The Brass Check: A Study of American JournalismSinclair, Upton
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The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism
Sinclair, Upton
Associated Press; Journalism -- United States; Press -- United States
In conflict with such motives, considerations of honor, truth and
justice count for absolutely nothing. The men and women who turn out the
Hearst newspapers were willing, not merely to destroy my reputation,
they have been willing again and again to drive perfectly innocent men
and women to ruin and suicide, in order that the copper flood may
continue to pour in. They have been willing by deliberate and shameful
lies, made out of whole cloth, to stir nations to enmity and drive them
to murderous war. Mr. Hearst’s newspaper machine telegraphed that vile
misrepresentation of me all the way round the world; it telegraphed my
repudiation of it nowhere, and I was helpless in the matter. Millions of
people were caused to think of me as a vulgar and fatuous person—and
some of them were permitted to denounce me in Mr. Hearst’s own papers!
The following contribution by the Rev. Charles H. Parkhurst, a
sensational clergyman of New York, was featured in the “New York Evening
Journal” with large headlines and a portrait of the reverend
physiognomy:
Upton Sinclair seems to be a person so profusely developed on the
animal side that marriage is not able to be conceived of by him as
being other than a mere matter of commerce between two parties of
opposite sexes, and sex simply a principle that starts and stops at
the level of the physical without ever mounting up into the region of
intellect and spirit.
A pig will contemplate even a garden of flowers with a pig’s eye, and
instead of arranging those flowers into a bouquet will bore into them
with his snout.
Mr. Sinclair’s doctrine is that of free love, and matrimony a physical
luxury and an evanescent convenience.
This comes dangerously near to companioning him with the cattle and
makes the marriage relation an elegant reproduction of the nuptials of
the pasture.
Also I quote a few scattered sentences from a long editorial in the
“Commercial-Appeal” of Memphis, Tennessee, an extremely conservative
family newspaper, widely-read throughout the South:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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