Irvin S. Cobb

“ And that's the cure for your friend, Jason Mallard, Esquire. Let the press of this country put the curse of silence on him and he's done for. Silence will kill off his cause and kill off his following and kill him off. It will kill him politically and figuratively. I'm not sure, knowing the man as I do, but what it will kill him actually. Entomb him in silence and he'll be a body of death and corruption in two weeks. Just let the newspapers and the magazines provide the grave, and the corpse will provide itself. ”

“ He was in all outward regards a shape of a man to catch the eye, with a voice to cajole the senses as with music of bugles, and an oratory to inspire. Moreover, the destiny which shaped his ends had mercifully denied him that which is a boon to common men but a curse to public men. Jason Mallard was without a sense of humour. He never laughed at others; he never laughed at himself. ”

“ The press is always prating about the power of the press, always nagging about pitiless publicity being potent to destroy an evil thing or a bad man, and all that sort of rot. And yet every day the newspapers give the lie to their own boastings. It's true, Drayton, that up to a certain point the newspapers can make a man by printing favourable things about him. ”

“ Mallard is news because the newspapers make news of him—and for no other reason. Let them quit, and he isn't news any more—he's a nonentity, he's nothing at all, he's null and he's void. So far as public opinion goes he will cease to exist, and a thing that has ceased to exist is no longer news—once you've printed the funeral notice. Every popular thing, every conspicuous thing in the world is born of notoriety and fed on notoriety—newspaper notoriety. ”

“ I believe a hiss is music to his ears and a curse is a hushaby, lullaby song. Put him out of business? Why say, doesn't nearly every editorial writer in the country jump on him every day, and don't all the paragraphers gibe at him, and don't all the cartoonists lampoon him, and don't all of us who write news from down here in Washington give him the worst of it in our despatches?... And what's the result? Mallard takes on flesh and every red-mouthed agitator in the country and every mushy-brained peace fanatic and every secret German sympathiser trails at his heels, repeating what he says. ”

“ Very well then, he should be destroyed. And the surest, quickest, best way for the newspapers to destroy him is to wall [29] him up in silence, to put a vacuum bell of silence down over him, to lock him up in silence, to bury him alive in silence. And that's a simpler thing than it sounds. They have all of them, only to do one little thing—just quit printing his name."
"But they can't quit printing his name, Quinlan!" exclaimed Drayton. "Mallard's news; he's the biggest figure in the news that there is to-day in this country." ”

“ Notoriety is as essential to the object of notoriety itself as it is in fashioning the sentiments of those who read about [30] it. And there's just one place where you can get wholesale, nation-wide notoriety to-day—out of the jaws of a printing press.
"We call baseball our national pastime—granted! But let the newspapers, all of them, during one month of this coming spring, quit printing a word about baseball, and you'd see the parks closed up and the weeds growing on the base lines and the turnstiles rusting solid. ”

“ By sheer force the living wedge made a furrow in the multitude—a furrow that instantly closed in behind it [39] as it pressed forward. Undoubtedly the policemen saved Congressman Mallard from being crushed and buffeted down under the caressing hands of those who strove with his bodyguard to touch him, to embrace him, to clasp his hand. Foreign-born women, whose sons were in the draft, sought to kiss the hem of his garments when he passed them by, and as they stooped they were bowled over by the uniformed burlies and some of them were trampled. ”

“ If he was a trifle young to be of that generation of public men who were born in unchinked log cabins of the wilderness or prairie-sod shanties, at least he was to enjoy the subsequent political advantage of having come into the world in a two-room house of unpainted pine slabs on the sloped withers of a mountain in East Tennessee. ”

“ Drawing nearer, Waggoner, who by name or by sight knew every resident of the town, made up his mind that the loiterer was a stranger. Now a stranger abroad at such an hour and apparently with no business to mind would at once be mentally catalogued by the vigilant night marshal as a suspicious person. ”

“ It only makes them crowd up closer to see his sores. I'll bet if the facts were known that was true two thousand years ago. Certainly it's true to-day, and human nature doesn't change.
"But the newspapers have one weapon [28] they've never yet used; at least as a unit they've never used it. It's the strongest weapon they've got, and the cheapest, and the most terrible, and yet they let it lie in its scabbard and rust. With that weapon they could destroy any human being of the type of Jason Mallard in one-twentieth of the time it takes them to build up public opinion for or against him. ”

“ You could get it because the press is practically united to-day in favour of real Americanism. Let some man like your editor-in-chief, Fred Core, or like Carlos Seers of the Era, or Manuel Oxus of the Period, or Malcolm Flint of the A.P. call a private meeting in New York of the biggest individual publishers of daily papers and the leading magazine publishers and the heads of all the press associations and news syndicates, from the big fellows clear down to the shops that sell boiler plate to the country weeklies with patent insides. ”

“ The reactions of printer's ink are stronger somehow than its original actions—its chemical processes acquire added strength in the back kick. What has saved many a rotten criminal in this country from getting his just deserts? It wasn't the fact that the newspapers were all for him. It was the fact that all the newspapers were against him. The under dog may be ever so bad a dog, but only let enough of us start kicking him all together, and what's the result? ”

“ At the next day's session Congressman Mallard's seat was vacant; the next day likewise, and the next it was vacant. It was rumoured that he had left Washington, his exact whereabouts being unknown. However, no one in Washington, so far as was known, in speaking of his disappearance, mentioned him by name. One man addressing another would merely say that he understood a certain person had left town or that he understood a certain person was still missing from town; the second man in all likelihood would merely nod [50] understandingly and then by tacit agreement the subject would be changed. ”

“ He calls himself a self-made man. Well, he's not; he's self-assembled, that's all. He's made up of standardised and interchangeable parts. He's compounded of something borrowed from every political mountebank who's pulled that old bunk about being a friend of the great common people and gotten away with it during the last fifty years. He's not a real genius. He's a synthetic genius. ”

“ Inside the room, while the station master was binding up the wound in the sweeper's forehead with a pocket handkerchief, it occurred to the policeman that in the flurry of excitement he had not found out the name of the tall and still excited belligerent. The sweeper he already [52] knew. He asked the tall man for his name and business.
"My name," said the prisoner, "is Jason C. Mallard. I am a member of Congress." ”

“ So far as the generality of Americans were concerned, they for the time being were neither Democrats nor Republicans; neither were they Socialists nor Independents nor Prohibitionists. For the duration of the war they were Americans, actuated by a common purpose and stirred by a common danger. ”

“ When he is excited it is only by a tremendous mental and physical effort and after repeated endeavours that he can form the words at all. In other regards he is a first-rate officer, sober, trustworthy and kindly. ”

“ And all of them kept the pledge. On a Monday Congressman Mallard's name appeared in practically every daily paper in America, for [35] it was on that evening that he was to address a mass meeting at a hall on the Lower West Side of New York—a meeting ostensibly to be held under the auspices of a so-called society for world peace. But sometime during Monday every publisher of every newspaper and periodical, of every trade paper, every religious paper, every farm paper in America, received a telegram from a certain address in New York. ”

“ This policeman's name is Caleb Waggoner and this Caleb Waggoner was and still is the night marshal in a small [57] town in Iowa on the Missouri River. He is one-half the police force of the town, the other half being a constable who does duty in the daytime. Waggoner suffers from an affection which in a large community might prevent him from holding such a job as the one he does hold. He has an impediment of the speech which at all times causes him to stammer badly. ”

“ Monday evening comes before Tuesday morning, and first I should tell what befell on Monday evening down on the Lower West Side.
That Monday afternoon Mallard came up from Washington; only his secretary came with him. Three men—the owner of a publication lately suppressed by the Post Office Department for seditious utterances, a former clergyman whose attitude in the present crisis had cost him his pulpit, and a former college professor of avowedly anarchistic tendencies—met him at the Pennsylvania Station. Of the three only the clergyman had a name which bespoke Anglo-Saxon ancestry. ”

“ Of all those who sat in judgment upon the acts and the utterances of the man—and this classification would include every articulate creature in the United States who was old enough to be reasonable—or unreasonable—only a handful had the right diagnosis for the case. ”

“ On Thursday, in conspicuous type, black faced and double-leaded, there appeared on the front page and again at the top of the editorial column of every daily paper, morning and evening, in the United States, and in every weekly and every monthly [47] paper whose date of publication chanced to be Thursday, the following paragraph:
"There is a name which the press of America no longer prints. ”

“ They think they can, but they can't. Let them [27] get together in a campaign of vituperation against a man, and at once they set everybody to talking about him. Then let them carry their campaign just over a psychological dividing line, and right away they begin, against their wills, to manufacture sentiment for him. ”

“ I tell you I know the man. Because you don't know him he's got you fooled the same as he's got so many other people fooled. Because he looks like a steel engraving of Henry Clay you think he is a Henry Clay, I suppose—anyhow, a lot of other people do ”

“ Call it a boycott; call it coercion, mob law, lynch law, anything you please—it's justifiable. And there'd be no way out for Mallard. He couldn't bring an injunction suit to make a newspaper publisher print his name. He couldn't buy advertising space to tell about himself if nobody would sell it to him. There's only one thing he could do—and if I'm any judge he'd do it, sooner or later."
THAT'S THE THING HE FEEDS ON—VANITY.ToList
Young Drayton stood up. ”