We had been training ourselves for a generation, so as to be instantly ready; we had been training ourselves in the office of Mr. Hearst’s “Cosmopolitan Magazine,” where Mr. Hearst had a twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year journalistic wizard by the name of Edgar Sisson. When we needed a molder of opinion for Russia, we sent this Hearst wizard across the seas, where he came upon a set of documents proving that Lenin and Trotsky were German agents. These documents had been examined and rejected as forgeries by Raymond Robins, also by the British Embassy, none too favorably disposed to the Bolsheviks; but matters like that do not trouble Hearst editors, who have learned to think in headlines. The “Sisson documents” were shipped to Washington, and issued under the authority of the United States government, and published in every newspaper in America.
We know today who were the real pro-Germans in Russia. Viscount French, in his recently published book, has told us that the Russian Court was rotten with pro-Germanism, and that if it had not been for treason among the Russian aristocracy, the war would have been won two years earlier. As for Lenin and Trotsky, not only were they bitter enemies of the German government, they were at this time offering to reject the Brest-Litovsk treaty, if America would support them; but America was a virtuous capitalist nation, and the entire capitalist press of America was a unit in proclaiming that our country should have no relations with men who refused to pay interest on the Tsar’s debts to J. P. Morgan & Company.
All the lying power of our Journalism was turned against the Russian Soviets; and if you have read this book without skipping, you know what that lying power is. No tale was too grotesque to be believed and spread broadcast. In the same week we would read that Trotsky had fled to Spain, that he had been put in jail by Lenin, that he had been seeking a job on the “Appeal to Reason,” Girard, Kansas! They published so many inventions that they couldn’t keep track of them. Here are two paragraphs from a single issue of one newspaper:
Nicolai Lenin, the Bolshevist Premier, is the only prominent Bolshevist left who appears to lead an austere life.—“New York Times,” February 26, 1919.
Premier Lenin, refugees say, is not affected by the food problem. His bill for fruit and vegetables in a recent month amounted to sixty thousand rubles.—“New York Times,” February 26, 1919.
In his book, “Russia in 1919,” Arthur Ransom tells how in Finland he read detailed accounts of mutiny and revolt in Petrograd, the city being bombarded by naval guns. He went into Petrograd and found the city peaceful, and everybody laughing at his tales. Returning to England he found that the tales had been forwarded to England, and published and universally believed. As I write these words, I read in my paper every other day of the fall of Petrograd. The accounts are detailed, some of them are “official,” and they continue for weeks. But finally I read that the anti-Bolshevik armies are in retreat from Petrograd!
Or take the “nationalization of women,” the most grotesque scarecrow ever constructed to terrify a highly moral people. I have shown you how the imagination of “kept” journalists runs to foul tales about sex orgies of radicals. A comic paper in Moscow published such a “skit” on Bolshevism, and the outcome is explained in the following from the “Isvestija,” the official organ of the Central Soviet Government, May 18, 1918:
Moscow Soviet decision.—The Moscow newspaper, the “Evening Life,” for printing an invented decree regarding the socialization of women, in the issue of the 3rd of May, No. 36, shall be closed for ever and fined 25,000 roubles.
And then again, in the city of Saratov, in central Russia, the Anarchists were making trouble, and some wag, to discredit the Anarchists, invented an elaborate decree, signed, “The Free Association of Anarchists of Saratov.” This decree was discovered one morning, posted in several parts of the city. An American official, Oliver M. Sayler, who was in Saratov, wrote the story in the “New Republic,” March 15, 1919. He visited the Anarchist clubs, and found them boiling with indignation—calling it a “Bolshevist plot”! Needless to say, of course, the decree had no relation to reality; the Anarchists never had any power to enforce any decree, whether in Saratov or anywhere else in Russia; several hundred Anarchists had been jailed by the Bolsheviki. But that, of course, made no difference to the editors of capitalist newspapers in America, to whom Anarchists, Bolsheviki, and Socialists were all the same; from one end of the country to the other this decree took the front page. The “Los Angeles Times” published it with a solemn assurance to its readers that the authenticity of the decree might be accepted without question. And forthwith all our capitalist clergymen rose up in their pulpits to denounce the Bolsheviki as monsters and moral perverts, and a good part of the moving picture machinery of Southern California has been set to work constructing romances around this obscene theme.
The “New Europe,” which had first published the story, made a full retraction and apology. Harold Williams, who had sent the story to England, also apologized. The American State Department denied the story officially, February 28, 1919. Jerome Davis, of the American Red Cross, denied it from first-hand knowledge in the “Independent,” March 15, 1919. But did you read these apologies and denials in American capitalist newspapers? You did not! It would not be too much to say that nine people out of ten in America today firmly believe that women have been “nationalized” in Russia, or at any rate that the Bolsheviki attempted it. In the “World Tomorrow,” for July, 1919, I come upon a letter signed Remington Rogers, Tulsa, Oklahoma. I find something very quaint and pathetic about this letter. How does it strike you?