Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/37

 the report, thirty-two typewritten pages, taking up every statement about conditions in the yards, and denying one after another.

I read the report, and recall one amusing detail. On page one hundred and sixteen of "The Jungle" is a description of the old packing-houses, their walls covered with grease and soaked with warm moist steam. "In these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years." The comment upon this statement was: "Unproven theory." So it was necessary for me to consult the text-books on bacteriology, and demonstrate to Doubleday, Page and Company that unicellular parasitic organisms are sometimes endowed with immortality!

I said: "This is not an honest report. The thing you have to do, if you really wish to know, is to send an investigator of your own, somebody in whom you have confidence." They decided this must be done, and picked a young lawyer, McKee by name, and sent him to Chicago. He spent some time there, and when he came back his verdict was that I had told the truth. I went to dinner at McKee's home and spent the evening hearing his story—incidentally getting one of the shocks of my life.

McKee had done what I had urged him not to do: he had gone first to the packers, to see what they had officially to show him. They had placed him in charge of a man—I do not recall the name, but we will say Jones—their publicity agent, a former newspaper man, who served as host and entertainer to inquiring visitors. He had taken McKee in charge and shown him around, and in the course of their conversation McKee mentioned that he was looking into the charges made in a novel called "The Jungle." "Oh, yes!" said Jones. "I know that book. I read it from beginning to end. I prepared a thirty-two page report on it for Keeley of the 'Tribune'."

So here was a little glimpse behind the curtain of the newspaper world of Chicago! James Keeley was, and still is the beau ideal of American newspaper men; I have never met him, but I have read articles about him, the kind of "write-ups" which the capitalist system gives to its heroes. He had begun life as a poor boy and risen from the ranks by sheer ability and force of character—you know the "dope." Now he was one of the high gods of newspaperdom; and when it was a question of protecting the great predatory interest which subsidizes all the newspapers of Chicago and holds the govern-