The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism

by Upton Sinclair

I have told you the stories of Maxim Gorky, of George D. Herron, of Upton Sinclair. How many such stories would you care to hear? Would you care to hear about Charlotte Perkins Gilman? About Thorstein Veblen? About Jack London, Reginald Wright Kauffman, Clarence Darrow? About Marion Craig Wentworth, Mary Ware Dennett, Gaylord Wilshire, Oscar Lovell Triggs, George Sterling? This that I am giving you is not a list of the vital spirits of our time; it is merely a list of persons of my acquaintance who happen to have been caught upon the hook of an unhappy marriage, gutted, skinned alive, and laid quivering on the red-hot griddle of Capitalist Journalism.

I will tell you a story told to me only the other day. The man asks me not to give his name; he is trying to forget. Poor fellow, as he talks about it, I see the color creep into his forehead, I see his hands begin to shake—all the symptoms I remember so well! I ask him: “Do you start in your sleep, as if someone had touched a live nerve? Do you cry aloud, and carry on long discourses through the night?”

A few years ago this man was a popular “extension” lecturer in Chicago; anywhere in the Middle West he chose to go he could have a couple of thousand people to listen to him. He was unhappily married; his wife was living with another man, and desired a divorce. When this happens in Chicago, they usually agree upon the charge of “cruelty”; their friends, and likewise all Chicago newspaper editors, perfectly understand that this is a conventional charge, having no necessary relation to the facts. I have quoted the case of Mr. Booth Tarkington, returning from Europe and saying to the newspaper reporters, with a smile, “When one’s wife accuses one of cruelty, no gentleman would think of replying.” The reporters all understood what that meant, and the public which read it appreciated Mr. Tarkington’s tact. Mr. Tarkington, you see, is a novelist whose work involves no peril to the profit system; therefore Mr. Tarkington’s wife could charge him with “cruelty,” without Mr. Tarkington’s reputation being destroyed and the sale of his books wiped out. A recent item sent out by Mr. Tarkington’s publishers—Messrs. Harper & Brothers, with the eight hundred thousand dollar mortgage reposing in the vaults of J. P. Morgan & Company—stated that they had sold a total of 1,324,900 copies of Mr. Tarkington’s novels.

But it was entirely different with this Chicago lecturer; this man, you see, was a Socialist, and therefore a menace to mortgages. In a lecture-room the question came up of a teacher who had switched a child; the speaker remarked playfully that the cave-man had been accustomed to inflict discipline with a club, and that boys, according to biology, were in the cave-man stage of development. So next day the readers of a yellow journal in Chicago read a scare headline about a “highbrow” society lecturer who was preaching “cave-man philosophy” to his students, and applying “cave-man treatment” to his wife, so that she was divorcing him for cruelty! Half a dozen such yarns at this were piled in quick succession upon the head of this Socialist lecturer, with the result that his career was ruined.

By way of contrast, let me tell you about another man—proprietor of a great department-store in New York. I will not name him; he is a worm, poor in everything but money. It happened that through mutual friends I knew about his private life; he kept numerous mistresses, and flaunted them boldly on the “Great White Way,” starting them on showy theatrical careers, and otherwise making himself a joke to the “Tenderloin.” This man’s wife divorced him for his infidelities; and what do you think happened? What did the newspapers do? Not a line about the matter in any newspaper of New York City!

To some of the rules which I lay down in this book there are exceptions. It is sometimes possible for a radical to be quoted honestly by a capitalist newspaper; it is sometimes possible to get news unfavorable to the profit-system into the most reactionary sheet. But to the following two rules there is no exception anywhere:

Rule 1. Any proprietor of a department-store anywhere in America may divorce, or be divorced, with entire immunity so far as concerns the press.

Rule 2. No radical in America can divorce or be divorced without being gutted, skinned alive, and placed on the red-hot griddle of Capitalist Journalism.

I will tell you about another Chicago Socialist whom I have mentioned—Oscar Lovell Triggs. Fifteen or twenty years ago Triggs was the most popular man in the faculty of Mr. Rockefeller’s University of Chicago; they had to get extra-sized class-rooms for his lectures, and so there was jealousy of him—camouflaged, of course, as opposition to Socialism. Triggs was so indiscreet as to live in a radical colony in Chicago. He was asked to give an interview on some subject or another, and the reporter, going down the hallway of the community building, made note of the fact that in the next room there hung some silk stockings and a pink kimono. So he went off and wrote a cunningly devised and highly suggestive story about silk stockings and a pink kimono in the room adjoining that of the Chicago college professor.

Here was a scandal, of course; and Triggs was expected to fight it. But, as it happened, Triggs was unhappily married, his wife was living with an artist in Paris, and desired a divorce. Any divorce lawyer will tell you that men who are thus caught on the hook are prone to strange and reckless rushes. Triggs, whose wife wanted a divorce, decided that this story would serve as well as anything. A friend who lived in the building at the time, and knew Triggs intimately, assures me that there was not a word of truth in the insinuations, there was nothing between Triggs and the young lady of the silk stockings and the pink kimono. Nevertheless, this most popular professor of literature was driven out of the university, and set to work as a common laborer on a California chicken-ranch.