And as I am reading the final proofs of this book, I hear the answer to my cry. I read the following in the “New York Times”:
Boston, Oct. 28.—Pressmen employed by the Chapple Publishing Company, Ltd., on discovering in a cartoon in “Life” which is being printed here during the New York strike, what they considered a reflection on organized labor, suspended work and refused to return until the objectionable cartoon was taken out. The cartoon was eliminated, and the men returned to work.
The drawing depicts a room apparently meant to typify conditions existing in a city tenement district. The artist portrays a man beating his wife over the head with the leg of a chair. The woman is shown lying on the floor; the man has one knee on her body and one hand clutching her throat. A child about two years old is shown in bed watching the scene. Its face is expressive of horror. Another child, evidently a little older, is stretched on the floor, face downward. At the door is standing a patrolman in full uniform. He is talking with a captain of police, who has rushed on the scene with drawn revolver. The patrolman with hand upraised says: “It’s all right, Captain, he’s got a union card.”
You may think my remedy drastic; but, honestly, do you think that any remedy could be too drastic for an infamy such as this?
Here, as everywhere, the salvation of the world rests upon you, the workers of hand and brain. I took up half this book telling how the capitalist press lied about one man; you said, perhaps, that I liked to be in the “limelight”; anyhow, I was only one writer-fellow, and it didn’t matter to you what the newspapers did to a writer-fellow. But now I make my appeal for yourself, for your wives and your children. I have shown you how this knavish press turns the world against you; I have shown how it turns you against yourself—how it seduces you, poisons your mind, breaks your heart. You go on strike, and it plays upon your fears, it uses your hunger and want as weapons against you; it saps your strength, it eats out your soul, it smothers your thinking under mountain-loads of lies. You fall, and the chariot of Big Business rolls over you.
These men who own the world in which you struggle for life—what is it that they want? They want power, power to rule you. And what is it that you want? You want power to rule yourself. Between those two wants there is eternal and unending and irreconcilable war—such is the class struggle, and whether you will or not, you take your part in it, and I take mine. I, a writer-fellow who wants to write the truth, appeal to you, the laboring fellows of hand and brain, who want to read the truth, who must read the truth, if civilization is not to perish. I cry to you: “Help! Help against the lying, kept press!”
I cry to you for the integrity of your calling, for the honor and dignity of Journalism. I cry to you that Journalism shall no longer be the thing described by Charles A. Dana, master-cynic of the “New York Sun,” “buying white paper at two cents a pound and selling it at ten cents a pound.” I cry to you that Journalism shall be a public ministry, and that you who labor in it shall be, not wage-slaves and henchmen of privilege, but servants of the general welfare, helping your fellow-men to understand life, and to conquer the evils in nature outside them, and in their own hearts. Why cannot the men and women of this great profession form a society with a common mind and a common interest and a common conscience, based upon the fact that they are all necessary, they have each, down to the humblest office-boy, their essential part in a great social service?
By the blindness and greed of ruling classes the people have been plunged into infinite misery; but that misery has its purpose in the scheme of nature. Something more than a century ago we saw the people driven by just such misery to grope their way into a new order of society; they threw off the chains of hereditary monarchy, and made themselves citizens of free republics. And now again we face such a crisis; only this time it is in the world of industry that we have to abolish hereditary rule, and to build an industrial commonwealth in which the equal rights of all men are recognized by law. Such is the task before us; go to it with joy and certainty, playing your part in the making of the new world, in which there shall be neither slavery nor poverty, in which the natural sources of wealth belong to all men alike, and no one lives in idleness upon the labor of his fellows. That world lies just before you, and the gates to it are barred only by ignorance and prejudice, deliberately created and maintained by prostitute journalism.
CHAPTER LXVI
A FRAME-UP THAT FELL DOWN
In concluding this, the most important and most dangerous book I have ever written, I have a personal word to leave with the reader. I have here attacked the most powerful interests in America, and it seems to me hardly conceivable that they will permit the attack to go out to the world, to be circulated among the general public, without some attempt at interference.