The Thunders of Silence

by Irvin S. Cobb

"We call baseball our national pastime—granted! But let the newspapers, all of them, during one month of this coming spring, quit printing a word about baseball, and you'd see the parks closed up and the weeds growing on the base lines and the turnstiles rusting solid. You remember those deluded ladies who almost did the cause of suffrage some damage last year by picketing the White House and bothering the President when he was busy with the biggest job that any man had tackled in this country since Abe Lincoln? Remember how they raised such a hullabaloo when they were sent to the workhouse? Well, suppose the newspapers, instead of giving them front-page headlines and columns of space every day, had refused to print a line about them or even so much as to mention their names. Do you believe they would have stuck to the job week after week as they did stick to it? I tell you they'd have quit cold inside of forty-eight hours.

"Son, your average latter-day martyr endures his captivity with fortitude because he knows the world, through the papers, is going to hear the pleasant clanking of his chains. Otherwise he'd burst from his cell with a disappointed yell and go out of the martyr business instanter. He may not fear the gallows or the stake or the pillory, but he certainly does love his press notices. He may or may not keep the faith, but you can bet he always keeps a scrapbook. Silence—that's the thing he fears more than hangman's nooses or firing squads.

"And that's the cure for your friend, Jason Mallard, Esquire. Let the press of this country put the curse of silence on him and he's done for. Silence will kill off his cause and kill off his following and kill him off. It will kill him politically and figuratively. I'm not sure, knowing the man as I do, but what it will kill him actually. Entomb him in silence and he'll be a body of death and corruption in two weeks. Just let the newspapers and the magazines provide the grave, and the corpse will provide itself."

Drayton felt himself catching the fever of Quinlan's fire. He broke in eagerly.

"But, Quinlan, how could it be done?" he asked. "How could you get concerted action for a thing that's so revolutionary, so unprecedented, so——"

"This happens to be one time in the history of the United States when you could get it," said the inebriate. "You could get it because the press is practically united to-day in favour of real Americanism. Let some man like your editor-in-chief, Fred Core, or like Carlos Seers of the Era, or Manuel Oxus of the Period, or Malcolm Flint of the A.P. call a private meeting in New York of the biggest individual publishers of daily papers and the leading magazine publishers and the heads of all the press associations and news syndicates, from the big fellows clear down to the shops that sell boiler plate to the country weeklies with patent insides. Through their concerted influence that crowd could put the thing over in twenty-four hours. They could line up the Authors' League, line up the defence societies, line up the national advertisers, line up organised labour in the printing trades—line up everybody and everything worth while. Oh, it could be done—make no mistake about that. Call it a boycott; call it coercion, mob law, lynch law, anything you please—it's justifiable. And there'd be no way out for Mallard. He couldn't bring an injunction suit to make a newspaper publisher print his name. He couldn't buy advertising space to tell about himself if nobody would sell it to him. There's only one thing he could do—and if I'm any judge he'd do it, sooner or later."

THAT'S THE THING HE FEEDS ON—VANITY.[ToList]

Young Drayton stood up. His eyes were blazing.