Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/231

 In New York City one of the Gimbel brothers, owners of a Philadelphia department store, was arrested, charged with sodomy, and he cut his throat. Not a single newspaper in Philadelphia gave this news! This was in the days before Gimbel Brothers had a store in New York, therefore it occurred to the "New York Evening Journal" that here was an opportunity to build up circulation in a new field. Large quantities of the paper were shipped to Philadelphia, and the police of Philadelphia stopped the newsboys on the streets and took away the papers; and the Philadelphia papers said nothing about it!

And this department-store interest supervises not only the news columns, but the editorial columns. Some years ago one of the girl-slaves of a New York department-store committed suicide, leaving behind her a note to the effect that she could not stand twenty cent dinners any longer. The "New York World," which collects several thousand dollars every day from department-stores, judged it necessary to deal with this incident. "The World," you understand, is a "democratic" paper, a "liberal" paper, an "independent" paper, a paper of "the people." Said the "World":

There are some people who make too large a demand upon fortune. Fixing their eyes upon the standards of living flaunted by the rich, they measure their requirements by their desires. Such persons are easily affected by outside influences, and perhaps in this case the recent discussions, more often silly than wise, concerning the relation of wages to vice, may have made the girl more susceptible than usual to the depressing effects of cheap dinners.

And do you think that is a solitary instance, the result of a temporary editorial aberration? No, it is typical of the capitalistic mind, which is so frugal that it extracts profit even from the suicide of its victims. Some years ago an old man committed suicide because his few shares of express-stock lost their value. The "New York Times" was opposing parcel-post, because the big express-companies were a prominent part of the city's political and financial machine; the "New York Times" presented this item of news as a suicide caused by the parcel-post!