The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1927-11-02
By Upton Sinclair

America attractive, and distractingV
the masses with jazz and sex and
luxury and fashion and crime and
mystery and every conceivable form
of futility. The individual writer or
artist may have no idea what his work
means; but rest assured that the
masters of the payroll know, and Sc
lect our cultural diet with care and
definite purpose.
Meet my old comrade and fellow
worker, Joseph Medill Patterson.
Twenty years ago Joe was the red
hope of the radical movement, the
author Of that brilliant undertaking
novel, "a Little Brother of the Rich,"
and of numerous labor plays which
wrung your heart. Joe knew his fam
lily had stolen from the public schools
of Chicago the land upon which it's
great newspaper stood, and had
bought several elections in order to
hold it's loot. But as time passed, the
ties of blood asserted themselves, and
Joe weakened in his rage against the
criminal rich. He went to war, and
learned the use of machine guns and
poison gas bombs, and now he has a
store of them ire the basement of the
new white stone palace in which his
great murder-newspaper is housed.
Captain Patterson, ex-Comrade Joe,
is now master-fascist; and he has
not only the Chicago Tribune" but
the DAILY News" of New York, the
trashy tabloid with more than a mil
lion readers; also Liberty" the bar
ber-shop weekly, upon which l am
told he has lost several millions, but
he does not mind, because it is cause
the liberty of American big bust
ness to put fourteen million Mexicans
into slavery. I happened to pick up
q copy on Lincoln's birthday of this
year, and I found an editorial call
ing for new war with Mexico, and
praising the last one as the best thing
that had ever happened to Mexico;
also panegyric on Lincoln by a
preacher-but you bet that preacher
didn't quote what Lincoln had said
concerning the Mexican war!
Meet the great Jesse l.. Lasky,
newspaper man, gold-miner, band
leader, magician-manager, and now
lord of the moving picture realm. Mr..
Lasky has no military title, so let
us call him Emperor Of Orgies. The
emperors of old knew only the orgies
of all times and places, and at three
weeks notice will produce a set of
the ruling class diversions of Perse-
polls or Paris, Nineveh or New York,
Sodom or Chicago, Harnak or Holly
wood. But when the Russian revolu-
ton CAME and threatened the orgy
enjoying rich, Mr.. Lasky fastened to
the rescue, to make the world safe
for orgies. Who could better reveal
the horrors Of the naturalization of
women in Russia, than one who knows
so we'll the moving perturbation of
women in America? In the year 1919
at the height Of our white terror, Mr..
Lasky produced. an elaborate feature
picture called "The World and It's Wo-
man." with Geraldine Farrar, opera
singer, and her husband, Lou Tellegen
as the stars, and it took my prize as
the most hideous piece of hate-pro-
paganda that had ever come under
my eyes.
And how do you think Mr.. Lasky
got all the details about the blood
thirsty "reds"? Why, he hired an
author who had lived among them
had actually been one Of them, in
fact. None other than my old friend
Thompson Buchanan, volunteer pub
licity agent for the Paterson Pageant!
That was fourteen years ago, when
ten thousand silk-workers Of Pater-
son, New Jersey, went on strike, and