Upton Sinclair's The Brass Check: The Book's Reception and Legacy

Recently reviewing The Brass Check by Upton Sinclair I limited myself to discussing the book's contents. However, others have addressed the book's reception, not least Robert McChesney and Ben Scott when they wrote the introduction to an edition of the book that the University of Illinois Press published in 2002 that McChesney and Scott also published as a separate article in their own publication.

In that introduction McChesney and Scott report that of all of Sinclair's other books The Brass Check was the only one to compare with his novel The Jungle in repute--until the book was buried, and so deeply that, as they write in their piece, those interested in the criticism of journalistic practice are often under the misapprehension that no one addressed the subject before the 1980s (when such works as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent appeared). Of course, this burial did not simply "happen," but was a reflection of the hostility to Sinclair generally and this book particularly--not least, from the very press institutions which Sinclair attacked, and which would have liked to sue him (indeed, Sinclair challenged them to try if they could catch him in an error of fact), but to his credit and not theirs proved unable to do so for lack of grounds (because, Sinclair and his supporters have been able to say, everything he wrote in that meticulously researched and documented book happened to be the truth).

If, as the book's onetime reputation shows, it did not prevent Sinclair from reaching a significant audience and having an effect on the dialogue that way at the time of its appearance, it did make it harder for the book's effect to endure. Moreover, as McChesney and Scott make clear in their piece there was also the presumption that journalism had been reformed in the Progressive era so that the ills of which Sinclair wrote in The Brass Check had been consigned to the past. Journalism was "professionalized," they said, and a wall put up between management and editorship to protect the autonomy of the professional journalists as they went about their work of reporting the news "objectively."

In hindsight that can seem a thoroughly "centrist" response--reflecting the belief of adherents in that ideology (inherited from the Progressive movement) in "education," "expertise," "professionalism"; in the idea that one could speak of objectivity in such matters in such a way as to not have to deal with touchy matters of "ideology" (a category from which centrism excluded itself, of course). This approach can seem very centrist, too, in the haste to consider a very large, structural, societal problem resolved by some tweaks, over and done with, so that there is no point in talking about it anymore. It also seems very centrist in what was really behind all of the above--a spirit of elitism and exclusion in the regard for "professionalism"; the sort of impoverished, narrow, context-avoiding, theory-averse analytical stance that C. Wright Mills criticized as "abstracted empiricism" as the reality of their "objectivity"; a greater inclination to dismiss problems than solve them (just as with their pretense that the New Deal and post-war boom took care of the problem of poverty); and as the last in particular suggests, a hostility to social criticism and social change that preemptively shuts down talk of a very large part of reality in loyalty to the status quo, not least by treating capitalism and the questions of class inextricable from it as entirely off-limits to legitimate discussion.

Indeed, it is worth recalling that the target of Progressive reformers in journalism of the kind discussed here was sensational "yellow" journalism rather than the fact that journalism was "a class institution, serving the rich and spurning the poor." The result was that in their view the great evil bedeviling journalism was the capitulation of the press to the temptation to pander toward the lowest common denominator out of simple "commercialism," a view that not only ignores what those seeing the matter Sinclair's way would have regarded as the largest problem, but in fact provides cover for those not wanting that problem raised let alone addressed, while actually punching "down" at the broad public rather than "up" at the elites whose agendas the press was serving in that way that a fundamentally, deeply, conservative centrism is so prone to do.

As with so much else about centrism, its notions about journalism are far from the peak of their credibility circa 2024--just as, I would think, a great many would see in Sinclair's book something very credible and relevant indeed for those interested in the state of journalism in our time.