Largely for my own amusement, but with a view to making a little more pleasant the task of high school students in approaching political economy, I wrote a little book called “The New Robinson Crusoe.” It was put out by that thoroughly staid and respectable firm, Harcourt & Brace. The book did nothing but illustrate in a microcosm the commercial and economic system of our world as it is. There was no attempt at suggesting a remedy such as Socialism or Communism, nor any effort at propaganda. So at least it seemed to my mind in writing it, and so it seemed to the mind of Mr. Harcourt. He thought it would be an excellent book for side reading in high school economics courses, and took it as a commercial prospect. In addition to the regular edition, he printed 250 copies in pamphlet form, which were sent to high school teachers with letters asking them to look it over and give their opinion. Harcourt showed me letters received from teachers, which run about as follows:
“I am a teacher in such and such a high school and teach political economy. I have read ‘The New Robinson Crusoe,’ and find it very interesting. I should like to recommend it to my pupils, but you know as well as I do that the day I make such a recommendation I would lose my job. Our supervisors will not stand for that amount of truth in regard to our political and economic system. How did you come to print the book?”
I was told of many cases of text-book publishers who are literally facing both ways—running two editions of books, adjusted to the prejudices of their customers. The American Book Company has one version of Civil War history for the North, and another for the South. In text-books on biology, you may believe in evolution in your editions for New England; but if you want to sell to the far South, you must have an edition in which “Darwinism” is repudiated. I have before me an editorial from the Newton, Mississippi, “Record,” a daily newspaper whose pious editor is not much shocked to learn that the book companies have been “robbing the state and the poor students,” but is horrified by the news that they have been furnishing books “contrary to the teaching of the Bible.” We may assure this pious editor that the book companies will accept a compromise with him, whereby they may continue to “rob the state and the poor students,” in consideration of their leaving out the achievements of modern science!
CHAPTER LXIV
POISON PICTURES
There are other forms of propaganda now being turned out wholesale for our children. There are various papers and magazines, to which in many cases the pupils are required to subscribe. For example, a four-page weekly newspaper called “Current Events”; during the time of the White Terror in this country this paper was full of the most atrocious slanders concerning the radicals. As I am working on this book someone sends me a sample copy; a new president of Armour & Company has been appointed, and the event is recorded to the school children under a headline, “Reward for Hard Work.” Such little touches, you see! Nothing is said about “The Jungle”; indeed, I could tell you of teachers who have lost their jobs for advising their pupils to read “The Jungle.” At the high school of Claremont, California, some thirty miles from where I live, the Better America Federation dragged a teacher into the newspapers because he ordered from the county library “The Jungle Book,” by Rudyard Kipling, and the librarian sent him “The Jungle” by mistake!
Also there are moving pictures. Quite recently one of the great statesmen of our plutocracy was appointed director of moving picture propaganda, at a salary of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year; our kept press celebrated this as one of the great events of our history. Speaking before the Bond Club in New York City, Mr. Will H. Hays unbosomed himself to his masters: “Unless people are properly entertained, this country may go Red; but shake a rattle at the baby and it calms down.” The rattle is now being diligently shaken from eleven o’clock in the morning until eleven o’clock at night, in some twenty thousand moving picture houses throughout the United States; and the censors keep careful watch over the infant’s mental states. Some of the organized workers made an effort to start a moving picture business of their own, the Labor Film Service; and among the films they tried to show was “The Jungle.” They submitted it in due course to the National Board of Review, and were ordered to remove a caption describing the United States of America as “Not just the sweet land of liberty.” Also they were ordered to remove a caption in a court house scene, “Pleading for Justice.” This seemed to convey the idea that workingmen sometimes did not get justice in the United States without pleading for it!
Take the experience of D. W. Griffith, who produced a film called “The Whistle,” dealing with the life of a factory worker. The Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce took offense at this picture, and issued a bulletin warning the masters of industry throughout the United States of the perils contained in such films. One caption ran: “Since the days of Plato and Socrates there have been many men of wisdom, but none sage enough to solve the eternal struggle between capital and labor.” Mr. Griffith was forbidden to mention the struggle between capital and labor in Pennsylvania, and the caption had to read: “One of the eternal struggles of life.” Another line read: “Connors’ widow came to you and you sent her away with a few filthy dollars when you killed her husband.” This had to be modified to read: “When Connors’ widow came to you, why didn’t you act like the decent bosses of today?” And again the lines: “You’ve had six years to make this place safe. You’ve been thinking of dollars. You haven’t had time to think of lives.” The censor changed this to read: “You had no right to put off making this place safe.”
Also there are films prepared especially for schools; “educational films,” they are called. This industry is the growth of the past four years, and already there are a hundred firms offering films, and some thirty thousand schools using them. Will Hays went before the N. E. A. convention of 1922 in Boston, and shook his rattle; the moving picture manufacturers of the country yearned to co-operate with the educators, to produce great pictures for the schools. Then he went back to his masters, who turned him over their knee and spanked him; the manufacturers had no remotest desire to co-operate with anyone—the movie houses would stand no competition from the schools, and the schools could not have pictures except second hand. So the poor educators have to make out with scenery pictures boosting the railroads, and so-called “industrial films,” boosting various makes of auto tires and shoes.
If you get tired of these, there are propaganda pictures, in support of every base prejudice. Needless to say, the product is full of the trickery of Big Business. A state inspector of “visual instruction” sends me some samples. Here is the National Film Company, with its newest release, “Wolves of the Street, an absorbing story showing machinations of the Bolsheviki.” And here is the Victor Animatograph Company, with Mr. Bryan’s “wonderful illustrated address. Back to the Ape, or Back to God?” And here are the “Better America Lectures,” prepared by Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, chaplain to the military department of God, Mammon and Company. For only $425 you may purchase these ten complete “lectures,” which have been supplied to the United States Army and Navy to the amount of $55,000, and which are full of every mental poison you can imagine.
This chaplain, it appears, is making up for the money he lost a few years ago, when he got caught in some stock-gambling business, and had to confess in tears before his congregation. If you will consult “The Brass Check,” pages 186-7, you will find him lying about the Colorado miners, and having his lies circulated in expensive form by parties whom he dares not name; also you will find him, pages 389-90, hiring himself out to the anti-Bolshevik liars, and perpetrating this culmination of all human infamy: “It is now conceded that the interior towns and cities of Russia have gone over to this nationalization of women.” From the flamboyant circular of his lectures, I learn that he has spoken before 2,600 audiences, and in every state of the union, and that the subjects he offers to colleges and schools include: “How Bolshevism Ruined Russia, and how it works Ruin where Tried; Is Socialism the Perpetual Motion Machine Delusion converted into Economics; False Views of Equality as Incitements to Social Revolution”—etc., etc. And such a list of sponsors—the whole Interlocking Directorate, and the Chiefs of its Riot Department, and of its Grand Old Party, and of its Goose-herds and Goose-step Drill-masters.