Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/302

 poisonous filth such as this. I do not count the people who read and answer the advertisements; I count only those who write them and sell them, those who set the type and manufacture the paper, those who distribute the publications and keep the accounts of the complicated operations. There cannot be less than a million people thus occupied with the advertising business in America; and all of them buried to the eyes in this poisonous filth, all compelled to absorb it, to believe it, to have their personalities befouled by it! It means, of course, that these people are permanently excluded from the intellectual life. These people cannot know beauty, they cannot know grace and charm, they cannot know dignity, they cannot even know common honesty. To say that they are bound as captives to the chariot-wheels of Mammon is not to indulge in loose metaphor, but to describe precisely their condition. They are bound in body, mind, and soul to vulgarity, banality, avarice and fraud.

You, perhaps, are not connected with the advertising business, so you think you may ignore the fate of these pitiful captives. You are a banker, perhaps; you handle the money of advertisers, and your mind is shaped by the effort to understand them and their ways. Or you are a telegrapher, and send telegrams for the advertising business; or you are a farmer, and raise food for the million advertisement-makers; or you are a steel-worker, and help to make their typewriters, the nails for their shoes, and the rails over which their products are carried.

Or perhaps you are a person of leisure; you dwell alone in an ivory tower of art. Now and then, however, you have to know something about the world in which you live; and competitive commercialism ordains that when you seek to learn this, you shall have the maniac shrieks of advertisers resounding in your brain, you shall have the whirling dervishes of this new cult of Publicity for Profit cavorting about in your ivory tower. More than that, you shall have the intellectual content of everything you read distorted by the advertisements which adjoin them; your most dignified editor, your most aloof, "art for art's sake" poet will be a parasite upon advertisements, and if he thinks the advertisements have nothing to do with him, it is only because the dignified editor and the aloof, "art for art's sake" poet are fools.,

Take the "American Magazine"; that awful flub-dub I