graduating class he urged the class "to seek a sense of form—in dress, manners, speech and intellectual habits. In antithesis it was pointed out that we had lived too long in a kingdom of slouch." The New York papers got it by telegraph in this fashion:
The wiggling, swaying movements of American women on the
streets and the stage have made them the ridicule of all Europe.
They have a glide and a wiggle that makes them both undignified
and ungraceful.
Whereupon the horrified professor writes to the "New
York Nation":
Of course, I never said any such thing, but papers in all parts
of the country could not know that the report was stupid fiction,
and that the quotation marks were absolutely false. Yet in this form
the above vulgar paragraphs have gone the length and breath of
the country as my utterances.
To understand such incidents you must know the economics
of reporting. The person who misquoted Professor Laughlin
was probably a student, scratching for his next week's board-*bill,
and knowing that he would get two or three dollars for
a startling story, and nothing at all for a true story—it would
be judged "dull," and would be "ditched." In my own case, the
person to blame was a "star writer"; she was working on
a fancy salary, earned by her ability to cook up sensations, to
keep her name and her picture on the front page. If this
"star" had gone back to her city editor and said, "Upton
Sinclair is a good fellow; he gave me an interesting talk about
the corruption of modern marriages," the editor would have
scented some preachment and said, "Well, give him two sticks."
But instead she came into the office exclaiming, "Gee, I've
got a hot one! That fool muck-raker tore up his marriage
certificate before my eyes! He says that married women are
sold like horses and he's sorry he's married to his wife!" So
the city editor exclaimed, "Holy Smoke!"—seeing a story
he could telegraph to the main offices in New York and
Chicago, thus attracting to himself the attention of the heads
of the Hearst machine.
For you must understand that while the city editor of the "San Francisco Examiner" will be getting three or four thousand dollars a year, above him are big positions of responsibility and power—Arthur Brisbane, getting ninety or
