harmless in itself, that finally draws blood; it is by just such a
leisurely and insidious process that the presumption of innocence is
destroyed, and a hospitality to suspicion created. The campaign against
Governor Sulzer in New York offers a classic example of this process in
operation, with very skillful gentlemen, journalistic and political, in
control of it. The charges on which Governor Sulzer was finally brought
to impeachment were not launched at him out of a clear sky, nor while
the primary presumption in his favor remained unshaken. Not at all. They
were launched at a carefully selected and critical moment—at the end, to
wit, of a long and well-managed series of minor attacks. The fortress of
his popularity was bombarded a long while before it was assaulted. He
was pursued with insinuations and innuendoes; various persons, more or
less dubious, were led to make various charges, more or less vague,
against him; the managers of the campaign sought to poison the plain
people with doubts, misunderstandings, suspicions. This effort, so
diligently made, was highly successful; and so the capital charges, when
they were brought forward at last, had the effect of confirmations, of
corroborations, of proofs. But if Tammany had made them during the first
few months of Governor Sulzer’s term, while all doubts were yet in his
favor, it would have got only scornful laughter for its pains. The
ground had to be prepared; the public mind had to be put into training.
The end of my space is near, and I find that I have written of popular
morality very copiously, and of newspaper morality very little. But, as
I have said before, the one is the other. The newspaper must adapt its
pleading to its clients’ moral limitations, just as the trial lawyer
must adapt _his_ pleading to the jury’s limitations. Neither may like
the job, but both must face it to gain a larger end. And that end, I
believe, is a worthy one in the newspaper’s case quite as often as in
the lawyer’s, and perhaps far oftener. The art of leading the vulgar, in
itself, does no discredit to its practitioner. Lincoln practiced it
unashamed, and so did Webster, Clay, and Henry. What is more, these men
practiced it with frank allowance for the naïveté of the people they
presumed to lead. It was Lincoln’s chief source of strength, indeed,
that he had a homely way with him, that he could reduce complex problems
to the simple terms of popular theory and emotion, that he did not ask
little fishes to think and act like whales. This is the manner in which
the newspapers do their work, and in the long run, I am convinced, they
accomplish about as much good as harm thereby. Dishonesty, of course, is
not unknown among them: we have newspapers in this land which apply a
truly devilish technical skill to the achievement of unsound and
unworthy ends. But not as many of them as perfectionists usually allege.
Taking one with another, they strive in the right direction. They
realize the massive fact that the plain people, for all their poverty of
wit, cannot be fooled forever. They have a healthy fear of that heathen
rage which so often serves their uses.
Look back a generation or two. Consider the history of our democracy
since the Civil War. Our most serious problems, it must be plain, have
been solved orgiastically, and to the tune of deafening newspaper urging
and clamor. Men have been washed into office on waves of emotion, and
washed out again in the same manner. Measures and policies have been
determined by indignation far more often than by cold reason. But is the
net result evil? Is there even any permanent damage from those debauches
of sentiment in which the newspapers have acted insincerely,
unintelligently, with no thought save for the show itself? I doubt it.
The effect of their long and melodramatic chase of bosses is an
undoubted improvement in our whole governmental method. The boss of
to-day is not an envied first citizen, but a criminal constantly on
trial. He himself is debarred from all public offices of honor, and his
control over other public officers grows less and less. Elections are no
longer boldly stolen; the humblest citizen may go to the polls in safety
and cast his vote honestly; the machine grows less dangerous year by
year; perhaps it is already less dangerous than a _camorra_ of utopian
and dehumanized reformers would be. We begin to develop an official
morality which actually rises above our private morality. Bribe-takers
are sent to jail by the votes of jurymen who give presents in their
daily business, and are not above beating the street-car company.
And so, too, in narrower fields. The white-slave agitation of a year or
so ago was ludicrously extravagant and emotional, but its net effect is
a better conscience, a new alertness. The newspapers discharged
broadsides of 12–inch guns to bring down a flock of buzzards—but they
brought down the buzzards. They have libeled and lynched the police—but
the police are the better for it. They have represented salicylic acid
as an elder brother to bichloride of mercury—but we are poisoned less
than we used to be. They have lifted the plain people to frenzies of
senseless terror over drinking-cups and neighbors with coughs—but the
death-rate from tuberculosis declines. They have railroaded men to
prison, denying them all their common rights—but fewer malefactors
escape to-day than yesterday.
The way of ethical progress is not straight. It describes, to risk a
mathematical pun, a sort of drunken hyperbola. But if we thus move
onward and upward by leaps and bounces, it is certainly better than not
moving at all. Each time, perhaps, we slip back, but each time we stop
at a higher level.
NEWSPAPER MORALS: A REPLY
BY RALPH PULITZER
The striking article in the March _Atlantic_ by Mr. Henry L. Mencken, on
“Newspaper Morals,” is so full of palpable facts supporting plausible
fallacies that simple justice to press and “proletariat” seems to render
proper a few thoughts in answer to it.
Mr. Mencken’s main facts, summarized, are as follows: that press and
public often approach public questions too superficially and
sentimentally; that the sense of proportion is too often lost in the
heat of campaigns; that the truth is too often obscured by the intrusion
of irrelevant personalities; and that after the intemperate extremes of
reform waves there always come reactions into indifference to the evils
but yesterday so furiously fought.
Mr. Mencken’s fallacies are: the supercilious assumption that these
weaknesses are not matters of human temperament running up and down
through a certain proportion of every division of society, but that, on
the contrary, they are class affairs, never tainting the educated
classes, but limited to “the man in the street,” “the rabble,” “the
mob”; that apparently the emotionalizing of public questions by the
press is to be censured in principle and sneered at in practice; that it
means a deliberate truckling by the newspapers to the ignorant tastes of
the masses when the press fights a public evil by attacking, with
argument and indignation mingled, a man who personifies that evil,
instead of opposing the general principle of that evil with a wholly
passionless intellectualism.
A general fallacy which affects Mr. Mencken’s whole article lies in
criticising as offenses against “newspaper morals” those imperfections
which, where they exist at all, could properly be criticised only under
such criteria as suggested by “Newspaper Intellectuals,” or “Newspapers
as the Exponents of Pure Reason.”
Mr. Mencken first exposes and deprecates the “aim” of the newspapers to
“knock somebody on the head every day,” “to please the crowd, to give a
good show, by first selecting a deserving victim and then putting him
magnificently to the torture,” and even to fight “constructive campaigns
for good government in exactly the same gothic, melodramatic way.”
Now “muck-raking” rather than incense-burning is not a deliberate aim so
much as a spontaneous instinct of the average newspaper. Nor is there
anything either mysterious or reprehensible about this. The public, of
all degrees, is more interested in hitting Wrong than in praising Right,
because fortunately we are still in an optimistic state of society,
where Right is taken for granted and Wrong contains the element of the
unusual and abnormal. If the day shall ever come when papers will be
able to “expose” Right and regard Wrong as a foregone conclusion, they
will doubtless quickly reverse their treatment of the two. In an Ali
Baba’s cave it might be natural for a paper to discover some man’s
honesty; in a _yoshiwara_ it might be reasonable for it to expatiate on
some woman’s virtue. But while honesty and virtue and rightness are
assumed to be the normal condition of men and women and things in
general, it does not seem either extraordinary or culpable that people
and press should be more interested in the polemical than in the
platitudinous; in blame than in painting the lily; in attack than in
sending laudatory coals to Newcastle. It scarcely needs remark, however,
that when the element of surprise is introduced by some deed of
exceptional heroism or abnegation or inspiration, the newspapers are not
slow in giving it publicity and praise.
Mr. Mencken finds it deplorable that “a very definite limit is set, not
only upon the people’s capacity for grasping intellectual concepts, but
also upon their capacity for grasping moral concepts”; that, therefore,
it is necessary “to visualize their cause in some definite and defiant
opponent ... by translating all arguments for a principle into rage
against a man.” Far be it from me to deny that people and papers are too
prone to get diverted from the pursuit of some principle by acrimonious
personalities wholly ungermane to that principle. But the protest
against this should not lead to unfair extremes in the opposite
direction. If Mr. Mencken’s ideal is a nation of philosophers calmly
agreeing on the abstract desirability of honesty while serenely ignoring
the specific picking of their own pockets, we have no ground for
argument. But until we reach such a semi-imbecile Utopia, it would seem
to be no reflection on “the people’s” intellectual or moral concepts
that they should refuse to excite themselves over any theoretical wrong
until their attention is focused on some practical manifestation of it,
in the concrete acts of some specific individual.
May I add, parenthetically, that some papers and many acutely
intellectual gentlemen find it far more convenient and comfortable to
generalize virtuously than to particularize virtuously? Nor does it
require merely moral or physical courage to reduce the safely general to
the disagreeably personal. It requires no despicable amount of
intellectual acumen as well.
Mr. Mencken next proceeds to “assume here, as an axiom too obvious to be
argued, that the chief appeal of a newspaper in all such holy causes is
not at all to the educated and reflective minority of citizens, but to
the ignorant and unreflective majority.” On the contrary, it is very far
from being “too obvious to be argued.” A great many persons of
guaranteed education are sadly destitute of any reflectiveness
whatsoever, while an appalling number of “the ignorant” have the
effrontery to be able to reflect very efficiently. This is apart from
the fact that the general intelligence among many of the ignorant is
matched only by the abysmal stupidity of many of the educated.
Thus it is that the decent paper makes its appeal on public questions to
the numerically large body of reflective “ignorance” and to the
numerically small body of reflective education, leaving it to the
demagogic papers, which are the exception at one end, to inflame the
unreflective ignorant, and to the sycophantic papers at the other end to
pander to the unreflective educated.
As to Mr. Mencken’s charge that he knows of “no subject, save perhaps
baseball, on which the average American newspaper discourses with
unfailing sense and understanding,” I know of no subject at all, even
including baseball, on which the most exceptionally gifted man in the
world discourses with unfailing sense and understanding. But I do know
this: that, considering the immense range of subjects which the American
paper is called upon to discuss, and its meagre limits of time in which
to prepare for such discussion, the failings of that paper in sense and
understanding are probably rarer than would be those under the same
conditions of Mr. Mencken’s most fastidious selection.
“But,” Mr. Mencken continues, “whenever the public journals presume to
illuminate such a matter as municipal taxation, for example, or the
extension of local transportation facilities, or the punishment of
public or private criminals, or the control of public-service
corporations, or the revision of city charters, the chief effect of
their effort is to introduce into it a host of extraneous issues, most
of them wholly emotional, and so they continue to make it unintelligible
to all earnest seekers after truth.” Here again it is all a matter of
point of view. If Mr. Mencken’s earnest seekers after truth wish to
evolve ideological schemes of municipal taxation, or supramundane
extensions of transportation facilities, or transcendental control of
public-service corporations, or academic revisions of city charters,
then, indeed, the newspaper discussions of these questions would be
bewildering to these visionary workers in the realms of pure reason. For
the newspapers “presume” to regard these questions, not as theoretical
problems, to be solved under theoretical conditions, on theoretical
populations, to theoretical perfection, but as workable projects for a
workaday world, in which the most beautiful abstract reasoning must
stand the test of flesh-and-blood conditions; they regard emotional
issues as so far, indeed, from being extraneous that the human nature of
the humblest men and women must be weighed in the balance against the
nicest syllogisms of the precisest logic. And this is nothing that Mr.
Mencken need condescend to apologize for so long as “newspaper morals”
are under discussion. For it must be obvious that the honest exposition
and analysis of public questions from a human as well as a scientific
point of view is a higher moral service to the community than an
exclusively scientific, wholly unsympathetic search after truth by those
who regard populations as mere subjects for the demonstration of
principles.
It is precisely the honorable prerogative of newspapers not only to
clarify but to vivify, to galvanize dead hypotheses into living
questions, to make the educated and the ignorant alike feel that public
questions should interest and stir all good citizens and not merely
engross social philosophers and political theorists.
But here let me avoid joining Mr. Mencken in the pitfall of
generalizations, by drawing a sharp distinction between the great run of
decent papers which do honestly emotionalize public questions and the
relatively few papers which unscrupulously _hystericalize_ these
questions.
Mr. Mencken is entirely correct when he admits that this emotionalizing
brings these problems down to a “man’s comprehension, and, what is more
important, within the range of his active sympathies.” But he again
shows a very unfortunate class arrogance when he identifies this man as
“the man in the street.” If Mr. Mencken searched earnestly enough after
truth, he would find this man to be about as extensively the man at the
ticker, the man in the motor-car, the man at the operating table, the
man in the pulpit. In the same vein he continues that the only papers
which discuss good government unemotionally “are diligently avoided by
the _mob_.” If Mr. Mencken only included with his proletariat the mob of
stockbrokers and doctors and engineers and lawyers and college graduates
generally, who refuse to read these logical and unemotional discussions,
he would unfortunately be quite right. It would be a beautiful thing
indeed if we had with us to-day one hundred millions of “earnest seekers
after truth,” all busily engaged in discussing “good government in the
abstract,” “logically and unemotionally.” If they were only thus
dispassionately busied, it is quite true that things would not be as at
present, when “they are always ready for a man hunt and their favorite
quarry is a man of politics. If no such prey is at hand, they will turn
to wealthy debauchees, to fallen Sunday-school superintendents, to money
barons, to white-slave traders.” In those halcyon times the one hundred
million calm abstractionists would discuss the influence of Beaumont and
Fletcher on bosses, or, failing this, the ultimate effect of wealth on
eroticism, the obscure relations between proselyting and decadence, or
the effect of the white-slave traffic on the gold reserve.
But in our present unregenerate epoch Mr. Mencken is quite right in
holding that it is generally the specific evils of government or society
which bring about reform waves, which in turn crystallize themselves
into general principles. It is a shockingly practical process, I admit;
but then, we are a shockingly practical people, who prefer sordid
results to inspired theories. And at that we are not in such bad
company. For in no country in the world is there such a thing as a
“revealed” civilization. On the contrary, civilization has always been
for the most part purely empirical, and progress will ever remain so.
There is, therefore, cause not for shame but for pride when a newspaper
reveals some specific iniquity, and by not merely expounding its
isolated character to the public intelligence, but also by interpreting
its general menace to the public imagination and bringing home its
inherent evil to the public conscience, arouses that public to social
legislation, criminal prosecution, or political reform.
Mr. Mencken next assaults once more his unfortunate “man in the street”
by declaring that “it is always as a game, of course, that the man in
the street views moral endeavor.... His interest in it is almost always
a sporting interest.” On the contrary, here at last we have a case where
a class distinction can fairly be drawn. “The man in the street” is a
naïve man who takes his melodrama seriously, who believes robustly in
blacks and whites without subtilizing them into intermediate shades, for
whom villains and heroes really exist. He is the last person on earth to
view the moral endeavor of a political or social campaign as a game. It
is the supercilious class, with its sophistication and attendant
cynicism, to whom such campaigns tend to take on the aspect of sporting
events and games of skill.
But it is not necessary to go into the details of Mr. Mencken’s theory
as to the depraved nature of popular participation in political reform.
Its gist is contained in his truly shocking statement that the war on
the Tweed ring and its extirpation was to the “plain people” nothing but
“sport royal”! Any one who can take one of the most inspiring civic
victories in the history, not alone of a city, but of a nation, and
degrade the spirit that brought it about to the level of the cockpit or
the bull ring, supplies an argument that needs no reinforcing against
his prejudices on this whole subject.
Mr. Mencken justly deplores the reactions which follow upon reform
successes, but unjustly concentrates the blame on the fickleness of “the
rabble.” This evil is not a matter of mob-psychology but of unstable
human nature, high and low. These revulsions and reactions are the
shame, impartially, of all classes of our communities. They permeate the
educated atmosphere of fastidious clubs as extensively as they do the
ignorant miasma of vulgar saloons. If they induce the “ignorant and
unreflective” plebeian to sit in his shirt-sleeves with his legs up,
resting his feet, on election day, instead of doing his duty at the
polls, do they not equally congest the golf links with “earnest seekers
after truth” busily engaged in sacrificing ballots to Bogeys?
I wholly agree with Mr. Mencken’s strictures on the public morality
which holds it to be a relevant defense for a ballot-box stuffer “that
he is kind to his little children.” The sentimentalism which so
frequently perverts a proper public conception of public morality is
sickening. But here again the indictment should be against average human
nature, educated or ignorant, and not against the “man in the street” as
a class and alone. To this man the fact that the ballot-box stuffer is
kind to his little children may carry more weight than to the man of
education and culture. To the latter the fact that some
monopoly-breeding, law-defying, legislation-bribing, railroad-wrecking
gentleman is kind to his fellow citizens by donating to them picture
galleries and free libraries may carry more weight than to the former.
Is not the one just as much as the other “ready to let feeling triumph
over every idea of abstract justice”?
Again, with Mr. Mencken’s prescription for making a successful newspaper
crusade there can be no quarrel, save that here once more he suggests,
by referring to the newspaper as a “mob-master,” that these methods are
exclusively applicable to the same long-suffering “man in the street.”
These methods on which Mr. Mencken elaborates are the rather obvious
ones used by every lawyer, clergyman, statesman, or publicist the world
over who has a forensic fight to make and win against some public
evil—accusation, iteration, cumulation, and climax. If these methods are
used by “mob-masters,” they are equally used by snob-servants, and
incidentally by the great mass of honest newspapers which are neither
the one thing nor the other.
At the end of his article, having set up a man of straw which he found
it impossible to knock down, Mr. Mencken patronizingly pats it on the
back:—
“The newspaper must adapt its pleading to its client’s moral
limitations, just as the trial lawyer must adapt his pleading to the
jury’s limitations. Neither may like the job, but both must face it to
gain a larger end. And that end is a worthy one in the newspaper’s case
quite as often as in the lawyer’s, and perhaps far oftener. The art of
leading the vulgar in itself does no discredit to its practitioner.
Lincoln practised it unashamed, and so did Webster, Clay, and Henry.”
Alas for this well-intentioned effort at amends! It is impossible to
agree with Mr. Mencken even here when he praises press and public with
such faint damnation.
A decent newspaper does not and must not adapt its pleadings to its
clients’ moral limitations. Intellectual limitations? Yes. It is
restricted by a line beyond which intelligence and education alike would
be at sea, and which only specialists and experts would understand. But
moral limitations? No. The paper in this regard is less like the lawyer
and more like the judge. A judge can properly adapt his charge in
simplicity of form to the intellectual limitations of the jury, but it
will scarcely be contended that he may adapt his charge in its substance
to the moral limitations of the jury. No more can any self-respecting
paper palter with what it believes to be the right and the truth because
of any moral limitations in its constituency. Demagogic papers may do
it. Class-catering papers may do it. But the decent press which lies
between does not thus stultify itself.
And now to Mr. Mencken’s condescending conclusion:—
“Our most serious problems, it must be plain, have been solved
orgiastically and to the tune of deafening newspaper urging and
clamor.... But is the net result evil?... I doubt it.... The way of
ethical progress is not straight.... But if we thus move onward and
upward by leaps and bounces, it is certainly better than not moving at
all. Each time, perhaps, we slip back, but each time we stop at a higher
level.”
Why, then, sweepingly reflect on the morals of the press, if by
humanizing abstract principles, by emotionalizing academic doctrines, by
personifying general theories, it has accomplished this progress?
Granted that in the heat of battle it fails to handle the cold
conceptions of austere philosophers with proper scientific etiquette.
Granted that it makes blunders in technical statements which to the
preciosity of specialists seem inexcusable. Granted that it mixes its
science and its sentiment in a manner to shock the gentlemen of
disembodied intellects. Granted that the press has many more such
intellectual peccadilloes on its conscience.
But if the press does these things honestly, it does them morally, and
does not need to excuse them by their results, even though these results
are in very truth infinitely more precious to humanity than could be
those obtained by the chill endeavors of what Mr. Mencken himself, with
the perfect accuracy of would-be irony, describes as “a Camorra of
Utopian and dehumanized reformers.”
THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS
BY EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS
I