Chapter XXXIII: A Fountain of Poison

I have lived in Southern California four years, and it is literally a fact that I have yet to meet a single person who does not despise and hate his “Times.” This paper, founded by Harrison Gray Otis, one of the most corrupt and most violent old men that ever appeared in American public life, has continued for thirty years to rave at every conceivable social reform, with complete disregard for truth, and with abusiveness which seems almost insane. To one who understands our present economic condition, the volcano of social hate which is smouldering under the surface of our society, it would seem better to turn loose a hundred thousand mad dogs in the streets of Los Angeles, than to send out a hundred thousand copies of the “Times” every day.

You cannot live in Southern California and stand for any sort of liberal ideas without encountering the wrath of this paper. And when you have once done this, it pursues you with personal vindictiveness; no occasion is too small for it to lay hold of, nor does it ever forget you, no matter how many years may pass. My friend Rob Wagner writes me an amusing story about the feud between Otis and the city of Santa Barbara, a millionaire colony about a hundred miles from Los Angeles:

When the big fleet came around here some years ago I was
director-generaling a very snappy flower festival at Santa Barbara,
and as the “Times” played up all the bar-room brawls the sailors got
into and belittled my pretty show, I got hold of the local
correspondent and says: “Mac, why are you crabbing the show and
featuring the rough stuff?” “Well the truth is, Bob, my pay depends
upon the kind of stuff I send. A rotten story is good for columns,
against a few paragraphs of the birds and the flowers. You know the
General has towns as well as individuals on his index, and Santa
Barbara is one of them. The General once owned the Santa Barbara
‘Press,’ and with his usual cave-man methods got in bad with the
villagers, and they bumped him socially so hard that he finally left
in great heat and swore vengeance, which he practices to this day.
This has been going on for years.”

Now the old “General” is gone, but his “index” still stands. The song should read: “Old Otis’ body lies a-moulderin’ in the grave, but his soul goes cursing on!” It goes on cursing, not merely movements of social reform and those who advocate them; it goes on cursing Santa Barbara! Soon after we came to Pasadena there was an earthquake shock, sufficiently severe to cause us to run out of our house. You understand, of course, that earthquakes are damaging to real-estate values; therefore there was no report of an earthquake in any Los Angeles paper next day—save that the “Times” reported an earthquake in Santa Barbara! A year or two later this happened again—and again it was an earthquake in Santa Barbara.

Also, Rob Wagner tells me of his own amusing experience with the “Times.” I quote:

During the Harriman campaign I deserted my class, kicked in and had
Socialist meetings at my studio, and even enjoyed the degradation of
offering hospice to Ben Reitman and Emma Goldman the night after they
were run out of San Diego. So the General paid me the amazing
compliment of putting me on his index, and gave orders that my name
should not appear thereafter in his art columns. Anthony Anderson
proved it to me by slipping in a harmless little notice of a portrait
exhibit I was holding, which got the blue pencil. So you see that even
an artist who might help the town in its very ingrowing aestheticism
got the General’s axe if the General didn’t like his politics!

It happens, curiously enough, that I have met socially half a dozen members of the “Times” staff. They are cynical worldlings, doing a work which they despise, and doing it because they believe that life is a matter of “dog eat dog.” I met the lady, Alma Whitaker, who had written the account of my Friday Morning Club lecture. She had enjoyed the lecture, she said, but afterwards had gone to the managing editor and inquired how I was to be handled; she took it for granted that I would understand this, and would regard it tolerantly. I explained to her the embarrassments of an author in relation to an unpaid grocer’s bill. As a result of what she had written about me, I had not been invited by any other woman’s club in Southern California!

Also I met one of the high editors of the “Times,” an important personage whom they feature. Talking about the question of journalistic integrity, he said: “Sinclair, it has been so long since I have written anything that I believed that I don’t think I would know the sensation.”

My answer was: “I have been writing on public questions for twenty years, and I can say that I have never written a single word that I did not believe.”

I have had much to say about the Associated Press in the course of this book. I need say only one thing about it in Southern California—that its headquarters are in the editorial rooms of the “Los Angeles Times.” A good part of what goes on the Associated Press wire is first strained through the “Times” sieve; and so I can inform Mr. Fabian Franklin, formerly of the “New York Evening Post” and now of the “Review,” that his sacred divinity, the Associated Press, has established here in Southern California a system which makes it impossible that any news favorable to the radical cause should get onto the Associated Press wires, and that everything dealing with the radical movement in Southern California which goes over the Associated Press wires should be not merely false, but violently and maliciously false. For example a prominent criminal lawyer in Los Angeles is blown up by a bomb, and the report goes out to the country that the police authorities believe that this was the work of “radicals.” But next day the police authorities state officially that they have no such belief; and a couple of days later the crime is proven to have had a purely personal motive.

I have myself tested out, not once but several score of times, the system of the concrete wall and the news channel as it works here in Los Angeles. For example, when I read that Russia had a Socialist premier by the name of Kerensky, and that he did not know what to do with the Tsar and his family, I wrote to him a letter suggesting “An Island of Kings”—one of the Catalina Islands, off Los Angeles, as a place where the dethroned sovereigns of Europe might be interned, under the guardianship of the United States government. This, you perceive, was a “boost” to Southern California; it conveyed to the outside world the information that Southern California has a wonderful out-door climate, and beautiful islands with wild goats running over them, and deep sea fishing off the shores. I offered this story to the “Los Angeles Times,” and they grabbed it, and it went out at once over the Associated Press wires.

Then, again, America went into the war, and I found myself compelled to revise the conclusions of a life-time, and to give my support to a war. I debated the issue at a gathering of Socialists; and here again was news which world-capitalism desired to have circulated, here was a well-known Socialist turning to the capitalist side! The “Times” printed the story and the “A. P.” sent it out. In order to make the record clear, I quote from the “Times”:

UPTON SINCLAIR FAVORS WAR

Has a Complete Reversal of Former Ideas.

Publicly Announces Views in Crown City.

Holds World’s Democracy Is in Danger.

Pasadena, Feb. 19.—After preaching vehemently against war for twenty
years, Upton Sinclair, the Socialist writer, has joined hands with
Mars. The propagandist’s exit from the ranks of the peace-at-any-price
Socialists was made unexpectedly and dramatically yesterday afternoon
at a mass meeting at the Pasadena High School. Sinclair’s announcement
of his change of heart came after an address by Prof. I. W. Howeth of
the University of California on the history and causes of war. In the
open forum, which followed the addresses, Sinclair was the storm
center in a discussion in which his stand was criticized by the
Socialists and other peace advocates and applauded by others in favor
of supporting the stand taken by President Wilson.

And then followed long extracts from my speech. As sent out by the Associated Press it was so garbled that I will ask the reader to read four paragraphs of the “Times” account. My reasons for asking this will appear later:

“My one interest in the world is democratic self-government. I have
fought for this at every sacrifice of personal advantage for twenty
years. I consider that all modern governments are evil, based upon
injustice, but I am bound to recognize that there are degrees in this
evil. The test is whether the government leaves the people free to
agitate against it. This the British government to a great extent has
done; so has the French; the German has not.

“For us to permit the Prussian ruling class to beat England to her
knees by the methods of general piracy that have been adopted is to
put democracy in peril of its life, and to make certain an age of
military preparation in the United States, Canada and Australia.

“If we go into the war the thing to do is to decide in advance the
terms, and let these be such as to unite all the democratic forces of
the world behind us. We do not want Germany beaten to her knees and
territories given to her enemies. We do not want to underwrite the
program of Russia in Constantinople. We want to remove these points of
contention from the arena.

“We want to heal up the ancient wounds. We want to teach all rulers
and all peoples that civilization will permit no one to gain territory
by war. We want to inter-nationalize the Dardanelles, Alsace-Lorraine,
Belgium, Poland, and to say that we, all the world, will fight to put
down any state which at any time attempts to invade them.”

Again, on the first anniversary of the Russian revolution, before a mass meeting of the Russian Revolutionary Society of Los Angeles, I defended the idea that Russia must stand by the Allies until the Kaiser was overthrown. The “Times” gave two columns to this story, with big headlines. I quote the opening paragraphs, with apologies for the “Times’” atrocious English:

TOSSES WRENCH INTO RED RUSSIAN MACHINE

Invited Speaker Gives the Bolshevik Adherents Talk on Patriotism.

Upton Sinclair threw a monkey-wrench of facts of American manufacture
into a mass meeting of Socialists and near-Socialists at the Labor
Temple yesterday, that after cheers and tears for the Bolsheviki,
their red riot of revolution, pledges of support of Lenine and his
associates, and a notable evasion of facts for the sake of indulgence
in rhetorical idealism, wound up by adopting a resolution for home
rule in Ireland.

“So long as the United States government is behind the small nations
and for justice in the world, every Socialist and every revolutionist
should be behind the American government,” Sinclair told more than
five hundred men and women, ranging in their sympathies from pale
pacifism and yellow disloyalty up, amid hisses and cheers.

Mr. Sinclair’s speech, while not unexpected by the committee in charge
of the arrangements, was not in keeping with the spirit of the meeting
and threw a damp blanket on the more radical element that had gathered
to pass resolutions and cheer the social revolution and the economic
disintegration of the Russian Empire.

The Sinclair speech, which bristled with loyal and patriotic
utterances, was sandwiched between an address by Michael Bey,
secretary to Prof. Lomonosoff of the Russian Mission, and the address
of Paul Jordan Smith.

Such was my stand during the war, as set forth in the news columns of the “Times.” But when the Kaiser was overthrown, and I saw America’s war for democracy being turned into a war to put down the first proletarian government in history, I went back into the radical camp—and what happened then? What happened was that instantly the news channels became a concrete wall! If you know anything about my going back into the radical camp, and the reasons therefor, you know it from the radical press, and not from the capitalist press. Since the day when I announced the change, the Associated Press has sent out _not one word_ about my point of view or my utterances; while the “Los Angeles Times” goes farther yet—the “Times” deliberately blinks the fact that I once “tossed a wrench into the red Russian machine,” and embarks on a campaign to make the public believe that I was disloyal during the war! You may find this beyond believing; but I shall prove it to you. And so far successful has it been that recently a high school principal in Los Angeles, addressing the pupils of her school, referred to me as a “notorious disloyalist and traitor”!

There are, of course, libel laws in California, so the “Times” dares not come out fairly and squarely with the statement that I was disloyal during the war. What it does is to scan my every word and action, and report them with subtly chosen phrases which expose me to suspicion, without making definite charges. Surely you must admit that such calculated and systematic treachery on the part of an enormously rich and powerful newspaper is of public importance. You will expect me to prove my charge. Very well, here are two cases. Case one:

While I stood by the war, I didn’t stand by the Espionage act, and when some of my friends were arrested as pacifists, and stood in danger of ten or twenty years in jail, I went to the authorities and interceded, and succeeded in having the cases settled on the basis of a plea of guilty and the payment of fines. The “Times” knew what I was doing, and was foaming at the mouth about it, so I was told by several of its staff; but it dared not say anything, because I had won both the Federal judge and the prosecuting authorities to my way of thinking.

The deputy United States attorney, Mr. Palmer, happened to be a Southerner, a type of man I understand, and I got to know him during these negotiations. Later on I went to see him and said: “Mr. Palmer, I am writing a story, ‘Jimmie Higgins,’ which I want to publish serially in my magazine. It is a story of a Socialist in war-time, and its purpose is to win the Socialists to the idea of supporting the war. But I am in this dilemma. If I am going to show a man converted from opposition to the war, I first have to show how he felt when he was opposing it; I have to make him a real character, I have to make his arguments real arguments—which is a difficult thing to do in war-time. I would not want anybody to misunderstand my purpose and point of view; so I wonder if you would read the manuscript, and tell me if there is anything in it that might be open to misunderstanding.”

Mr. Palmer’s answer was that he was forbidden to give official opinions on anything before publication, but he would be very glad to give me a personal, unofficial opinion. I answered that I would regard this as a favor, and Mr. Palmer read the manuscript. No doubt he spoke about it to others, and the “Times” must have heard of the matter. Some months later appeared the following paragraph on the editorial page of the “Times”:

Upton Sinclair has stuck his fingers in the Tom Mooney mess. Sinclair
has dropped his pen that for some time has been engaged in preparing
the manuscript of a book whose loyalty had to be passed on by the
United States District-Attorney, and is therefore in a position to
sympathize with those who might run afoul of the law.

Now, note the subtle treachery of this phrasing. The loyalty of my manuscript “had to” be passed on. Practically everybody who read that paragraph would understand from it that the government had taken some action in the matter, had placed me under compulsion to submit the manuscript. Nobody would get the impression that the compulsion in the matter was the compulsion of my own conscience and judgment, my wish to make sure that my piece of fiction was not open to misunderstanding. Needless to say, the “Times” didn’t mention the fact that Mr. Palmer, having read the manuscript, wrote cordially to assure me that there was no possibility of its being misunderstood, and no need of any changes being made.

Case two—and still more significant:

It happened a year or more ago that I had to undergo an operation for appendicitis. I requested the authorities at the hospital not to give out news about this operation, because I do not care to have purely personal matters exploited in the papers. Thus it was a couple of weeks later, after I was out of the hospital, before anything was known about my operation. A friend of mine called me on the phone to ask if I would meet the Pasadena correspondent of the “Times,” Robert Harwood, a decent young fellow who was trying to learn to write. I said that I could not meet him at that time, because I had just come out of the hospital. My friend explained these circumstances to Harwood, and Harwood sent in a news item, which appeared next morning under the headline: “_Anarchist Writer in Hospital_.”

Now, of course, the editors of the “Times” know perfectly well that I am not an Anarchist. When they call me an Anarchist, they do it merely to hurt me. When in war-time they add the words: “Sinclair is still under surveillance,” they mean, of course, that their readers shall derive the impression that the “Anarchist writer” is under surveillance by the Department of Justice; but if I should sue them for libel, they would plead that they meant I was under surveillance by a surgeon!

A couple of weeks later I met young Harwood, and he made an embarrassed apology for the item, explaining that he had turned in to the “Times” a perfectly decent and straight mention of my operation; the article had been rewritten in the “Times” office, and the false headline put on by the managing editor of the paper. The manuscript of the copy that Harwood had turned in had been read in advance by another man who was present at the dinner, Ralph Bayes, formerly city editor of the “Los Angeles Record,” so there were two witnesses to the facts.

To call a man an Anarchist at this time was to place him in obloquy and in physical danger. Both Harwood and Bayes were willing to testify to the facts, and I considered the possibility of suing the “Times.” I consulted a lawyer who knows Los Angeles conditions intimately, and he said: “If you expect to win this suit, you will have to be prepared to spend many thousands of dollars investigating with detectives the records and opinions of every prospective talesman. The ‘Times’ will do that—does it regularly in damage-suits. If you don’t do it, you will find yourself confronting a jury of Roman Catholics and political crooks. In any case you will have a jury which has no remotest idea of any difference between a Socialist and an Anarchist, so the utmost you could possibly get would be six cents.”

A few days later young Harwood came to see me again. He was anxious for me to bring suit, because he was sick of his job. There was a strike of the Pacific Electric Railway employes in Los Angeles. The city, you understand, is celebrated as an “open shop” town, and the “Times” is the propaganda organ of the forces of repression.

“Mr. Sinclair,” said Harwood, “I was at the car-barns here in Pasadena all evening yesterday, and not a single car came in. I wrote the facts in my story, and the ‘Times’ altered it, reporting that the cars had run on schedule every ten minutes.”

This is the regular practice of the “Times.” All its accounts of strikes are hate-stories, entirely disregarding the facts; all its accounts of political events and conditions, local, state, or national, are class-propaganda. It will write its own views of political conditions in Washington, and label it “Exclusive Dispatch.” It will take the dispatches which come through the Associated Press, and put hate headlines over them—and sometimes it is so overpowered by hate that the headlines do not fit the context! Thus I read a large headline, “STOKES WOMAN SENT TO PRISON”; and when I read the dispatch under the headline I discover, quite plainly stated, that the “Stokes woman” is _not_ sent to prison! Again, the Western Union Telegraph Company defies the United States Government, refusing to accept the decision of the War Labor Board. This is placed under the headline: “TELEGRAPH COMPANY DEFIES UNION LABOR.” A few days later comes the news that the telegraphers’ union is threatening to strike because of the company’s attitude. This bears the title: “TELEGRAPHERS’ UNION DEFIES GOVERNMENT.”

Needless to say, a newspaper which thus lies in the interest of privilege is deeply and reverently religious. Every Monday the “Times” prints a couple of pages of extracts from sermons, and now and then its editorial page breaks into a spiritual ecstasy of its own. I clipped one sample during the war—two columns, twelve point leaded, with caps here and there: “_The One Tremendous Thought_.”

And what is this thought which overwhelms the “Times”? The thought “that in this war the world is to be made safe, not so much for democracy, as for men’s souls.” This war, “sinister, cruel, bloody and bestial though it be,” has placed our soldier-boys under the care of religion. “Upon the Protestant soldiers are the sleepless eyes of the Young Men’s Christian Association. Around our Catholic soldiers are the faithful arms of the Knights of Columbus.” Christianity had been weakening before “the noisy school of the sciences”; but—

Now cometh the war! And behold, a professedly Christian world that had
been slipping away from belief in THE GREAT MIRACLE OF THE AGES, now
swings back to the old belief again. The Christian world is more truly
Christian.

This then is the striking fact of the war.

And this is the one tremendous thought.

And from this overpowering sublimity, take a jump to the news columns, in which the “Times” reports family scandals in minute detail. Observe the chaste refinement of its headlines—this pious organ of sanctity!

RACY CHARGES MADE BY RICH

Says Wife Sneaked Paramour Into Room to Beat Him.

She Avers He Made Love to Widow in a Flat.

Sensational Accusations in Wealthy Man’s Fight.

Also the “Times” has deep convictions on the subject of Economics. I quote about half of one editorial:

MY LADY POVERTY

There is many a thing in this world much dreaded by us that we have no
need to dread. We often regard as a foe that which is really a friend.
And how many times we think of as being ugly that which is indeed
beautiful.

Perverted thus as we are in our natures, how unwelcome at the door of
life is the presence of poverty. Next to sickness and disease we dread
to be poor. And yet poverty is not a curse but a blessing.

Have you ever dwelt upon the sweet dignity and the beauty with which
St. Francis of Assisi clothed poverty? “My Lady Poverty” he called it,
giving to his rags and his hunger a personality, and taking that
personality into his heart.

And richly did his Lady Poverty reward Francis for his devotion and
his love. She cast out the dross from his nature, made life
unspeakably sweet and joyous for him, endeared him to the world
forever and immortalized him as few men have ever been
immortalized....

It must be that you will have thought often, too, of old blind Homer
who begged his way from door to door in the old times of Greece. He
was the master singer. He was the greatest, by far, of all the poets
that sung before him or that since have sung. Not Sappho, nor
Shakespeare, nor Tasso, nor Longfellow nor any one of all that
palm-crowned company was the peer of old blind Homer begging his way
from door to door.

Now, had not My Lady Poverty claimed Homer as a lover, had he been
rich, with a palace to live in and servants to wait upon him, there
would have been no Odyssey, no Iliad.

It was My Lady Poverty that lured Schiller to his garret and the crust
that was there; it was she who wove her fingers in Goldsmith’s hair
when he wandered through Erin playing for pennies on his flute.

So, if some day, there shall be some among us who will wake to find
the Lady Poverty standing at the door, think not that fate will then
have served us ill. Fling back the creaking hinges and let her in.
Make room for her gracious presence in the wide guest chambers of your
heart.

This, you perceive, is exquisitely written and deeply felt. In order to appreciate fully its passionate and consecrated sincerity you need to be informed that the newspaper which features it boasts a profit of something like a million dollars a year; this income being derived from the publication of the filthiest patent medicine advertisements, of pages upon pages of news about moving-picture rubbish, real estate speculations, oil stocks, gold mines, every kind of swindling—all paid for.

I shall have much to say in later chapters about the “Times” fortune and the way it was made. For the moment I give one anecdote, to round out my picture.

My authority is a gentleman who a few years ago was managing editor of the “Los Angeles Herald.” The “Herald” was then a morning paper, a rival of the “Times,” and was controlled and practically owned by the Farmers’ & Merchants’ National Bank of Los Angeles. The president of this institution is the biggest banker on the coast, and was engaged, with the connivance of the newspapers, in unloading upon the city for two and a half million dollars a water company which was practically worthless. It was found that the “Herald” was not paying, and the banker decided to reduce the price from five cents to two cents. But Otis of the “Times” got wind of it, and notified the banker that if he lowered the price of the “Herald,” the “Times” would at once open up on the water company swindle. “Oh, very well, General,” replied the banker. “If that’s the way you feel about it, we’ll forget it.” So the price of the “Herald” stayed up, and the paper lost money, and finally Otis bought it for a song, ran it for a while in pretended rivalry to the “Times,” and then sold it at a profit, upon condition that it be made an evening paper, so that it should not interfere with the “Times.”

Reading this, you will not be surprised to learn that the particular page upon which appeared the rhapsody to “My Lady Poverty” bears the name of the particular “Times” editor who told me: “It has been so long since I have written anything that I believe, that I don’t think I would know the sensation!”