I have seen a photograph from "Somewhere in France", showing a
wayside shrine with a statue of the Virgin Mary, innocent and
loving, with her babe in her arms. If you were a hostile aviator,
you might sail over and take pictures to your heart's content,
and you would see nothing but a saintly image; you would have to
be on the enemy's side, and behind the lines, to make the
discovery that under the image had been dug a hole for a
machine-gun. When I saw that picture, I thought to myself--there
is capitalist Religion!
You see, if cannon and machine-guns are out in the open, they are
almost instantly spotted and put out of action; and so with
magazines like "Leslie's Weekly", or "Munsey's", or the "North
American Review", which are frankly and wholly in the interest of
Big Business. If an editor wishes really to be effective in
holding back progress, he must protect himself with a camouflage
of piety and philanthropy, he must have at his tongue's end the
phrases of brotherhood and justice, he must be liberal and
progressive, going a certain cautious distance with the
reformers, indulging in carefully measured fair play--giving a
dime with one hand, while taking back a dollar with the other!
Let us have an illustration of this clerical camouflage. Here are
the wives and children of the Colorado coal-miners being shot and
burned in their beds by Rockefeller gun-men, and the press of the
entire country in a conspiracy of silence concerning the matter.
In the effort to break down this conspiracy, Bouck White,
Congregational clergyman, author of "The Call of the Carpenter",
goes to the Fifth Avenue Church of Standard Oil and makes a
protest in the name of Jesus. I do not wish to make extreme
statements, but I have read history pretty thoroughly, and I
really do not know where in nineteen hundred years you can find
an action more completely in the spirit and manner of Jesus than
that of Bouck White. The only difference was that whereas Jesus
took a real whip and lashed the money-changers, White politely
asked the pastor to discuss with him the question whether or not
Jesus condemned the holding of wealth. He even took the
precaution to write a letter to the clergyman announcing in
advance what he intended to do! And how did the clergyman prepare
for him? With the sword of truth and the armor of the spirit?
No--but with two or three dozen strong-arm men, who flung
themselves upon the Socialist author and hurled him out of the
church. So violent were they that several of White's friends,
also one or two casual spectators, were moved to protest; what
happened then, let us read in the New York "Sun", the most
bitterly hostile to radicalism of all the metropolitan
newspapers. Says the "Sun's" report:
A police billy came crunching against the bones of Lopez's legs.
It struck him as hard as a man could swing it eight times. A fist
planted on Lopez's jaw knocked out two teeth. His lip was torn
open. A blow in the eye made it swell and blacken instantly. A
minute later Lopez was leaning against the church with blood
running to the doorsill.
And now, what has the clerical camouflage to say on this
proceeding? Does it approve it? Oh no! It was "a mistake", the
"Outlook" protests; it intensifies the hatred which these
extremists feel for the church. The proper course would have been
to turn the disturber aside with a soft answer; to give him some
place, say in a park, where he could talk his head off to people
of his own sort, while good and decent Christians continued to
worship by themselves in peace, and to have the children of their
mine-slaves shot and burned in their beds. Says our pious editor:
The true way to repress cranks is not to suppress them; it is to
give them an opportunity to air their theories before any who
wish to learn, while forbidding them to compel those to listen
who do not wish to do so.
Or take another case. Twelve years ago the writer made an effort
to interest the American people in the conditions of labor in
their packing-plants. It happened that incidentally I gave some
facts about the bedevilment of the public's meat-supply, and the
public really did care about that. As I phrased it at the time, I
aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the
stomach. There was a terrible clamor, and Congress was forced to
pass a bill to remedy the evils. As a matter of fact this bill
was a farce, but the public was satisfied, and soon forgot the
matter entirely. The point to be noted here is that so far as
concerned the atrocious miseries of the working-people, it was
not necessary even to pretend to do anything. The slaves of
Packingtown went on living and working as they were described as
doing in "The Jungle", and nobody gave a further thought to them.
Only the other day I read in my paper--while we are all making
sacrifices in a "War for Democracy"--that Armour and Company had
paid a dividend of twenty-one per cent, and Swift and Company a
dividend of thirty-five per cent.
This prosperity they owe in good part to their clerical
camouflage. Listen to our pious "Outlook", engaged in
countermining "The Jungle". The "Outlook" has no doubt that there
are genuine evils in the packing-plants; the conditions of the
workers ought of course to be improved; BUT--
To disgust the reader by dragging him through every conceivable
horror, physical and moral, to depict with lurid excitement and
with offensive minuteness the life in jail and brothel--all this
is to overreach the object .... Even things actually terrible may
become distorted when a writer screams them out in a sensational
way and in a high pitched key...... More convincing if it were
less hysterical.
Don't you see what these clerical crooks are for?