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
I have many friends who were present at the marriage of George D. Herron
and Carrie Rand. They were married by a Congregational clergyman,
William Thurston Brown, and I have seen the marriage certificate. Yet
all over this country, and in fact all over the world, the newspapers
portrayed the ceremony as a “free love wedding,” no real marriage, but
just a say-so to be terminated at pleasure. The most horrible tales were
told, the most horrible pictures were published—of Herron, and of his
first wife, and of his “soul mate” and his “soul mate’s” mother.
I saw that the strain of the thing was killing Herron, and persuaded him
to go abroad to live and do his writing. Three or four years later old
Mrs. Rand died, leaving a part of her money to found the Rand School;
Herron and his wife came home to bury her, and again the storm broke
out. He had purchased a farm at Metuchen, New Jersey, intending to live
there; a reporter came, representing that the “Cosmopolitan Magazine”
wished to publish a series of articles about the wives of distinguished
American writers. On this pretext the reporter obtained a photograph of
a painting which Herron had had made of his wife and baby, and a week
later there appeared in the magazine section of the “New York Sunday
American” a horrible scare story about the “free love colony” which
Herron was founding in the midst of an exclusive residential suburb of
New Jersey. There was a picture of the free love wife and the free love
baby, and of Herron standing upon a ladder, tacking upon a wall his
repudiation of the institution of marriage. The headlines ran:
ELEVEN MILLION DOLLARS TO PROMOTE THIS DOCTRINE
How the Vast Fortune of the Late Mrs. Rand, Who Gave Prof. Herron’s
Deserted Wife $60,000 to Divorce Him, is Being Used in an Amazing
Warfare on Marriage and Religion Under the Leadership of Herron and
Mrs. Rand’s Daughter.
This story went all over the country, and recently when Herron was named
by President Wilson as one of the delegates to confer with the Russian
Soviets, the story was rehashed in our newspapers, and made the subject
of indignant protest by religious bodies. Having visited this Metuchen
home and seen the whole story in the making, I am in a position to state
that the Metuchen “free love colony” was entirely a product of the
obscene minds of the editors of the “Sunday Yellows.” What is the moral
character of these “yellow” editors you may judge from the fact that,
soon after this, one of the editors of the “Sunday World” was arrested
by Anthony Comstock and sent to jail for a year or two, for having in
his possession several thousand obscene photographs which he used in the
corrupting of boys. In such minds the Metuchen story was born; and
seventeen years later its foul carcass is exhumed by the “Churchman,”
organ of “the Church of Good Society” in New York, and made the basis of
a vicious sneer at President Wilson. I quote:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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