The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism

by Upton Sinclair

It is the thesis of this book that American newspapers as a whole represent private interests and not public interests. But there will be occasions upon which exception to this rule is made; for in order to be of any use at all, the newspapers must have circulation, and to get circulation they must pretend to care about the public. There is keen competition among them, and once in a while it will happen that a “scoop” is too valuable to be thrown away. Newspapermen are human, and cannot be blamed by their owners if now and then they yield to the temptation to publish the news. So I had found it with “Everybody’s Magazine,” and so now I found it when I went with my suit-case full of documents to the office of the “New York Times.”

I arrived about ten o’clock at night, having wasted the day waiting upon the Associated Press. I was received by C. V. Van Anda, managing editor of the “Times”—and never before or since have I met such a welcome in a newspaper office. I told them I had the entire substance of the confidential report of Roosevelt’s investigating committee, and they gave me a private room and two expert stenographers, and I talked for a few minutes to one stenographer, and then for a few minutes to the other stenographer, and so the story was dashed off in about an hour. Knowing the “Times” as I have since come to know it, I have often wondered if they would have published this story if they had had twenty-four hours to think, and to be interviewed by representatives of the packers. But they didn’t have twenty-four hours, they only had two hours. They were caught in a whirlwind of excitement, and at one o’clock in the morning my story was on the press, occupying a part of the front page and practically all of the second page.

The question had been raised as to how the story should be authenticated. The “Times” met the problem by putting the story under a Washington “date-line”—that is, they told their readers that one of their clever correspondents in the capital had achieved this “scoop.” Being new to the newspaper game, I was surprised at this, but I have since observed that it is a regular trick of newspapers. When the Socialist revolution took place in Germany, I happened to be in Pasadena, and the “Los Angeles Examiner” called me up to ask what I knew about the personalities in the new government. So next morning the “Examiner” had a full description of Ebert and a detailed dispatch from Copenhagen!

The “New York Times,” having put its hand to the plough, went a long way down the furrow. For several days they published my material. I gave them the address of the Bloors, and they sent a reporter to Delaware to interview them, and get the inside story of the commission’s experiences in Chicago; this also went on the front page. All these stories the “Times” sold to scores of newspapers all over the country—newspapers which should have received them through the Associated Press, had the Associated Press been a news channel instead of a concrete wall. The “Times,” of course, made a fortune out of these sales; yet it never paid me a dollar for what I gave it, nor did it occur to me to expect a dollar. I only mention this element to show how under the profit-system even the work of reform, the service of humanity, is exploited. I have done things like this, not once but hundreds of times in my life; yet I read continually in the newspapers the charge that I am in the business of muck-raking for money. I have read such insinuations even in the “New York Times”!

Also I had another experience which threw light on the attitude of the great metropolitan newspapers to the subject of money. It is the custom of publishers to sell to newspaper syndicates what are called the “post-publication serial rights” of a book. “The Jungle” having become an international sensation, there was keen bidding for these serial rights, and they were finally sold to the “New York American” for two thousand dollars, of which the author received half. Forthwith the editorial writers of both the Hearst papers in New York, the “American” and the “Evening Journal,” began to sing the praises of “The Jungle.” You will recall the patronizing tone in which Arthur Brisbane had spoken of my charges against the Chicago packers. But now suddenly Brisbane lost all his distrust of my competence as an authority on stockyards. In the “Evening Journal” for May 29, 1906, there appeared a double-column editorial, running over into another double column, celebrating “The Jungle” and myself in emphatic capitals, and urging the American people to read my all-important revelations of the infamies of the Beef Trust:

In his book—which ought to be read by at least a million Americans—Mr. Sinclair traces the career of one family. It is a book that does for modern INDUSTRIAL slavery what “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” did for black slavery. But the work is done far better and more accurately in “The Jungle” than in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

Mr. Sinclair lived in the stockyards. He saw how the men that work there are treated, how the people that buy dreadful, diseased products are treated. HE TOLD THE TRUTH SIMPLY AND CONVINCINGLY. He went there to study life, not merely to tell a story.

As a result of the writing of this book, of the horror and the shame it has aroused, there is a good prospect that the Beef Trust devilries will be CHECKED at least, and one hideous phase of modern life at least modified....

Meanwhile, the public should be thankful to Mr. Sinclair for the public service he is rendering, and his book “The Jungle” should sell as no book has sold in America since “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

And then on May 31st, two days later, appeared another editorial of the same character, conveying to the readers of the “Evening Journal” the fact that they might read this wonderful novel in the Hearst newspapers; the first chapter would be published in both the “Evening Journal” and the “American,” and after that the complete story would run in the “American.” The ordinary capitals used by Mr. Brisbane in his editorials were not sufficient in this crisis; he used a couple of sizes larger—almost an advertising poster. I quote the closing paragraphs from his editorial: