VIII
SOME NEWSPAPER TRAITS
At Cooper's house last winter I met Professor Grundschnitt of Berlin, who has been making a study of American newspaper methods in behalf of the German government. For some time after the professor's arrival in this country, he told me, he found himself completely at sea. American newspapers, it appeared to him, were written in two languages. One was the English language as he had studied it in the writings of Oliver Goldsmith, John Ruskin, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In America it seemed to be used chiefly by auctioneers, art critics, and immigrants. The other was a dialect, evidently English in origin, but sufficiently removed from the parent stock to be quite unintelligible. The professor spent many painful hours over such sentences as "Jeffries annexes the Brunette Beauty's Angora," and "Sugar Barons hand Uncle Sam a lemon." This dialect, he found, was extensively employed by truck-drivers, playwrights, and college students.
It did not take the professor very long, however, to overcome this initial difficulty. His education proceeded rapidly. One of the first things he learned, so he told me, is that some American newspapers are printed in black ink and some in red. As a rule, the former tell more of the truth, but the latter sell many more copies. On Sunday, which in America is observed much more rigorously than in Europe, the red ink predominates. The professor suggested that this might be a survival of primitive times when the British ancestors of the present-day Americans tattooed themselves in honour of their gods. It is universally accepted that the American business man reads so many papers because he has neither the time nor the energy to read books. But this would seem to be contradicted on Sundays, when every American business man reads two or three times the equivalent of the entire works of William Shakespeare. Herr Grundschnitt was inclined to believe that carrying home the Sunday paper is the most popular form of physical exercise among our people.
A very curious circumstance about the press in all the great American cities, the professor thought, is that every newspaper has a larger circulation than any other three newspapers combined. According to the arithmetical system in use among all civilised peoples, that would be manifestly impossible. But the professor imagines that the methods of calculation by which such results are obtained are the same as those employed by politicians in estimating their majorities on the eve of election day, by millionaires in paying their personal taxes, and by operatic sopranos in figuring out their age. The influence of a newspaper depends, of course, upon its circulation. Such influence is exercised directly in the form of news and editorial comment, and indirectly in the form of wrapping paper.
Still another curious trait about all American newspapers, this learned German found, is that they tell a story backward. This arises from the desire to put the most important thing first; and in this country it is the rule that the thing which happens last is the most important. As an illustration Herr Grundschnitt read the following brief account clipped from one of the principal newspapers in New York city:
"Arthur Wellesley Jones died in the municipal hospital last night as the result of injuries sustained in an automobile accident. The end was peaceful. Mr. Jones was driving his own machine down Fifth Avenue when he ran into a laundry-wagon at Twenty-first Street. He had left his home in New Rochelle an hour before. Mr. Jones was an enthusiastic motorist. In 1905 he won the Smithson cup for heavy cars. In 1903 he was second in the Westchester hill-climbing contest. In 1899 he helped to organise the first road race in New York State. He was in Congress from 1894 to 1898, and was elected to the Legislature in 1889, the same year that his eldest son was born. Two years before that event he married a daughter of Henry K. Smith of Philadelphia. He was graduated from Yale, having prepared for that institution at Andover, where he played right tackle on the football team. As a child he showed a decided taste for mechanics. He was born in 1861."
The daily press in America, the professor went on to say, takes extraordinary interest in visitors from abroad. He referred, as an instance in point, to the recent arrival in New York of a nephew of the Dalai Lama of Tibet. As the ship was being warped into the dock, a young man with a notebook asked the distinguished visitor if it was true that his Holiness, the Dalai Lama, had been found guilty of converting the temple treasures at Lhassa to his own use. Upon receiving a reply in the negative, the young man asked what progress the suffrage movement had made in Tibet. He was told that inasmuch as every woman in Tibet must take care of several husbands instead of one, as among the more civilised nations, women there were not interested in the question of votes. Thereupon the young man asked whether Tibet offered a promising market for automobiles. He was pleased to learn that Tibet, with its extremely sparse population and its very precipitous cliffs, was an ideal place for the automobilist.
These, however, were superficial characteristics. What the professor was anxious to learn was just how the newspapers influence the national life to the remarkable extent they undoubtedly do. He knew, of course, that the Americans are a free people, and that they select their own lawmakers and magistrates. He soon discovered that when the people desire to choose some one to rule over them, they name two, three, or more men for the same office. The newspapers then proceed to accuse these men of the vilest crimes, and the one who comes out least besmirched is declared to be elected. After he has been put into office the people no longer pay attention to him, leaving it to the newspapers to see that he conducts himself properly. When a high official is caught stealing the people rejoice, because it shows that the newspapers are doing their duty.
In the sphere of social relations, Herr Grundschnitt learned, the newspapers are mainly concerned with safeguarding the purity and integrity of the home. Most of them do this by printing full accounts of all murder and divorce trials. The professor told me that he could recall nothing in literature that quite equals the white heat of indignation with which the editor of the Star once spoke of "the festering national sore revealed in the proceedings of the Dives divorce suit, the nauseous details of which the reader will find in all their hideous completeness on the first three pages of the present issue, together with all the photographs ruled out of evidence on the grounds of decency." The press also serves the cause of public morals by holding up to scorn the vices and extravagances of the vulgar rich, whose ill-used millions, as they hasten to point out elsewhere, are nothing more than what any American may look forward to, provided he has courage and energy.