pointing out to the men the social significance of their labor, the duty
they owe to the working-class, and to society as a whole. So before long
we shall see the News-Writers’ Union of Boston taking up the task of
forcing the Boston newspapers to print the truth. We shall see the
News-Writers’ Union taking up the question: Shall the “Boston Evening
Transcript” permit its news-columns to be edited by the gas company, and
by “Harvard Beer, 1,000 Pure”? We shall see the union at least bringing
these facts to public attention, so that the “Transcript” can no longer
pose as a respectable newspaper.
I quote one paragraph more from my San Francisco letter:
All three evening papers, I am told, are one hundred per cent
organized; a charter is on the way from the I. T. U. and the movement
has the full backing—or is promised the full backing—of the A. F. of
L. and the local labor organizations. Just what that is worth is yet
to be learned.
This man, you see, is groping his way. He doesn’t know what the backing
of organized labor is worth. But the newspaper-men of Boston found out;
they won because the type-setters and the pressmen stood by them. And
the New York actors won because the musicians and the stage-hands stood
by them. And this is the biggest thing about the whole movement—the fact
that workers of hand and brain are uniting and preparing to take
possession of the world. One purpose of this book is to urge a
hand-and-brain union in the newspaper field; to urge that the
news-writers shall combine with the pressmen and type-setters and the
truckmen—one organization of all men and women who write, print and
distribute news, to take control of their own labor, and see to it that
the newspapers serve public interests and not private interests.
What I ask at the very outset is a representative of the News-Writers’
Union, acting as one of the copy-readers of every newspaper. This man
will say, in the name of his organization: “That is a lie; it shall not
go in. This news-item is colored to favor the railroad interests; it
must be rewritten. Tonight there is a mass-meeting of labor to protest
against intervention in Russia. That meeting is worth a column.” Such
demands of the copy-reader will, if challenged, be brought before a
committee of the workers of the paper—the workers both of hand and
brain. If any demand is not complied with, the paper will not appear
next day. Do you think that lying about the labor movement would
continue under such conditions?
I recognize the rights of the general public in the determining of news.
I should wish to see a government representative sitting in all councils
where newspaper policy is laid down. The owner should be represented, so
long as his ownership exists; but unless I mis-read the signs of the
times, the days of the owner as owner are numbered in our industry. The
owner may best be attended to by a government price-fixing board, which
will set wages for newspaper work and prices of newspapers to the public
at a point where interest, dividends and profits are wiped out. So the
owner will become a worker like other workers; if he is competent and
honest, he will stay as managing director; if he is incompetent and
dishonest, he will go to digging ditches, under the eye of a thoroughly
efficient boss.
Little by little the workers of all industrial nations are acquiring
class-consciousness, and preparing themselves for the control of
industry. In America they seem backward, but that is because America is
a new country, and the vast majority of the workers have no idea how the
cards are stacked against them. I have just been reading an account of
the general strike in Seattle, the most significant labor revolt in our
history, and I observe how painfully chivalrous the Seattle strikers
were. Because they did not permit the capitalist papers of their city to
be published, therefore they refrained from publishing their own paper!
This was magnificent, but it was not war, and I venture to guess that
since the Seattle strikers have had the capitalist newspapers, not
merely of their city, but of all the rest of the world telling lies
about them, they will be more practical next time—as practical as those
they are opposing.
How all this works out, you may learn from the Syndicalist movement of
Italy—only, of course, Capitalist Journalism has not allowed you to know
anything about the Syndicalist movement of Italy! The glass-workers were
beaten in a terrific strike, and they realized that they had to find a
new weapon; they contributed their funds and bought a glass-factory,
which they started upon a co-operative basis. When this factory had its
product ready for sale, strikes were called on the other factories. By
applying this method again and again, the union broke its rivals, and
bought them out at a low price, and so before the war practically the
entire glass-industry of Italy was in the hands of co-operative unions,
and the glass-workers were getting the full value of their product.
The same thing was being done before the war by the agricultural workers
in Sicily. The strikers had been shot down by the soldiery, their own
brothers and sons; they bought several estates and worked them
co-operatively, and when harvest-time came there was labor for the
co-operative estates, and there were strikes against the absentee
landlords, who were spending their time in Paris and on the Riviera. So
the landlords made haste to sell out, and the agricultural unions were
rapidly taking possession of the land of Sicily.
The same methods were recently tried out in the newspaper field by
strikers in the Argentine Republic; I quote from an account in the
“Christian Science Monitor,” a Boston newspaper which gives fair
accounts of radical happenings abroad, and which may some day give fair
accounts of radical happenings in America. The “Christian Science
Monitor” is interviewing a United States embassy official, just returned
from Buenos Aires:
An incident of the latter strike shows the unique control, as Mr.
Barrett puts it, that they exercise over the newspapers. During the
seventy-three days the port was closed, the only goods handled were
shipments of newsprint. The newspapers represent the workers. If a
paper dares to send to its composing-room an item opposed to the
interest of the labor element, the compositors probably will refuse to
put it in type. If they do set it up and it appears, the paper can
expect no more newsprint from the docks.
I hear the reader says: “These strikers don’t represent the public; they
represent themselves. You are only substituting one kind of
class-interest for another.” Ah, yes—dear reader of capitalist opinion!
This at least you admit; the class represented by the strikers is vastly
larger than that represented by the owners; we are that much nearer to
democracy. But you demand one hundred per cent pure democracy—dear
reader of capitalist opinion!
Well, the workers offer you the way; they cheerfully permit all owners
to become workers—either of hand or brain—and to receive their full
share with all other workers of hand or brain; whereas, in the nature of
the case, the owners do not welcome the workers as owners, and are doing
all in their power to make sure that no one shall be owners but
themselves. This is the fundamental and all-determining fact about the
class struggle, and the reason why he who serves the interest of the
workers is serving the interest of all society, and of the Co-operative
Commonwealth which is to be. To the argument that the taking of power by
the workers is the substitution of one kind of class tyranny by another
kind of class tyranny, the answer, complete and final, is that there is
no need of the capitalist class as a class and that the world will be a
happier place for all men when the members of that class have become
workers, either of hand or brain. When that has been done, there will be
no classes, therefore no class tyranny, and no incentive to class lying.
Thus, and thus only, shall we break the power of the capitalist press—by
breaking the power of capitalism. And so it is that I, an advocate of
pure democracy, am interested in this story from the Argentine Republic,
and tempted to cry to the American dockers, the American typographers,
the American news-writers: “Help! Help against the lying, kept press!”
And as I am reading the final proofs of this book, I hear the answer to
my cry. I read the following in the “New York Times”:
Boston, Oct. 28.—Pressmen employed by the Chapple Publishing Company,
Ltd., on discovering in a cartoon in “Life” which is being printed
here during the New York strike, what they considered a reflection on
organized labor, suspended work and refused to return until the
objectionable cartoon was taken out. The cartoon was eliminated, and
the men returned to work.
The drawing depicts a room apparently meant to typify conditions
existing in a city tenement district. The artist portrays a man
beating his wife over the head with the leg of a chair. The woman is
shown lying on the floor; the man has one knee on her body and one
hand clutching her throat. A child about two years old is shown in bed
watching the scene. Its face is expressive of horror. Another child,
evidently a little older, is stretched on the floor, face downward. At
the door is standing a patrolman in full uniform. He is talking with a
captain of police, who has rushed on the scene with drawn revolver.
The patrolman with hand upraised says: “It’s all right, Captain, he’s
got a union card.”
You may think my remedy drastic; but, honestly, do you think that any
remedy could be too drastic for an infamy such as this?
Here, as everywhere, the salvation of the world rests upon you, the
workers of hand and brain. I took up half this book telling how the
capitalist press lied about one man; you said, perhaps, that I liked to
be in the “limelight”; anyhow, I was only one writer-fellow, and it
didn’t matter to you what the newspapers did to a writer-fellow. But now
I make my appeal for yourself, for your wives and your children. I have
shown you how this knavish press turns the world against you; I have
shown how it turns you against yourself—how it seduces you, poisons your
mind, breaks your heart. You go on strike, and it plays upon your fears,
it uses your hunger and want as weapons against you; it saps your
strength, it eats out your soul, it smothers your thinking under
mountain-loads of lies. You fall, and the chariot of Big Business rolls
over you.
These men who own the world in which you struggle for life—what is it
that they want? They want power, power to rule you. And what is it that
you want? You want power to rule yourself. Between those two wants there
is eternal and unending and irreconcilable war—such is the class
struggle, and whether you will or not, you take your part in it, and I
take mine. I, a writer-fellow who wants to write the truth, appeal to
you, the laboring fellows of hand and brain, who want to read the truth,
who _must_ read the truth, if civilization is not to perish. I cry to
you: “Help! Help against the lying, kept press!”
I cry to you for the integrity of your calling, for the honor and
dignity of Journalism. I cry to you that Journalism shall no longer be
the thing described by Charles A. Dana, master-cynic of the “New York
Sun,” “buying white paper at two cents a pound and selling it at ten
cents a pound.” 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 fellow-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?
By the blindness and greed of ruling classes the people have been
plunged into infinite misery; but that misery has its purpose in the
scheme of nature. Something more than a century ago we saw the people
driven by just such misery to grope their way into a new order of
society; they threw off the chains of hereditary monarchy, and made
themselves citizens of free republics. 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. That world
lies just before you, and the gates to it are barred only by ignorance
and prejudice, deliberately created and maintained by prostitute
journalism.
CHAPTER LXVI
A FRAME-UP THAT FELL DOWN
In concluding this, the most important and most dangerous book I have
ever written, I have a personal word to leave with the reader. I have
here attacked the most powerful interests in America, and it seems to me
hardly conceivable that they will permit the attack to go out to the
world, to be circulated among the general public, without some attempt
at interference.
What will they do? I cannot say. There are things on every page of this
book which are libelous unless they are true. If I am brought into court
and required to prove them, I may be facing a judge who has been
appointed by the interests I have exposed, a jury which has been
selected by the interests I have exposed, a prosecuting attorney who is
looking to these interests for his campaign-funds and his publicity at
the next election. The trial will be conducted on this simple basis—that
everything favorable to me is kept from the public, and everything that
can be made to seem unfavorable to me is sent by telegraph and cable all
over the world.
I would not mind losing what little property I own in the world; I would
not mind going to jail for this book. There are only two things I would
mind—first, having the book barred from circulation, and second, being
discredited in the eyes of those I seek to influence in favor of Social
Justice. So in this, the last word I may be able to get to you on the
subject, I wish to warn you of one crucial fact, which is this:
Our police and prosecuting authorities, our political machines and Big
Business interests, are many of them practiced in the art of producing
in court whatever testimony may be required in an emergency. There are
few traction interests or other public service corporations in America
which do not regularly employ perjured witnesses in case of need; and
those which have given up the custom have done so merely because they
have got the courts and the jury system so completely in their hands
that they no longer care what evidence is introduced against them. We
have seen Tom Mooney held in jail for three years, entirely upon the
basis of perjured testimony. Even the trial judge has written that he is
satisfied that Tom Mooney is innocent—but still Tom Mooney stays in
jail!
I am doing what I can to get this book to the people. I intend to go on
doing what I can to that end. Meantime I say to you, my readers, what I
said to my wife when I went out to Colorado on behalf of the
coal-strikers: “Whatever you read about me, don’t worry. If there is any
scandal, pay no attention to it, for that is the way they fight in
Denver.”
That is the way Big Business fights all over America.
The above was written in August. In November I am reading the page
proofs of the book, and “Big Business” steps forward to prove me a
prophet. A plot is laid against me, so wanton and so utterly without
basis of truth that no less than an assassin could have planned it. I
escaped—but by a margin so narrow that it is unpleasant to think about
it. Literally by a minute or two of time I missed having printed on the
front page of every big newspaper in America convincing evidence that I
am a secret German conspirator, contriving underhand plots for the
undermining of my country! My wife remarks: “I have been watching the
radical movement for seven or eight years, and I have heard much about
‘frame-ups.’ I always thought it was foolish talk, cheap melodrama; but
now I know that the ‘frame-up’ is a real thing, and it has changed my
whole view of the class struggle.”
I have mentioned on page 399 how I made a speech before the City Club of
Los Angeles, exposing the dishonesty of the “Los Angeles Times,”
whereupon the “Times” opened up a furious attack upon me, demanding that
I should be put in jail. I have quoted one sample of its ravings. Every
day or so for a week it printed similar abuse, and it continues the
attack, both editorially and in its news columns. I have stated publicly
in the “Appeal to Reason” that I am collecting evidence against the
“Times,” and preparing a book exposing it; so the “Times” proclaims me
as “the trumpet of Bolshevism,” and will be satisfied with nothing short
of a life sentence for me.
There is in Los Angeles a returned soldiers’ paper, the “Dugout.” The
editor, Sydney R. Flowers, is an American citizen who was in South
Africa at the outbreak of the war, and was so anxious to fight the
Kaiser that he left his wife and baby and enlisted. Invalided to
England, he tried again to enlist, and finally enlisted in Canada, and
served for three years in Belgium and France. He was twice wounded and
once gassed, and has only one lung as a result. Returning to his home in
Los Angeles with his wife and child, he found the war veterans’
organization being courted as a strike-breaking agency by the Merchants’
and Manufacturers’ Association of the city. Flowers rebelled, and
started a rival organization, the Allied World War Veterans, and with
the support of these veterans he started the “Dugout.” I met him, and
heard him speak several times, and gave him my support to the extent of
raising some money. He told me of the efforts of the “M. and M.” to
bribe him, and of their plots against him; he knew, and I knew, that
there were spies in his office.
There came to the office a letter from a stranger who signed himself
“Paul Rightman.” The envelope bore a Chicago return address, but had
been mailed in Los Angeles. It was typewritten, and the type was bad,
the ribbon double, with traces of red showing here and there. “Paul”
suggested to Flowers that he should send sample copies of his paper to
Socialist and labor papers abroad. Flowers, who is out to prevent the
next war by the spirit of international fraternity, thought this a good
idea; his impulse was encouraged by a mysterious Austrian who happened
into his office a few minutes after the letter arrived, and suggested to
him exactly the sort of letter he should write to these foreign
editors—most of whom, by a curious coincidence, happened to be in
Silesia, where American troops are going!
Flowers wrote the letters and mailed them, and an hour or two after he
had mailed them, two men who have been seen frequently in the offices of
the “M. and M.,” called upon Flowers’ wife and terrified her by the
announcement that her husband had committed a crime which would cause
him to be sent to jail for life; his only chance was to drop the
“Dugout,” and he had one hour in which to make his decision. Flowers was
summoned by a telephone call, purporting to come from the United States
District Attorney’s office. He obeyed this call, and in the hallway of
the Federal Building was met by two mysterious persons who exhibited
shields of authority, and informed him that he had three minutes in
which to decide whether he would drop the “Dugout” or be sent to jail
for life.
He refused to decide so quickly, and telephoned me for advice. I advised
him to stand firm. I went to his office, and in my hearing he gave
orders over the telephone for the printing of the next issue of his
paper. In less than one hour after he had given that order, someone,
identity unknown, came to the United States Attorney with “definite”
information that Flowers was in relation with enemy publications abroad,
and a search warrant was issued and served. I happened to be present in
the office of the “Dugout” and witnessed the events, and can testify
that the Federal agents, in defiance of the law, refused to permit
Flowers to read the search warrant; that they held him against his will
in violation of the law; that they raided the office of the Allied World
War Veterans, which they had been given no authority to enter; and
finally that they left the place a wreck.
Next morning there appeared in the “Los Angeles Times” a front page
two-column story about the uncovering of a nest of treason. Among other
things, it was stated that Flowers had been publishing seditious
material before the armistice, and had been warned by the Federal
authorities and forced to change his tone; the fact being that at this
time Flowers was in the trenches in France, and did not start the
publication of the “Dugout” until four or five months after the
armistice!
I have said that the raid was brutally conducted. I might mention that I
protested to one of the Federal agents against the unnecessary rowdyism,
and this man remarked concerning the other man, his chief: “He’s a
rough-neck. I don’t believe in rough-house business myself, there’s no
sense at all in it.” Also I might mention that I brought two assistant
U. S. Attorneys to the scene, and they arrived five minutes after their
agents had left, and admitted to me that the proceedings were wholly
unwarranted; one of them called up Flowers’ home and very angrily
ordered the agents to desist from the search they were making of that
place. But next morning the “Los Angeles Times” reported:
VIOLENCE FAKED
The government agents disturbed no property in the office, simply
carrying away the papers they desired. After the inspectors had gone,
witnesses say that certain known followers of Flowers took possession
of the offices, tore down an American flag which was on the wall,
threw it on the floor, and generally wrecked the place. Then they sent
for a “Los Angeles Examiner” photographer to make a photograph of the
offices, with the apparent desire to have the publication of the
photograph give the impression that the Federal officers had
desecrated the flag and destroyed the office property.
Prior to this episode I had been too busy with my own writings to have
even read a copy of the “Dugout” through. But I knew the record of
Flowers in the war, and I knew his purpose since the war, and when I saw
this plot to destroy his magazine, I made up my mind to stand back of
him. I engaged a lawyer for him, and I sent long telegrams about the
case to the “Appeal to Reason” and other Socialist papers over the
country. So the masters of Los Angeles decided to get me in the same net
with Flowers.
There came to Flowers’ office a second letter signed by the mysterious
“Paul.” This letter was written on the same bad typewriter, with a
double ribbon showing traces of red. But this time the return address on
the envelope was not “Paul Rightman, Chicago, Illinois”; this time it
was “Upton Sinclair, Pasadena, California!”
Flowers called me on the ’phone, and said; “Did you mail me a letter
yesterday?” I answered, “No, I haven’t written you any letter.” “Well,”
said Flowers, “here is a letter with your name on the envelope.
Evidently somebody wants it to appear that you are writing me letters
signed with an assumed name.” “What is in the letter?” I asked, and
Flowers started to read it to me over the ’phone. It was a letter of
violent denunciation of the government, full of the most venomously
treasonable sentiments, and offering to supply Flowers with more names
of papers in Germany with which he might correspond. I waited to hear
only about half of it, then I cried: “Get that letter out of your
office!”
“But wait—” said Flowers.
“Don’t wait for anything,” I insisted. “Drop what you are doing and take
that letter to my lawyer as quickly as you can run.”
Flowers promised me he would do that, and I hung up the receiver. Two or
three minutes after he left his office with the letter in his pocket
there were two agents of the District Attorney’s office of Los Angeles
County looking for him at his office. When he returned there were four
of them on hand, and they held him up and proceeded to make another
raid. The man in charge, I might mention, was C. E. Sebastian, once
mayor of the city, prosecuted for a sexual crime, kicked out of office
by the people, and now working as a detective for the District
Attorney’s office!
The first thing this man did was to examine all Flowers’ letters—letters
on his desk, letters in the drawers of his desk, letters in his pockets.
There were some hundred and fifty letters altogether, and they went over
them all several times, studying the return addresses on the envelopes.
They spent something like an hour and a half at it, and their balked
anger was comically evident. In their whispered consultations Flowers
heard them mention my name several times, and once he heard Sebastian
say: “He’s a slick one.”
Flowers was haled before the Grand Jury, indicted under the Criminal
Syndicalism law, and thrown into jail at once. The authorities fixed the
bail at fifteen thousand dollars, which they hoped would be prohibitive,
and denied Flowers the right to see his counsel that night. They have
taken every scrap of paper belonging to the magazine. They have
frightened off one printer and raided another, and so they think they
have smashed the “Dugout.”
Come to my lawyer’s office for a minute and examine this mysterious
“Paul” letter. It is a long letter, very abusive and stupid, and I won’t
waste space on it, except to point out one more of the subtle traps that
were placed in it. One sentence denouncing the acts of the government
agents adds the phrase: “as I stated in the papers.” It so happens that
out of the half million population of Los Angeles, just one person had
been quoted in the newspapers as protesting against the raid on the
“Dugout,” and that one person was myself. So when this letter was
published, the newspapers would be able to say: Upton Sinclair is
carrying a secret correspondence with a pro-German conspirator, using
the alias “Paul.” But you see, he forgets and puts his name on the
envelope! And also he gives himself away in the text of the letter—he
identifies himself as the mysterious conspirator!
If you have any doubt that this was the plan, you have only to look at
the “Los Angeles Times” next morning; a double-column, front page story
about this second raid on the “Dugout,” giving the full text of the
first “Paul” letter as a part of Flowers’ “conspirings” with the
enemy—and without any hint that this mysterious “Paul” might be an
imaginary person! If the second “Paul” letter had been found, that too
would have been published in full, and the entire country would have
read a story to the effect that both letters had come from Upton
Sinclair, who was thus caught red-handed in a vile German conspiracy
against his country!
Maybe you are like my wife; maybe you never believed in the “frame-up.”
But study this case, and see what else you can make of it. Ask yourself:
How comes it that the raids of both the Federal agents and of the Los
Angeles County officers are so precisely timed to the arrival of letters
from a mysterious “Paul” whom nobody has ever seen? And how comes it
that this mysterious “Paul” puts the name of Upton Sinclair on his
envelope? If “Paul” is afraid to put his own name on the envelope, why
does he not mail it without return address, as millions of letters are
mailed every day? And why does he employ the words: “As I stated in the
papers”—when he hasn’t stated anything whatever in the papers, and when
Flowers must know he hasn’t stated anything? Is it not plain that some
dark agency is here working behind the scenes, plotting to ruin Upton
Sinclair, and “tipping off” both the Federal authorities and the county
authorities at the precise critical moment?
What is this agency? I do not know, and my lawyer, who takes this
conspiracy very seriously, will not permit me to guess in public. But he
admits my right to study these “Paul” letters, and to point out a
peculiar bit of internal evidence. It would seem that this dark agency
which is plotting to ruin Upton Sinclair is also interested in injuring
the “Los Angeles Examiner.” The first “Paul” letter offers to supply
Flowers with the names of more German papers, if he will insert a
request in the personal columns of the “Examiner”; and the “Times”
publishes this letter in full, calling particular attention to the
damaging mention of the “Examiner.” Day after day the “Times” is
attacking the “Examiner,” calling it a pro-German sheet; and here is a
German conspirator using this pro-German sheet as a medium for his
schemes!
The above is what is done to me before this book comes out. What will be
done after my enemies have actually read the book, I cannot imagine. All
I can do is to repeat my warning to you. Twenty years ago old “One-hoss”
Wayland told me he had made it the rule of his life never to write a
letter that he would not publish in the “Appeal to Reason.” And that is
the principle upon which I have always carried on my propaganda. I have
no secrets. What I have to say is said once a week in a full page of the
“Appeal,” and the opposition to violence and conspiracy in the class
struggle which I there write in public I advocate just as vigorously in
private, and all my friends know it. So, if at any time you read that a
carload of dynamite bombs has been found in my home, or that I have been
carrying on a cipher correspondence with some foreign assassins, or that
I have poisoned my wife and eloped with a chorus girl, or that I have
taken a job on the “Los Angeles Times”—please go back and read this
warning, and understand what is being done to both of us.
CONCLUSION
When I first talked over this book with my wife, she gave me a bit of
advice: “Give your facts first, and then call your names.” So throughout
this book I have not laid much stress on the book’s title. Perhaps you
are wondering just where the title comes in!
What is the Brass Check? 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.
Please do not think that I am just slinging ugly words. Off and on for
years I have thought about this book, and figured over the title, and
what it means; I assert that the Brass Check which serves in the house
of ill-fame as “the price of a woman’s shame” is, both in its moral
implications and in its social effect, precisely and identically the
same as the gold and silver coins and pieces of written paper that are
found every week in the pay-envelopes of those who write and print and
distribute capitalist publications.
The prostitution of the body is a fearful thing. The young girl,
trembling with a strange emotion of which she does not know the meaning,
innocent, confiding and tender, is torn from her home and started on a
road to ruin and despair. The lad, seeking his mate and the fulfilment
of his destiny, sees the woman of his dreams turn into a foul harpy,
bearer of pestilence and death. Nature, sumptuous, magnificent, loving
life, cries: “Give me children!” And the answer comes: “We give you
running sores and bursting glands, rotting lips and festering noses,
swollen heads and crooked joints, idiot gabblings and maniac shrieks,
pistols to blow out your brains and poisons to still your agonies.” Such
is the prostitution of the body.
But what of the mind? The mind is master of the body, and commands what
the body shall do and what it shall become; therefore, always, the
prostitution of the mind precedes and causes the prostitution of the
body. Youth cries: “Life is beautiful, joyous! Give me light, that I may
keep my path!” The answer comes: “Here is darkness, that you may
stumble, and beat your face upon the stones!” Youth cries: “Give me
Hope.” The answer comes: “Here is Cynicism.” Youth cries: “Give me
understanding, that I may live in harmony with my fellow-men.” The
answer comes: “Here are lies about your fellow-men, that you may hate
them, that you may cheat them, that you may live among them as a wolf
among wolves!” Such is the prostitution of the mind.
When I planned this book I had in mind a sub-title: “A Study of the
Whore of Journalism.” A shocking sub-title; but then, I was quoting the
Bible, and the Bible is the inspired word of God. It was surely one of
God’s prophets who wrote this invitation to the reading of “The Brass
Check”:
Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore
that sitteth upon many waters;
With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the
inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her
fornication.
For eighteen hundred years men have sought to probe the vision of that
aged seer on the lonely isle of Patmos. Listen to his strange words:
So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a
woman sit upon a scarlet colored beast, full of names of blasphemy,
having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple
and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and
pearls, having a golden cup in her hands full of abominations and
filthiness of her fornication:
And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT,
THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.
Now, surely, this mystery is a mystery no longer! Now we know what the
seer of Patmos was foreseeing—Capitalist Journalism! And when I call
upon you, class-conscious workers of hand and brain, to organize and
destroy this mother of all iniquities, I do not have to depart from the
language of the ancient scriptures. I say to you in the words of the
prophet Ezekiel:
So the spirit took me up, and brought me into the inner court; and
behold, the glory of the Lord filled the house.
And I heard him speaking unto me out of the house:
Now let them put away their whoredom, and the carcases of their kings,
far from me, and I will dwell in the midst of them forever.
A PRACTICAL PROGRAM
As I am about to send this book to press, I take one last look at the
world around me. Half a million coal-miners have struck, a court
injunction has forced the leaders to call off the strike, the miners are
refusing to obey their leaders—and the newspapers of the entire United
States are concealing the facts. For a week it has been impossible for
me to learn, except from vague hints, what is happening in the
coal-strike. And at the same time, because of false newspaper stories
from Centralia, Washington, a “white terror” reigns in the entire West,
and thousands of radicals are beaten, jailed, and shot.
I have pleaded and labored long to avoid a violent revolution in
America; I intend to go on pleading and laboring to the last hour. I
know that thousands of my readers will, like myself, be desperately
anxious for something they can do. I decided to work out a plan of
action; something definite, practical, and immediate.
I propose that we shall found and endow a weekly publication of
truth-telling, to be known as “The National News.” This publication will
carry no advertisements and no editorials. It will not be a journal of
opinion, but a record of events pure and simple. It will be published on
ordinary newsprint paper, and in the cheapest possible form. It will
have one purpose and one only, to give to the American people once every
week the truth about the world’s events. It will be strictly and
absolutely nonpartisan, and never the propaganda organ of any cause. It
will watch the country, and see where lies are being circulated and
truth suppressed; its job will be to nail the lies, and bring the truth
into the light of day. I believe that a sufficient number of Americans
are awake to the dishonesty of our press to build up for such a paper a
circulation of a million inside of a year.
Let me say at the outset that I am not looking for a job. I have my
work, and it isn’t editing a newspaper; nor do I judge myself capable of
that rigid impartiality which such an enterprise would require. It is my
idea that control of the paper should be vested in a board of directors,
composed of twenty or thirty men and women of all creeds and causes, who
have proven by their life-time records that they believe in fair play.
By way of illustration, I will indicate my idea of such a board: Allan
Benson, Alice Stone Blackwell, Harriet Stanton Blatch, Arthur Bullard,
William C. Bullitt, Herbert Croly, Max Eastman, William Hard, Mrs. J.
Borden Harriman, Rev. John Haynes Holmes, Hamilton Holt, Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, Paul Kellogg, Amos Pinchot, Charles Edward Russell,
Lincoln Steffens, J. G. Phelps Stokes, Ida Tarbell, Col. William Boyce
Thompson, Samuel Untermyer, Frank A. Vanderlip, Oswald Garrison Villard,
Rabbi Stephen S. Wise.
The above list is confined to men and women who live in or near New
York, and who therefore could attend directors’ meetings, and not be
merely “dummies.” You will note that the list contains some practical
publishers and editors; it contains Socialists and anti-Socialists,
pro-Bolsheviks and anti-Bolsheviks, radicals and liberals of all shades.
In addition I would like to provide for a number of directors to be
appointed by various organized groups in the country: one representative
each from the Nonpartisan League, The American Federation of Labor, the
National Teachers’ Federation, the Federation of Catholic Societies, the
Federation of Protestant Churches, the Federation of Women’s Clubs, etc.
The members thus named should not be sufficient in number to control the
publication, for it is obvious in common sense that control must rest
with the stockholders who have founded and made possible the paper. But
these various groups should have a voice on the board, for the purpose
of criticizing the publication and holding it rigidly to its declared
policy, “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” It
should be provided that each director has the right to a column twice a
year in the publication, in which to state any criticism of its policy
which he may have; also that any five directors have the right once a
month to insert a column pointing out what they consider failure of the
paper to live up to its professed standards. There should be a
directors’ meeting in New York City once every month, and all these
meetings should be open to representatives of the press; the editorial
staff should be present, and answer all criticisms and explain their
policy. Unless I am mistaken, this would result in making “National
News” in another sense; the capitalist press would be forced to discuss
the paper, and to advertise it.
I picture a publication of sixty-four pages, size nine inches by twelve,
with three columns of ordinary newspaper type. The paper will have
special correspondents in several of the big cities, and in the
principal capitals of Europe, and will publish telegraphic news from
these correspondents. It will obtain the names of reliable men in cities
and towns throughout America, and in case of emergency it can telegraph,
say to Denver, ordering five hundred words about the Ludlow massacre, or
to Spokane, ordering the truth about the Centralia fight. The editor of
the “National News” will sit in a watch-tower with the world spread
before him; thousands of volunteers will act as his eyes, they will send
him letters or telegrams with news. He and his staff will consider it
all according to one criterion: Is the truth being hidden here? Is this
something the American people ought to know? If so, the editor will send
a trusted man to get the story, and when he has made certain of the
facts he will publish them, regardless of what is injured, the Steel
Trust or the I. W. W., the Standard Oil Company or the Socialist
Party—even the “National News” itself.
Our editor will not give much space to the news that all other papers
publish. The big story for him will be what the other papers let alone.
He will employ trained investigators, and set them to work for a week,
or maybe for several months, getting the facts about the lobby of the
Beef Trust in Washington, the control of our public schools in the
interest of militarism, the problem of who is paying the expenses of the
American railway mission in Siberia. Needless to say, the capitalist
press will provide the “National News” with a complete monopoly of this
sort of work. Also it will provide the paper with many deliberate
falsehoods to be nailed. When this is done, groups of truth-loving
people will buy these papers by the thousands, and blue-pencil and
distribute them. So the “National News” will grow, and the “kept” press
will be moved by the only force it recognizes—loss of money.
There are in America millions of people who could not be persuaded to
read a Socialist paper, or a labor paper, or a single tax paper; but
there are very few who could not be persuaded to read a paper that gives
the news and proves by continuous open discussion that it really does
believe in “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” I do
not think I am too optimistic when I say that such a publication, with a
million circulation, would change the whole tone of American public
life.
What would such a paper cost? To be published without advertisements, it
would have to charge a high subscription price, two dollars a year at
least; and there are not enough who will subscribe to a paper at that
price. It would be better for the people to go without shoes than
without truth, but the people do not know this, and so continue to spend
their money for shoes. If the “National News” is to succeed, the few who
do realize the emergency must pay more than their share; in other words,
the paper must have a subsidy, and the subsidy must be large enough to
make success certain—otherwise, of course, no one ought to give
anything.
I have telegraphed to publishers of liberal sympathies in the East, and
present herewith the following estimate of the cost of launching and
maintaining the “National News”:
Weekly cost on basis of half million circulation: Editorial, overhead
and paid matter, $1,000; paper, composition and printing, $9,000;
addressing and mailing, $1,000; stencil list, $1,000; postage, $1,250;
telegraph 50; business and circulation, $500; total, $14,000 per week,
$728,000 per year.
The above is figured, as requested, on 64 page paper, size nine by
twelve. Such work has to be done in a job plant and is more expensive.
By making 32 pages, size twelve by eighteen, the cost could be cut to
$650,000 per year.
Income on basis of 500,000 circulation, three-fifths consisting of
paid subscriptions at one dollar per year, and two-fifths of
news-stand sales at five cents per copy retail, three cents wholesale:
$612,000. Deficit to be made up by subsidy, $116,000. Deficit on
larger size, $38,000.
On basis of one million circulation, cost in smaller size will be
$1,300,000; income will be $1,224,000; deficit, $76,000. On the larger
size there would be no deficit.
It is recommended that no definite policy as to advertising be fixed
in preliminary stages, but the matter left to the directing board.
There is a great deal of advertising, relating to books, liberal
organizations and political movements, which adds to the interest of a
publication; also there is some commercial advertising which would not
seek to control policy. A definite declaration contained in
advertising contracts, to the effect that the contract carries no
expectation of editorial favors, and rigid adherence to this principle
should suffice. The deficits here figured would be covered by one or
two pages of advertising per week, so it is not necessary to figure a
permanent deficit on the paper.
The income from subscriptions has been figured without agents’
commissions and premiums, on the understanding that the paper will
rely on volunteer labor for canvassing. For the same reason the sum of
one hundred thousand dollars may be set as the maximum cost of
establishing the paper.
The above represents the combined views of three different persons, all
qualified experts. As suggested, I will leave the questions of detail to
be worked out by the governing board. It appears that we may have an
honest paper if we will give one hundred thousand dollars in cash, and
will pledge, say thirty thousand dollars a year for two years to cover a
possible deficit.
Such are the figures. I believe that this amount of money can be raised,
and I purpose to set out and raise it. To every reader of this book I
say: Will you help, and if so, how much? Presumably nobody will want to
cut out a page from a book, so I will not print a stock subscription
blank. I ask that you write me a letter as follows:
UPTON SINCLAIR,
Pasadena, California:
Assuming that you are able to raise the total necessary endowment fund
and permanent annual subsidy for the “National News,” and that you
name an organization committee satisfactory to us, we, the
undersigned, agree to contribute to the project as follows:
Then give, in vertical columns, names; addresses; the number of
subscribers that each signer undertakes to obtain, on a basis of not
more than one dollar per year; the amount of money that each signer will
contribute to the endowment fund; the amount that each will contribute
each year to make up the permanent deficit.
_Please do not send money for the paper._ I will let you know when I
reach that stage, and meantime I do not want the responsibility of
keeping money. If you are enough interested in the plan to care to help
in advertising it, printing circulars and soliciting pledges from people
of means, I will be glad to receive such money and to account for it. If
I succeed in raising the necessary sum, I will name an organization
committee, and have a charter prepared, and submit the whole matter to
you for endorsement.
Sometimes people criticize my books as being “destructive.” Well, here
is a book with a constructive ending. Here is something to be done;
something definite, practical, and immediate. Here is a challenge to
every lover of truth and fair dealing in America to get busy and help
create an open forum through which our people may get the truth about
their affairs, and be able to settle their industrial problems without
bloodshed and waste. Will you do your share?
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Two years ago I finished “The Profits of Religion,” and offered it to
publishers. They said it could not be sold; no book on religion could be
sold, it was the deadest subject in the world. I believed that “The
Profits of Religion” could be sold, and I published it myself. In less
than a year I have sold forty thousand copies, and am still selling
them.
One reason, of course, is the low price. Everybody told me that a book
could not be published at that price. I would report on the figures if I
could, but I gave the book as a premium for my magazine, and never made
any attempt to separate the two ventures. All that I can report is that
since February, 1918, when I started the magazine, I have taken in for
magazines and books a total of $14,269, and I have paid out for
printing, postage, labor and advertising, a total of $20,995. This
deficit represents some two hundred thousand magazines sent out free for
propaganda purposes; the deficit was made up by donations from friends,
so it cost me nothing but my time, which I gladly gave. And I am willing
to give it again; I can’t expect either royalty as author or profit as
publisher from “The Brass Check.” The cost of book manufacturing has
increased fifty per cent in the past two years, and to make matters
worse, “The Brass Check” is exactly twice as long as “The Profits of
Religion.” If this book were published in the ordinary way, to be sold
to book-stores, it would be priced at $2.00, postage extra; or possibly
even $2.50. Sold, as it is, at $1.00, postpaid, it is an appeal to the
conscience of every reader to do his part in helping to get it widely
distributed.
“The Profits of Religion” was practically boycotted by the capitalist
press of America. Just one newspaper, the “Chicago Daily News,” reviewed
it—or rather allowed me space in which to review it myself. Just one
religious publication, the “Churchman,” took the trouble to ridicule it
at length. Half a dozen others sneered at it in brief paragraphs, and
half a dozen newspapers did the same, and that was all the publicity the
book got, except in the radical press. That this was a deliberate
boycott, and not the fault of the book, is something which I leave for
my readers to assert.
“The Brass Check,” of course, will be treated in the same way. If it
gets any publicity, it will be only because of a libel suit or something
sensational. If the great mass of the people ever hear of the book, it
will be because you, the reader, do your part. If it seems to you an
honest book, and one which the public ought to know, get busy. If you
can afford it, order a number of copies and give them to your friends.
If you can’t afford that, make up a subscription list among your
friends. If you need to earn money, turn agent, and sell the book among
your neighbors, in the shop where you work, on the road. If your
experience is the same as mine, you will find nearly everybody
distrustful of Capitalist Journalism, and willing at least to consider
the truth about it.
POSTSCRIPT TO SECOND EDITION.—A letter from E. J. Costello, managing
editor of the “Federated Press”:
“Let me say in this very first sentence that the ‘Brass Check’ is the
most remarkable book that has ever been published in America. It is
one that should, in the quickest possible manner, be placed in the
hands of every American who can read, and read to every American who
cannot read.
“I have been in this newspaper game for about twenty years, and I know
from my own experience that your story is the absolute truth. For
dozens of the incidents of ‘kept press’ rottenness I can cite
counterparts. Your story of the Associated Press is without doubt the
most concise exposé on record of the despicable methods which prevail
in that organization.”
Mr. Costello goes on to tell me that he was for seven years a staff
correspondent and editor for the Associated Press. He was in charge of
its Des Moines bureau at the time I was trying to get out the truth
from the Colorado coal strike. One day there came through on the
Associated Press wire instructions from the New York office “that
henceforth Upton Sinclair must be kept out of the Denver office, and
that no relations with him might be had by any employe of the Denver
bureau. I remember that my operator copied the message and brought it
to me, and that I determined to keep it for possible future reference.
“Within fifteen minutes after the message had been sent the chief
operator at Chicago asked the Des Moines operator if he had copied it,
and on being informed affirmatively he ordered the copy sent to
Chicago. The operator asked me for the message, but I declined to let
him have it. I placed it in a locked compartment of my desk, where it
remained for several weeks, when one day it turned up missing. I have
never been able to ascertain just how it disappeared, but I am quite
positive that other keys fitted my desk, and that there was a reason
for its disappearance. It wasn’t so many months after this occurrence
that I was ordered in to the Chicago office, presumably because it was
thought I would bear watching. My radical views led finally, in 1916,
to my leaving the Associated Press service entirely.
“Perhaps you have not heard that it was because of his efforts to do
the square thing by you in the Ammons matter that Rowsey was
discharged by Superintendent Cowles upon the orders of Melville E.
Stone. Yet that was what was currently reported in inner ‘A. P.’
circles at the time.”
Mr. Costello goes on to tell me that he left the Associated Press with
his mind made up as to what was to be his life’s work, “the
establishment of a press association which would represent the people
who work, as against the eight or ten millionaire publishers, who,
through the ownership of Associated Press bonds, outvote nearly 2,000
other members of the organization, and absolutely control the channels
through which the great public gets its poisoned news.”
The “Federated Press” had its inception at a convention of the Labor
Party in Chicago, November, 1919. It is a co-operative
non-profit-making organization of working class newspapers, and
maintains an admirable service of vital news from all over the world.
It publishes a weekly four-page bulletin, which it will mail to you
for five dollars a year, and which you will find worth the price many
times over. The address of the “Federated Press” is 156 West
Washington Street, Chicago, Illinois.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_A book which has been absolutely boycotted by the literary reviews of
America._
THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
BY UPTON SINCLAIR
A study of Supernaturalism as a Source of Income and a Shield to
Privilege; the first examination in any language of institutionalized
religion from the economic point of view. “Has the labour as well as the
merit of breaking virgin soil,” writes Joseph McCabe. The book has had
practically no advertising and only two or three reviews in radical
publications; yet forty thousand copies have been sold in the first
year.
_From the Rev. John Haynes Holmes_: “I must confess that it has fairly
made me writhe to read these pages, not because they are untrue or
unfair, but on the contrary, because I know them to be the real facts.
I love the church as I love my home, and therefore it is no pleasant
experience to be made to face such a story as this which you have
told. It had to be done, however, and I am glad you have done it, for
my interest in the church, after all, is more or less incidental,
whereas my interest in religion is a fundamental thing.... Let me
repeat again that I feel that you have done us all a service in the
writing of this book. Our churches today, like those of ancient
Palestine, are the abode of Pharisees and scribes. It is as spiritual
and helpful a thing now as it was in Jesus’ day for that fact to be
revealed.”
_From Luther Burbank_: “No one has ever told ‘the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth’ more faithfully than Upton Sinclair
in ‘The Profits of Religion.’”
_From Louis Untermeyer_: “Let me add my quavering alto to the chorus
of applause of ‘The Profits of Religion.’ It is something more than a
book—it is a Work!”
315 pages. Single copy, paper, 50c postpaid; three copies, $1.20;
ten copies, $3.50. By freight collect, 25 copies or more at 30 cents
per copy. Single copy, cloth, $1.00 postpaid; three copies, .25; ten
copies, $7.00. By freight collect, 25 copies or more at 60 cents per
copy.
JIMMIE HIGGINS
“Jimmie Higgins” is the fellow who does the hard work in the job of
waking up the workers. Jimmie hates war—all war—and fights against it
with heart and soul. But war comes, and Jimmie is drawn into it,
whether he will or no. He has many adventures—strikes, jails,
munitions explosions, draft-boards, army-camps, submarines and
battles. “Jimmie Higgins Goes to War” at last, and when he does he
holds back the German army and wins the battle of “Chatty Terry.” But
then they send him into Russia to fight the Bolsheviki, and there
“Jimmie Higgins Votes for Democracy.”
A picture of the American working-class movement during four years of
world-war; all wings of the movement, all the various tendencies and
clashing impulses are portrayed. Cloth, $1.00 postpaid.
_From “the Candidate”_: I have just finished reading the first
installment of “Jimmie Higgins” and I am delighted with it. It is the
beginning of a great story, a story that will be translated into many
languages and be read by eager and interested millions all over the
world. I feel that your art will lend itself readily to “Jimmie
Higgins,” and that you will be at your best in placing this dear
little comrade where he belongs in the Socialist movement. The opening
chapter of your story proves that you know him intimately. So do I and
I love him with all my heart, even as you do. He has done more for me
than I shall ever be able to do for him. Almost anyone can be “The
Candidate,” and almost anyone will do for a speaker, but it takes the
rarest of qualities to produce a “Jimmie Higgins.” You are painting a
superb portrait of our “Jimmie” and I congratulate you.
EUGENE V. DEBS.
_From Mrs. Jack London_: Jimmie Higgins is immense. He is real, and so
are the other characters. I’m sure you rather fancy Comrade Dr.
Service! The beginning of the narrative is delicious with an
irresistible loving humor; and as a change comes over it and the Big
Medicine begins to work, one realizes by the light of 1918, what you
have undertaken to accomplish. The sure touch of your genius is here,
Upton Sinclair, and I wish Jack London might read and enjoy.
CHARMIAN LONDON.
_From a Socialist Artist_: Jimmie Higgins’ start is a master portrayal
of that character. I have been out so long on these lecture tours that
I can appreciate the picture. I am waiting to see how the story
develops. It starts better than “King Coal.”
RYAN WALKER.
Price, cloth, $1.00 postpaid.
=UPTON SINCLAIR—Pasadena, California=
OTHER BOOKS BY UPTON SINCLAIR
=KING COAL=: a Novel of the Colorado coal country. Cloth, $1.00.
“Clear, convincing, complete.”—Lincoln Steffens.
“I wish that every word of it could be burned deep into the heart of
every American.”—Adolph Germer.
=THE CRY FOR JUSTICE=: an Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest,
with an Introduction by Jack London, who calls it “this humanist
Holy-book.” Thirty-two illustrations, 891 pages, $1.50.
“It should rank with the very noblest works of all time. You could
scarcely have improved on its contents—it is remarkable in variety and
scope. Buoyant, but never blatant, powerful and passionate, it has the
spirit of a challenge and a battle cry.”—Louis Untermeyer.
“You have marvelously covered the whole ground. The result is a book
that radicals of every shade have long been waiting for. You have made
one that every student of the world’s thought—economic, philosophic,
artistic—has to have.”—Reginald Wright Kauffman.
=SYLVIA=: a Novel of the Far South. Price $1.00.
=SYLVIA’S MARRIAGE=: a sequel. Price $1.00.
=DAMAGED GOODS=: a Novel made from the play by Brieux. Cloth, $1.00;
paper, 50 cents.
=PLAYS OF PROTEST=: four dramas. Price $1.00.
=THE FASTING CURE=: a study of the problem of health. Price $1.00.
_The above prices postpaid._
=UPTON SINCLAIR—Pasadena, California=
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
4. Enclosed bold font in =equals=.