The Brass Check: A Study of American JournalismSinclair, Upton
General
The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism
Sinclair, Upton
Associated Press; Journalism -- United States; Press -- United States
For the most part what you read about these leisure-class hotels in the
newspapers is elaborate advertisements of the hotels and their
attractions, together with fatuous and servile accounts of the social
doings of the guests: columns and columns of stuff about them, what they
eat and what they drink and what they wear, what games they play and
what trophies they win, how much money they have, and what important
positions they fill in the world, and their opinions on every subject
from politics to ping-pong. They are “society”; they are the people who
own the world, and for whom the world exists, and in every
newspaper-office there is a definite understanding that so long as these
people keep out of the law-courts, there shall be published no
uncomplimentary news concerning them.
I will finish with the subject of Helicon Hall while I am on it. Seven
years later I found myself involved in the Colorado coal-strike,
fighting to break down the boycott of the capitalist newspapers. A group
of young radicals endeavored to tell the story of the Ludlow massacre at
a street meeting in Tarrytown, New York, the home of the Rockefellers.
They were arrested and thrown into jail, and I started a campaign in
Tarrytown to set them free. Under these circumstances I became the
object of venomous attacks by the local paper, the “Tarrytown News”; in
one of its editorials the “News” declared that my home in Englewood, New
Jersey, had been raided by the police on account of “free-love”
practices; and this statement was reprinted by other papers. I was
pretty cross at the time, because of a series of outrages which I had
witnessed, so I caused the arrest of the editors of the “Tarrytown News”
for criminal libel. By a curious coincidence I found myself involved
once more with a village horse-doctor—not the horse-doctor of Englewood,
New Jersey, but the horse-doctor of Tarrytown, New York. Readers of
“King Coal” will find him portrayed as the justice of the peace with
whom the hero has an interview.
This judicial horse-doctor issued warrants, and appointed the day of the
trial, and a number of my Helicon Hall friends agreed to come. But one
was ill and another was called away, and my lawyer arranged with the
lawyers of the other side for a week’s postponement. Such agreements
between lawyers are always considered matters of honor with the
profession, but in this case, when we appeared before the judicial
horse-doctor to have the postponement arranged, the lawyers of the other
side repudiated their agreement. So we found ourselves in a trap—ordered
to proceed to trial without a single witness. Of course we refused to
proceed, and the defendants were discharged.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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