Wilson was urging you not to spend money on luxuries. In the same way, when there is a crisis of unemployment, the department-stores and other advertisers command that falsehoods shall be told you. If you know that business is bad, you may be cautious and save your money; whereas the department-stores want you to spend your money, and the kept press wants its share of this money for advertisements. Says Prof. Ross:
The alacrity with which many dailies serve as mouth-pieces of
the financial powers came out very clearly during the recent industrial
depression. The owner of one leading newspaper called his reporters
together and said in effect, "Boys, the first of you who turns in a
story of a lay-off or a shut-down, gets the sack." Early in the
depression the newspapers teemed with glowing accounts of the resumption
of steel-mills and the revival of business, all baseless. After
harvest-time they began to cheep "Prosperity," "Bumper Crops,"
"Farmers Buying Automobiles." In cities where banks and employers
offered clearing-house certificates instead of cash, the press usually
printed fairy tales of the enthusiasm with which these makeshifts were
taken by depositors and workingmen. The numbers and sufferings
of the unemployed were ruthlessly concealed from the reading public.
A mass meeting of the men out of work was represented as "anarchistic"
or "instigated by the Socialists for political effect." In
one daily appeared a dispatch under the heading "Five Thousand Jobs
Offered; Only Ten Apply." It stated that the Commissioner of Public
Works of Detroit, misled by reports of dire distress, set afoot a
public work which called for five thousand men. Only ten men applied
for work, and all these expected to be bosses. Correspondence with
the official establishes the fact that the number of jobs offered was
five hundred, and that three thousand men applied for them.
That was twelve years ago, in the Middle West. Six years
ago we had another unemployment crisis, and I watched the
newspapers handling it in New York. You might have thought
they would not have been able to fool me; but they did! A
boy out of this unemployed army, Frank Tanenbaum by name,
led a number of starving men to the Catholic Church of St.
Alphonsus to request shelter on a winter's night. I read
several newspapers, in the hope of getting the truth from one
of them; on this occasion all the papers agreed that the unemployed
men and their leader abused and threatened the
priest, and were noisy and blasphemous in their behavior. I
was heartsick about it. Oh, what a pity! If only those poor
devils had had the sense to go to the churches in a quiet and
respectful way, their position would have been impregnable.
Christian churches would not have dared to turn out starving
men on a winter's night!
