Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/207

 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