Chapter LI: The Press and the Radicals

If you go into a New York club in the middle of August, you will be told in entire good faith that “everybody” is out of town. It is this “everybody” who is out of town in August that American Journalism knows and serves. Those who stay in town in August are “nobody,” and have to take their chances with the newspapers, as with everything else in capitalist society. Imagine yourself a poor devil, caught in a set of circumstances which cause the city editor of some newspaper, after five minutes consideration, to make up his mind that you are guilty of a crime! Trial by a city editor in five minutes, and execution in columns of illustrated slander—that is our American system of jurisprudence. In the city of Atlanta, a Jewish manufacturer of pencils was tried for rape and murder. He was quite evidently innocent, but it happens that the “poor whites” of the South are jealous of the commercial keenness of the Jews; the politicians of the South want the votes of these “poor whites,” and the “yellow” journals want their pennies; so this poor wretch was hounded by the newspapers for several months, and finally was hanged.

But it is for the poor devil become class-conscious, and protesting against injustice to his class, that our Journalism reserves its deadliest venom. It is when the Radical steps upon the scene that the hunting-pack joins in full cry. Then every prejudice, every hatred in the whole journalistic psychology becomes focused as by a burning-glass upon one centre. The hatred of the staff, men who have sold their honor, and take bold truth-telling for a personal insult; the hatred of the owner, whose life-time gains are threatened; the hatred of the advertiser who supports the paper, of the banker who handles its funds, of the politician who betrays the state to it—all these various hatreds mass themselves, they form what the foot-ball player knows as a “V,” they “rush” this enemy and bowl him over and trample him under their feet.

Any kind of radical, it makes no difference; anyone who advocates a change in anything, who expresses discontent with the system of legalized plunder and repression. Six or seven years ago Mrs. Pankhurst came from England in the interest of militant suffrage. The American people had read about Mrs. Pankhurst, and wanted to know what she looked like, and what she was going to do in America. A New York paper came out with a report to the effect that Mrs. Pankhurst, before being allowed to land in New York, had been required by the Federal authorities to give a pledge that she would not engage in militancy in America. This report was cabled to London, where it was hailed with glee by Mrs. Pankhurst’s opponents; Lloyd George made a speech about it, and this speech was cabled to America by the Associated Press, and thus widely spread in the American papers. Mrs. Pankhurst stated to me personally that she had been asked for no such pledge, and had given no such pledge, and that all her efforts to have this false report corrected by the New York newspapers and by the Associated Press had been in vain.

Such was the treatment of a “militant” leader. You say, perhaps, “Well, nobody cares about those militants.” If so, let us hear one of those who vehemently opposed “militancy.” I write to Mrs. Alice Stone Blackwell, and she replies:

For many years, the news carried by the great press agencies on the
subject of woman suffrage was habitually twisted, and the twist was
almost always unfavorable to suffrage. As editor for a long time of
the “Woman’s Journal,” and later as one of the editors of the “Woman
Citizen,” I had constant occasion to observe this, and I commented
upon it repeatedly. The thing happened so often as to make it
impossible to explain it as accident or coincidence.

As an extreme instance, take the following: Every time that the woman
suffrage bill was defeated in the British House of Commons, the fact
was promptly cabled to this country; but when the bill finally
passed—an event which both friends and opponents of suffrage were
awaiting with great interest—not one of the papers in the United
States that are served by the Associated Press gave the news!

In my suffrage work, I learned beyond question that the news coming
through the great press agencies was colored and distorted; and if
this has been done on one subject, it has doubtless been done on
others. A good many women, I think, learned a wholesome distrust of
press reports during the suffrage struggle.

And now let us hear some radicals of the male sex. Hiram Johnson of California is a radical. In “Everybody’s Magazine” during 1908 there appeared an interview which had been submitted to him and printed with his corrections. Sixteen newspapers published on their front page the report that Governor Johnson had repudiated this interview; and when he declared that the report was false, they refused to correct it.

Charles Zueblin is a radical—a very quiet and conservative one, who lectures on municipal ownership to ladies’ clubs. I write to ask him what his experiences have been, and he tells me they are “too personal to be quoted.” He gives me one illustration, which I take the liberty of quoting:

The “Kansas City Journal” has pursued me every season I lecture there
because it is an organ of the local public utilities. At one time they
twisted some statement of mine in a report of a lecture which they
headed: “Zueblin Believes Every Woman Should Marry a Negro.” There was
no doubt this was done solely to queer other things that might be said
which had no connection with this invention.

Senator La Follette is a radical—and here is a public man who has been almost wiped out by deliberate newspaper boycott. The story of what was done to La Follette in the 1912 presidential campaign can hardly be made to sound like reality; it is a plot out of an old-time Bowery melodrama. La Follette was a candidate for the Republican nomination. He was conducting a tremendous campaign all through the Middle West, and the Associated Press was suppressing the news of it. At an open conference of newspaper-men, held at the University of Wisconsin, the editor of the “Milwaukee Journal,” a strong capitalist paper, openly stated that the Associated Press was sending—“something, of course—but so little that it amounted to nothing.” But when the governor of the state made an attack upon La Follette—“Well, the Associated Press suddenly woke up, and sent out that entire address word for word!”

Nevertheless, La Follette was winning, and stood an excellent chance to get the nomination. He was invited to a dinner of the Periodical Publishers’ Association in Philadelphia, and at that dinner he told a little about the control of newspapers by the big advertising agencies—such facts as fill Chapter XLVII of this book. After the dinner was over the newspaper-men got together on the proposition, and decided that they would end the career of La Follette that night. They cooked up an elaborate story, describing how he had raged and foamed at the mouth, and rambled on and on for hours, until the diners had got up and left him orating to the empty seats and dinner-plates. It was evident, said the story, sympathetically, that La Follette was suffering from overwork and exhaustion; his mind was failing, and he would be compelled to retire from public life. After that, by deliberate arrangement, the Washington correspondents reported not a line of anything that La Follette wrote or said for a couple of years!

Again, during the war, they did the same thing to him. He made a speech before the Nonpartisan Convention in St. Paul, denouncing bitterly the war profiteers, who were being protected by our big newspapers. The Associated Press took this speech and doctored it, as a means of making La Follette odious to the country. They had to make such a slight change in it! La Follette said, “We had grievances against the German government.” And all the Associated Press had to do was to slip in one little word, “We had _no_ grievances against the German government!” The whole country rose up to execrate La Follette, and the United States Senate ordered him placed on trial. When it came to a show-down, they discovered they had nothing against him, and dropped the case, and the Associated Press, after many months’ delay and heavy pressure from La Follette, finally admitted that it had misquoted him, and made a public apology.

And then La Follette came before the people for their verdict on his conduct. He carried the state by a vote of 110,064 to 70,813; but the big capitalist newspapers of Milwaukee deliberately held back the returns favorable to him, and on election night the story was telegraphed all over the country that the La Follette ticket had been overwhelmed. The leading Chicago newspapers reported the election of twenty out of twenty-six anti-La Follette delegates, and the repudiation of La Follette by “an overwhelming majority of Wisconsin voters.” Next morning there followed editorials in all the leading Wall Street organs, gloating over this defeat. And, as usual in newspaper practice, this first story got all the space that the subject was worth; the later news of La Follette’s victory was “buried.”