct personal knowledge, or from the evidence of a friend whom I trust, that the owner or manager of this paper has committed a definite act of crime for which, if the laws were enforced, the owner or manager would be sent to the penitentiary. I count a total of fifteen such papers, located in leading American cities, such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Each one of these criminals sits in a seat of power and poisons the thinking of hundreds of thousands of helpless people. I ask myself: In what respect is the position of these people different from that of the peasantry of mediaeval Germany, who lived and labored subject to raids from robber knights and barons whose castles they saw upon distant cliffs and mountain tops?

I once had the pleasure of hearing Jack London express his opinion of American Journalism; it was a picturesque and vivid experience, a sort of verbal aurora borealis. Not wishing to trust to my memory of the incidents, I write to Mrs. London, and she sends me a huge scrap-book, the journalistic adventures of Jack London during the year 1906. I open it, and the first thing I come upon is a clipping from the “St. Louis Post-Dispatch,” with a picture of Mrs. London which is not Mrs. London! Then, a couple of pages on, a clipping from the “New Haven Palladium,” with a picture of Jack London which is not Jack London!

They just take any old picture, you understand, and slap your name under it. I have seen Jack London’s picture serving for me, and I have seen my own picture serving for a vaudeville actor. As I write, the “Los Angeles Times” comes to my desk, with a scare-headline all the way across the page: “Britain Defies Union Labor Threat of Revolution.” It appears that the miners are preparing a general strike, and the “Los Angeles Times,” wishing to make them odious, publishes on its front page a large portrait, with this caption: “Trying to Throw Britain Off Balance. Robert Smillie, Brains of the Triple Alliance of Powerful Labor Unions, Seeking Social and Economic Revolution in the United Kingdom.” The portrait shows a foreign-looking individual with straggly beard and tousled hair, wearing a Russian blouse. It is Abram Krylenko, commander-in-chief of the Russian Bolshevist armies! If you are near a library you may find the picture in the “Outlook,” Vol. 118, p. 254; or in the “Independent,” Vol. 93, p. 405; or in the “Metropolitan Magazine” for October, 1919. A picture of Smillie appears in “Current Opinion” for August, 1919—an entirely conventional-looking Englishman!

To return to Jack London: This was the year that Charmian and Jack got married. It was in Chicago, and the Hearst paper of that city reported it in this chaste fashion:

And then next day the Hearst reporters discovered that this marriage was not legal; Jack was liable to three years in jail; so, as a matter of precaution, he was going to be married in every state in the Union! All over the country this story was telegraphed; such trifling with a sacred institution displeased certain women’s clubs in Iowa, which canceled their engagements to hear Jack London lecture! Returning to his home after these excitements, I find Jack being interviewed by the “Oakland Herald.”

That report was all the imagination of the Chicago reporters who were scooped on the wedding story. There was nothing in that at all.

Later on Jack took another trip to the East, and delivered his famous address, “Revolution,” which you may find in his volume “Revolution and Other Essays.” He is describing the feelings of a Colorado workingman under the régime of the militia general, Sherman Bell, whose orders were, “To hell with the Constitution.” Says London:

Nor does the Constitution of the United States appear so glorious and constitutional to the workingman who has experienced a bull pen or been unconstitutionally deported from Colorado. Nor are this particular workingman’s hurt feelings soothed by reading in the newspapers that both the bull pen and the deportation were preeminently just, legal, and constitutional. “To hell, then, with the Constitution,” says he, and another revolutionist has been made—by the capitalist class.

And next morning here comes the “New York Times,” not quite saying that Jack said “To hell with the Constitution,” but carefully implying it; which dishonesty, of course, takes wings, and from one end of the country to the other Americans read that Jack London has said, “To hell with the Constitution.” Jack is on his way home, and cannot answer; here am I, as vice-president of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, under whose auspices the meeting had been held, writing to the “Times” to call attention to the injustice it has done to a great American novelist. The “Times” puts my letter under the title:

Jack London Puts an “If” in the Condemned Constitution.

And here is the “New York Evening Sun,” denouncing Jack; here is the “Chicago Inter-Ocean,” in an editorial:

If Jack London speaks only for himself, he is either a cheap seeker after notoriety or a pestilential agitator. If the latter, he is more dangerous than the agitators whose fulminations led to the assassination of President McKinley, and assassination is as likely to follow his diatribes.

Our laws prevent the importation of foreign Anarchists. Are the laws and public sentiment not strong enough to suppress the exploiter of sensationalism who preaches treason to the flag and war on the Government?

And here is the “Rochester Post Express,” with the headline: “A LITERARY ANARCHIST.” Here is the “Milwaukee Sentinel”: “LONDON BELCHES MORE FIRE.” Here is the “Chicago Inter-Ocean”: “ASSASSINATION PET JOY OF MR. LONDON.”

And here are various public libraries, rushing to defend our imperiled institutions by barring the books of Jack London from their shelves: Derby, Connecticut; Des Moines, Iowa; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And here is Jack, writing to Gaylord Wilshire: “Thanks for the enclosures. You bet they amuse me! I leave it to you if my situation isn’t amusing!” In a letter to me, Mrs. London explains this amusement: “Down went his royalties!” And she adds:

Several years ago Jack learned, from one newspaper man and another, what he had often suspected—that the standing instructions in practically every newspaper office on the Pacific Coast were to give Jack London the worst of it whenever possible. Of course this meant no matter what the occasion, whether slamming his work, or wilfully misrepresenting his personal actions. And they only subsided, as I have said above, when they adjudged he had a bank account, and therefore must needs be less radical.

This trick played upon Jack London is a favorite one with our newspapers—to take some quotation, and put it in the mouth of the quoter. What a sordid man is William Shakespeare; he said: “Put money in thy purse!” What a vainglorious man is the apostle Matthew; he said: “All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me!” What a violent man is James H. Maurer, president of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor; he said: “Down with the Stars and Stripes!”

Mr. Maurer came to New York to tell the people about the state constabulary, a public strike-breaking agency organized by the big capitalists of his state. The big capitalists of New York wanted the same thing, and the big newspapers of New York were boosting for it, and of course ridiculing and slandering all who opposed it. At the Washington Irving High School, on April 19, 1916, Mr. Maurer addressed a public meeting and read a passage from his book, “The American Cossack.” The incident he read was a funeral; a Spanish war-veteran had died during the miners’ strike in Westmoreland County, and was being buried by the striking miners with military honors. Members of the state constabulary came riding up. They objected to these lousy strikers using the American flag, and ordered that the flag be lowered. The strikers refused, whereupon the Cossacks threatened to shoot unless the flag was lowered and furled. Maurer quoted them: “Down with the Stars and Stripes!” So next day the newspapers reported Maurer as saying, “Down with the Stars and Stripes!” The “New York Times” went farther yet, and reported him as saying, “To hell with the Stars and Stripes!” I quote Maurer’s letter:

Mayor Mitchel of New York ordered the school-board to investigate these charges at once and they did so. At the hearing twelve witnesses were heard. Eleven swore that I said nothing of the kind and repeated what I did say. One, a “New York Sun” reporter by the name of Lester S. Walbridge, contended that I had said, “Down with the Stars and Stripes!” but admitted that there had been much cheering at the time and that he did not catch all that I said. Three others wrote and telegraphed their testimony, all saying that I said nothing of the kind. Some of the witnesses were people favorable to the State Police. The verdict of the School-board was to the effect that I said nothing of the kind, but had simply told my audience what the State Police had said; that it was the State Police who said, “Down with the Stars and Stripes,” and not Mr. Maurer. A clear vindication.

The day the story first appeared in the New York papers, charging me with the flag slander, the story was used to stampede the New York senators into voting for the State Police Bill then pending, and it worked. Although I was vindicated, the story is still used; every now and then someone editorializes about it.

In my effort to verify this story, I write to a reporter who was on the job at this time. He answers:

As a matter of fact all the reporters were out getting a drink when Maurer spoke, and they took their version of what he said from the Real Estate Association’s provocateurs at the meeting.

In connection with this Maurer episode, there is a curious story which should be told. You remember “Collier’s Weekly,” a magazine “run on a personal basis,” and the many young writers who had been debauched by “Collier” prosperity. One of these writers was Richard Harding Davis, and you would have to hunt a long time to find a more perfect incarnation of capitalist prosperity and success in literature. It happened that Davis was at his country home when he read in the “New York Times” that Maurer had said, “To hell with the Stars and Stripes!” Davis flew into a rage, and drafted a telegram to the mayor of New York, calling upon him to use the power of the government to put down these preachers of sedition. He went to the telephone to dictate the message, and before he was half-way through, fell dead of an apoplectic stroke!

Ten years ago I produced in California a one-act play called “The Indignant Subscriber.” The editor of a great newspaper is found walking on the shore of an imaginary lake. A stranger invites him for a row in a boat—the “boat” consisting of two chairs and a board tied together, the “oars” being brooms. The stranger rows the editor out into the middle of the lake, and then announces himself as the Indignant Subscriber. “For twenty-five years,” he says, “I have listened helplessly, while you set forth your views on every subject under the sun. Now for once I mean to tell you my views on one subject—yourself!” So he speaks his mind, and at the end upsets the boat and swims away, leaving the editor floundering in the water.

Now I am the Indignant Subscriber, who has been taking the “New York Times” for twenty-five years. I propose to give the “Times” a taste of its own medicine—by writing some headlines and letting the “Times” see just how it feels. Here goes:

Now, how’s that?

I have told many stories of newspaper lies about myself, and perhaps you thought that was just one person who was wronged, and it didn’t make much difference; but when it comes to lying about the labor movement, thousands and even millions of people are wronged, and that surely does make a difference. When newspapers lie about a strike, they lie about every one of the strikers, and every one of these strikers and their wives and children and friends know it. When they see deliberate and long-continued campaigns to render them odious to the public, and to deprive them of their just rights, not merely as workers, but as citizens, a blaze of impotent fury is kindled in their hearts. And year by year our newspapers go on storing up these volcanic fires of hate-against the day when labor will no longer be impotent!

Imagine, if you can, the feelings of a workingman on strike who picks up a copy of the “Wall Street Journal” and reads:

We have a flabby public opinion which would wring its hands in anguish if we took the labor leader by the scruff of his neck, backed him up against a wall, and filled him with lead. Countries which consider themselves every bit as civilized as we do not hesitate about such matters for a moment.

Whenever it comes to a “show-down” between labor and capital, the press is openly or secretly for capital—and this no matter how “liberal” this press may pretend to be. Says Professor Ross:

During labor disputes the facts are usually distorted to the injury of labor. In one case (Chicago), strikers held a meeting on a vacant lot enclosed by a newly-erected billboard. Forthwith appeared, in a yellow journal professing warm friendship for labor, a front-page cut of the billboard and a lurid story of how the strikers had built a “stockade” behind which they intended to bid defiance to the blue-coats. It is not surprising that when the van bringing these lying sheets appeared in their quarter of the city, the libeled men overturned it.

During the struggle of carriage-drivers for a six-day week, certain great dailies lent themselves to a concerted effort of the liverymen to win public sympathy by making it appear that the strikers were interfering with funerals. One paper falsely stated that a strong force of police was being held in reserve in case of “riots,” and that policemen would ride beside the non-union drivers of hearses. Another, under the misleading headline, “Two Funerals Stopped by Striking Cabmen,” described harmless colloquies between hearse-drivers and pickets. This was followed up by a solemn editorial, “May a Man Go to His Long Rest in Peace?”—although, as a matter of fact, the strikers had no intention of interfering with funerals....

That was in Chicago, ten years ago. And now, as I write, the employes of the packing-houses, my old friends of “The Jungle,” are on strike again, and the Chicago newspapers are at their usual game of deliberate lying: “Violence is Expected,” “Situation is Critical,” and so on. It happens that an honest man, Alfred W. McCann, is on the scene. He writes:

I say it isn’t true. To the shame of the press, no foundation can be discovered for the wild stories now filling their columns, spreading public anxiety and inciting labor to outbursts of indignation against what is called “the deliberate misrepresentation of the press.”

The packers advertise heavily in Chicago newspapers; and so also do the Chicago department-stores. Says Prof. Ross:

In the same city (Chicago), during a strike of the elevator men in the large stores, the business agent of the elevator-starters’ union was beaten to death, in an alley behind a certain emporium, by a “strong-arm” man hired by that firm. The story, supported by affidavits, was given by a responsible lawyer to three newspaper men, each of whom accepted it as true and promised to print it. The account never appeared.

Try, for a moment, to put yourself in the position of a girl-slave of one of these big department-stores. You resist the flirtatious advances of the floor-walker, and continue to eat your twenty-cent dinners; but after a few years you grow desperate, and in the face of the heaviest pressure you organize and declare a strike for better pay. How much chance do you stand for fair play from the newspapers? Why, they won’t even print the names of the stores against which you are striking! Says Max Sherover:

While addressing a street meeting, held under the auspices of the Retail Clerks’ Union, in front of Stern Brothers’ department-store, Miss Elizabeth Dutcher was arrested at the instigation of one of the store-managers. Miss Dutcher is highly prominent in social and labor circles, and the papers did not dare to be entirely silent about the arrest. Every paper in New York, except one—and that one does not carry department-store advertising—spoke of a meeting at the doors of a “large retail establishment.” They also referred to an earlier incident as a disturbance at the doors of a “Sixth Avenue Store,” not daring to mention the name, Gimbel’s.

Or again, Prof. Ross:

In New York the salesgirls in the big shops had to sign an exceedingly mean and oppressive contract, which, if generally known, would have made the firms odious to the public. A prominent social worker brought these contracts, and evidence as to the bad conditions that had become established under them, to every newspaper in the city. Not one would print a line on the subject.

And not only do they exclude the news; they keep watch over the general ideas which go into their columns, to make sure there is nothing to injure the sensibilities of department-stores, or to favor the girl-slaves of department-stores. Would you think I was absurd if I were to declare that there is a whole set of philosophical ideas which the newspapers forbid you to know about, because the department-stores ordain? Yes, even so! You must believe in free will, you must not believe in economic determinism! You must think that prostitution is a sexual phenomenon; you must not learn that prostitution is an economic phenomenon. Anybody who advocates the heretical, anti-department-store doctrine that white-slavery is caused by low wages will be suppressed, and if necessary will be slandered as an immoral person. You remember the “New York World,” its solemn editorial about twenty-cent dinners? Some years ago the “World” was under contract to publish every week a short story by O. Henry. They received the manuscript of what posterity has come to recognize as O. Henry’s masterpiece, “The Unfinished Story”; they refused to publish this “Unfinished Story,” because it was injurious to department-stores!

Or consider what happened when the Illinois Vice Commission made an investigation of the causes of prostitution, and submitted one of the best reports on this subject ever written. The report was highly sensational, also it was highly important; it was news in every possible sense of the word. But it attributed prostitution to low wages, and therefore only one Chicago newspaper gave an adequate account of this report!

You saw the “Boston Herald” and “Journal,” and also the “Boston Post,” forbidding you to know that President Wilson was urging you not to spend money on luxuries. In the same way, when there is a crisis of unemployment, the department-stores and other advertisers command that falsehoods shall be told you. If you know that business is bad, you may be cautious and save your money; whereas the department-stores want you to spend your money, and the kept press wants its share of this money for advertisements. Says Prof. Ross:

The alacrity with which many dailies serve as mouth-pieces of the financial powers came out very clearly during the recent industrial depression. The owner of one leading newspaper called his reporters together and said in effect, “Boys, the first of you who turns in a story of a lay-off or a shut-down, gets the sack.” Early in the depression the newspapers teemed with glowing accounts of the resumption of steel-mills and the revival of business, all baseless. After harvest-time they began to cheep “Prosperity,” “Bumper Crops,” “Farmers Buying Automobiles.” In cities where banks and employers offered clearing-house certificates instead of cash, the press usually printed fairy tales of the enthusiasm with which these makeshifts were taken by depositors and workingmen. The numbers and sufferings of the unemployed were ruthlessly concealed from the reading public. A mass meeting of the men out of work was represented as “anarchistic” or “instigated by the Socialists for political effect.” In one daily appeared a dispatch under the heading “Five Thousand Jobs Offered; Only Ten Apply.” It stated that the Commissioner of Public Works of Detroit, misled by reports of dire distress, set afoot a public work which called for five thousand men. Only ten men applied for work, and all these expected to be bosses. Correspondence with the official establishes the fact that the number of jobs offered was five hundred, and that three thousand men applied for them.

That was twelve years ago, in the Middle West. Six years ago we had another unemployment crisis, and I watched the newspapers handling it in New York. You might have thought they would not have been able to fool me; but they did! A boy out of this unemployed army, Frank Tanenbaum by name, led a number of starving men to the Catholic Church of St. Alphonsus to request shelter on a winter’s night. I read several newspapers, in the hope of getting the truth from one of them; on this occasion all the papers agreed that the unemployed men and their leader abused and threatened the priest, and were noisy and blasphemous in their behavior. I was heartsick about it. Oh, what a pity! If only those poor devils had had the sense to go to the churches in a quiet and respectful way, their position would have been impregnable. Christian churches would not have dared to turn out starving men on a winter’s night!

But Christian churches did! And the capitalist press backed them up! The leader, Frank Tanenbaum, was arrested, and he called as witnesses the very newspaper men who had written the stories of his “raid.” These men had been willing to lie in what they wrote—that was part of the newspaper game; but they were unwilling to lie under oath—that was not part of the game! So they testified that these unemployed men had been entirely peaceful in their conduct, that Tanenbaum had addressed the priest with politeness and respect, and that the crowd had left the church when told that they must do so!

Some years ago there was a strike of the hotel-workers in New York, an I. W. W. strike—and of course there is nothing with which the newspapers deal more freely than the I. W. W. They quoted Joe Ettor as having advised the strikers to put poison in the soup which they served to hotel patrons; also as having insulted the American flag. Ettor denied vigorously having made any such statements, but of course his denial went for nothing. Some of us who knew Ettor thought that the public ought to get a little of the truth about conditions under which these hotel-workers were forced to live—conditions menacing not only to themselves, but to the public they served. Therefore the Intercollegiate Socialist Society called a meeting in Carnegie Hall to hear the I. W. W. leaders. A fiery little New York politician who held the office of sheriff saw an opportunity to leap into the limelight. He would attend that meeting with a large force of deputies, and protect the American flag from insult! He brought some thirty deputies, to whom the county paid three dollars each; and we provided them with seats on the platform, and all the orators made speeches to them, and the young ladies who passed the collection-plates took away a part of their three dollars. And next morning the newspapers reported that the gallant sheriff had protected the American flag and tamed the seditious fury of the I. W. W.!

You remember, perhaps, my story of the Paterson silk-strikers, and how the “New York Times” quoted me as telling them that they “had the police at their mercy.” Here is another glimpse of this strike, through the eyes of Max Sherover:

At the I. W. W. pageant held about two years ago at Madison Square Garden, New York, for the benefit of the Paterson, N. J. silk-strikers, the writer was an eye-witness to the following scene: A reporter, whose identity we were unable to learn, in the basement of the Garden hurriedly printed the following words on an improvised banner, “No God and No Master, I. W. W.” One of the illiterate strikers was asked to hold the banner aloft and pose while a newspaper photographer was taking a flashlight photo.

This Paterson pageant was a result of the effort of a few literary men and women in New York, who saw the shameless lying of the press and the shameless violation of law by the authorities in Paterson. A group of people, including Ernest Poole, Hutchins Hapgood, Leroy Scott, John Reed, Thompson Buchanan, Margaret Sanger, and myself worked for weeks, giving all our time and energy and a great deal of money, and brought about a thousand strikers to New York City to rehearse the story of their sufferings before an audience in Madison Square Garden. This was so sensational that the newspapers could not suppress it; therefore what they did was to ridicule and betray it. They always make out that labor-movements are rolling in wealth, and that “agitators” are making fortunes. In this case they said that we were planning to finance the strike by this pageant. Every newspaper man knew this was absurd, for they knew the seating capacity of the Garden and could figure the possible gross receipts. The enterprise suffered a deficit of one or two thousand dollars; so of course the poor, starving strikers, who had read in the newspapers that they were to be “financed,” were bitterly disappointed. The “New York Times” thus had a chance for a story to the effect that the strikers were accusing us of having robbed them; and this while we were engaged in making up the deficit out of our own pockets!

Or take the Lawrence strike. I have told the story of how conspirators of the great Woolen Trust planted dynamite in the homes of strike-breakers as a “frame-up” to discredit the strikers. The man who was convicted of this was a school commissioner and a prominent Catholic, a close friend of the mill-owners. When this dynamite was found, the Associated Press sent the story fully. When the plot was exposed, it sent almost nothing. These statements were made publicly at a conference at the University of Wisconsin by A. M. Simons, and never challenged by the Associated Press. And at this same conference it was stated by George French that the department-stores served notice upon all the Boston newspapers that if they featured this strike they would get no more Sunday advertising!

Or take the present struggle of the railroad brotherhoods for a living wage. The “Saturday Evening Post” published a series of articles by Edward Hungerford, full of gross falsehoods regarding the wages of railroad workers and managers under the Federal administration. These, mind you, were flat misstatements of facts officially recorded and available to any one. The brotherhoods asked a certain United States railroad administration official to prepare from official records a statement concerning these misrepresentations. This was formally submitted to the “Saturday Evening Post,” and was absolutely ignored.

Or take the case of Tom Mooney. The capitalist newspapers of San Francisco tried Tom Mooney, with the help of a million dollar corruption fund, raised by the Merchants and Manufacturers Association of the city. They found him guilty, but the prosecuting authorities didn’t have enough evidence to make good the verdict in court, so they manufactured the evidence. Mooney was a Socialist and a well-known labor organizer, so the case was taken up by the Socialists and the unions of the country, and became the great labor issue of the time—all without one word getting into the capitalist newspapers of the East! There were two or three million copy “protest editions” of the “Appeal to Reason” issued—and still not a word about it in the capitalist newspapers outside of California! Finally the Anarchists in Petrograd took up the matter; they attacked the American embassy, and the news was cabled back to New York that the attack was on account of a certain “Tom Muni.” The newspapers of New York didn’t know anything about the case, and couldn’t find out about it in time; they had to publish the name as it came over the cables—thus laying bare their shame to the whole world! Could any writer of farce-comedy have invented a greater satire upon New York Journalism than the fact that it had to get its San Francisco labor-news misspelled from Petrograd?