Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/244

 made by giving the news to the people; I must qualify the statement by explaining that it must be done on a large scale, and you must have capital to keep you going until you reach the people who can understand you. If you try it on a small scale, and without capital, you are crushed before you get your head out of the mud. And you know that, and govern yourself accordingly. The other day I had a call from the editor of a small newspaper, out here in this broad free West, about which you read in romances. The editor explained that he hadn't dared to write and order my books; he couldn't afford to let a check, payable to me, go through his bank; he called personally, and would carry the books home in his trunk!

Also this chapter would be incomplete without mention of the swarm of "house organs," published by big industrial concerns for the edification of their employes. According to the "New York Times" (Oct. 26, 1919), there are three hundred and seventy-five such publications in America, many with circulations running into thousands. During the war seventy-three were started in the shipyard industry alone. "During the past spring and summer they multiplied like bacteria." And the "Times" tells admiringly of the subtle arts whereby slave-labor is cajoled and idealized: "saying it in ragtime jazz variations to the vast delight of its reading public a Diamond Dick sort of tale  the story has punch  all as intimate as the small town weekly" and so on through columns of poison prescriptions. They trap the poor devils in their homes:

The woman's page is one of the most carefully thought out departments, on the theory that the influence of the family is counted on to sway the man from radicalism. Fully half of this group of publications is sent to the man's home by mail, to give the wife first innings. In this particular magazine the woman's page is fairly crawling with babies

You hardly notice the propaganda even when you're looking for it with a microscope, but it is there. It is in the weave and the woof, rather than in the conspicuous pattern. You find it in similes, "like soap in the home of a Bolshevik. Some novelty!" The agitator is taken down from the dignity of his soapbox throne and flippantly advised to bathe.