Chapter II: Part 2

No such centripedal mandate, as far as I have been able to discover, is in the fundamental law of any other country practising the representative system. An Englishman, if ambition heads him toward St. Stephen’s, may go hunting for a willing constituency wherever the hunting looks best, and if he fails in the Midlands he may try again in the South, or in the North, or in Scotland or Wales. A Frenchman of like dreams has the same privilege; the only condition, added after nineteen years of the Third Republic, is that he may not be a candidate in two or more _arrondissements_ at once. And so with a German, an Italian, or a Spaniard. But not so with an American. He must be an actual inhabitant of the State he aspires to represent at Washington. More, he must be, in all save extraordinary cases, an actual inhabitant of the congressional district--for here, by a characteristic American process, the fundamental law is sharpened by custom. True enough, this last requirement is not laid down by the constitution. It would be perfectly legal for the thirty-fifth New York district, centring at Syracuse, to seek its congressman in Manhattan, or even at Sing Sing. In various iconoclastic States, in fact, the thing has been occasionally done. But not often; not often enough to produce any appreciable effect. The typical congressman remains a purely local magnifico, the gaudy cock of some small and usually far from appetizing barnyard. His rank and dignity as a man are measured by provincial standards of the most puerile sort, and his capacity to discharge the various and onerous duties of his office is reckoned almost exclusively in terms of his ability to hold his grip upon the local party machine.

If he has genuine ability, it is a sort of accident. If he is thoroughly honest, it is next door to a miracle. Of the 430-odd representatives who carry on so diligently and obscenely at Washington, making laws and determining policies for the largest free nation ever seen in the world, there are not two dozen whose views upon any subject under the sun carry any weight whatsoever outside their own bailiwicks, and there are not a dozen who rise to anything approaching unmistakable force and originality. They are, in the overwhelming main, shallow fellows, ignorant of the grave matters they deal with and too stupid to learn. If, as is often proposed, the United States should adopt the plan of parliamentary responsibility and the ministry should be recruited from the lower house, then it would be difficult, without a radical change in election methods, to fetch up even such pale talents and modest decencies as were assembled for their cabinets by Messrs. Wilson and Harding. The better sort of congressmen, to be sure, acquire after long service a good deal of technical proficiency. They know the traditions and precedents of the two houses; they can find their way in and out of every rathole in the Capitol; they may be trusted to carry on the legislative routine in a more or less shipshape manner. Of such sort are the specialists paraded in the newspapers--on the tariff, on military affairs, on foreign relations, and so on. They come to know, in time, almost as much as a Washington correspondent, or one of their own committee clerks. But the average congressman lifts himself to no such heights of sagacity. He is content to be led by the fugelmen and bellwethers. Examine him at leisure, and you will find that he is incompetent and imbecile, and not only incompetent and imbecile, but also incurably dishonest. The first principles of civilized law-making are quite beyond him; he ends, as he began, a local politician, interested only in jobs. His knowledge is that of a third-rate country lawyer--which he often is in fact. His intelligence is that of a country newspaper editor, or evangelical divine. His standards of honour are those of a country banker--which he also often is. To demand sense of such a man, or wide and accurate information, or a delicate feeling for the public and private proprieties, is to strain his parts beyond endurance.

The constitution, of course, stops with Congress, but its influence is naturally powerful within the States, and one finds proofs of the fact on all sides. It is taking an herculean effort everywhere to break down even the worst effects of this influence; the prevailing tendency is still to discover a mysterious virtue in the office-holder who was born and raised in the State, or county, or city, or ward. The judge must come from the bar of the court he is to adorn; the mayor must be part and parcel of the local machine; even technical officers, such as engineers and health commissioners, lie under the constitutional blight. The thing began as a belief in local self-government, the oldest of all the sure cures for despotism. But it has gradually taken on the character of government by local politicians, which is to say, by persons quite unable to comprehend the most elemental problems of State and nation, and unfitted by nature to deal with them honestly and patriotically, even if they could comprehend them. Just as prohibition was forced upon the civilized minorities collected in the great cities against their most vigorous and persistent opposition, so the same minorities, when it comes to intra-state affairs, are constantly at the mercy of predatory bands of rural politicians. If there is any large American city whose peculiar problems are dealt with competently and justly by its State legislature, then I must confess that twenty years in journalism have left me ignorant of it. An unending struggle for fairer dealing goes on in every State that has large cities, and every concession to their welfare is won only at the cost of gigantic effort. The State legislature is never intelligent; it represents only the average mind of the county bosses, whose sole concern is with jobs. The machines that they represent are wholly political, but they have no political principles in any rational sense. Their one purpose and function is to maintain their adherents in the public offices, or to obtain for them in some other way a share of the State funds. They are quite willing to embrace any new doctrine, however fantastic, or to abandon any old one, however long supported, if only the business will promote their trade and so secure their power.

This concentration of the ultimate governmental authority in the hands of small groups of narrow, ignorant, and unconscionable manipulators tends inevitably to degrade the actual office-holder, or, what is the same thing, to make office-holding prohibitive to all men not already degraded. It is almost impossible to imagine a man of genuine self-respect and dignity offering himself as a candidate for the lower house--or, since the direct primary and direct elections brought it down to the common level, for the upper house--in the average American constituency. His necessary dealings with the electors themselves, and with the idiots who try more or less honestly to lead them, would be revolting enough, but even worse would be his need of making terms with the professional politicians of his party--the bosses of the local machine. These bosses naturally make the most of the constitutional limitation; it works powerfully in their favour. A local notable, in open revolt against them, may occasionally beat them by appealing directly to the voters, but nine times out of ten, when there is any sign of such a catastrophe, they are prompt to perfume the ticket by bringing forth another local notable who is safe and sane, which is to say, subservient and reliable. The thing is done constantly; it is a matter of routine; it accounts for most of the country bankers, newspaper owners, railroad lawyers, proprietors of cement works, and other such village bigwigs in the lower house. Here everything runs to the advantage of the bosses. It is not often that the notable in rebellion is gaudy enough to blind the plain people to the high merits of his more docile opponent. They see him too closely and know him too well. He shows none of that exotic charm which accounts, on a different plane, for exogamy. There is no strangeness, no mysteriousness, above all, no novelty about him.

It is my contention that this strangle-hold of the local machines would be vastly less firm if it could be challenged, not only by rebels within the constituency, but also by salient men from outside. The presidential campaigns, indeed, offer plenty of direct proof of it. In these campaigns it is a commonplace for strange doctrines and strange men to force themselves upon the practical politicians in whole sections of the country, despite their constant effort to keep their followers faithful to the known. All changes, of whatever sort, whether in leaders or in ideas, are opposed by such politicians at the start, but time after time they are compelled to acquiesce and to hurrah. Bryan, as every one knows, forced himself upon the Democratic party by appealing directly to the people; the politicians, in the main, were bitterly against him until further resistance was seen to be useless, and they attacked him again the moment he began to weaken, and finally disposed of him. So with Wilson. It would be absurd to say that the politicians of his party--and especially the bosses of the old machines in the congressional districts--were in favour of him in 1912. They were actually against him almost unanimously. He got past their guard and broke down their resolution to nominate some more trustworthy candidate by operating directly upon the emotions of the voters. For some reason never sufficiently explained he became the heir of the spirit of rebellion raised by Bryan sixteen years before, and was given direct and very effective aid by Bryan himself. Roosevelt saddled himself upon the Republican party in exactly the same way. The bosses made heroic efforts to sidetrack him, to shelve him, to get rid of him by any means short of homicide, but his bold enterprises and picturesque personality enchanted the people, and if it had not been for the extravagant liberties that he took with his popularity in later years he might have retained it until his death.

The same possibility of unhorsing the machine politicians, I believe, exists in even the smallest electoral unit. All that is needed is the chance to bring in the man. Podunk cannot produce him herself, save by a sort of miracle. If she has actually hatched him, he is far away by the time he has come to his full stature and glitter--in the nearest big city, in Chicago or New York. Podunk is proud of him, and many other Podunks, perhaps, are stirred by his ideas, his attitudes, his fine phrases--but he lives, say, in some Manhattan congressional district which has the Hon. Patrick Googan as its representative by divine right, and so there is no way to get him into the halls of Congress. In his place goes the Hon. John P. Balderdash, State’s attorney for five years, State senator for two terms, and county judge for a brief space--and always a snide and petty fellow, always on the best of terms with the local bosses, always eager for a job on any terms they lay down. The yokels vote for the Hon. Mr. Balderdash, not because they admire him, but because their only choice is between him and the Hon. James Bosh. If anything even remotely resembling a first-rate man could come into the contest, if it were lawful for them to rid themselves of their recurrent dilemma by soliciting the interest of such a man, then they would often enough rise in their might and compel their parish overlords, as the English put it, to adopt him. But the constitution protects these overlords in their business, and in the long run the voters resign all thought of deliverance. Thus the combat remains one between small men, and interest in it dies out. Most of the men who go to the lower house are third-raters, even in their own narrow bailiwicks. In my own congressional district, part of a large city, there has never been a candidate of any party, during the twenty years that I have voted, who was above the intellectual level of a corner grocer. No successful candidate of that district has ever made a speech in Congress (or out of it) worth hearing, or contributed a single sound idea otherwise to the solution of any public problem. One and all, they have confined themselves exclusively to the trade in jobs. One and all, they have been ciphers in the house and before the country.

Well, perhaps I labour my point too much. It is, after all, not important. The main thing is the simple fact that the average representative from my district is typical of Congress--that, if anything, he is superior to the normal congressman of these, our days. That normal congressman, as year chases year, tends to descend to such depths of puerility, to such abysses of petty shysterism, that he becomes offensive alike to the intelligence and to the nose. His outlook, when it is honest, is commonly childish--and it is very seldom honest. The product of a political system which puts all stress upon the rewards of public office, he is willing to make any sacrifice, of dignity, of principle, of honour, to hold and have those rewards. He has no courage, no intellectual _amour propre_, no ardent belief in anything save his job, and the jobs of his friends. It was easy for Wilson to beat him into line on the war issue; it was easy for the prohibitionists to intimidate and stampede him; it is easy for any resolute man or group of men to do likewise. I read the _Congressional Record_ faithfully, and have done so for years. In the Senate debates, amid oceans of tosh, I occasionally encounter a flash of wit or a gleam of sense; direct elections have not yet done their work. But in the lower house there is seldom anything save a garrulous and intolerable imbecility. The discussion of measures of the utmost importance--bills upon which the security and prosperity of the whole nation depend--is carried on in the manner of the Chautauqua and the rural stump. Entire days go by without a single congressman saying anything as intelligent, say, as the gleams that one sometimes finds in the New York _Herald_, or even in the New York _Times_. The newspapers, unfortunately, give no adequate picture of the business. No American journal reports the daily debates comprehensively, as the debates in the House of Commons are reported by the London _Times_, _Daily Telegraph_, and _Morning Post_. All one hears of, as a rule, is the action taken, and only too often the action taken, even when it is reported fairly, is unintelligible without the antecedent discussion. If any one who reads this wants to know what such a discussion is like, then I counsel him to go to the nearest public library, ask for the _Record_ for 1918, and read the debate in the lower house on the Volstead Act. It was, I believe, an average debate, and on a subject of capital importance. It was, from first to last, almost fabulous in its evasion of the plain issue, its incredible timorousness and stupidity, its gross mountebankery and dishonesty. Not twenty men spoke in it as men of honour and self-respect. Not ten brought any idea into it that was not a silly idea and a stale one.

That debate deserves a great deal more study than it will ever get from the historians of American politics, nearly all of whom, whether they lean to the right or to the left, are bedazzled by the economic interpretation of history, and so seek to account for all political phenomena in terms of crop movements, wage scales, and panics in Wall Street. It seems to me that that obsession blinds them to a fact of the first importance, to wit, the fact that political ideas, under a democracy as under a monarchy, originate above quite as often as they originate below, and that their popularity depends quite as much upon the special class interests of professional politicians as it depends upon the underlying economic interests of the actual voters. It is, of course, true, as I have argued, that the people can force ideas upon the politicians, given powerful leaders of a non-political (or, at all events, non-machine) sort, but it is equally true that there are serious impediments to the process, and that it is not successful very often. As a matter of everyday practice the rise and fall of political notions is determined by the self-interest of the practical politicians of the country, and though they naturally try to bring the business into harmony with any great popular movements that may be in progress spontaneously, they by no means wait and beg for mandates when none are vociferously forthcoming, but go ahead bravely on their own account, hoping to drag public opinion with them and so safeguard their jobs. Such is the origin of many affecting issues, later held dear by millions of the plain people. Such was the process whereby prohibition was foisted upon the nation by constitutional amendment, to the dismay of the solid majority opposed to it and to the surprise of the minority in favour of it.

What lay under the sudden and melodramatic success of the prohibitionist agitators was simply their discovery of the incurable cowardice and venality of the normal American politician--their shrewd abandonment of logical and evidential propaganda for direct political action. For years their cause had languished. Now and then a State or part of a State went dry, but often it went wet again a few years later. Those were the placid days of white-ribbon rallies, of wholesale pledge-signings, of lectures by converted drunkards, of orgiastic meetings in remote Baptist and Methodist churches, of a childish reliance upon arguments that fetched only drunken men and their wives, and so grew progressively feebler as the country became more sober. The thing was scarcely even a nuisance; it tended steadily to descend to the level of a joke. The prohibitionist vote for President hung around a quarter of a million; it seemed impossible to pull it up to a formidable figure, despite the stupendous labours of thousands of eloquent dervishes, lay and clerical, male and female. But then, out of nowhere, came the Anti-Saloon League, and--sis! boom! ah! Then came the sudden shift of the fire from the people to the politicians--and at once there was rapid progress. The people could only be wooed and bamboozled, but the politicians could be threatened; their hold upon their jobs could be shaken; they could be converted at wholesale and by _force majeure_. The old prohibition weepers and gurglers were quite incapable of this enterprise, but the new janissaries of the Anti-Saloon League--sharp lawyers, ecclesiastics too ambitious to pound mere pulpits, outlaw politicians seeking a way back to the trough--were experts at every trick and dodge it demanded. They understood the soul of the American politician. To him they applied the economic interpretation of history, resolutely and with a great deal of genial humour. They knew that his whole politics, his whole philosophy, his whole concept of honesty and honour, was embraced in his single and insatiable yearning for a job, and they showed him how, by playing with them, he could get it and keep it, and how, by standing against them, he could lose it. Prohibition was rammed into the constitution by conquering the politicians; the people in general were amazed when the thing was accomplished; it may take years to reconcile them to it.

It was the party system that gave the Anti-Saloon League manipulators their chance, and they took advantage of it with great boldness and cleverness. The two great parties divide the country almost equally; it is difficult to predict, in a given year, whether the one or the other musters the most votes. This division goes down into the lowest electoral units; even in those backward areas where one party has divine grace and the other is of the devil there are factional differences that amount to the same thing. In other words, the average American politician is never quite sure of his job. An election (and, if not an election, then a primary) always exposes him to a definite hazard, and he is eager to diminish it by getting help from outside his own following, at whatever cost to the principles he commonly professes. Here lies the opportunity for minorities willing to trade on a realistic political basis. In the old days the prohibitionists refused to trade, and in consequence they were disregarded, for their fidelity to their own grotesque candidates protected the candidates of both the regular parties. But with the coming of the Anti-Saloon League they abandoned this fidelity and began to dicker in a forthright and unashamed manner, quickly comprehensible to all professional politicians. That is, they asked for a pledge on one specific issue, and were willing to swallow any commitment on other issues. If Beelzebub, running on one ticket, agreed to support prohibition, and the Archangel Gabriel, running on another, found himself entertaining conscientious doubts, they were instantly and solidly for Beelzebub, and they not only gave him the votes that they directly controlled, but they also gave him the benefit of a campaign support that was ruthless, pertinacious, extraordinarily ingenious, and overwhelmingly effective. Beelzebub, whatever his swinishness otherwise, was bathed in holy oils; Gabriel’s name became a thing to scare children.

Obviously, the support thus offered was particularly tempting to a politician who found himself facing public suspicion for his general political practices--in brief, to the worst type of machine professional. Such a politician is always acutely aware that it is not positive merit that commonly gets a man into public office in the United States, but simply disvulnerability. Even when they come to nominate a President, the qualities the two great parties seek are chiefly the negative ones; they want, not a candidate of forceful and immovable ideas, but one whose ideas are vague and not too tenaciously held, and in whose personality there is nothing to alarm or affront the populace. Of two candidates, that one usually wins who least arouses the distrusts and suspicions of the great masses of undifferentiated men. This advantage of the safe and sane, the colourless and unprovocative, the apparently stodgy and commonplace man extends to the most trivial contests, and politicians are keen to make use of it. Thus the job-seeker with an aura of past political misdemeanour about him was eager to get the Christian immunity bath that the prohibitionists offered him so generously, and in the first years of their fight they dealt almost exclusively with such fellows. He, on his side, promised simply to vote for prohibition--not even, in most cases, to pretend to any personal belief in it. The prohibitionists, on their side, promised to deliver the votes of their followers to him on election day, to cry him up as one saved by a shining light, and, most important of all, to denounce his opponent as an agent of hell. He was free, by this agreement, to carry on his regular political business as usual. The prohibitionists asked no patronage of him. They didn’t afflict him with projects for other reforms. All they demanded was that he cast his vote as agreed upon when the signal was given to him.

At the start, of course, such scoundrels frequently violated their agreements. In the South, in particular, dry legislature after dry legislature sold out to the liquor lobby, which, in those days, still had plenty of money. An assemblyman would be elected with the aid of the prohibitionists, make a few maudlin speeches against the curse of drink, and then, at the last minute, vote wet for some thin and specious reason, or for no avowed reason at all. But the prohibition manipulators, as I have said, were excellent politicians, and so they knew how to put down that sort of treason. At the next election they transferred their favour to the opposition candidate, and inasmuch as he had seen the traitor elected at the last election he was commonly very eager to do business. The punishment for the treason was condign and merciless. The dry rabble-rousers, lay and clerical, trumpeted news of it from end to end of the constituency. What was a new and gratifying disvulnerability was transformed into a vulnerability of the worst sort; the recreant one became the county Harry Thaw, Oscar Wilde, Captain Boy-Ed, and Debs. A few such salutary examples, and treason became rare. The prohibitionists, indeed, came to prefer dealing with such victims of their reprisals. They could trust them perfectly, once the lesson had been learned; they were actually more trustworthy than honest believers, for the latter usually had ideas of their own and interfered with the official plans of campaign. Thus, in the end, the professional politicians of both parties came under the yoke. The final battle in Congress transcended all party lines; democrats and republicans fought alike for places on the band-wagon. The spectacle offered a searching and not unhumorous commentary on the party system, and on the honour of American politicians no less. Two-thirds, at least, of the votes for the amendment were cast by men who did not believe in it, and who cherished a hearty hope, to the last moment, that some act of God would bring about its defeat.

Such holocausts of frankness and decency are certainly not rare in American politics; on the contrary, they glow with normalcy. The typical legislative situation among us--and the typical administrative situation as well--is one in which men wholly devoid of inner integrity, facing a minority that is resolutely determined to get its will, yield up their ideas, their freedom, and their honour in order to save their jobs. I say administrative situation as well; what I mean is that in these later days the pusillanimity of the actual law-maker is fully matched by the pusillanimity of the enforcing officer, whether humble assistant district attorney or powerful judge. The war, with its obliteration of customary pretences and loosening of fundamental forces, threw up the whole process into high relief. For nearly two long years there was a complete abandonment of sense and self-respect. Rowelled and intimidated by minorities that finally coalesced into a frantic majority, legislators allowed themselves to be forced into imbecility after imbecility, and administrative officers, including some of the highest judges in the land, followed them helter-skelter. In the lower house of Congress there was one man--already forgotten--who showed the stature of a man. He resigned his seat and went home to his self-respect. The rest had no self-respect to go home to. Eager beyond all to hold their places, at whatever cost to principle, and uneasily conscious of their vulnerability to attack, however frenzied and unjust, they surrendered abjectly and repeatedly--to the White House, to the newspapers, to any group enterprising enough to issue orders to them and resolute enough to flourish weapons before them. It was a spectacle full of indecency--there are even congressmen who blush when they think of it to-day--but it was nevertheless a spectacle that was typical. The fortunes of politics, as they now run, make it overwhelmingly probable that every new recruit to public office will be just such a poltroon. The odds are enormously in favour of him, and enormously against the man of honour. Such a man of honour may occasionally drift in, taken almost unawares by some political accident, but it is the pushing, bumptious, unconscionable bounder who is constantly _fighting_ to get in, and only too often he succeeds. The rules of the game are made to fit his taste and his talents. He can survive as a hog can survive in the swill-yard.

Go to the Congressional Directory and investigate the origins and past performances of the present members of the lower house--our typical assemblage of typical politicians, the cornerstone of our whole representative system, the symbol of our democracy. You will find that well over half of them are obscure lawyers, school-teachers, and mortgage-sharks out of almost anonymous towns--men of common traditions, sordid aspirations, and no attainments at all. One and all, the members of this majority--and it is constant, no matter what party is in power--are plastered with the brass ornaments of the more brummagem fraternal orders. One and all, they are devoid of any contact with what passes for culture, even in their remote bailiwicks. One and all their careers are bare of civilizing influences.... Such is the American _Witenagemot_ in this 146th year of the Republic. Such are the men who make the laws that all of us must obey, and who carry on our dealings with the world. Go to their debates, and you will discover what equipment they bring to their high business. What they know of sound literature is what one may get out of McGuffey’s Fifth Reader. What they know of political science is the nonsense preached in the chautauquas and on the stump. What they know of history is the childish stuff taught in grammar-schools. What they know of the arts and sciences--of all the great body of knowledge that is the chief intellectual baggage of modern man--is absolutely nothing.

H. L. MENCKEN

JOURNALISM

According to the _World Almanac_ for 1921 the daily circulation of newspapers in the big cities of the United States in 1914 (evidently the most recent year for which the figures have been compiled) was more than forty million. For the six months ending April 1, 1920, the average daily circulation of five morning newspapers and eleven evening newspapers in Greater New York City was, as shown by sworn statements, more than three and a third million. These statistics cover only daily newspapers, not weekly or monthly journals; and the figures for New York do not include papers in languages other than English. The American certainly buys newspapers. To what extent he reads them it is impossible to determine. But we may fairly assume that the great majority of literate inhabitants of the United States of all ages are every day subjected in some measure to the influence of the newspaper. No other institution approaches the newspaper in universality, persistence, continuity of influence. Not the public school, with all other schools added to it, has such power over the national mind; for in the lives of most people formal schooling is of relatively short duration, ceasing with adolescence or earlier. The church? Millions of people never go to church, and the day when the clergy dominated human thought is gone for ever. If we add to the daily press the weekly and monthly periodicals, with a total circulation per issue of two hundred million (for the year 1914), we shall not be far wrong in saying that the journalist, with the powers behind him, has more to do, for good or for evil, than the member of any other profession, in creating and shaping the thoughts of the multitude. Compared with him the teacher, the preacher, the artist, the politician, the man of science, are restricted, interrupted, indirect in reaching the minds of their fellow-men.

So that in estimating the capacities and contents of the American mind, which we have no means of lining up in its hundred million individual manifestations and examining directly, an analysis of the American newspaper is a fair rough-and-ready method. What everybody reads does not tell the whole story of what everybody is, but it tells a good deal. Moreover, it is not necessary to analyze any one newspaper or to separate its clientèle from that of any other newspaper. For though everybody knows that the New York _Tribune_ and the New York _World_ have distinct qualities which differentiate them from each other, that some papers are better and some are worse, yet on the whole the American newspaper is amazingly uniform from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. It is, indeed, a more or less unified institution fed by the same news services and dominated by kindred financial interests. If you travel much, as actors do, without interest in local affairs, when you go to the hotel news-stand in the morning, you cannot tell from the general aspect of the newspaper you pick up what city you are in; and in a small city it is likely to be a metropolitan paper that has come a hundred miles or more during the night. Indeed, this is the first thing to be learned about the American from a study of his newspapers, that he lacks individuality, is tediously uniform, and cut according to one intellectual pattern. He may have his “favourite” newspaper, and with no sense that his confession of habitude is shameful he may write the editor that he has read it constantly for forty years. But if it goes out of existence, like his favourite brand of chewing-gum or cigarettes, there is no aching void which cannot be comfortably filled by a surviving competitor. Editors, except those in charge of local news, move with perfect ease from one city to another; it is the same old job at a different desk.

The standardization of the newspaper reader and the standardization of the journalist are two aspects of the same thing. As a citizen, a workman, a human being, the journalist is simply one of us, a victim of the conformity which has overwhelmed the American. When we speak of the influence of the journalist, we are not speaking of an individual, but of “the powers behind him,” of which he is nothing but the wage-earning servant, as impotent and unimportant, considered as an individual, as a mill-hand. Journalism in America is no longer a profession, through which a man can win to a place of real dignity among his neighbours. If we had a Horace Greeley to-day, he would not be editor of a newspaper. He would not wish to be, and he would not be allowed to be. Certainly his vigorous integrity would not be tolerated in the modern unworthy successor of the newspaper which he founded. The editor of a newspaper is no doubt often a man of intelligence and experience and he may be well paid, like the manager of a department store; but he is usually submerged in anonymity except that from time to time the law requires the newspaper to publish his name. His subordinates, assistant editors, newswriters, reporters, and the rest, are as nameless as floor-walkers, shipping clerks, salesladies, and ladies engaged in more ancient forms of commerce.

It is true that during the last generation there has been a tendency in the newspaper to “feature” individuals, such as cartoonists, conductors of columns, writers on sport, dramatic critics, and so on. But these men are artists, some of them very clever, who have nothing to do with the news but contribute to the paper its vaudeville entertainment. During the war there was a great increase in the amount of signed cable matter and correspondence. This was due to the necessity of the prosperous newspaper to show its enterprise and to cajole its readers into believing that it had men of special ability in close touch with diplomats and major-generals collecting and cabling at great expense intimate information and expert opinion. The circumstances were so difficult that the wisest and most honest man could not do much, except lose his position, and nobody will blame the correspondents. But it is significant that not a single American correspondent emerged from the conflict who is memorable, from the point of view of a more or less careful reader, as having been different from the rest. If from a miscellaneous collection of clippings we should cut off the dates, the alleged place of origin and the names of the correspondents, nobody but an editor with a long and detailed memory could tell t’other from which, or be sure whether the despatch was from Mr. Jones, the special correspondent of the _Christian Science Monitor_ (copyright by the Chicago _News_) or an anonymous cable from the London office of the Associated Press. And even the editor, who may be assumed to know the names of hundreds of his colleagues and competitors, would begin his attempt at identification by examining the style of type to see if it looked like a column from the _Sun_ or from the _World_. Almost all the war news was a hopeless confusion of impressions, of reports of what somebody said somebody else, “of unquestionable authority,” had heard from reliable sources, and of sheer mendacity adapted to the momentary prejudices of the individual managing editor, the American press as a whole, and the American people. And this is a rough recipe for all the news even in times of peace, for the war merely aggravated the prevalent diseases of the newspapers.

Since the purpose of this book is to discuss peculiarly American characteristics, it should be said at once that the tendency of the newspaper to obliterate the journalist as a person immediately responsible to the public is not confined to America. Economic conditions in Europe and America are fundamentally alike, and the modern newspaper in every country must be a business institution, heavily capitalized, and conducted for profit. In England the decline of journalism as a profession and the rise of the “stunt” press has been noted and deplored by Englishmen. Years ago it meant something to be editor of the London _Times_, and the appointment of a new man to the position was an event not less important than a change in the cabinet. Who is editor of the _Times_ now is a matter of no consequence except to the man who receives the salary check. English journalism is in almost as bad a case as American. In England, however, there is at least one exception which has no counterpart in America, the Manchester Guardian; this admirable newspaper has the good fortune to be owned by people who are so rich that they are not obliged, and so honest that they are not willing, to sell out. It is this fact which has afforded Mr. Scott, the editor-in-chief for nearly half a century, an opportunity adequate to his courage and ability. There are few such opportunities in England, and none in America. Even the Springfield _Republican_ has largely lost its old character.

As for the continental papers, one who does not read any of them regularly is in no position to judge. In 1900 William James, a shrewd observer, wrote in a letter: “The Continental papers of course are ‘nowhere.’ As for our yellow papers--every country has its criminal classes, and with us and in France, they have simply got into journalism as part of their professional evolution, and they must be got out. Mr. Bosanquet somewhere says that so far from the ‘dark ages’ being over, we are just at the beginning of a new dark-age period. He means that ignorance and unculture, which then were merely brutal, are now articulate and possessed of a literary voice, and the fight is transferred from fields and castles and town walls to ‘organs of publicity.’” This is only a passing remark in an informal letter. But it is a partial explanation of American yellow journalism which in twenty years has swamped the whole press, including papers that pretend to be respectable, and it suggests what the state of things was, and is, in France.

It should be noted, however, that personal journalism has not entirely disappeared in France, that the editor can still be brought to account, sometimes at the point of a pistol, for lies and slander, and that a young French _littérateur_, before he has won his spurs in poetry, drama, or fiction, can regard journalism as an honourable occupation in which it is worth while to make a name.

With the decadence in all countries, certainly in America, of the journalist as a professional man in an honourable craft, there might conceivably have been a gain in objectivity, in the right sort of impersonality. Anonymity might have ensured a dispassionate fidelity to facts. But there has been no such gain. Responsibility has been transferred from the journalist to his employers, and he is on his mettle to please his employers, to cultivate whatever virtues are possible to journalism, accuracy, clearness of expression, zeal in searching out and interpreting facts, only in so far forth as his employers demand them, only as his livelihood and chances of promotion depend on them. The ordinary journalist, being an ordinary human being, must prefer to do honest work; for there is no pleasure in lying, though there is a temptation to fill space with unfounded or unverified statements. And if his manager orders him to find a story where there is no story, or to find a story of a certain kind where the facts lead to a story of another kind, he will not come back empty-handed lest he go away empty-handed on pay-day. Any one who has worked in a newspaper office knows that the older men are likely to be weary and cynical and that the younger men fall into two classes, those who are too stupid to be discontented with any aspect of their position except the size of their salaries, and those who hope either to rise to the better paid positions, or to “graduate,” as they put it, from daily journalism to other kinds of literary work.

The journalist, then, should be acquitted of most of the faults of journalism. Mr. Walter Lippmann says in his sane little book, “Liberty and the News”: “Resistance to the inertias of the profession, heresy to the institution, and willingness to be fired rather than write what you do not believe, these wait on nothing but personal courage.” That is a little like saying that the harlot can stop harlotry by refusing to ply her trade--which is indeed the attitude of some people in comfortable circumstances. I doubt if Mr. Lippmann would have written just as he did if he had ever had to depend for his dinner on pleasing a managing editor, if he had not been from very early in his brilliant career editor of a liberal endowed journal in which he is free to express his beliefs. Most newspaper men are poor and not brilliant. The correspondents whom Mr. Lippmann mentions as “eminences on a rather flat plateau” are nearly all men who have succeeded in other work than newspaper correspondence, and if not a newspaper in the world would hire them, most of them could afford to thumb their noses at the Ochses, Reids, and Harmsworths. Personal courage is surely a personal matter, and it can seldom be effective in correcting the abuses of an institution, especially when the institution can hire plenty of men of adequate if not equal ability to take the place of the man of stubborn integrity. I know one journalist who lost his position as managing editor of two wealthy newspapers, one in Boston, the other in New York, in the first instance because he refused to print a false and cowardly retraction dictated by a stockholder whom the editor-in-chief desired to serve, in the second instance because he refused to distort war news. But what good did his single-handed rebellion do, except to make a few friends proud of him? Did either newspaper lose even one mournful subscriber? Did the advertising department suffer? Far from it. Another man took his place, a man not necessarily less honest, but of more conformable temperament. The muddy waters of journalism did not show a ripple. Paradoxically, the journalist is the one man who can do little or nothing to improve journalism. Mr. Lippmann’s suggestion that our salvation lies “ultimately in the infusion of the news-structure by men with a new training and outlook,” is, as he knows, the expression of a vague hope, too remotely ultimate to have practical bearing on the actual situation. The man of training and outlook, especially of outlook, is the unhappiest man in the employ of a newspaper. His salvation, if not ours, lies in getting out of newspaper work and applying his ability and vision in some occupation which does not discourage precisely the merits which an honest institution should foster. This is not merely the opinion of a critical layman but represents accurately if not literally the advice given to me by a successful editor and writer of special articles. “In this game,” he said, “you lose your soul.”

The stories of individuals who have tried to be decent in newspaper work and have been fired might be valuable if they were collated and if the better journalists would unite to lay the foundation in fact of more such stories. But a profession, a trade, which has so little sense of its own interest that it does not even make an effective union (to be sure, the organization of newspaper writers met with some success, especially in Boston, but to-day the organization has practically disappeared) to keep its wages up can never be expected to unite in the impersonal interests of truth and intellectual dignity. The individual who charges against an enormous unshakable institution with the weapons of his personal experience is too easily disposed of as a sore-head and is likely to be laughed at even by his fellow-journalists who know that in the main he is right.

This has happened to Mr. Upton Sinclair. I have studied “The Brass Check” carefully for the selfish purpose of getting enough material so that the writing of this chapter should be nothing but a lazy man’s task of transcription, not to speak of the noble ethical purpose of reforming the newspaper by exposing its iniquities. I confess I am disappointed. “The Brass Check” is a mixture of autobiography, valuable in its way to those who admire Mr. Sinclair, as I do most sincerely, and of evidence which, though properly personal, ought to be handled in an objective manner. I am puzzled that a man of “training and outlook,” who has shown in at least one of his novels an excellent sense of construction, could throw together such a hodge-podge of valid testimony, utterly damning to his opponents, and naïve trivialities, assertions insecurely founded and not important if they were well founded. I am so sure that Mr. Sinclair is on the whole right that I am reluctant to criticize him adversely, to lend a shadow of encouragement to the real adversary, who is unscrupulous and securely entrenched. But as a journalist of “training and outlook” I lament that another journalist of vastly more ability, experience, and information should not have done better work in selecting and constructing his material. As a lawyer said to his client, “You are a saint and you are right, but a court-room is no place for a saint and you are a damn bad witness.” Mr. Sinclair’s evidence, however, is all there to be dug out by whoever has the will and the patience. If one-tenth of it is valid and nine-tenths of doubtful value, the one-tenth is sufficient to show the sinister forces behind the newspapers and to explain some of the reasons why the newspapers are untrustworthy, cowardly, and dishonest.

Though Mr. Sinclair tells some damaging stories about the sins of anonymous reporters and of the prostitution of writers like the late Elbert Hubbard, who had no excuse for being anything but honest and independent, yet Mr. Sinclair on the whole would agree with me that the chief responsibility for the evils of journalism does not rest upon the journalist. He tries to place it squarely where it belongs on the owners of the press and the owners of the owners. But it is difficult to determine how the weight of guilt is distributed, for the press is a monster with more than two legs.

Part of the responsibility rests upon the reader, if indeed the reader is to blame for being a gullible fool and for buying shoddy goods. Mr. Lippmann says: “There is everywhere an increasingly angry disillusionment about the press, a growing sense of being baffled and misled.” And Mr. Sinclair says: “The people want the news; the people clamour for the news.” Both these statements may be true. But where do the learned doctors find the symptoms? A few of us who have some special interest in the press, in publicity, in political problems, are disillusioned and resentful. Probably everybody has said or heard somebody else say: “That’s only a newspaper story,” or “You cannot believe everything you read.” But such mild scepticism shows no promise of swelling to an angry demand on the part of that vague aggregate, the People, for better, more honest newspapers, to such an angry demand as you can actually hear in any house you enter for cheaper clothes and lower taxes.

If we make a rough calculation of the number of papers sold and of the number of people in the main economic classes, it is evident that papers of large circulation must go by the million to the working-people. Well, is there any sign of growing wrath in the breasts of the honest toilers against the newspapers, against Mr. Hearst’s papers, which throw them sops of hypocritical sympathy, not to speak of papers which are openly unfair in handling labour news? Or consider the more prosperous classes. In the smoking-car of any suburban train bound for New York some morning after eight o’clock, look at the men about you, business men, the kind that work, or do something, in offices. They are reading the _Times_ and the _Tribune_. There may be some growls about something in the day’s news, something that has happened on the stock-market, or a stupid throw to third base in yesterday’s game. But is there any murmur of discontent with the newspaper itself? I fail to find any evidence of widespread disgust with the newspaper as it is and a concomitant hunger for something better. The Reader, the Public is mute, if not inglorious, and accepts uncritically what the daily press provides. The reader has not much opportunity to choose the better from the worse. If he gives up one paper he must take another that is just as bad. He is between the devil and the deep sea, as when he casts his ballot for Democrat or Republican. And if he votes Socialist he gets the admirable New York _Call_, which is less a newspaper than a vehicle of propaganda. When one paper is slightly more honest and intelligent than its rivals, the difference is so slight that only those especially interested in the problems of the press are aware of it. For example, in discussing these problems with newspaper men, with critical readers of the press, persons for any reason intelligently interested in the problems, I have never found one who did not have a good word to say for the New York _Globe_. It is so appreciably more decent than the other New York papers that I can almost forgive it for thrusting Dr. Frank Crane under my nose when I am looking at the amusing pictures of Mr. Fontaine Fox--the newspaper vaudeville has to supply stunts for all juvenile tastes. Yet the _Globe_ does not find a clamorous multitude willing to reward it for its superiority to its neighbours, which I grant is too slight for duffers to discern. The American reader of newspapers, that is, almost everybody, is a duffer, so far as the newspaper is concerned, uncritical, docile, only meekly incredulous. It may be that “the people” get as good newspapers as they wish and deserve, just as they are said to get as good government as they wish and deserve. Certainly if the readers of newspapers seem to demand nothing better, the manufacturers of newspapers have no inducement to give them anything better. But this does not get us any nearer a solution of the problem or do more than indicate that some vaguely indeterminate part of the responsibility for the evils of the newspapers must rest on the people who buy them.