Chapter LIII: The Press and Sex

There is a whole field of problems connected with our sex-nature which we are only beginning to explore. Metchnikoff has told us something. Freud and Jung have told us more; but long after we have solved our economic problems we shall still be seeking knowledge about sex. And meantime men and women grope blindly, and are betrayed into entanglements and misunderstandings and cruel miseries. If they happen to be ordinary, respectable citizens, they keep these things under cover. If they are radicals, trying to square their preaching and their practice, they will get into weird and awful predicaments, and then there will be sport for predatory Journalism!

I have told you the stories of Maxim Gorky, of George D. Herron, of Upton Sinclair. How many such stories would you care to hear? Would you care to hear about Charlotte Perkins Gilman? About Thorstein Veblen? About Jack London, Reginald Wright Kauffman, Clarence Darrow? About Marion Craig Wentworth, Mary Ware Dennett, Gaylord Wilshire, Oscar Lovell Triggs, George Sterling? This that I am giving you is not a list of the vital spirits of our time; it is merely a list of persons of my acquaintance who happen to have been caught upon the hook of an unhappy marriage, gutted, skinned alive, and laid quivering on the red-hot griddle of Capitalist Journalism.

I will tell you a story told to me only the other day. The man asks me not to give his name; he is trying to forget. Poor fellow, as he talks about it, I see the color creep into his forehead, I see his hands begin to shake—all the symptoms I remember so well! I ask him: “Do you start in your sleep, as if someone had touched a live nerve? Do you cry aloud, and carry on long discourses through the night?”

A few years ago this man was a popular “extension” lecturer in Chicago; anywhere in the Middle West he chose to go he could have a couple of thousand people to listen to him. He was unhappily married; his wife was living with another man, and desired a divorce. When this happens in Chicago, they usually agree upon the charge of “cruelty”; their friends, and likewise all Chicago newspaper editors, perfectly understand that this is a conventional charge, having no necessary relation to the facts. I have quoted the case of Mr. Booth Tarkington, returning from Europe and saying to the newspaper reporters, with a smile, “When one’s wife accuses one of cruelty, no gentleman would think of replying.” The reporters all understood what that meant, and the public which read it appreciated Mr. Tarkington’s tact. Mr. Tarkington, you see, is a novelist whose work involves no peril to the profit system; therefore Mr. Tarkington’s wife could charge him with “cruelty,” without Mr. Tarkington’s reputation being destroyed and the sale of his books wiped out. A recent item sent out by Mr. Tarkington’s publishers—Messrs. Harper & Brothers, with the eight hundred thousand dollar mortgage reposing in the vaults of J. P. Morgan & Company—stated that they had sold a total of 1,324,900 copies of Mr. Tarkington’s novels.

But it was entirely different with this Chicago lecturer; this man, you see, was a Socialist, and therefore a menace to mortgages. In a lecture-room the question came up of a teacher who had switched a child; the speaker remarked playfully that the cave-man had been accustomed to inflict discipline with a club, and that boys, according to biology, were in the cave-man stage of development. So next day the readers of a yellow journal in Chicago read a scare headline about a “highbrow” society lecturer who was preaching “cave-man philosophy” to his students, and applying “cave-man treatment” to his wife, so that she was divorcing him for cruelty! Half a dozen such yarns at this were piled in quick succession upon the head of this Socialist lecturer, with the result that his career was ruined.

By way of contrast, let me tell you about another man—proprietor of a great department-store in New York. I will not name him; he is a worm, poor in everything but money. It happened that through mutual friends I knew about his private life; he kept numerous mistresses, and flaunted them boldly on the “Great White Way,” starting them on showy theatrical careers, and otherwise making himself a joke to the “Tenderloin.” This man’s wife divorced him for his infidelities; and what do you think happened? What did the newspapers do? Not a line about the matter in any newspaper of New York City!

To some of the rules which I lay down in this book there are exceptions. It is sometimes possible for a radical to be quoted honestly by a capitalist newspaper; it is sometimes possible to get news unfavorable to the profit-system into the most reactionary sheet. But to the following two rules there is no exception anywhere:

Rule 1. Any proprietor of a department-store anywhere in America may divorce, or be divorced, with entire immunity so far as concerns the press.

Rule 2. No radical in America can divorce or be divorced without being gutted, skinned alive, and placed on the red-hot griddle of Capitalist Journalism.

I will tell you about another Chicago Socialist whom I have mentioned—Oscar Lovell Triggs. Fifteen or twenty years ago Triggs was the most popular man in the faculty of Mr. Rockefeller’s University of Chicago; they had to get extra-sized class-rooms for his lectures, and so there was jealousy of him—camouflaged, of course, as opposition to Socialism. Triggs was so indiscreet as to live in a radical colony in Chicago. He was asked to give an interview on some subject or another, and the reporter, going down the hallway of the community building, made note of the fact that in the next room there hung some silk stockings and a pink kimono. So he went off and wrote a cunningly devised and highly suggestive story about silk stockings and a pink kimono in the room adjoining that of the Chicago college professor.

Here was a scandal, of course; and Triggs was expected to fight it. But, as it happened, Triggs was unhappily married, his wife was living with an artist in Paris, and desired a divorce. Any divorce lawyer will tell you that men who are thus caught on the hook are prone to strange and reckless rushes. Triggs, whose wife wanted a divorce, decided that this story would serve as well as anything. A friend who lived in the building at the time, and knew Triggs intimately, assures me that there was not a word of truth in the insinuations, there was nothing between Triggs and the young lady of the silk stockings and the pink kimono. Nevertheless, this most popular professor of literature was driven out of the university, and set to work as a common laborer on a California chicken-ranch.

I write to ask him to verify the details of this story; I ask him to be heroic, and let me tell the story, in the interest of the public welfare. He gives the permission, adding the following comment:

In this statement, you speak of only one detail—the last one. But the
real story involves what amounted to a conspiracy against me in the
two years preceding my retirement from the university. This consisted
in so reporting lectures and statements that a very quiet and
reasonable scholar came to be regarded as a “freak professor.” No one
could stand up against this kind of attack and retain a position in a
conventional university. I never could get to the bottom of it. It is
a poor way to treat human material, but so be it.

Maybe you distrust the radicals; they are all “free lovers,” you say; they deserve their marital unhappiness, they deserve exposure and humiliation. Well, then, suppose I tell you about some respectable person? Suppose I tell you about the President of the United States, secure in the sanctity of the White House? Will that convince you?

You didn’t happen to know that the “Scandal Bureau” had prepared a story on Woodrow Wilson! The “interests,” which wanted war with Germany and Mexico, had a scandal all ready to spring on him toward the end of the 1916 campaign. They had the dynamite planted, the wires laid; all they had to do was to press the button. At the last moment their nerve failed them, they did not press the button. I was told why by a prominent Republican leader, who was present in the councils of the party when the final decision was made. This man pounded on the table and declared: “I’d have said I’d sooner vote for the devil than for Woodrow Wilson, but if you start a dirty story on the President of the United States, I’ll vote for Woodrow Wilson, and one or two million Americans will do likewise.”

Their nerve failed them; but some steps they had already taken, and you may trace their footprints if you are curious. There were dark hints in many newspapers, and if you saw the Washington correspondence of London papers during the fall of 1916, you found more than hints. For example, here is James Davenport Whelpley, a well-known journalist, writing in the “Fortnightly Review,” one of the most dignified of English monthlies:

Another issue has come to the fore in the American political campaign
quite unusual in American politics.... With all the freedom that is
given to the American Press, and with all the pernicious intrusion
into private affairs that finds expression in the columns of American
newspapers, it has been many years since the personality of a
candidate has played any part in the publicity work of a campaign, no
matter how great the temptation may have been to use material at hand.
In reading American newspapers today, however, much can be gleaned
from between the lines. Something seems to be struggling against
precedent and unwritten rules for clear expression, and that something
finds itself articulate in the communications of man to man.

And then Mr. Whelpley goes on to tell about “elections being won and lost at the last moment by psychological waves which have swept across the national mind, swamping on their way the political hopes of one or the other candidate.” So Mr. Whelpley is unable to predict the re-election of Woodrow Wilson!

More definite even than this, there was a story in “McClure’s Magazine,” which had already gone to press, and could not be recalled. “McClure’s,” now a tool of the “interests,” was conducting a raging campaign for “preparedness,” and Wilson stood in the way. The story was called “That Parkinson Affair,” by Sophie Kerr, and was published in the issue of September, 1916—just when the scandal was ready to be sprung. It is ostensibly a piece of fiction, but so transparent that no child could fail to recognize it. It is the vilest piece of innuendo in American political history, and remains on our library shelves as a monumental example of the depths to which our predatory interests have been willing to drag their “kept” magazines.

When the big magazines were bought up by the “interests,” we were solemnly assured that the purpose was to put an end to “scandal-mongering.” But now it appears that the purpose was not to lay the “muck-rake” on the shelf, but merely to turn it against the friends of human progress!