"Tenderloin." This man's wife divorced him for his infidelities; and what do you think happened? What did the newspapers do? Not a line about the matter in any newspaper of New York City!
To some of the rules which I lay down in this book there are exceptions. It is sometimes possible for a radical to be quoted honestly by a capitalist newspaper; it is sometimes possible to get news unfavorable to the profit-system into the most reactionary sheet. But to the following two rules there is no exception anywhere:
Rule 1. Any proprietor of a department-store anywhere in America may divorce, or be divorced, with entire immunity so far as concerns the press.
Rule 2. No radical in America can divorce or be divorced without being gutted, skinned alive, and placed on the red-hot griddle of Capitalist Journalism.
I will tell you about another Chicago Socialist whom I have mentioned—Oscar Lovell Triggs. Fifteen or twenty years ago Triggs was the most popular man in the faculty of Mr. Rockefeller's University of Chicago; they had to get extra-sized class-rooms for his lectures, and so there was jealousy of him—camouflaged, of course, as opposition to Socialism. Triggs was so indiscreet as to live in a radical colony in Chicago. He was asked to give an interview on some subject or another, and the reporter, going down the hallway of the community building, made note of the fact that in the next room there hung some silk stockings and a pink kimono. So he went off and wrote a cunningly devised and highly suggestive story about silk stockings and a pink kimono in the room adjoining that of the Chicago college professor.
Here was a scandal, of course; and Triggs was expected to fight it. But, as it happened, Triggs was unhappily married, his wife was living with an artist in Paris, and desired a divorce. Any divorce lawyer will tell you that men who are thus caught on the hook are prone to strange and reckless rushes. Triggs, whose wife wanted a divorce, decided that this story would serve as well as anything. A friend who lived in the building at the time, and knew Triggs intimately, assures me that there was not a word of truth in the insinuations, there was nothing between Triggs and the young lady
