THE CASE OF RUSSIA
But the perfect case of journalistic knavery, the case which in the
annals of history will take precedence over all others, past or present,
is the case of Russia. You might say that all previous experience of the
capitalist press of America in perverting and distorting news was but
training for what it was to do to the Russian revolution. Say to
yourself as follows: American Journalism did thus and so to an American
author who advocated the abolition of privilege and exploitation; what
would this Journalism do to a hundred and eighty million people who rose
up and actually put an end to privilege and exploitation upon the half
of two continents?
Let me make clear at the outset my point of view, oft repeated. I am not
a Bolshevik, and have never been a Bolshevik. I understand that a
Bolshevik is one who repudiates political action, and wishes to
accomplish the social revolution by mass action of the proletariat, the
direct overthrow of our present capitalist government and the setting up
of a government by councils of the workers, something corresponding to
our present trade union councils and conventions. For my part, I agree
with the syndicalists in thinking that the best way to govern industry
is through trade unions; that is the only real industrial democracy. But
I believe that the trade unions can get this power by the ballot, backed
by the mass strike. I don’t believe that it will be necessary for the
workers to seize guns and turn the politicians out of office; I believe
that they can elect their own politicians, or force even capitalist
legislatures pass laws recognizing union control of industry.
I am well aware that this method will be slower, but I believe it will
be quicker in the long run, because it will avoid the waste incidental
to civil war, and the possibilities of failure and temporary reaction.
Anybody can see that, as a matter of business, it would pay the workers
better to continue working for the capitalists a few months or even a
few years longer, than to take a course which might result in burning
down the factories and getting the best leaders of the movement stood up
against a wall and shot.
But such a program, of course, can be effective only in a country where
political rights are recognized. Russia was not such a country. The
Russian people had been held down by an utterly ruthless and utterly
corrupt despotism, deprived of all opportunity to organize and to
educate themselves, to acquire experience in government affairs; so,
when they rose, they turned upon their oppressors the weapons they had
been taught to understand. We, who were born in a more fortunate land,
and have learned to use, if only half successfully, the ballot and
public discussion in the settlement of our affairs—what attitude were we
to take towards the Russian people, striking out blindly against their
oppressors, groping for liberty and life?
The first revolution, the Kerensky revolution, was a political one, and
that suited us fairly well; it made no threat against property, and it
proposed to support our war. Our capitalist newspapers had no difficulty
in getting the news about it, and had no objection to letting us read
this news. But then came the second revolution, the Bolshevik
revolution, and that did threaten property, and proposed to withdraw
from our war. How did we treat that?
We had been training ourselves for a generation, so as to be
instantly ready; we had been training ourselves in the office of Mr.
Hearst’s “Cosmopolitan Magazine,” where Mr. Hearst had a
twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year journalistic wizard by the name
of Edgar Sisson. When we needed a molder of opinion for Russia, we
sent this Hearst wizard across the seas, where he came upon a set of
documents proving that Lenin and Trotsky were German agents. These
documents had been examined and rejected as forgeries by Raymond
Robins, also by the British Embassy, none too favorably disposed to
the Bolsheviks; but matters like that do not trouble Hearst editors,
who have learned to think in headlines. The “Sisson documents” were
shipped to Washington, and issued under the authority of the United
States government, and published in every newspaper in America.
We know today who were the real pro-Germans in Russia. Viscount French,
in his recently published book, has told us that the Russian Court was
rotten with pro-Germanism, and that if it had not been for treason among
the Russian aristocracy, the war would have been won two years earlier.
As for Lenin and Trotsky, not only were they bitter enemies of the
German government, they were at this time offering to reject the
Brest-Litovsk treaty, if America would support them; but America was a
virtuous capitalist nation, and the entire capitalist press of America
was a unit in proclaiming that our country should have no relations with
men who refused to pay interest on the Tsar’s debts to J. P. Morgan &
Company.
All the lying power of our Journalism was turned against the Russian
Soviets; and if you have read this book without skipping, you know what
that lying power is. No tale was too grotesque to be believed and spread
broadcast. In the same week we would read that Trotsky had fled to
Spain, that he had been put in jail by Lenin, that he had been seeking a
job on the “Appeal to Reason,” Girard, Kansas! They published so many
inventions that they couldn’t keep track of them. Here are two
paragraphs from a single issue of one newspaper:
Nicolai Lenin, the Bolshevist Premier, is the only prominent
Bolshevist left who appears to lead an austere life.—“New York Times,”
February 26, 1919.
Premier Lenin, refugees say, is not affected by the food problem. His
bill for fruit and vegetables in a recent month amounted to sixty
thousand rubles.—“New York Times,” February 26, 1919.
In his book, “Russia in 1919,” Arthur Ransom tells how in Finland he
read detailed accounts of mutiny and revolt in Petrograd, the city being
bombarded by naval guns. He went into Petrograd and found the city
peaceful, and everybody laughing at his tales. Returning to England he
found that the tales had been forwarded to England, and published and
universally believed. As I write these words, I read in my paper every
other day of the fall of Petrograd. The accounts are detailed, some of
them are “official,” and they continue for weeks. But finally I read
that the anti-Bolshevik armies are in retreat from Petrograd!
Or take the “nationalization of women,” the most grotesque scarecrow
ever constructed to terrify a highly moral people. I have shown you how
the imagination of “kept” journalists runs to foul tales about sex
orgies of radicals. A comic paper in Moscow published such a “skit” on
Bolshevism, and the outcome is explained in the following from the
“Isvestija,” the official organ of the Central Soviet Government, May
18, 1918:
Moscow Soviet decision.—The Moscow newspaper, the “Evening Life,” for
printing an invented decree regarding the socialization of women, in
the issue of the 3rd of May, No. 36, shall be closed for ever and
fined 25,000 roubles.
And then again, in the city of Saratov, in central Russia, the
Anarchists were making trouble, and some wag, to discredit the
Anarchists, invented an elaborate decree, signed, “The Free Association
of Anarchists of Saratov.” This decree was discovered one morning,
posted in several parts of the city. An American official, Oliver M.
Sayler, who was in Saratov, wrote the story in the “New Republic,” March
15, 1919. He visited the Anarchist clubs, and found them boiling with
indignation—calling it a “Bolshevist plot”! Needless to say, of course,
the decree had no relation to reality; the Anarchists never had any
power to enforce any decree, whether in Saratov or anywhere else in
Russia; several hundred Anarchists had been jailed by the Bolsheviki.
But that, of course, made no difference to the editors of capitalist
newspapers in America, to whom Anarchists, Bolsheviki, and Socialists
were all the same; from one end of the country to the other this decree
took the front page. The “Los Angeles Times” published it with a solemn
assurance to its readers that the authenticity of the decree might be
accepted without question. And forthwith all our capitalist clergymen
rose up in their pulpits to denounce the Bolsheviki as monsters and
moral perverts, and a good part of the moving picture machinery of
Southern California has been set to work constructing romances around
this obscene theme.
The “New Europe,” which had first published the story, made a full
retraction and apology. Harold Williams, who had sent the story to
England, also apologized. The American State Department denied the story
officially, February 28, 1919. Jerome Davis, of the American Red Cross,
denied it from first-hand knowledge in the “Independent,” March 15,
1919. But did you read these apologies and denials in American
capitalist newspapers? You did not! It would not be too much to say that
nine people out of ten in America today firmly believe that women have
been “nationalized” in Russia, or at any rate that the Bolsheviki
attempted it. In the “World Tomorrow,” for July, 1919, I come upon a
letter signed Remington Rogers, Tulsa, Oklahoma. I find something very
quaint and pathetic about this letter. How does it strike you?
I find that like most radical papers, you assume that your reader
knows a great many things that may be trite in the discussion of
parlor Socialists, but with which the average citizen is not in the
least familiar. For example, in your May issue, page 141, I find the
assertion that the reports purporting to show how family life had been
officially demoralized in Russia are “now happily proved false.” If
this is the fact, no such proof has leaked into the newspapers or
other periodicals to which I subscribe, and in view of the fact that
we have what purport to be authentic copies of the official edicts and
decrees, I cannot believe that these reports have been proved false.
And here is a letter from Alice Stone Blackwell, which, needless to say,
could only be published in some radical paper. It appeared in the
“Public,” New York:
Catherine Breshkovsky “the Grandmother of the Russian Revolution,” is
getting badly misquoted. She is astonished to see how different some
of the press reports are from what she really said. She tells me she
declared the other day that she would work twenty years longer to keep
Russia from having another Tsar, and she was reported as saying that
she would work twenty years longer to get the Tsar back.
She also denied that women have been “nationalized,” or “made common
property,” or that the Government puts any compulsion upon them in
matters of sex. She said to me: “Women have more freedom in Russia now
than they ever had before.” As Madame Breshkovsky is strongly opposed
to the Bolshevist régime, her denial of this particular accusation may
be accepted as conclusive.
I have at several places in this book portrayed the degeneracy of
“McClure’s Magazine,” since it has become an organ of privilege; also I
have mentioned Newell Dwight Hillis, agent of the Clerical Camouflage,
and his knavish pamphlet against the Colorado strikers. Now we see
“McClure’s” hiring Hillis to vilify the Russian Soviets. After all these
denials have been published, and are available to all honest men, this
agent of the Clerical Camouflage contributes to “McClure’s” (June, 1919)
a long article calling for the blood of the Russian people. “McClure’s”
puts over the article a picture representing a hideous fiend with a
torch and bomb; also this editorial statement:
Dr. Hillis’s articles have brought in a flood of letters of
commendation. He writes as he preaches, fearlessly, truthfully.
I ask: Could the re-crucifixion of Christ go farther than the
application of the words “fearlessly, truthfully,” to the following
dastardly lie:
It is now conceded that the interior towns and cities of Russia have
gone over to this nationalization of women.
This agent of the Clerical Camouflage of course portrays Russia as a
chaos of murder and bloodshed; in which our whole capitalist press
agrees. We now know that most of the time Petrograd and Moscow were the
most orderly capitals in Europe; but our newspaper correspondents in
Stockholm and Copenhagen and Odessa and Omsk, meeting in the cafés with
exiled Russian noblemen, thought nothing of standing a few thousand
Russians against the wall of the Kremlin and shooting them in a news
despatch. For weeks they harrowed us with a projected “St. Bartholomew’s
Eve Massacre,” in which all the bourgeoisie in Russia were to be
destroyed. Bartholomew’s Eve came, and next morning I looked in the
papers, and saw that there had been a general amnesty for political
prisoners in Russia—something for which I am still petitioning the
President of my own country! I saw no mention of the massacre; but this
did not surprise me. I, too, have been lied about by Capitalist
Journalism on the front page, and have seen the retraction buried in
small print among the advertisements.
That there was much killing in Russia, I do not doubt; but whether there
was more killing than under the government of the Tsar—that is the real
question. Frazier Hunt tells us that in the first fourteen months of
their rule, the Bolsheviki executed four thousand, five hundred persons,
mostly for stealing and speculation; whereas, in twelve months after the
1905 revolution, Stolypin, minister of the Tsar, caused the execution of
thirty-two thousand, seven hundred and seventy-three persons. That is
about the usual proportion of the White Terror to the Red, and the
proportion that would have prevailed had the Allies succeeded in their
plan of getting Kolchak to Moscow.
Our papers were giving us lurid accounts of the Bolsheviki advancing in
the Baltic provinces, burning and slaying as they went; but the
conspiracy slipped a cog, and there crept into an Associated Press
dispatch a little paragraph which gave the game away. In reading it,
understand that these provinces are a part of Russia, which the Russians
were taking back from the Germans:
Warsaw, Dec. 29.—The Bolsheviki are advancing rapidly toward Vilna,
and are favored by mild weather. Their advance guards are said to be
orderly, well clothed and well armed. _They have committed no
depredations except where they met with resistance._
And here is another from Berlin, Feb. 15, 1919, which gives us the real
reason for the world-wide dread of the Bolsheviki. Ralph Rotheit,
correspondent of the Berlin “Vossische Zeitung,” visited the Bolshevik
line at Vilna.
He pictured the situation as extremely pessimistic, although so far
the Bolsheviki have always been defeated by the Germans whenever they
ventured skirmishing. However, Rotheit writes, the Bolsheviki do not
rely so much on fighting as on corrupting opponents by never-ceasing
wireless propaganda, and by sending emissaries into the districts
still occupied by the Germans, and by Bolshevik literature with which
the latter’s positions are flooded. Rotheit says unfortunately the
effect of this propaganda at Kovno, headquarters of the German
commander, was only too evident, as in many other places on German
territory, as well as the Russian and Polish.
Here we have the real quarrel with the Soviets, the real reason why they
must not, cannot be permitted to survive. They are propagandists; day
and night they agitate, they preach and they print—and for some reason,
the more loudly we proclaim that their propaganda is false, the more
deeply we seem to dread its success! Since when have we lost our faith
in the might of truth? Since when have we decided that error must be
fought with bullet and machine-gun? Surely there must be some dark
secret here, some skeleton in our family closet!
The truth is that we have seen in Russia a gigantic strike, an I. W. W.
strike, if you please; and it has been successful. The workers have
seized the factories, and now we call for the militia to drive them out.
The very existence of capitalism depends upon their being driven out; as
the phrase is, they must “be made an example of.” And so the capitalist
press is called in, our great lying-machine is given the biggest job in
its history. The Associated Press does for Russia precisely what Charles
Edward Russell showed it doing for Calumet, what I showed it doing for
Colorado. All our newspapers, big and little, do what they are
accustomed to do whenever there is a strike in America—telling
everything evil about the strikers and nothing good about them,
clamoring for violence against them, justifying every crime committed
against them in the name of “law and order.”
Recently the Soviets, pressed by starvation, have bowed so far to the
will of world-capitalism as to agree to pay interest on the Tsar’s
debts; they have offered to pledge some of the vast natural resources of
Russia to pay for the machinery and supplies they must have. So Allied
diplomacy hesitates and falters; dare the diplomats risk the terrors of
Bolshevist propaganda, that mysterious black magic? Dare they allow the
world to see a prospering social revolution, a government of the
workers, by the workers, for the workers, which does not perish from the
earth?
They decided upon a conference with the Bolsheviki, on a remote island
in Turkish waters. Our newspapers printed the fact that the invitation
had been extended to the Bolsheviki: but they did not print the
Bolshevik acceptance. They did not print the text of the Russian foreign
minister’s appeal to the French Socialist, Longuet, as to the meaning of
the Allied proposals. They did not print the fact that the conference
was abandoned because William Allen White, American delegate and man of
honor, insisted upon full publicity.
President Wilson sent a confidential mission to Russia, composed of
William C. Bullitt and Lincoln Steffens. They came back and reported
that there was order in Russia; that the Russian people were satisfied
with the Soviet régime; that the “nationalization of women” in Russia
was an absurd yarn; that the cause of the starvation and misery in
Russia was the allied blockade; and that Lenin wanted peace, and was
willing to do almost anything to get peace. President Wilson, for
reasons presumably known to him, turned down the advice of this
commission. Steffens made a public statement as to his position, which
was reported in the “London Daily Herald,” but in no American newspaper
or magazine. Bullitt resigned from the Peace Commission, and addressed
to President Wilson a brief and dignified letter, explaining his
reasons: which letter was published in the “New York Nation,” but in no
capitalist newspaper in America, so far as I could find out.
Then Bullitt was summoned before the Senate committee, and the
Associated Press sent out a brief and inadequate report of his
testimony. Next day he submitted the confidential report about Russia
which he had delivered to President Wilson. This was the most important
information about Russia yet available to the American people; and the
“Los Angeles Times,” from which I get my first news of the world, gave
not a line of this report! More than that, in order to avoid having to
mention the report, the “Times” cut out that day every word of its news
about the struggle over the peace treaty in the Senate! Instead, it gave
two columns, of which I quote the headlines:
ROOSEVELT SCORES REDS
“Smash ’Em!” Cries Teddy, Jr., in Talks Telling of Perils in
Radicalism
That was on Sunday morning. On Monday morning again, the “Times” had not
a word about Bullitt, and not a word about the agitation over the peace
treaty in Washington, the most important news of the day; the reason
being simply that Washington was talking about the Bullitt report, and
about nothing else! But on Tuesday, the British government issued a
denial of some of Bullitt’s statements—one of those evasive denials
whereby the gigantic trading corporation tells lies without quite
telling them; so once more the “Los Angeles Times” was willing to
mention William C. Bullitt!
I call up the “Los Angeles Examiner,” to ask if the Associated Press
handled the Bullitt report. The “Los Angeles Examiner,” you understand,
gets the Associated Press service—is one of the “forty-one vote”
newspapers. Both the city editor and the telegraph editor assure me that
the Associated Press did not send the “Examiner” a word of it—the most
important news about Russia yet made available to the American people!
Says the “Nation”:
No newspaper has printed Mr. Bullitt’s testimony in full or even in
generous part; there were only three press representatives present
when he testified, and he has had the invariable experience of having
his testimony misquoted and altered, and interviews attributed to him
which he never gave.
The Social Revolution came in Hungary. It came in an orderly and
sensible way, without terror, without bloodshed; and how was it treated
by Capitalist Journalism? It was treated just as the Russian Soviets had
been treated—as an outcast and outlaw. All the power of World Capitalism
was turned against the Hungarian Communist government. Poland, Roumania,
the Ukraine, all made war upon it, with French officers and British
tanks and American money; and at the same time the great lying-machine
was put to work. The news agencies brought the report that Bela Kun had
fled to the Argentine; and two days later that he was about to be
overthrown in Budapesth! All the power of American Journalism was set to
keeping the workers from realizing that a nation of fifteen or twenty
million people had overthrown the profit system, and was making a
success of the Co-operative Commonwealth.
I have before me some letters from a correspondent in Budapesth,
representing one of the most influential and supposed-to-be-respectable
of the great New York newspapers. This correspondent explains that she
sends her articles with the instructions that they shall be published as
written or not at all—and they are not published. “One of my confrères
here had an article twisted and turned about so badly that it meant
exactly the opposite of what he knew and wrote to be true.” And there is
a group of correspondents in Budapesth, all having the same experiences,
it appears:
Their economic sentences are cut out of articles and their radical
articles are paid for but never printed. There isn’t a day passes that
we don’t have an indignation meeting. One man wrote a long article for
one of the prominent magazines two months ago alluding to the new
order. He received a fat check with the letter announcing that the
article could not be used; they wished him to write more _moderately_.
Since my trip to Hungary and my conviction that Budapesth is the only
honest place in Europe outside Russia, I am not any longer willing to
write “moderately.”
Only once before in modern history was there a crime like this—when the
kings and emperors of Europe went to war to wipe out the French
revolution, which their hired propagandists described in precisely the
same terms as we now see applied to the Bolsheviki. Then it was
political revolution, now it is social revolution; but the program is
the same—the earth is to be soaked with the blood of revolutionists,
their new ideal is to be corrupted in the military campaign necessary to
its defense, and the world is to be made safe for another Holy
Alliance—this time of the profit-system, of Industrial Exploitation. It
is for the people, who pay for all privilege and maintain all parasites,
to decide whether history shall repeat itself to the full; whether the
Holy Alliance of World Capitalism is to crush for another century the
hopes of the working masses of the world.