I can understand it now. We were trying to get together in an association, but the big bosses always got in, and Mr. Ochs always came TO OUR DINNER, and always made the principal speech, and always dismissed the gathering after vaudeville stunts by “old vets.” I remember that at that dinner I PAID, but sat away at the foot of a horseshoe table, and the BIG GUNS of the “Times” all sat around the center of the horseshoe, and the big guns thundered and sent us away—me boiling, that we writers had to sit mute and dumb at our own dinner, and could never talk over our affairs—the bosses rushed so to every gathering we planned.
I wish you could print the menu card for that dinner—the illustration on the cover. I kept it as the most humiliating example I ever saw of the status of the news-writer.... The illustration showed Adolph S. Ochs as a man with his coat off wielding a big sledgehammer. He was knocking one of those machines where you send the ball away up in the air, and get a cigar if the bell rings at the top of the column. Well, a little figure stood behind the redoubtable plutocratic owner of the “Times.” This little figure was labeled “THE STAFF.”
“STAFF” WAS FLUNKEYING IT FOR OCHS—holding the great man’s hat and coat, if you will—while he hit the circulation ball a wallop!
CHAPTER LXV
THE PRESS SET FREE
Some years ago Allan Benson told me of his troubles as an honest journalist; I asked him to repeat them for this book, and he answered:
I doubt if my experiences as a daily newspaper editor would serve your purpose. When I was a daily editor I edited. I printed what I pleased. If I could not do so, I resigned. I didn’t resign with a bank account to fall back upon—I resigned broke.
I am sorry that I struck my friend Benson in an uncommunicative mood. It doesn’t in the least interfere with my thesis to learn that some editors resign; it is plain enough to the dullest mind that it doesn’t help the public when an honest man resigns, and a rogue or a lickspittle takes his place.
I am not one of those narrow radicals who believe that the pocket-nerve of the workers is the only nerve, or even the principal nerve, by which they will be moved to action. I know that the conscience of newspaper men is struggling all the time. Now and then I come on a case of truth-telling in a capitalist newspaper, which cannot be explained by any selfish, competitive motive. What does it mean? If you could go inside that office, you would find some man risking the bread that goes into his children’s mouths, the shoes that go onto their feet, in order that the knavery of Capitalist Journalism may be a little less knavish; going to his boss and laying down the law: “I won’t stand for that. If that goes in, I go out.” As a rule, alas, he goes out—and this reduces the inclination of others to fight for honesty in the news.
One purpose of this book is to advocate a union of newspaper workers, so that they may make their demands as an organization, and not as helpless individuals. Events move fast these days; while I write, I learn that there is already a “News-Writers’ Union” in Boston, and one in New Haven; there is one being formed in Omaha, one in Louisville, one in Seattle, one in San Francisco. In Louisville the “Courier-Journal” and “Times” served notice on their staff that joining the union would automatically constitute resignation. In San Francisco, I am told by an editor of that city, the movement “was carried through swiftly and silently at the start, the evening papers being one hundred per cent organized, the morning papers about fifty per cent.” Then the publishers got wind of it, and held a secret meeting in the St. Francis Hotel. “That fearless backer of organized labor and the rights of the working classes, to wit: William Randolph Hearst, preferred to carry out his great program of betterment without consulting his handmaidens and bondmen.” The “Chronicle,” the paper of “Mike” De Young, took the same stand; so—
Upon the morning after the meeting every man on both papers who had signed the charter roll of the proposed association was told to recant with bended knee, or to go forth and earn his bread with a pick and shovel. Some did and some did not—all honor to the latter.... It is certain that the publishers of the morning papers will fight to the last ditch.