OWNING THE OWNERS
The second of the methods by which our Journalism is controlled is by
far the most important of all the four. I do not mean merely that the
owners are owned by mortgages, and such crude financial ties. They are
owned by ambition, by pressure upon their families, by club
associations, by gentlemen’s agreements, by the thousand subtle
understandings which make the solidarity of the capitalist class. I have
written elsewhere of labor-leaders, otherwise incorruptible, who have
accepted “the dress-suit bribe.” These same bribes are passed in the
business-world, and are the biggest bribes of all. When you have your
shoes shined, you pay the bootblack ten cents; but can you figure what
you are paid for having your shoes shined? When you buy a new suit of
clothes, you pay the dealer, say, one hundred dollars; but can you
figure what you are paid for being immaculately dressed, for having just
the right kind of tie, just the right kind of accent, just the right
manner of asserting your own importance and securing your own place at
the banquet-table of Big Business?
If you are the publisher of a great newspaper or magazine, you belong to
the ruling-class of your community. You are invited to a place of
prominence on all public occasions; your voice is heard whenever you
choose to lift it. You may become a senator like Medill McCormick or
Capper of Kansas, who owns eight newspapers and six magazines; a
cabinet-member like Daniels, or an ambassador like Whitelaw Reid or
Walter Page. You will float upon a wave of prosperity, and in this
prosperity all your family will share; your sons will have careers open
to them, your wife and your daughters will move in the “best society.”
All this, of course, provided that you stand in with the powers that be,
and play the game according to their rules. If by any chance you
interfere with them, if you break their rules, then instantly in a
thousand forms you feel the pressure of their displeasure. You are “cut”
at the clubs, your sons and daughters are not invited to parties—you
find your domestic happiness has become dependent upon your converting
the whole family to your strange new revolutionary whim! And what if
your youngest daughter does not share your enthusiasm for the “great
unwashed”? What if your wife takes the side of her darling?
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. The interests of
these Olympian beings, their sports, their social doings, their
political opinions, their comings and goings, are assumed by the
newspapers to be the object of the absorbed interest of every American
who knows how to read.
On every page and in every column of every page the American newspaper
preaches the lesson: “Get money, and all things else shall be added unto
you—especially newspaper attention.” When Mr. John P. Gavit, managing
editor of the “New York Evening Post,” wrote to Mr. Melville E. Stone,
general manager of the Associated Press, that I had a reputation “as an
insatiable hunter of personal publicity,” what Mr. Gavit meant was that
I was accustomed to demand and obtain more space in newspapers than the
amount of my worldly possessions entitled me to. Some years ago my wife
went for a visit to her home in the far South, after the unusual
adventure of marrying a Socialist; she met one of her girlhood friends,
who exclaimed:
“My, but your husband must be a rich man!”
“My husband is a poor man,” said M. C. S.
Whereat the girl-friend laughed at her. “I know better,” said she.
“But it’s true,” said M. C. S. “He has no money at all; he never had
any.”
“Well,” said the other, skeptically, “then what are the papers all the
time talking about him for?”
A large part of what is called “conservatism” in our Journalism is
this instinctive reverence for wealth, as deeply rooted in every
American as respect for a duke in an English butler. So the average
American newspaper editor is a horse that stands without hitching, and
travels without a whip. But emergencies arise, a fork in the road, a
sudden turn, a race with another vehicle; and then a driver is
needed—and perhaps also a whip! I showed you Mr. Ochs pulling the
“Metropolis” story off the front page of the “New York Times” at one
o’clock in the morning. Every Hearst editor has stories to tell of
one-o’clock-in-the-morning visits from the owner, resulting in the
whole policy of the paper being shifted. And where the owner is owned,
maybe somebody will call _him_ up and lay down the law; maybe an agent
will be set to keep watch over his doings, and to become the real
master of his paper. I could name more than one famous editor and
publisher who has been thus turned out of his job, and remains nothing
but a name.
For great “interests” have a way of being wide-awake even at the late
hour when the forms of newspapers close; they have a way of knowing what
they want, and of getting it. “I am a great clamorer for dividends,”
testified old Rockefeller; and imagine, if you can, a publishing
enterprise controlled by old Rockefeller—how closely the policy of that
enterprise would be attended to! Imagine, if you can, one controlled by
Pierpont Morgan!
It happens that I can tell you about one of these latter. The story has
to do with one of the most famous publishing-houses in America, a house
which is a national institution, known to every literate person—the
ancient house of “Harper’s,” which now has the misfortune to have an
eight hundred thousand dollar mortgage reposing in the vaults of J. P.
Morgan & Company. Would you think me absurd if I should state that the
publishing-business of Harper & Bros. is managed to the minutest detail
by this mortgage?
First, recall to mind “The Money-changers,” a novel dealing with the
causes of the 1907 panic. The “villain” of this novel is a certain “Dan
Waterman,” a great financier who dominates the life of Wall Street, and
who in his relations to women is an old wild boar. The veil of fiction
was thin, and was meant to be. Every one who knew the great Metropolis
of Mammon would recognize Pierpont Morgan, the elder, and would know
that the picture was true both in detail and in spirit. Naturally old
“J. P.” himself would be furious, and his hired partisans would be
looking for a chance to punish his assailant.
Very well. Five years passed, and I was editing an anthology of
revolutionary literature. I was quoting authors from Homer to H. G.
Wells, several hundred in all, and as part of the routine of the job, I
addressed a long list of authors and publishing-houses, requesting
permission to quote brief extracts from copyrighted books, due credit of
course to be given. Such quotations are a valuable advertisement for any
book, the more valuable because they are permanent; the request is a
matter of form, and its granting a matter of course. It proved to be
such in the case of all publishing-houses both in America and in
England—all save one, the house of the eight hundred thousand dollar
mortgage! This house informed me that no book of mine might contain a
line from any book published by them. My reputation was such that I
would injure the value of any book which I quoted!
I am interested in this capitalistic world, and try to find out as much
about it as I can. So I took the trouble to visit the dingy old building
in Franklin Square, and to interview the up-to-date gentleman who had
rendered this unexpected decision. He was perfectly polite, and I was
the same. I pointed out to him that some of the authors—“his”
authors—were personal friends of mine, and that they themselves desired
to be quoted in my anthology. Mr. Charles Rann Kennedy, for example, was
a Socialist. Mr. William Dean Howells was one of Harper’s own editors;
he was in that very office, and I had in my hand a letter from him,
giving cordial consent to the publication of two passages from “A
Traveller from Altruria”! Also Mr. H. G. Wells, an English Socialist,
who had honored me with his friendship, had published “When the Sleeper
Wakes” through “Harper’s,” and now requested that I be permitted to
quote from this book in my anthology. Also Mark Twain had honored me
with his friendship; he had visited my home in Bermuda, and had
expressed appreciation of my writings. He was no longer where I could
consult him in the matter, but I offered evidence to Messrs. Harper &
Bros. proving that he had not regarded me as a social outcast. But no
matter; the decision stood.
I took the question to the authors themselves, and I am sorry to have to
record that neither Mr. William Dean Howells nor Mr. Charles Rann
Kennedy cared to support a fellow-Socialist in this controversy with a
great capitalist publishing-house. So it comes about that you will not
find Mr. Kennedy or Mr. Howells quoted in “The Cry for Justice”; but you
will find “When the Sleeper Wakes” quoted, the reason being that Mr.
Wells did stand by me. Mr. Wells lives farther away, and is not so
deeply influenced by an eight hundred thousand dollar mortgage in the
vaults of a Wall Street banking-house!
The point of this story is the petty nature of the vengeance of this
mortgage, the trouble it took, the minute detail into which it was
willing to go. The moral for you is just this: that when you pick up
your morning or evening newspaper, and think you are reading the news of
the world, what you are really reading is a propaganda which has been
selected, revised, and doctored by some power which has a financial
interest in you; and which, for the protecting of that financial
interest, has been willing to take trouble, and to go into the most
minute detail!
You will miss the point of this book if you fail to get clear that the
perversion of news and the betrayal of public opinion is no haphazard
and accidental thing; for twenty-five years—that is, since the day of
Mark Hanna—it has been a thing deliberately planned and systematically
carried out, a science and a technique. 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.