Samuel Hopkins Adams’s The Clarion follows a young man who buys a newspaper and finds that owning one honestly is far harder than inheriting a fortune. Set in the fictional industrial city of Worthington, the novel runs from a country medicine show in 1897 to the city’s centennial celebrations in 1913, tracing the education of Harrington Surtaine—called Hal—as he tries to turn a disreputable daily into something clean while the money behind it comes from his father’s patent-medicine empire. Thirty-seven chapters carry the story from “The Itinerant” to “McGuire Ellis Wakes Up,” and the cast is large: reformers and reporters, society women and slum landlords, a boss who owns the town and a foreman who despises it.
“Pain. Pain. Pain. The primal curse, the dominant tragedy of life.”
From the Medicine Wagon to the Editor’s Chair
The Itinerant and the Hardscrabbler
The novel opens on a night in Marysville, 1897, where a platform speaker works a crowd of townsfolk and farmers gathered by an advertisement in the Canoga County Palladium. He preaches release from pain, then produces bottles of “Professor Certain’s Vitalizing Mixture,” claiming it cures all disease and has saved five thousand people in three years. A skeptical, well-dressed stranger of forty stands in front with a little girl who calls him “Guardy.” Certain demonstrates on old Uncle Cal Parks, who dances; a rustic jokes about trying it on his mare. Sales proceed until Certain flings away a counterfeit dollar. He then targets women, telling a slattern she has cancer and selling her “soothing, balmy oils”; she recruits a younger woman whose husband “Joe” would object. The stranger challenges: “Are you going to take that woman’s money?” Certain offers to sell him a bottle, calling him “Doctor,” then touts dyspepsia cures and announces private men-only consultations at the Moscow Hotel. The stranger remarks, “A little blackmail on the side.”
A gaunt “Hardscrabbler” from the Hardscrabble Settlement on Corsica Lake accuses Certain of having doped his wife with morphine, causing her committal and death. He lunges with a knife; a boy (“Boyee”) is wounded; the stranger knocks the attacker down and Certain pins him. The stranger, revealed as Mark Elliot, Surgeon, U.S.N., treats the flesh wound at the hotel, aided by the girl Esmé. Certain admits his diploma came from a diploma-mill, confesses the Mixture contains liquor and morphine and the oils arsenious acid, and resolves to quit itinerating and settle in Worthington for proprietary manufacturing. He bribes the Palladium editor to suppress the stabbing story. Esmé and Boyee exchange childish affection; Certain takes in the Hardscrabbler’s seven-year-old red-haired daughter. Five people sleep under one roof, fated to meet again.
Our Leading Citizen
By 1913, Dr. L. André Surtaine—formerly Professor Certain—is sixty, rich (about fifteen millions), and living in Worthington (two hundred thousand inhabitants). His Certina, “the Sure-Cure,” made his fortune. He meets his son Hal at State Crossing station with exuberant affection and boasts of his self-education in culture and of Worthington’s greatness; Hal mildly calls it “a very decent little place,” provoking his father’s loyal protest.
Dr. Surtaine boasts that the town was “dead-and-alive” before he opened his business, and that Certina is now “the cross-mark that shows where Worthington is on the map,” with business “BOOMING.” Hal says he has “loafed quite long enough”; his father, calling him “Boyee,” replies that at twenty-five his four years abroad are “educational capital,” and that Hal need not enter the business unless he wishes. Hal says he is bored with doing nothing and offers to be useful; the father recalls their old partnership, when he did the “spieling” and Hal’s “little hands” took in the dollars amid torch-smoke and shadows, calling it “a miracle.” Hal barely remembers it, having been sleepy. The father admits he sometimes hated the life for the boy, but there was nobody to leave him with. Hal says his own outcome “remains to be seen.” The father says most youngsters would be content with an unlimited allowance; Hal is tired of playing and globe-trotting. Asked if he can make Worthington feel like home, Hal notes he has spent under two weeks there since entering college eight years before. The father admits he deliberately kept Hal away until “absolutely established,” obstacles now overcome, and asks if Hal feels “like a prince entering into his realm”; Hal feels more “like a freshman entering college,” with misgivings not about the town but the business—specifically what he can do in it. The father’s own doubt is whether the business is “genteel enough” for Hal, since folks mock “Patent-medicine millions.” Hal answers that if the money is good enough to spend, it is good enough to earn. Hal mentions a leaning toward medicine; the father dismisses doctors as “prejudiced pedants and hypocrites,” calling Hal’s interest fit only as a hobby.
The train brakes bite (the Mid-State and Great Muddy River, “Mid-and-Mud”); Hal supports a lurching stranger, Mr. Elias M. Pierce, who dryly calls him the “prodigal son.” Pierce is “one of the men who run Worthington”—spare, square, in permanent black, appraising Hal unamiably. Douglas (William)
The Ellersley Blood and a Spray of Arbutus
Talk at the Willards’ turns on Hal’s parentage. His mother, the narrator’s mother reports, loved his father with a devotion that never faded; the man was nearly destroyed by her death and poured what remained of his affection into a child of three. Young Hal, taking dollars at a country-fair booth, looked then like the girl-mother he lost. Once “Professor Certain” grew rich he gave the boy every advantage but kept him wholly clear of the Ellersleys, and the family is now extinct. Willard grants the old man some good yet confesses he cannot like him; he does like the boy, and warns that blood tells—if Hal is as much Ellersley as his face suggests, bitter enlightenment waits when he sees Dr. Surtaine plainly.
Hal comes home early, warm with the Willards’ hospitality, sleeps well, and wakes buoyant. At breakfast an unfamiliar envelope holds no letter, only a spray of trailing arbutus, still fragrant—eloquent of the woman who wore it the night before.
The New Editor Confronts His Ignorance
Ignorance, the chapter reflects, is a mist that proves a mountain on approach. Hal discovers how little he knows of newspaper-making, having imagined a paper an automatic mill fed with facts. Watching McGuire Ellis handle copy at superhuman speed and then doze while the owner faces drifts of proofs and queries, he admits as much. Ellis advises throwing most of it on the floor: the more you discard, the better the paper. Hal says he wants the cleanest, decentest sheet in the city—it is not that now, partly because of his father, partly from the files he has read since morning. He calls it yellow, sensational, vulgar. Ellis answers that people are vulgar and a paper must suit them—Lesson Number One—and dismisses muckraking as surface-bluff. The “Daily Carrion” nickname, the sewing-girls’ strike that cost ten thousand dollars in advertising, the charge of socialism: Ellis insists the paper went wrong precisely when it printed straight facts.
Ellis on Honesty and the Machinery of a Paper
Asked how honest he means to be, Hal says strictly and absolutely. Ellis cites “The Wrecker”: honesty is a difference of definition, for a newspaper a matter of eternal watchfulness and expert figuring-out. He maps the trade—news the merchandise, advertising the by-product that pays, the editorial page a survival, at best interpreting, at worst a mouthpiece, swaying few. News is conventional, varying by place: a shower in Arizona, the boll-weevil in New Orleans, anything about Dr. Surtaine in Worthington. A “Sweet Singer of Policy” chimes in that business is an exchange of goods for dollars and a paper must make its own living; Surtaine doubts Ellis means what he says, and Ellis laughs into his flimsy.
Esmé’s Mission and the Talk-it-Over Breakfast
Esmé Elliot’s half-jocular partnership with Hal has become a real but indeterminate tie—her set calls it another flirtation, she a mission. Kathleen Pierce teases her about the man behind the nice-boy smile, and Esmé admits his trick of leveling his eyes like pistols and demanding what she really means. At the Vanes’ tea she accuses him of ignoring their partnership; the paper, she says, is still tawdry and yellow. She proposes a luncheon with his staff—a speech on his intentions, talk, somewhere the men actually eat—and this casual suggestion becomes the genesis of the Talk-it-Over Breakfast.
Dr. Surtaine’s Counsel and the Breakfast Speech
Within a month the Doctor is a daily caller, preaching policy: keep in with business, for Worthington is a business city; ginger is good but sugar catches more flies. He approves the breakfast, urges Hal to work at advertising, and regrets the loss of Sterne, who knew his job and took orders from the business office. Ellis, roused from a nap, is told he must speak within the hour. Hal means to speak on honesty, and Ellis challenges who he is to talk standards; the reporters, he says, are no less honest than the papers they serve. The Doctor calls this hifalutin nonsense; Ellis answers that the “Banner” belongs to a boss, the “News” to a brewer, the “Star” to a scaly promoter, the “Observer” to an advertising agency, the “Telegraph” to the banks—all taking orders from Elias M. Pierce’s Dry Goods Union.
“Must” and the Suppressed Story
Hal weighs Mrs. Willard’s friendship against his memory of the itinerant quack of fifteen years before, resolving to lay the matter before Esmé. She arrives at the office; he shows her the wire box where “Must”
Esmé’s Campaign Against the Proof
Wayne greets Esmé Elliot’s first visit to the Clarion office by dubbing her “the new boss of our new boss,” a title she would have savored, since she has not yet proved her power over her partner. She frames the conquest of an institution as a larger test than her earlier coquetries with men, and the uncertainty gives the game fresh zest. At Greenvale she builds a trap of apple blossoms in one corner of the living-room—pink is her color—and is startled by her uncle, Dr. Elliot, whom she calls Uncle Guardy. She announces she means to work a bewitchment on a newspaper, playing fairy-godmother witch to her foster-child by “arointing” something out of print, and cites “Aroint thee, witch” when he mocks her jumble of Tennyson and Coleridge. He calls her the Great American Pumess; she says Mr. Surtaine is due at half past eight.
Hal arrives, and she straightens his tie, seats him where he cannot escape, and asks for the proofs. Reading the strip of print, her face turns from gay to grave. “Oh, it’s cruel,” she says, dropping the paper; Hal answers, “It’s true.” She argues that even truth should not be printed against a woman who has been his guest, but Hal separates personal from journalistic obligation: it is the business and the honor of the Clarion to give the news, and printing it would warn other reckless drivers. Let the police act, she pleads; the police dare do nothing to the daughter of Elias M. Pierce. He appeals to their long talk about making the paper honest and clean, asking whether she is going back on him. She shifts ground: the girl is young and frightened, cried in her arms, and was promised the story would not run. She writes “Must not” and the initials “E.S.M.E.” on the proof and urges him to kill it. “And my honesty with it,” he says. If it were she, would she ask it? She would not have to—she would trust him. Others trust him too, the men in the office, to be honest. She feels the solid wall of character blocking her design and admires him while resenting him; she turns all feline.
She reminds him he promised. He says he has never forgotten a word between them since he first saw her seven weeks ago at the station. She corrects him: fifteen years ago this summer, when he made a child’s promise to do anything in the world for her if ever she asked. Does he have a scar on his left shoulder? He recalls torches across the square, a man with a knife, darkness, and a fairy child with soft eyes looking down at him, and realizes it was her. She says she remembered—though the narrator notes she is lying, having learned the story from her uncle and saved it for coquetry. He says she has come back into his life. She slips the proof back into his hand and asks about her subscription-flower, the arbutus; he keeps it always on his desk. She shows him a withered sprig in a tiny vase in a hanging window-box, kept to remind her of the responsibilities of journalism and of her hold over the incorruptible editor. Choosing apple blossom, she sets it in her dress, notes he is not wearing her colors—a white rose, which he tosses into the fireplace—replaces it with a twig of pink bloom, brings her face close, and breathes “Please.” For Kathleen Pierce, she says. His hand closes over hers; he says, “You are bribing me.” Lifted face: “For me. Please.”
Men had kissed Esmé before, but none had ever visited her lips twice; the game always ended in surrender and avowal, her pulses never stirred beyond the thrill of triumph. In Hal’s arms she plays for another stake. She feels his lips on hers—gentlest pressure, instantly relaxed—then the knowledge of him as a loyal, chivalrous gentleman beguiled burns her with shame. Her heart goes out to him as never to any man; the coquette wanes and the woman waxes. She draws back, quivering, hoping for her own defeat, yearning that he should refuse, yet gathering every power of her sex to gain the dreaded victory. “Wait. Don’t speak to me for a minute,” she says. He must speak. “Am I that to you?” “Always. From the first.” “But—”
Ostracism, and the Editor’s Apprentice
After Esmé leaves his life, Hal stops seeking social amusement and scarcely notices the widening ostracism, driven by Pierce influence, that shuts him out of house after house. Mrs.
Esmé Elliot’s Errand
Esmé Elliot slips back into Worthington in late May, keeping clear of society because it would mean facing Will Douglas, to whom she feels conscience-stricken, and probably not Hal Surtaine at all. She buries herself in slum work under the Reverend Norman Hale and tells herself she needs occupation, though it is Harrington Surtaine who occupies her mind. She wants to see him and dreads what she wants; the resolve she announced to Kathleen Pierce proves harder to perform than to promise. Guessing Hal would refuse a summons, she decides to beard him in his office, takes encouragement from a brown thrasher’s twitter, and says, “I’ll do it NOW.”
The interview has no witness, and Esmé reports it afterward to Mrs. Festus Willard. She had been scared, she admits, and cooed at him like a dove of peace, but he stayed stiff and proud, demanding what she was doing there and accusing her of frequenting the Rookeries. She joked about picking edelweiss from fire escapes. He warned her the tenements held sickness, possibly a contagious epidemic, and was surprised Uncle Guardy had not warned her. Why, she asked, knowing the danger, did he warn her privately instead of warning the public in print? He answered that their last discussion of the Clarion’s policy had closed that topic; someone called him away, and when he came back she had gone. She never delivered her message—Kathleen Pierce’s confession that she had lied about the reporter interview, the lie that made Esmé believe Hal invented the “catch a train” remark and wrote the editorial after their talk.
Mrs. Willard asks why she broke her engagement. Esmé denies it was because of Hal; she wants to marry no one, dreads running a house, babies, losing her figure. The words wound Mrs. Willard, who lost a baby, and Esmé concedes she need not have hurt Douglas—”But he was stupider… He thought I was just as bad as I seemed.”
The Apology That Fails
Mrs. Willard telephones, and Hal arrives: “You ‘phoned for me, Lady Jinny.” Esmé apologizes about Kathleen Pierce. He accepts with surface politeness, privately set against her as a light-minded woman ignoring the graver wrong; Mrs. Willard might have shown him that only complete surrender would suffice. Subscription lists, he says, are closed “on the old terms.” She protests, “Oh, you couldn’t have thought I meant that!” He leaves with “Good-afternoon, Miss Elliot,” carrying again the mystery of her still and desperate smile. Mrs. Willard tells Festus she blames the town’s men—”Mice”—for Norrie’s behavior; Festus bets she will get hurt if she makes a footpath of Hal.
Milly Neal at the Clarion
A barrier of reticences has risen between Dr. Surtaine and Hal; dinner has become an ordeal. The Doctor blames the Esmé affair and rumors linking Hal with Milly Neal, seen in his runabout, who resigned from the Clarion without reason. Laxity kept hidden he would tolerate; entanglement with an employee under his own roof he will not. After an uncomfortable dinner Hal goes to the office and his father to the club. At 9:05 Milly Neal, drinking, comes to the Clarion; Bim Currier admits her—”Once a ‘Clarion’ man, always a ‘Clarion’ man.” McGuire Ellis, roused from his nap, refuses to let her see Hal, noting she has been drinking. She asks if he knows what a Hardscrabbler is, says she would see the Clarion blazing in hell before taking another cent, and warns she gave Hal his chance to square himself. Ellis decides not to tell Hal, later wondering whether Heaven pardons our mistakes.
At eleven Milly confronts Dr. Surtaine at home, in trouble and demanding help. She cites the Clarion clipping “A Happy Lady” advertising Relief Pills—”Every form of suppression relieved. The most obstinate cases yield at once”—fake abortion pills, she says, made by the Neverfail Company: him. He says she cannot stay at the factory; she retorts that his lies tempted her. Her father told her how the Doctor sent her mother to her death; she held her tongue to save her father from hanging. She draws a revolver. Hal enters; she accuses both of lying promises and threatens to kill them both—”Two Surtaines against two Neals.” Hal throws his cane; two shots; the Doctor is winged in the shoulder. She cannot kill Hal, drops the weapon, sobs. The Doctor hushes it up, telling the housekeeper it was pistol experimenting.
The Child in the Red Cross Car
A politician, hesitating on the street, recognizes Esmé and tells a distracted mother that the child will be taken to the hospital and to go quietly. The car races past every law under a red cross, nearly runs down Dr. Merritt, and sweeps him aboard; he confirms Esmé’s diagnosis and warns it will be touch and go. Esmé carries the stricken child into the ward, the volunteers wait, and within the hour word comes that the boy will probably live—thanks to their promptitude. The doctor protests that picking up chance infants is unsafe; Miss Pierce retorts that they belong to the St. Bernard tribe and take them as they find them, then invites Hugh to lunch. He pleads no time; she twits him about not stepping aside from the thorny path, and Esmé, hearing a new tone beneath the flippancy, knows all is well with the girl and envies her gently.
Hal Alone Against the Town
Hal Surtaine works with a sense of wild freedom. He has broken with his father, challenged every commercial interest in Worthington, and banished Esmé from his heart, though she still forces her way into his thoughts. He expects near-certain defeat and means to make it a defeat no man need be ashamed of. Leaving epidemic news to his colleagues, he writes editorials defending the Clarion’s policy: concealment and suppression were the chief factors in spreading the contagion; early recognition and frank fighting would have saved most lives; the blame lies with those who fostered peril by secrecy and blocked the housing and sanitation reforms that would have checked a filth disease like typhus. Tenements netting twelve per cent and breeding plagues, he writes, are good private but poor public investments. Thereafter highly regarded Christian citizens begin calling the editor an anarchist.
The Owners Behind the Rookeries
The Clarion’s principle of finding the facts behind the news leads to an inquiry into who owns the Rookeries, with Wayne reporting sensational results. A Monday spread is planned with a triple layout: the tenement with its deaths and cases, the owner’s photograph, and the owner’s own house for contrast. By Sunday, four days after the opening story, everything is ready except two freeholds in Sadler’s Shacks delayed by trusteeship complications—Number 3 and Number 9 Sperry Street, the latter dubbed the Pest-Egg and supposed origin of the pestilence. The net of publicity has already caught a high city official, an important merchant, a lady given to platform philanthropies, and the Reverend Dr. Wales’s fashionable church.
Veltman Waits on the Curb
Max Veltman, who owns no twelve per cent share, has sworn there shall be no morrow’s Clarion. Four days earlier he crawled home with certain acids bought at a drug store and worked in complete absorption, neither stirring out nor communicating, so he knows nothing of the sensation in Worthington or the paper’s change of policy. To his inflamed mind the Surtaine organ is noxious and Harrington Surtaine the guilty partner in the profits of Milly’s death, who rejected the one chance to make amends. Carrying a wrapped bundle, he goes out Sunday evening into the Rookeries, where a red-necked man on a barrel is roasting the Clarion to a crowd and says they ought to tear the building down. Veltman sits on the curb to wait.
Fortifying the Press
McGuire Ellis hears the speech, scents danger, and hurries back to warn Hal that a mob may visit. Hal exclaims over the new press; Ellis reports that Police Headquarters laughed, still sore over the Clarion’s attack on the department for dodging saloon law. Hal regrets placing the press in the most exposed spot; Ellis proposes fortifying it with rolls of print paper—cylinders seven feet long and four in diameter that no small-arm bullet could pierce. The pressroom force builds the barrier in half an hour, leaving the south end exposed; Ellis says plate-glass insurance covers the windows. Hal wishes for revolvers, and Ellis goes out to get them.
Hal surveys the ground: his outer office juts into a narrow L overlooking the street, iron posts of dubious origin mark the boundary, and the flagged depressed space is privately owned but long treated as a thoroughfare. He does not want to shoot into a crowd but will not let a mob ruin his property without a fight. Bim Currier and Dr. Elliot arrive; the doctor offers help and briskly directs the roping off of the space using the sentinel posts for moral effect, since mobs always stop to think at a line. He says he noticed what the Clarion did to its medical advertisers, likes Hal’s nerve and a fight in a good cause, and suggests signs: Danger, Keep Out, Trespassers Enter Here at their Peril.
Ellis returns with two revolvers. Dr. Elliot takes a long-barreled .
The Father’s Fortune and the Son’s Conscience
The novel’s central knot is the relationship between Hal and Dr. L. André Surtaine, the former “Professor Certain” whose Certina—”the Sure-Cure”—built a fifteen-million-dollar business on liquor, morphine, and advertising. Adams makes the father genuinely lovable: he is generous, devoted, and utterly without self-doubt, and he hands Hal half a million dollars with the wish that his son “own himself.” That generosity is the trap. Every dollar Hal spends on honest journalism comes from the sale of a medicine he cannot defend, and the father’s “Pæan of Policy”—advertisers pay for the paper, so ask of every story whether it will gain or lose one—is a theory of journalism that Hal can neither refute nor accept. The book’s most painful scenes are not the confrontations with Pierce but the quiet ones where Dr. Surtaine, wounded, still offers to back his son.
Around this axis Adams arranges a set of characters who each embody a position. McGuire Ellis, the cynical editorial manager who stays on because Hal has the nerve to ask him, argues that honesty in journalism is not a virtue but a discipline—”eternal watchfulness, care, and expert figuring-out”—and that most reporters are more honest than the papers they work for. Elias M. Pierce, president of the Consolidated Employers’ Organization, represents the ownership of the town itself: he controls the Dry Goods Union, hence the advertising, hence the press, and he says so without embarrassment. Dr. Miles Elliot, Esmé’s uncle, brings the medical conscience, denouncing the Relief Pills advertisement as an abortion notice dressed in slogans. And Max Veltman, the brooding composing-room foreman, and Milly Neal, the “Kitty the Cutie” writer, give the paper its working-class and its woman’s point of view.
Esmé, Milly, and the Education of Feeling
Adams gives Hal two teachers in love as well as in journalism, and the contrast between them carries much of the book’s moral weight. Esmé Elliot is the tawny-haired society girl who first appears as a child on the night of the stabbing and reappears fifteen years later as a coquette who decides to make a newspaper her “new toy.” Her campaign to save Kathleen Pierce is the novel’s sharpest study of corruption by charm: she does not bribe Hal with money but with a kiss, and the narrator is careful to note that she is playing for a stake larger than any previous conquest—the conquest of an institution. When she finally marries Will Douglas, the news reaches Hal through a letter, and the lightness with which he takes it is not entirely convincing.
Milly Neal is her opposite: a Hardscrabbler’s daughter who came to the Certina factory “a raw slip of a country creature tied up in calico,” who reads Stevenson and Tennyson with wondering delight, and who offers herself to Hal without trickery or terms. Hal refuses her, and Adams lets the refusal cost him something—Milly’s parting vow to “wait and see” is not a threat but a wound. The narrator’s closing judgment on the two women, that Hal has reckoned “two daughters of Eve by the same standard—the oldest and most disastrous hereditary error of the sons of Adam,” is the book’s most direct statement about its own hero.
The Epidemic Behind the Centennial
The plot’s engine is a public-health crisis that the city’s leading men would rather not see. Dr. Surtaine, who knows the truth about the disease in the Rookeries, persuades himself that concealment serves Worthington; the Old Home Week committee, with five thousand dollars to spend, hands the money to Tip O’Farrell, the district boss, and calls the trouble “malaria.” When Hal refuses to suppress the story, the committee’s deputation offers him a bargain—silence in exchange for the withdrawal of Pierce’s criminal suit—and Pierce produces a nurse who will swear the accident was her own fault. Hal’s answer is the Babson story, the town that was offered a fortune to change its name and told the benefactor to go to hell, and the scene in which he tells the committee “Plumb” is the novel’s comic high point and its clearest statement of theme.
Adams is careful to make the epidemic more than a plot device. The narrator observes that buying off an epidemic has never succeeded and embodies a dangerous fallacy—”that the dollar can overtake and swallow the germ”—and the book’s later chapters show the cost of that fallacy in the Rookeries themselves. The centennial, with the President of the United States coming to town, becomes the deadline against which the whole struggle is measured: the city wants a clean face for its birthday, and Hal wants the truth printed before the guests arrive.
What the Novel Leaves Behind
The Clarion belongs to the muckraking moment in American fiction, when novelists turned the machinery of reform journalism into plot. Its portrait of a newspaper as three parts—merchandise, by-product, and survival—is as unsentimental as anything in the period, and its insistence that corruption usually arrives as a favor from a friend rather than a threat from an enemy gives it a psychological acuity that outlasts its topicality. The book’s final chapters, in which McGuire Ellis wakes up and the paper’s long fight reaches its verdict, close the arc that began on a torch-lit platform in Marysville, where a little boy took in dollars for a man who called himself Professor Certain. Adams’s subject is not simply a newspaper but the inheritance of a fortune made badly, and the question his novel keeps asking—whether a good man can spend bad money well—has not lost its edge.
