America 1929: John F. Kennedy, the Great Writer

Chapter 154 Exclusive Moment of Death

Dayton, a city that once took pride in the Wright brothers and its thriving auto parts industry, now appears lifeless under a gray sky.

Following the clues provided by Wayne Stone, Arthur drove the Ford pickup truck into an open area near an abandoned railway shunting yard.

He saw Hoover Village in Dayton.

After the Great Depression broke out, people who lost their jobs and homes built a slum stretching for nearly half a mile using scrap metal, tattered tarpaulins, and broken wooden crates used to store car parts.

Arthur parked the car at the village entrance, grabbed his camera, and got out.

As soon as he entered the muddy alley, he heard a very noisy commotion ahead.

Dozens of ragged, unemployed workers stood in a circle, pointing and gesturing towards the center.

Arthur pushed his way through the crowd.

In the center of the crowd stood a gleaming black sedan, with white slogans printed on its doors:

Midnight Truth Report—Chicago's number one circulation weekly newsletter of true stories.

Three young reporters dressed in sophisticated tweed suits were standing next to the car.

One of them set up an expensive Leica camera, while the other two were shouting at a man not far away.

The man was standing on a rickety, broken wooden crate.

He was pale, thin with prominent cheekbones and sunken eyes. A rough hemp rope was around his neck, the other end of which was tightly tied to the crossbeam of an abandoned railway signal frame.

"Jump! Didn't you say you couldn't survive?!"

A young reporter wearing a baseball cap excitedly waved a five-dollar bill in his hand.

"Just kick that box away, struggle a few times in mid-air, and those five dollars are your wife's! Hurry, the light's about to dim!"

The man standing on the wooden crate trembled violently, his hands gripping the rope around his neck tightly. His voice was filled with desperate sobs: "Gentlemen—please give me the money first—my wife has a high fever in the tent, she needs to buy aspirin—"

I really will jump—

"That won't do. We need to take the photos first," another overweight reporter urged viciously.

"Make your expression even more pained! Widen your eyes! We need photos that will make a Chicago middle-class housewife scream at the dinner table! This kind of exclusive will sell three thousand more copies of the newspaper!"

Arthur stood on the periphery of the crowd, a surge of anger rising within him.

He knows this trick all too well.

In the late 19th century, in order to compete for newspaper sales in New York, Pulitzer and Hearst invented "yellow journalism," which was extremely sensational and even went so far as to fabricate lies to incite the Spanish-American War.

But during the Great Depression of 1930, yellow journalism underwent an extremely sinister mutation.

When the nation’s lower classes were plunged into utter despair, the cheap tabloids of Chicago and New York astutely discovered that “real despair” was more marketable than any fictional story.

So they began to venture into slums around the world, looking for people who were truly on the verge of collapse, and luring them with a few dollars to "perform" suicide in front of the camera.

After taking the photos, they usually rescue the person at the last minute and print them on the front page for mass sales.

But if the rescue fails, they don't care at all; instead, they'll use the "exclusive moment of death" as a selling point and triple the price of the newspaper.

They are not recording suffering, but consuming human lives.

The man on the wooden crate finally broke down.

He closed his eyes, tears mingling with the mud as they streamed down his face. He moved his toes little by little, preparing to kick away the support.

"Yes! That's it! Get ready to press the shutter!"

The reporter in the baseball cap shouted excitedly.

Arthur stepped forward, grabbed the man's ankle, and firmly pressed him into the center of the wooden box.

Stop.

The reporter in the baseball cap, his filming interrupted, flew into a rage, pointing his finger at Arthur and yelling, "Get out of here, you nosy country bumpkin! This is exclusive material for our 'Midnight Truth,' obstructing press freedom! I'll have the police arrest you!"

Arthur released his grip, turned around, and looked coldly at the reporter.

"News reporting? I remember last October, your editor William Cole published a report about a Brooklyn dockworker who hanged himself because he was owed rent, and you included a high-resolution close-up of the body."

"A week later, that worker's twelve-year-old daughter was mocked at school by her classmates with your newspaper, and she went home and swallowed rat poison. Because of that report, your editor-in-chief won the Chicago Press Association's annual sensationalist reporting award, right?"

The three reporters were stunned for a moment.

The portly reporter looked at Arthur warily: "Who are you? How do you know so much?"

Arthur stared into his eyes and continued, "I published a commentary on the front page of the New York Herald. It was titled 'Even Vultures Can Win Awards.' In it, William Cole should be stuffed into the sewers of the Potomac River."

Upon hearing this, the expressions of the three reporters changed instantly.

The New York Herald.

This is the most talked-about name in the American news media recently.

The reporter in the baseball cap's eyes darted around, as if recalling something, and she said with a hint of fear, "You—you're Arthur Kennedy?"

Arthur Kennedy.

That "honest man" who stood up to the mayor of New York City and ultimately forced the mayor to resign.

The man who wrote "Sixteen Tons" and ignited the anger of workers across the country.

Compared to this person, these tabloid reporters who make a living by filming poor people hanging themselves are not even as good as rats in the sewers.

The scene was deathly silent.

Arthur pointed to the rickety wooden crate, his tone extremely casual: "You guys go ahead. I'll just stand here and watch. If you drive him to his death today, I'll write an article tonight about everything that happened in Hoover, Dayton, titled 'The Chicago Journalist's Hunter Game: Five Dollars for a Life.'"

He paused, then added, "By the way, I'll print your three names, your faces, and even the brand of the suits you're wearing today, word for word, in the newspaper. I'll make you rats in the entire press."

The reporter in the baseball cap had turned a deep purplish-red.

He gritted his teeth in humiliation, but he knew that if he angered this colleague, they would definitely suffer a terrible fate.

"You win—pack up the machine! Let's go!"

The three of them hurriedly disassembled the camera tripod and climbed into the black sedan like dogs on a chopping block.

The car kicked up a cloud of mud and water as it fled the scene in a sorry state.

Arthur ignored the low cheers erupting from the workers around him.

He stepped onto the wooden crate, deftly untied the rope around the man's neck, and helped him down.

The man slumped down in the mud, covering his face and wailing loudly.

Arthur took a five-dollar bill from his coat pocket and stuffed it into the man's hand.

"Here you go. Go buy some aspirin and some hot soup."

The man stared blankly at the money in his hand, then looked up: "Sir—why did you save me?"

Arthur crouched down, looking him straight in the eye: "Your name is Joseph Macaulay, right? The former credit manager at First Agricultural Trust Bank."

The man's crying stopped abruptly, his eyes instantly filled with extreme fear. He recoiled as if he had been electrocuted.

"Wayne Stone sent me to find you."

Arthur grabbed his shoulder directly.

He said, "You have an account book."