I said: “This is not an honest report. The thing you have to do, if you really wish to know, is to send an investigator of your own, somebody in whom you have confidence.” They decided this must be done, and picked a young lawyer, McKee by name, and sent him to Chicago. He spent some time there, and when he came back his verdict was that I had told the truth. I went to dinner at McKee’s home and spent the evening hearing his story—incidentally getting one of the shocks of my life.
McKee had done what I had urged him not to do: he had gone first to the packers, to see what they had officially to show him. They had placed him in charge of a man—I do not recall the name, but we will say Jones—their publicity agent, a former newspaper man, who served as host and entertainer to inquiring visitors. He had taken McKee in charge and shown him around, and in the course of their conversation McKee mentioned that he was looking into the charges made in a novel called “The Jungle.” “Oh, yes!” said Jones. “I know that book. I read it from beginning to end. I prepared a thirty-two page report on it for Keeley of the ‘Tribune’.”
So here was a little glimpse behind the curtain of the newspaper world of Chicago! James Keeley was, and still is the _beau ideal_ of American newspaper men; I have never met him, but I have read articles about him, the kind of “write-ups” which the capitalist system gives to its heroes. He had begun life as a poor boy and risen from the ranks by sheer ability and force of character—you know the “dope.” Now he was one of the high gods of newspaperdom; and when it was a question of protecting the great predatory interest which subsidizes all the newspapers of Chicago and holds the government of the city in the hollow of its hand, this high god sent to Armour and Company and had a report prepared by their publicity-agent, and sent this report to a friend in New York as the result of a confidential investigation by a trusted reporter of the “Chicago Tribune” staff!
And maybe you think this must be an unusual incident; you think that capitalist Journalism would not often dare to play a trick like that! I happen to be reading “Socialism versus the State,” by Emile Vandervelde, Belgian Minister of State, and come upon this paragraph: