a hundred thousand, Ihmsen, Carvalho, von Hamm and the rest, getting fifteen or twenty thousand. If you are to be lifted into those higher regions, you must show one thing and one thing only; it is called "a nose for news," and it means a nose for the millions of pennies which come pouring into the Hearst coffers every day. From top to bottom every human being in the vast Hearst machine, man, woman and office-boy, has every nerve and sinew stretched to the task of bringing in that flood of pennies; each is fighting for a tiny bit of prestige, a tiny addition to his personal share of the flood. And always, of course, from top to bottom the thing to be considered is the million-headed public—what will tickle its fancies, what particular words printed in large red and black letters will cause it to pay out each day the greatest possible number of pennies.
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.
