Now, surely, this mystery is a mystery no longer! Now we know what the seer of Patmos was foreseeing—Capitalist Journalism! And when I call upon you, class-conscious workers of hand and brain, to organize and destroy this mother of all iniquities, I do not have to depart from the language of the ancient scriptures. I say to you in the words of the prophet Ezekiel:
So the spirit took me up, and brought me into the inner court; and behold, the glory of the Lord filled the house.
And I heard him speaking unto me out of the house:
Now let them put away their whoredom, and the carcases of their kings, far from me, and I will dwell in the midst of them forever.
A PRACTICAL PROGRAM
As I am about to send this book to press, I take one last look at the world around me. Half a million coal-miners have struck, a court injunction has forced the leaders to call off the strike, the miners are refusing to obey their leaders—and the newspapers of the entire United States are concealing the facts. For a week it has been impossible for me to learn, except from vague hints, what is happening in the coal-strike. And at the same time, because of false newspaper stories from Centralia, Washington, a “white terror” reigns in the entire West, and thousands of radicals are beaten, jailed, and shot.
I have pleaded and labored long to avoid a violent revolution in America; I intend to go on pleading and laboring to the last hour. I know that thousands of my readers will, like myself, be desperately anxious for something they can do. I decided to work out a plan of action; something definite, practical, and immediate.
I propose that we shall found and endow a weekly publication of truth-telling, to be known as “The National News.” This publication will carry no advertisements and no editorials. It will not be a journal of opinion, but a record of events pure and simple. It will be published on ordinary newsprint paper, and in the cheapest possible form. It will have one purpose and one only, to give to the American people once every week the truth about the world’s events. It will be strictly and absolutely nonpartisan, and never the propaganda organ of any cause. It will watch the country, and see where lies are being circulated and truth suppressed; its job will be to nail the lies, and bring the truth into the light of day. I believe that a sufficient number of Americans are awake to the dishonesty of our press to build up for such a paper a circulation of a million inside of a year.
Let me say at the outset that I am not looking for a job. I have my work, and it isn’t editing a newspaper; nor do I judge myself capable of that rigid impartiality which such an enterprise would require. It is my idea that control of the paper should be vested in a board of directors, composed of twenty or thirty men and women of all creeds and causes, who have proven by their life-time records that they believe in fair play. By way of illustration, I will indicate my idea of such a board: Allan Benson, Alice Stone Blackwell, Harriet Stanton Blatch, Arthur Bullard, William C. Bullitt, Herbert Croly, Max Eastman, William Hard, Mrs. J. Borden Harriman, Rev. John Haynes Holmes, Hamilton Holt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Paul Kellogg, Amos Pinchot, Charles Edward Russell, Lincoln Steffens, J. G. Phelps Stokes, Ida Tarbell, Col. William Boyce Thompson, Samuel Untermyer, Frank A. Vanderlip, Oswald Garrison Villard, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise.
The above list is confined to men and women who live in or near New York, and who therefore could attend directors’ meetings, and not be merely “dummies.” You will note that the list contains some practical publishers and editors; it contains Socialists and anti-Socialists, pro-Bolsheviks and anti-Bolsheviks, radicals and liberals of all shades.