“Perhaps you have not heard that it was because of his efforts to do the square thing by you in the Ammons matter that Rowsey was discharged by Superintendent Cowles upon the orders of Melville E. Stone. Yet that was what was currently reported in inner ‘A. P.’ circles at the time.”
Mr. Costello goes on to tell me that he left the Associated Press with his mind made up as to what was to be his life’s work, “the establishment of a press association which would represent the people who work, as against the eight or ten millionaire publishers, who, through the ownership of Associated Press bonds, outvote nearly 2,000 other members of the organization, and absolutely control the channels through which the great public gets its poisoned news.”
The “Federated Press” had its inception at a convention of the Labor Party in Chicago, November, 1919. It is a co-operative non-profit-making organization of working class newspapers, and maintains an admirable service of vital news from all over the world. It publishes a weekly four-page bulletin, which it will mail to you for five dollars a year, and which you will find worth the price many times over. The address of the “Federated Press” is 156 West Washington Street, Chicago, Illinois.
A book which has been absolutely boycotted by the literary reviews of America.
THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
By Upton Sinclair
A study of Supernaturalism as a Source of Income and a Shield to Privilege; the first examination in any language of institutionalized religion from the economic point of view. “Has the labour as well as the merit of breaking virgin soil,” writes Joseph McCabe. The book has had practically no advertising and only two or three reviews in radical publications; yet forty thousand copies have been sold in the first year.
From the Rev. John Haynes Holmes: “I must confess that it has fairly made me writhe to read these pages, not because they are untrue or unfair, but on the contrary, because I know them to be the real facts. I love the church as I love my home, and therefore it is no pleasant experience to be made to face such a story as this which you have told. It had to be done, however, and I am glad you have done it, for my interest in the church, after all, is more or less incidental, whereas my interest in religion is a fundamental thing.... Let me repeat again that I feel that you have done us all a service in the writing of this book. Our churches today, like those of ancient Palestine, are the abode of Pharisees and scribes. It is as spiritual and helpful a thing now as it was in Jesus’ day for that fact to be revealed.”
From Luther Burbank: “No one has ever told ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’ more faithfully than Upton Sinclair in ‘The Profits of Religion.’”