The Thunders of Silence

by Irvin S. Cobb

"Counterfeit? why, he's as bogus as a pewter dime," said Quinlan. "I tell you I know the man. Because you don't know him he's got you fooled the same as he's got so many other people fooled. Because he looks like a steel engraving of Henry Clay you think he is a Henry Clay, I suppose—anyhow, a lot of other people do; but I'm telling you his resemblance to Henry Clay is all on the outside—it doesn't strike in any farther than the hair roots. He calls himself a self-made man. Well, he's not; he's self-assembled, that's all. He's made up of standardised and interchangeable parts. He's compounded of something borrowed from every political mountebank who's pulled that old bunk about being a friend of the great common people and gotten away with it during the last fifty years. He's not a real genius. He's a synthetic genius."

"There are just two things about Mallard that are not spurious—two things that make up the real essence and tissue of him: One is his genius as a speaker and the other is his vanity; and the bigger of these, you take it from me, is his vanity. That's the thing he feeds on—vanity. It's the breath in his nostrils, it's the savour and the salt on his daily bread. He lives on publicity, on notoriety. And yet you, a newspaper man, sit here wondering how the newspapers could kill him, and never guessing the real answer."

"Well, what is the answer then?" demanded Drayton.

"Wait, I'm coming to that. The press is always prating about the power of the press, always nagging about pitiless publicity being potent to destroy an evil thing or a bad man, and all that sort of rot. And yet every day the newspapers give the lie to their own boastings. It's true, Drayton, that up to a certain point the newspapers can make a man by printing favourable things about him. By that same token they imagine they can tear him down by printing unfavourable things about him. They think they can, but they can't. Let them get together in a campaign of vituperation against a man, and at once they set everybody to talking about him. Then let them carry their campaign just over a psychological dividing line, and right away they begin, against their wills, to manufacture sentiment for him. The reactions of printer's ink are stronger somehow than its original actions—its chemical processes acquire added strength in the back kick. What has saved many a rotten criminal in this country from getting his just deserts? It wasn't the fact that the newspapers were all for him. It was the fact that all the newspapers were against him. The under dog may be ever so bad a dog, but only let enough of us start kicking him all together, and what's the result? Sympathy for him—that's what. Calling 'Unclean, unclean!' after a leper never yet made people shun him. It only makes them crowd up closer to see his sores. I'll bet if the facts were known that was true two thousand years ago. Certainly it's true to-day, and human nature doesn't change.

"But the newspapers have one weapon they've never yet used; at least as a unit they've never used it. It's the strongest weapon they've got, and the cheapest, and the most terrible, and yet they let it lie in its scabbard and rust. With that weapon they could destroy any human being of the type of Jason Mallard in one-twentieth of the time it takes them to build up public opinion for or against him. And yet they can't see it—or won't see that it's there, all forged and ready to their hands."

"And that weapon is what?" asked Drayton.

"Silence. Absolute, utter silence. Silence is the loudest thing in the world. It thunders louder than the thunder. And it's the deadliest. What drives men mad who are put in solitary confinement? The darkness? The solitude? Well, they help. But it's silence that does the trick—silence that roars in their ears until it cracks their eardrums and addles their brains."

"Mallard is a national peril, we'll concede. Very well then, he should be destroyed. And the surest, quickest, best way for the newspapers to destroy him is to wall him up in silence, to put a vacuum bell of silence down over him, to lock him up in silence, to bury him alive in silence. And that's a simpler thing than it sounds. They have all of them, only to do one little thing—just quit printing his name."

"But they can't quit printing his name, Quinlan!" exclaimed Drayton. "Mallard's news; he's the biggest figure in the news that there is to-day in this country."

"That's the same foolish argument that the average newspaper man would make," said Quinlan scornfully. "Mallard is news because the newspapers make news of him—and for no other reason. Let them quit, and he isn't news any more—he's a nonentity, he's nothing at all, he's null and he's void. So far as public opinion goes he will cease to exist, and a thing that has ceased to exist is no longer news—once you've printed the funeral notice. Every popular thing, every conspicuous thing in the world is born of notoriety and fed on notoriety—newspaper notoriety. Notoriety is as essential to the object of notoriety itself as it is in fashioning the sentiments of those who read about it. And there's just one place where you can get wholesale, nation-wide notoriety to-day—out of the jaws of a printing press.