He was twenty-seven years old when he first sprang into prominence in the
newspapers through the publication of his book, _Sex and Progress_. The
book remains to-day a milestone in the history and philosophy of
marriage. It is a heavy tome of over seven hundred pages, painfully
careful and accurate, and startlingly original. It was a book for
scientists, and not one calculated to make a stir. But Gluck, in the
last chapter, using barely three lines for it, mentioned the hypothetical
desirability of trial marriages. At once the newspapers seized these
three lines, “played them up yellow,” as the slang was in those days, and
set the whole world laughing at Emil Gluck, the bespectacled young
professor of twenty-seven. Photographers snapped him, he was besieged by
reporters, women’s clubs throughout the land passed resolutions
condemning him and his immoral theories; and on the floor of the
California Assembly, while discussing the state appropriation to the
University, a motion demanding the expulsion of Gluck was made under
threat of withholding the appropriation—of course, none of his
persecutors had read the book; the twisted newspaper version of only
three lines of it was enough for them. Here began Emil Gluck’s hatred
for newspaper men. By them his serious and intrinsically valuable work
of six years had been made a laughing-stock and a notoriety. To his
dying day, and to their everlasting regret, he never forgave them.
It was the newspapers that were responsible for the next disaster that
befell him. For the five years following the publication of his book he
had remained silent, and silence for a lonely man is not good. One can
conjecture sympathetically the awful solitude of Emil Gluck in that
populous University; for he was without friends and without sympathy.
His only recourse was books, and he went on reading and studying
enormously. But in 1927 he accepted an invitation to appear before the
Human Interest Society of Emeryville. He did not trust himself to speak,
and as we write we have before us a copy of his learned paper. It is
sober, scholarly, and scientific, and, it must also be added,
conservative. But in one place he dealt with, and I quote his words,
“the industrial and social revolution that is taking place in society.”
A reporter present seized upon the word “revolution,” divorced it from
the text, and wrote a garbled account that made Emil Gluck appear an
anarchist. At once, “Professor Gluck, anarchist,” flamed over the wires
and was appropriately “featured” in all the newspapers in the land.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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