Table Of ContentA LETTER FOR THE TIME
VlLLENEUVE, SWITZERLAND,
Monday, Oct. 6, 1919.
My Dear Confrere:
I am happy to see you always so burning with
energy, but your next book prepares for you some rude
combats. It requires a bold courage to dare, when
one is alone, to attack the monster, the new Minotaur,
to which the entire world renders tribute: the Press.
I return to Paris in a few weeks. Reaction there
holds the center of the walk. It speaks already as
master, and perhaps it will be master before the end
of the winter. The wave of counter-revolution, of
counter-liberty, passes over the world. It will drown
more than one among us, but it will retire, and our
ideas will conquer.
Very cordially I press your hand.
Romain Rolland.
CONTENTS
PART I
THE EVIDENCE
Chapter Page
I. The Story of the Brass Check.......................................... 13
II. The Story of a Poet........................................................... 17
III. Open Sesame! ..................................................................... 22
IV. The Real Fight..................................................................... 27
V. The Condemned Meat Industry........................................ 32
VI. An Adventure with Roosevelt.......................................... 39
VII. Jackals and a Carcase......................................................... 45
VIII. The Last Act.................... ................................................... 59
IX. Aiming at the Public’s Heart.............................. 55
X. A Voice from Russia............................................................ 58
XI. A Venture in Co-operation............................................... 62
XII. The Village Horse-Doctor.................................................. 68
XIII. In High Society..................................................................... 74
XIV. The Great Panic................................................................... 89
XV. Shredded Wheat Biscuit..................................................... 86
XVI. An Interview on Marriage.................................................. 99
XVII. “Gaming” on the Sabbath.................................................... 97
XVIII. An Essential Monogamist................................................... 162
XIX. In the Lion’s Den................................................. 119
XX. The Story of a Lynching..................................... 114
XXI. Journalism and Burglary............................ 121
XXII. A Millionaire and an Author............................................ 125
XXIII. The "Heart-Wife” ............................................................... 139
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6 Contents
Chapter Page
XXIV. The Mourning Pickets....................................................... 142
XXV. The Case of the Associated Press.................................. 150
XXVI. A Governor and His Lie................................................... 154
XXVII. The Associated Press at the Bar.................................... 165
XXVIII. The Associated Press and Its Newspapers................... 169
XXIX. The Scandal-Bureau .......................................................... 176
XXX. The Concrete Wall ...................... 184
XXXI. Making Bomb-Makers ....................................................... 191
XXXII. The Roof-Garden of the World...................................... 197
XXXIII. A Fountain of Poison.......................................................... 202
XXXIV. The Daily Cat-and-Dog Fight.......................................... 213
PART II
THE EXPLANATION
XXXV. The Causes of Things........................................................ 221
XXXVI. The Empire of Business.................................................... 228
XXXVII. The Dregs of the Cup........................................................ 237
XXXVIII. Owning the Press................................................................ 241
XXXIX. The War-Makers................................................................ 250
XL. Owning the Owners.....................................................’.... 258
XLI. The Owner in Politics........................................................ 263
XLII. Owning the Associated Press........................................... 271
XLIII. The Owner and His Advertisers................................... 282
XLIV. The Advertising Boycott .................................................. 289
XLV. The Advertising Ecstasy .................................................. 295
XLVI. The Bribe Direct ................................................................ 300
XLVII. The Bribe Wholesale ........................................................ 307
XLVIII. Poison Ivy ............................................................................ 311
' Contents T
Chapter Page
XLIX. The Elbert Hubbard Worm.............................................. 314
L. The Press and Public Welfare......................................... 318
LI. The Press and the Radicals.............................................. 323
LII. The Press and the Socialists.............................................. 327
LIII. The Press and Sex ............................................................. 332
LIV. The Press and Crime ..........................'. ............................ 337
LV. The Press and Jack London ............................................ 341
LVI. The Press and Labor ......................................................... 346
LVII. The Associated Press and Labor.................................... 353
LVIII. “Poisoned at the Source”.................................................. 362
LIX. The Press and the War...................................................... 377
LX. The Case of Russia............................................................. 385
LXI. “Bolshevism” in America......................................................395
PART III
THE REMEDY
LXII. Cutting the Tiger’s Claws......................................................403
LXIII. The Mental Munition-Factory ........................................ 408
LXIV. The Problem of the Reporter............................................ 415
LXV. The Press Set Free ........................................................... 421
LXVI. A Frame-up That Fell Down.......................................... 429
Conclusion .................................................................................................... 436
A Practical Program................................................................................... 438
Publisher’s Note ........................................................................................ 443
INTRODUCTORY
The social body to which we belong is at this moment
passing through one of the greatest crises of its history, a
colossal process which may best be likened to a birth. We
have each of us a share in this process, we are to a greater
or less extent responsible for its course. To make our judg
ments, we must have reports from other parts of the social
body; we must know what our fellow-men, in all classes of
society, in all parts of the world, are suffering, planning, doing.
There arise emergencies which require swift decisions, under
penalty of frightful waste and suffering. What if the nerves
upon which we depend for knowledge of this social body
should give us false reports of its condition?
The first half of this book tells a personal story: the story
of one man’s experiences with American Journalism. This
personal feature is not pleasant, but it is unavoidable. If I
were taking the witness-chair in a court of justice, the jury
would not ask for my general sentiments and philosophic
opinions; they would not ask what other people had told me,
or what was common report; the thing they would wish to
know—the only thing they would be allowed to know—is
what I had personally seen and experienced. So now, taking
the witness-stand in the case of the American public versus
Journalism, I tell what I have personally seen and experienced.
I take the oath of a witness: the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth, so help me God. After this pledge,
earnestly given and earnestly meant, the reader must either
believe me, or he must exclude me from the company of
civilized men.
My motive in writing this book is not to defend myself.
We live in a time of such concentrated agony and peril that a
man who would waste ink and paper on a defense of his own
personality would be contemptible. What I tell you is: “Look!
Here is American Journalism! Here is what it did to one
man, systematically, persistently, deliberately, for a period of
twenty years. Here are names, places, dates—such a mass of
material as you cannot doubt, you cannot evade. Here is the
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10 Introductory
whole thing, inside and out. Here are your sacred names,
the very highest of your gods. When you have read this story,
you will know our Journalism; you will know the body and
soul of it, you will know it in such a way that you will not
have to be told what it is doing to the movement for industrial
freedom and self-government all over the world.”
In the second half of the book you will hear a host of
other witnesses—several score of them, the wisest and truest
and best people of our country. They are in every part of
our country, in every class and every field of public life; and
when you have heard their experiences, told for the most part
in their own words, you must grant my claim concerning this
book—that it is a book of facts. There are no mistakes in
it, no guesses, no surmises; there are no lapses of memory, no
inaccuracies. There are only facts. You must understand that
I have had this book in mind for twenty years. For twelve
years I have been deliberately collecting the documents and
preserving the records, and I have these before me as I write.
In a few cases of personal experiences I have relied upon my
memory; but that memory is vivid, because the incidents were
painful, they were seared into my soul, and now, as I recall
them, I see the faces of the people, I hear their very tones.
Where there is any doubt or vagueness in my recollection, or
where there is hearsay testimony, I state the fact explicitly;
otherwise I wish the reader to understand that the incidents
happened as I say they happened, and that upon the truth of
every statement in this book I pledge my honor as a man
and my reputation as a writer.
One final word: In this book I have cast behind me the
proprieties usually held sacred; I have spared no one, I have
narrated shameful things. I have done this, not because I
have any pleasure in scandal; I have not such pleasure,
being by nature impersonal. I do not hate one living being.
The people I have lashed in this book are to me not individuals,
but social forces; I have exposed them, not because they lied
about me, but because a new age of fraternity is trying to be
born, and they, who ought to be assisting the birth, are stran
gling the child in the womb.
PART I
THE EVIDENCE
I THE STORY OF THE BRASS CHECK
Once upon a time there was a little boy; a nice little boy,
whom you would have liked if you had known him—at least,
so his mother says. He had been brought up in the traditions
of the old South, to which the two most important things in
the world were good cooking and good manners. He obeyed
his mother and father, and ate his peas with a fork, and never
buttered the whole slice of his bread. On Sunday mornings
he carefully shined his shoes and brushed his clothes at the
window, and got into a pair of tight kid gloves and under a
tight little brown derby hat, and walked with his parents to
a church on Fifth Avenue. On week-days he studied hard
and obeyed his teachers, and in every field of thought and
activity he believed what was told him by those in authority.
He learned the catechism and thought it was the direct word
of God. When he fell sick and the doctor came, he put him
self in the doctor’s hands with a sense of perfect trust and
content; the doctor knew what to do, and would do it, and
the little boy would get well.
The boy’s grandfather had been a Confederate naval
officer, drowned at sea. The boy’s father had spent his youth
in Virginia during the agonies of the Civil War, thus missing
most of his education. After the war the family was ruined,
and the father had to enter into competition with Yankee
“hustle,” handicapped by a Southern gentleman’s quaint notions
of dignity, and also by a Southern gentleman’s weakness for
mint-juleps. So the last week’s board bill was generally a
matter of anxiety to the family. But always, no matter how
poor the family might be, the little boy had a clean white
collar, and a copy of the “New York Sun” every morning.
This paper was beautifully printed, smooth and neat; the
little boy knew all its peculiarities of type, and he and his
father and his mother accepted every word they read in it,
both the news-columns and the editorial page, precisely as they
accepted the doctor’s pills and the clergyman’s sermons, the
Bible and the multiplication table and Marian Harland’s cook
book.
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