CHAPTER LI
THE PRESS AND THE RADICALS
If you go into a New York club in the middle of August, you will be told in entire good faith that “everybody” is out of town. It is this “everybody” who is out of town in August that American Journalism knows and serves. Those who stay in town in August are “nobody,” and have to take their chances with the newspapers, as with everything else in capitalist society. Imagine yourself a poor devil, caught in a set of circumstances which cause the city editor of some newspaper, after five minutes consideration, to make up his mind that you are guilty of a crime! Trial by a city editor in five minutes, and execution in columns of illustrated slander—that is our American system of jurisprudence. In the city of Atlanta, a Jewish manufacturer of pencils was tried for rape and murder. He was quite evidently innocent, but it happens that the “poor whites” of the South are jealous of the commercial keenness of the Jews; the politicians of the South want the votes of these “poor whites,” and the “yellow” journals want their pennies; so this poor wretch was hounded by the newspapers for several months, and finally was hanged.
But it is for the poor devil become class-conscious, and protesting against injustice to his class, that our Journalism reserves its deadliest venom. It is when the Radical steps upon the scene that the hunting-pack joins in full cry. Then every prejudice, every hatred in the whole journalistic psychology becomes focused as by a burning-glass upon one centre. The hatred of the staff, men who have sold their honor, and take bold truth-telling for a personal insult; the hatred of the owner, whose life-time gains are threatened; the hatred of the advertiser who supports the paper, of the banker who handles its funds, of the politician who betrays the state to it—all these various hatreds mass themselves, they form what the foot-ball player knows as a “V,” they “rush” this enemy and bowl him over and trample him under their feet.
Any kind of radical, it makes no difference; anyone who advocates a change in anything, who expresses discontent with the system of legalized plunder and repression. Six or seven years ago Mrs. Pankhurst came from England in the interest of militant suffrage. The American people had read about Mrs. Pankhurst, and wanted to know what she looked like, and what she was going to do in America. A New York paper came out with a report to the effect that Mrs. Pankhurst, before being allowed to land in New York, had been required by the Federal authorities to give a pledge that she would not engage in militancy in America. This report was cabled to London, where it was hailed with glee by Mrs. Pankhurst’s opponents; Lloyd George made a speech about it, and this speech was cabled to America by the Associated Press, and thus widely spread in the American papers. Mrs. Pankhurst stated to me personally that she had been asked for no such pledge, and had given no such pledge, and that all her efforts to have this false report corrected by the New York newspapers and by the Associated Press had been in vain.
Such was the treatment of a “militant” leader. You say, perhaps, “Well, nobody cares about those militants.” If so, let us hear one of those who vehemently opposed “militancy.” I write to Mrs. Alice Stone Blackwell, and she replies:
For many years, the news carried by the great press agencies on the subject of woman suffrage was habitually twisted, and the twist was almost always unfavorable to suffrage. As editor for a long time of the “Woman’s Journal,” and later as one of the editors of the “Woman Citizen,” I had constant occasion to observe this, and I commented upon it repeatedly. The thing happened so often as to make it impossible to explain it as accident or coincidence.
As an extreme instance, take the following: Every time that the woman suffrage bill was defeated in the British House of Commons, the fact was promptly cabled to this country; but when the bill finally passed—an event which both friends and opponents of suffrage were awaiting with great interest—not one of the papers in the United States that are served by the Associated Press gave the news!
In my suffrage work, I learned beyond question that the news coming through the great press agencies was colored and distorted; and if this has been done on one subject, it has doubtless been done on others. A good many women, I think, learned a wholesome distrust of press reports during the suffrage struggle.
And now let us hear some radicals of the male sex. Hiram Johnson of California is a radical. In “Everybody’s Magazine” during 1908 there appeared an interview which had been submitted to him and printed with his corrections. Sixteen newspapers published on their front page the report that Governor Johnson had repudiated this interview; and when he declared that the report was false, they refused to correct it.
Charles Zueblin is a radical—a very quiet and conservative one, who lectures on municipal ownership to ladies’ clubs. I write to ask him what his experiences have been, and he tells me they are “too personal to be quoted.” He gives me one illustration, which I take the liberty of quoting: