Malden Exploit

U. S. newspaper readers, marvelling at the tales of Father Patrick J. Power's wonder-working grave in Malden, Mass., marvelled no less at the reported size of the crowds (total of 1,250,000) which thronged the cemetery until the gates were ordered closed by Boston's Archbishop. William Henry Cardinal O'Connell (TIME, Nov. 25 et seq.). How came those crowds, whence first blew the blizzard of Malden headlines, was told by Gardner Jackson, bespectacled factfinder of the Boston Globe, famed for his chairmanship (1927) of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense, in last week's Nation (liberal weekly).

Wrote Gardner Jackson: "At a morning mass on Sunday, October 27, Father Walsh [of St. Joseph's Church, Malden] announced that cures at Father Power's grave had been reported to him. He asked members of his congregation to inform him of any they heard about. The friend of a friend of the city editor [Edward F. Sullivan] of Boston's only tabloid [the Record] was there; likewise a relative of an office boy on the Boston Globe. The tabloid city editor and the office boy's relative heard Father Walsh's announcement and also heard an altar boy report after the service the cure of his mother's deafness. The city editor sent a man to interview the altar boy's mother. The relative of the Globe office boy got in touch with him and the Globe was immediately on the trail, too. . . . The tabloid city editor went ahead with the material in hand. . . . More cures were reported. The account gathered momentum. Other Boston newspapers had to pay heed."

Fact-Finder Jackson said: "The commercialism involved is shocking: the slab over the grave covered with money dropped by the kneelers; the two wastebaskets filled with money and emptied two or three times a day; the mountainous pile of scarcely burned vigil candles in the rear of the cemetery chapel which are removed to make room for other candles by three shifts of boys working day and night ... the hordes and hordes of crippled children yowling at the treatment forced upon them; the tragically ignorant and faithful mothers with typically Mongolian idiot children whom they place upon the muddy, foul slab (to cure idiocy) ; the newspapermen rushing from one crowd collected around a reported cure to another crowd, taking names, and rushing off to the telephone across the street; the sergeant and patrolman at the grave trying to keep the kneelers moving, yanking them up from kissing the stone and (in the case of the sergeant) treating them just like a football crowd, even to telling one woman 'to get the hell out of here! you've been in here 19 times already!'"

Concluded Fact-Finder Jackson: ". . . The first cure at the grave was reported 30 years ago (when modern newspaper methods were not in vogue). . . . The Boston newspapers meanwhile are trading on the sincere faith of their hundreds of thousands of readers. It is shameless commercial journalism."

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