Upton Sinclair

“ I cry to you that Journalism shall be a public ministry, and that you who labor in it shall be, not wage-slaves and henchmen of privilege, but servants of the general welfare, helping your 428fellow-men to understand life, and to conquer the evils in nature outside them, and in their own hearts. Why cannot the men and women of this great profession form a society with a common mind and a common interest and a common conscience, based upon the fact that they are all necessary, they have each, down to the humblest office-boy, their essential part in a great social service? ”

“ High-priced experts devote their lives to it, they sit in counsel with the masters of industry, and report on the condition of the public mind, and determine precisely how this shall be presented and how that shall be suppressed. They create a public psychology, a force in the grip of which you, their victim, are as helpless as à moth in the glare of an arc-light. And what is the purpose of it all? One thing, and one only—that the wage-slaves of America shall continue to believe in and support the system whereby their bones are picked bare and thrown upon the scrap-heap of the profit-system. ”

“ THE PRESS AND THE RADICALS If you go into a New York club in the middle of August, you will be told in entire good faith that “everybody” is out of town. It is this “everybody” who is out of town in August that American Journalism knows and serves. Those who stay in town in August are “nobody,” and have to take their chances with the newspapers, as with everything else in capitalist society. Imagine yourself a poor devil, caught in a set of circumstances which cause the city editor of some newspaper, after five minutes consideration, to make up his mind that you are guilty of a crime! ”

“ In the course of my twenty years career as an assailant of special privilege, I have attacked pretty nearly every important interest in America. The statements I have made, if false, would have been enough to deprive me of a thousand times all the property I ever owned, and to have sent me to prison for a thousand times a normal man’s life. I have been called a liar on many occasions, needless to say; but never once in all these twenty years has one of my enemies ventured to bring me into a court of law, and to submit the issue between us to a jury of American citizens. ”

“ What about the millions of patient strikers who obey the law, who wait, day after day, month after month, starving, seeing their wives fading, their little ones turning white and thin—and still restrain themselves, obeying the laws of their masters? What about the strike-leaders who plead day in and day out—I have heard them a hundred times—“No violence! No violence!”—what about them? Why, nothing; just nothing! The Associated Press will let a big strike continue for months and never mention it—unless there is violence! For example, the great coal-strike in West Virginia. ”

“ The men and women who turn out the Hearst newspapers were willing, not merely to destroy my reputation, they have been willing again and again to drive perfectly innocent men and women to ruin and suicide, in order that the copper flood may continue to pour in. They have been willing by deliberate and shameful lies, made out of whole cloth, to stir nations to enmity and drive them to murderous war. Mr. Hearst’s newspaper machine telegraphed that vile misrepresentation of me all the way round the world; it telegraphed my repudiation of it nowhere, and I was helpless in the matter. ”

“ THE ADVERTISING ECSTASY Such was the fate of a magazine which rebelled. As for those which submitted, the answer is writ large on our newsstands. “McClure’s,” “Collier’s,” “Everybody’s,” the “American” have survived, as a woman without virtue, as a man without honor, of whom his friends say that he would better have died. The masters of finance have taken not merely the conscience from them, they have taken the life from them. If there was a man on the editorial staff with red blood in his veins, they turned him out to become a Socialist soap-boxer, and in his place they put a pithed frog. ”

“ And now again we face such a crisis; only this time it is in the world of industry that we have to abolish hereditary rule, and to build an industrial commonwealth in which the equal rights of all men are recognized by law. Such is the task before us; go to it with joy and certainty, playing your part in the making of the new world, in which there shall be neither slavery nor poverty, in which the natural sources of wealth belong to all men alike, and no one lives in idleness upon the labor of his fellows. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is my firm belief that were it not for the capitalists at the head of the great daily newspapers, if it were possible for the men who write the news and the editorials of all the newspapers in the United States, to take absolute charge of their publications and print the news exactly as they see it, and write their views exactly as they feel them, for a space of three days, there would be such a revolution in the United States of America as would put that of France to shame. ”

“ Steffens, you go from city to city and from state to state, and you show us these great corporations buying public privileges and capitalizing them for tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, and unloading the securities upon the general investing public. You show this enormous mass of capital piling up, increasing at compound interest, demanding its toll of dividends, which we, the people who do the hard work of the world, who produce the real wealth of the world, must continue forever to pay. ”

“ From top to bottom every human being in the vast Hearst machine, man, woman and office-boy, has every nerve and sinew stretched to the task of bringing in that flood of pennies; each is fighting for a tiny bit of prestige, a tiny addition to his personal share of the flood. And always, of course, from top to bottom the thing to be considered is the million-headed public—what will tickle its fancies, what particular words printed in large red and black letters will cause it to pay out each day the greatest possible number of pennies. ”

“ The Brass Check is found in your pay-envelope every week—you who write and print and distribute our newspapers and magazines. The Brass Check is the price of your shame—you who take the fair body of truth and sell it in the market-place, who betray the virgin hopes of mankind into the loathsome brothel of Big Business. And down in the counting-room below sits the “madame” who profits by your shame; unless, perchance, she is off at Palm Beach or Newport, flaunting her jewels and her feathers. ”

“ Wherever in America the workers organize and strike for a small portion of their rights, they come out of the experience with a bitter and abiding hatred of the press. I have shown you what happened in Colorado; in West Virginia; in Paterson, New Jersey; in Calumet, Michigan; in Bisbee, Arizona; in Seattle, Washington. I could show you the same thing happening in every industrial center in America.
The workers have come to realize the part which the newspapers play; they have come to know the newspapers as the crux of the argument, the key to the treasure-chamber. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ I have never anywhere heard such crude talk about the prices of things and the worldly possessions of people as I have heard among the idle rich in New York. And even if “society” were as austere and free from vulgarity as it wishes the penny-a-liners and hack-writers to believe, that would make no difference to me; for if people are squandering the blood and tears of the poor in luxury and wantonness, it does not seem to me such a great virtue that they avoid referring to the fact. ”

“ A modern newspaper, seen from the point of view of the workers, is a gigantic munition-factory, in which the propertied class manufactures mental bombs and gas-shells for the annihilation of its enemies. And just as in war sometimes the strategy is determined by the location of great munition-factories and depots, so the class-struggle comes to center about newspaper offices. In every great city of Europe where the revolution took place, the first move of the rebels was to seize these offices, and the first move of the reactionaries was to get them back. ”

“ Just imagine if the newspapers of America were to print the truth for ten days! The truth about poverty, and the causes of poverty; the truth about corruption in politics and in all branches of government, in Journalism, and throughout the business world; the truth about profiteering and exploitation, about the banking graft, the plundering of the railroads, the colossal gains of the Beef Trust and the Steel Trust and the Oil Trust and their hundreds of subsidiary organizations; the truth about conditions in industry, the suppression of labor-revolts and the corrupting of labor movements ”

“ If you can conceive all that Power ever wielded by the great autocrats of history, by the Alexanders, Caesars, Tamburlaines, Kubla Khans and Napoleons, to be massed together into one vast unit of Power, even this would be less than the Power now wielded by the Associated Press.
Thought is the ultimate force in the world and here you have an engine that causes thirty million minds to have the same thought at the same moment, and nothing on earth can equal the force thus generated. ”

“ It is such hidden forces as this which account for much of the snobbery in American newspapers; the fact that in every department and in every feature they favor the rich and powerful, and reveal themselves as priests of the cult of Mammon. I have watched the great metropolitan dailies, and those in many smaller cities and towns; I have yet to see an American newspaper which does not hold money for its god, and the local masters of money for demi-gods at the least. ”

“ For twenty-five years Older was managing editor of a great newspaper, and now, in the interest of public welfare, he has told what went on inside that newspaper office. Older began as a plain, every-day hireling of privilege, but little by little his mind and his conscience awakened, he took his stand for righteousness in his city, and fought the enemies of righteousness, not merely at peril of his job, but at peril of his life. ”

“ It was interesting to observe the conduct of the New York newspapers during this affair. It made, of course, a tremendous excitement. Bombs are news; they are heard all the way around the world. But the outrages which have caused the bombs are not news, and no one ever refers to them. No one makes clear that these outrages will continue to cause bombs, so long as the human soul remains what it is.
Now the New York newspapers knew perfectly well that our Broadway demonstration, our “Free Silence League,” as they had dubbed it, had been a peaceable demonstration. ”

“ To one who has lived all his life in cities, to one who has spent most of his days and nights with the men who write the great daily papers of the cities, it is perfectly evident that ninety out of one hundred editorial writers on the press today are men who are in intellectual and sympathetic revolt against present-day conditions. You will find the average editorial writer a Socialist, and as for the reporter, he is most likely to be an Anarchist. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”