Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/327

 CHAPTER LI

THE PRESS AND THE RADICALS

If you go into a New York club in the middle of August, you will be told in entire good faith that "everybody" is out of town. It is this "everybody" who is out of town in August that American Journalism knows and serves. Those who stay in town in August are "nobody," and have to take their chances with the newspapers, as with everything else in capitalist society. Imagine yourself a poor devil, caught in a set of circumstances which cause the city editor of some newspaper, after five minutes consideration, to make up his mind that you are guilty of a crime! Trial by a city editor in five minutes, and execution in columns of illustrated slander—that is our American system of jurisprudence. In the city of Atlanta, a Jewish manufacturer of pencils was tried for rape and murder. He was quite evidently innocent, but it happens that the "poor whites" of the South are jealous of the commercial keenness of the Jews; the politicians of the South want the votes of these "poor whites," and the "yellow" journals want their pennies; so this poor wretch was hounded by the newspapers for several months, and finally was hanged.

But it is for the poor devil become class-conscious, and protesting against injustice to his class, that our Journalism reserves its deadliest venom. It is when the Radical steps upon the scene that the hunting-pack joins in full cry. Then every prejudice, every hatred in the whole journalistic psychology becomes focused as by a burning-glass upon one centre. The hatred of the staff, men who have sold their honor, and take bold truth-telling for a personal insult; the hatred of the owner, whose life-time gains are threatened; the hatred of the advertiser who supports the paper, of the banker who handles its funds, of the politician who betrays the state to it—all these various hatreds mass themselves, they form what the foot-ball player knows as a "V," they "rush" this enemy and bowl him over and trample him under their feet.

Any kind of radical, it makes no difference; anyone who