I would call the reader’s attention to the fact that in this book I am dealing with our standard magazines and newspapers, the ones which are considered respectable, which all ladies and gentlemen accept as they accept the doctor’s pills and the clergyman’s sermons, the Bible and the multiplication table and Marian Harland’s cook-book. I have not made my case easy by dwelling on the cultural content of the “mail order” and “household” publications, of which there are scores with a circulation of a million or more; or of the agricultural papers of the country, whose total circulation amounts to tens of millions. How I could freeze your blood if I were to summarize the contents of the “Ladies’ World,” the “Gentlewoman,” the “Household Guest,” “Home Life,” the “Household,” “Comfort,” the “Home Friend,” “Mother’s Magazine,” “Everyday Life,” the “People’s Popular Monthly,” the “Clover Leaf” weeklies and the “Boyce” weeklies, the “Saturday Blade” and the “Chicago Ledger”! If I were to tell about the various “Family Story Papers,” which are left in area-ways for servants! Or the “fashion-papers,” the “Butterick Trio,” with close to two millions, the “Woman’s World,” with two millions, and “Vogue,” the “Delineator,” the “Parisienne,” the “Ladies’ Pictorial,” “Needlecraft” with their half million or more. Or the “fast” papers, which cultivate a taste for perfumed smut—and which I will not advertise by naming! Or the papers of the sporting and racing and gambling worlds, down to the “Police Gazette,” with its “leg-shows” and illustrated murders!
Also the local papers, the small dailies, the weeklies and semi-monthlies and monthlies by the thousands and tens of thousands! If you wish to get a complete picture of American Journalism, you must take these into account; you must descend from the heights of metropolitan dignity into the filthiest swamps of provincial ignorance and venality. Hardly a week passes that someone does not send me a copy of some country paper which calls for the stringing-up of Socialists to lamp-posts, and denounces highly educated Bolshevik leaders in editorials with half a dozen grammatical errors to the column.
And if you go to the small town in Pennsylvania or Arkansas or Colorado, or wherever this paper is published, you find a country editor on the level of intelligence of the local horse-doctors of Englewood, New Jersey, and Tarrytown, New York, whose proceedings I have described in this book. Frequently you find this editor hanging on by his eye-teeth, with a mortgage at the local bank, carried because of favors he does to the local money-power. You find him getting a regular monthly income from the copper-interests or the coal-interests or the lumber-interests, whatever happens to be dominant in that locality. You find him heavily subsidized at election-time by the two political machines of these great interests. His paper is used to print the speeches of the candidates of these interests, and five or ten or fifty thousand copies of this particular issue are paid for by these interests and distributed at meetings. Campaign circulars and other literature are printed in the printing-office of this newspaper, and of course the public advertising appears in its columns—a graft which is found in every state and county of the Union, and is a means by which hundreds of millions of dollars are paid as a disguised subsidy by the interests which run our two-party political system.
Our great metropolitan newspapers take a fine tone of dignity, they stand for the welfare of the general public, they are above all considerations of greed. But the conditions under which these small-town newspapers are published do not permit them to pretend to such austerity, or even to conceive of it. They are quite frankly “out for the stuff”—as everybody else they know is “out for the stuff.” For example, the “Tarrytown News,” which jumped on me with its cloven hoofs, declaring that my home had been raided as a “free love” place. This “Tarrytown News” explained quite honestly why it was opposed to allowing agitators to come to Tarrytown and denounce the Rockefellers. And why was it? Because the Rockefellers stood for religion and the home, the Constitution and the Star-Spangled Banner and the Declaration of Independence? No, not at all; it was because the Rockefellers carried a payroll in Tarrytown of thirty thousand dollars a month!
The average country or small-town editor is an entirely ignorant man; the world of culture is a sealed book to him. His idea of literature is the “Saturday Evening Post”—only as a rule he doesn’t have time to read it. His idea of art is a lithograph of the President and Vice-President with a stand of flags. His idea of music is “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean.” He has an idea what is good for his readers; “optimism” and “boost,” “cheer-up” stuff, “mother, home and heaven” stuff, “sob” stuff, “slush for the women.” He has no money to pay writers, of course; he doesn’t even set type, except for local news. He gets his “filler” in the form of “boiler-plate,” sent practically free from Washington and New York—this matter containing fiction, poetry, “special stories,” novelty and gossip of the sort his readers find entertaining. What difference does it make if sandwiched in between this reading matter is the poison propaganda of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association, of the tariff-lobbyists, the railroad-lobbyists, the liquor-lobbyists, the whole machine of capitalist graft and greed?
Several years ago I had a brilliant and wonderful idea. I was finishing “King Coal,” and thought that I had an excellent serial, timely, and full of swift incident. I ascertained that there were seventeen thousand weekly newspapers in America; surely among this number must be a few hundred which would like to give their readers the truth about labor conditions in a basic American industry! I would build up a little syndicate of my own, I would market my future books, and perhaps those of other writers! I prepared a circular, outlining the plan, and offering the entire serial for some nominal sum, ten or fifteen dollars, plus the cost of the plates from which the printing would be done. I prepared a sample sheet, containing the first half-dozen chapters of “King Coal”; you may consult the volume and satisfy yourself as to whether they are interesting chapters. I sent out the offer to thousands of weeklies, and waited for replies. How many do you think I got? I didn’t keep a record, but you could have counted them on your fingers, without your thumbs!
No, the editors of country and small-town newspapers are not giving their readers the truth about labor conditions in basic American industries. They know, as the phrase is, “which side their bread is buttered on,” and they keep that side up with care. I have said that there are fortunes to be made by giving the news to the people; I must qualify the statement by explaining that it must be done on a large scale, and you must have capital to keep you going until you reach the people who can understand you. If you try it on a small scale, and without capital, you are crushed before you get your head out of the mud. And you know that, and govern yourself accordingly. The other day I had a call from the editor of a small newspaper, out here in this broad free West, about which you read in romances. The editor explained that he hadn’t dared to write and order my books; he couldn’t afford to let a check, payable to me, go through his bank; he called personally, and would carry the books home in his trunk!
Also this chapter would be incomplete without mention of the swarm of “house organs,” published by big industrial concerns for the edification of their employes. According to the “New York Times” (Oct. 26, 1919), there are three hundred and seventy-five such publications in America, many with circulations running into thousands. During the war seventy-three were started in the shipyard industry alone. “During the past spring and summer they multiplied like bacteria.” And the “Times” tells admiringly of the subtle arts whereby slave-labor is cajoled and idealized: “saying it in ragtime ... jazz variations to the vast delight of its reading public ... a Diamond Dick sort of tale ... the story has punch ... all as intimate as the small town weekly” ... and so on through columns of poison prescriptions. They trap the poor devils in their homes:
The woman’s page is one of the most carefully thought out departments, on the theory that the influence of the family is counted on to sway the man from radicalism. Fully half of this group of publications is sent to the man’s home by mail, to give the wife first innings. In this particular magazine the woman’s page is fairly crawling with babies....
You hardly notice the propaganda even when you’re looking for it with a microscope, but it is there. It is in the weave and the woof, rather than in the conspicuous pattern. You find it in similes, “like soap in the home of a Bolshevik. Some novelty!” The agitator is taken down from the dignity of his soapbox throne and flippantly advised to bathe.