“BOLSHEVISM” IN AMERICA
And what of those American radicals who have ventured to protest against
this policy, and to expose this campaign of falsification? Here again it
is only a question of how much space one is willing to give to
anecdotes.
My friend Rose Pastor Stokes is a pacifist, under sentence of ten years
in jail for pacifist activities; again and again the New York newspapers
report her as calling for a bloody revolution in America, and refuse to
publish her protest that this is false. You may not like pacifists; I
myself admit that during the war I found some of them extremely trying
to my patience. But do you believe that the proper way to treat them is
to lie about them? Listen to the experiences of Mrs. Stokes on a lecture
trip in the Middle West. The “Kansas City Star,” a one-time “liberal”
paper, sent a special writer to interview her on the laundry-workers’
strike then in progress; but finding that this interview put her in a
good light, they suppressed it, and sent another reporter to write up
her address to the “Women’s Dining Club.” Says Mrs. Stokes:
The “Star” so garbled and twisted my speech that it was actually
unrecognizable. For example, one of the things I was quoted as having
said was that the Red Cross was a war camouflage. It so happened that
I did not mention the Red Cross during the entire speech.
Then she went to speak in Springfield, Missouri, and the “Star” had a
lurid account of how she had been arrested in Springfield, and admitted
to bail, and has stolen out of the city at day-break, forfeiting the
hundred-dollar bond of a Socialist comrade. Says Mrs. Stokes:
Except for the arrest, the story was a fabrication. I had left
Springfield at a respectable hour, wholly cleared; and no bond was
forfeited.
She came back to Kansas City, and a “Star” reporter was sent to
interview her; she asked him to deny this Springfield story, and he
turned in a denial, but not a word of it was published. As a direct
result of this newspaper misrepresentation, Mrs. Stokes was arrested by
the Federal authorities and sentenced to ten years in jail. She tells me
how this trial and sentence were reported, and points out the obvious
motive of the falsifications:
Anything to frighten people away from Socialist meetings! If you want
to see this motive running through the capitalist press of the entire
country as a single thread, come and read the hundreds of editorials
on my ten-year sentence. Every state and every important industrial
community is represented. The wording is almost as if one man, let
alone one spirit, had dictated them all.
And here is Judson King, writing to members of Congress:
For your information permit me to state that at the meeting at Poli’s
Theatre Sunday afternoon at which I presided there was no advocacy of
anarchy or violence, no attack upon the American form of government,
and no propaganda that Bolshevism be adopted in our country. The
well-nigh unanimous sentiment of audience and speakers was that
American troops be withdrawn and Russia be permitted to settle her own
fate in her own way.
The article in Monday’s “Washington Post” headed, “Urge Red America,”
is an absurd perversion of the truth and a gross violation of
journalistic ethics. Discussions in Congress regarding this meeting,
based apparently upon this article, have proceeded under a
misapprehension of facts. Whether any attempt was made to verify the
truth of the article I do not know. No inquiry was made of me.
Mr. King goes on to state that the address of Albert Rhys Williams at
this meeting was read from a typewritten text, and a carbon copy handed
by him to a reporter of the “Washington Post.” The falsification of
Williams’ remarks by the “Post” was therefore deliberate.
At this same time Max Eastman was touring the country, addressing
enormous meetings. The meeting in Los Angeles was reported by the
“Examiner” as follows:
RADICAL’S TALK BRINGS POLICE
Max Eastman Stops Address When Disgusted Auditors Leave and Officers
Arrive
Cutting his lecture short, when many of his auditors left Trinity
Auditorium in disgusted anger, probably saved Max Eastman, editor of a
radical Socialist publication, from a police intervention last night.
Before the speaker had entered far upon his subject, “Hands Off
Russia,” his remarks were deemed so unpatriotic and his unwarranted
attack upon the administration so vitriolic that scores left the
auditorium and telephoned the Federal authorities and the police,
denouncing Eastman and demanding his arrest.
Apparently scenting trouble, Eastman effected a sudden diminuendo, his
anti-climax coming when he left the rostrum to conduct a canvassing of
his audience for prospective subscribers to his magazine and
purchasers of stock in same. When the police officers appeared on the
scene, nothing of treasonable nor anarchistic nature was heard.
Eastman’s address contained many statements so preposterous that even
the most gullible refused to believe them. He demanded that Eugene
Debs, Thomas J. Mooney and all I. W. W.’s in jail should be freed and
advised his hearers to emulate the Russian Bolsheviks and rise in
revolution.
Only a scant audience heard the address.
As it happens, I do not have to ask the reader to take either my word or
Eastman’s about this meeting. Here is part of a letter written to Max
Ihmsen, managing editor of the “Los Angeles Examiner,” by Rob Wagner,
artist and author of “Film Folk.”
Mar. 2, 1919.
Dear Max Ihmsen:
The other night Mrs. Wagner, Charlie Chaplin and I, seeking light on
darkest Russia, went to hear Max Eastman’s lecture. During what we
thought was a very thoughtful and unimpassioned address, he made the
statement that the press of the country was in a deliberate conspiracy
to withhold or color all news from that country.
We all felt that he was unfair in including _all_ the papers with
those notorious offenders, such as the “Times,” from which one could
expect nothing else. But the next morning we read an account of the
lecture in the “Examiner” that was false from the headline to the
final sentence, which said: “Only a scant audience heard the address.”
The lecture was not broken up by the police; in fact if there were any
police present no one even saw them. The chairman announced that Mr.
Eastman would speak on Russia; then Mr. McBride would tell them about
their magazine; and then at the end Mr. Eastman would answer
questions. The program was finished exactly that way, without the
slightest interruption, and to the very sympathetic applause of some
twenty-five hundred auditors.
Nor did Mr. Eastman insult the President. In urging the withdrawal of
American troops from Russia—a policy vigorously urged by Hearst
papers—he simply stated that there was a striking inconsistency
between President Wilson’s words and his deeds; for when the President
addressed his memorandum on the Marmora conference he assured the
delegates that America had absolutely no interest in the internal
affairs of Russia, and would not take sides; while at that moment he
was commander-in-chief of an army that was at war with the Russians on
two fronts.
Rob Wagner went on to explain that he wrote this protest “in the
kindliest spirit”; and Mr. Ihmsen in reply expressed his regret, and
promised to investigate the matter. You remember how it was with the
express companies in the old days; they would lose your package, and
promise to “investigate”—which meant that they filed your complaint away
with five hundred thousand others of the same sort. Six months later I
am preparing the manuscript of this book, and I write to Mr. Ihmsen that
I desire to verify every charge I bring against American Journalism.
Will he inform me if he has ever published a correction of this
falsehood? Mr. Ihmsen replies that he has unfortunately overlooked the
matter, but will be glad to publish a correction now. He does—the very
next day! I wonder if this will seem as funny to the reader as it seems
to me. Mr. Ihmsen brands Max Eastman in the public mind as a coward and
a blatherskite, and for six months he lets that brand remain, though he
knows it is undeserved. But then suddenly he learns that he himself is
to be branded as a character-assassin; and so he makes a quick jump. But
even so, he cannot be really fair. He gave the original story half a
column; he gives the correction two inches of space, in a corner so
remote that I, who read the “Examiner” every morning, do not see it
until he sends me a marked copy!
A month or two after Max Eastman’s lecture came Louise Bryant, freshly
returned from Russia, and gave one of the most interesting talks I have
ever heard; and next morning not a line in any Los Angeles newspaper!
The following evening she spoke again, and I came upon the platform, and
called the attention of the audience to this case of newspaper
suppression, and asked for funds to get the truth to the people of Los
Angeles. Before I had finished speaking, money began to shower upon the
stage, and the total collection amounted to twelve hundred and forty
dollars. I interviewed the assistant managing editor of the “Los Angeles
Examiner,” and he agreed to publish a report of the meeting, and allowed
me to dictate a column to a reporter—of which he published two inches! A
committee called upon the managing editor of the “Los Angeles Times,”
and this gentleman not only refused to publish a line, but refused to
accept a paid advertisement giving the news; incidentally he flew into a
rage and insulted the ladies of the committee. The money collected at
the meeting was expended upon an edition of fifty thousand copies of a
local radical paper, the “New Justice,” containing an account of the
whole affair; and when an attempt was made to distribute these papers
among the shipyard workers in the harbor, the distributors were
arrested, and the judge declared that he wished he could get the editors
of the paper.
In connection with this meeting, there was a humorous incident which
ought to be mentioned. Among the statements made by Miss Bryant was that
the Bolsheviki had taken Odessa because the French troops had refused to
fight them; several companies had gone over to the enemy. This statement
was published in the “New Justice,” and was among those which the Los
Angeles newspapers refused to admit to their columns. Louise Bryant had
travelled all over the country making the statement, and almost
everywhere the capitalist press refused to print it. But two months
later came an Associated Press despatch from Paris; the Odessa incident
had become the subject of interpellations in the French parliament—so at
last the news was out that French troops had mutinied when ordered to
fight the Bolsheviki!
Now comest the joke of the matter. To the Associated Press despatch, the
“New York Times” added the following comment:
The account of the mutiny of the seamen on the French Black Sea Fleet,
given by M. Goude in the French Chamber, rationally explains _for the
first time_ the extraordinary events which took place at Odessa on
April 8, the day the city was evacuated by the Allies and by all the
population who could get away.
Don’t you think those words, “for the first time,” are funny? Almost as
funny as the story of “Tom Muni” from Petrograd!
And then President Wilson comes to Los Angeles, and there is held in the
largest music auditorium in the city a mass meeting of two thousand
citizens, which unanimously submits to the President a request for
amnesty for political prisoners. The “Los Angeles Times” gave this
meeting not one word. I am invited to address the City Club of Los
Angeles, and I tell them of this failure of the “Times” to report the
news. Whereupon the “Times” starts a campaign to have me put in jail! I
quote its first editorial; they have followed it up, every other day for
a couple of weeks—they are quite determined that I shall go to jail!
Get the I. W. W. Seditionists! And lock them up. Tight! Right! But why
let Upton Sinclair roam at large? He spits more poison than the cheap
skate. It is villainy to promote anarchy in these ticklish times.
Blood will be on the heads of some of the civic club managers, male
and female. It is a crime for them to invite disloyal speakers to
spout for them; just for amusement. The City Club and some of the
women’s clubs have boosted the Red cause. Bolshevism is no toy to play
with, ladies and gentlemen. An “open forum” should not be open to
mobocracy and treason.
As I have said, I know several of the men and women who help to edit the
newspaper in which the above murderous raving is published. These men
and women will read this book, and I now request the general public to
step outside for a few moments, while I address these editors privately.
I speak, not in my own voice, but in that of an old-time journalist,
venerated in his day, John Swinton, editor of the “New York Tribune.” He
is answering, at a banquet of his fellow-editors, the toast: “An
Independent Press”:
There is no such thing In America as an independent press, unless it
is in the country towns.
You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write
his honest opinions, and if you did you know beforehand that it would
never appear in print.
I am paid one hundred and fifty dollars a week for keeping my honest
opinions out of the paper I am connected with—others of you are paid
similar salaries for similar things—and any of you who would be so
foolish as to write his honest opinions would be out on the streets
looking for another job.
The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the truth, to
lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon,
and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread.
You know this and I know it, and what folly is this to be toasting an
“Independent Press.”
We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the
jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our
possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are
intellectual prostitutes.
PART III
THE REMEDY
CHAPTER LXII
CUTTING THE TIGER’S CLAWS
Every day the chasm between the classes in America grows wider; every
day the class struggle grows more intense. Both sides become more
conscious, more determined—and so the dishonesty of American Journalism
becomes more deliberate, more systematic. And what is to be done? It
must be evident to any sensible man that the conditions portrayed in
this book are intolerable. Mankind will not consent to be lied to
indefinitely.
William Marion Reedy discussed the question ten years ago, and his
solution was pamphleteering. We must return to the custom of the
eighteenth century, printing and circulating large numbers of leaflets,
pamphlets and books. And for the past ten years we have been doing this;
the Socialist party, for example, is a machine for the circulating of
pamphlets and leaflets, and the holding of public meetings to counteract
the knaveries of the capitalist press. There are innumerable other
organizations which serve the same purpose: the “People’s Council,” the
“Civil Liberties Bureau,” the “International Workers’ Defense League,”
the I. W. W. groups, “The Rand School,” the “People’s College,” the
“Young People’s Socialist League,” the “Intercollegiate Socialist
Society.” But, obviously, this can only be a temporary solution. The
workers of the country are in the condition of a frontier settlement
besieged by savage Indians. They defend themselves with such weapons as
they find at hand; but sooner or later, it is evident, they will
organize a regular force, and invade the woods, and be done with those
Indians once for all.
Take the Moyer-Haywood case, the Mooney case, the Ludlow massacre, the
Bisbee deportations; and consider what happens. For days, for weeks,
perhaps for years, the Associated Press and its thousand newspapers
prepare a carefully constructed set of falsehoods, and twenty or thirty
million copies per day of these falsehoods are sold to the public.
Whereupon men and women of conscience all over the country are driven to
protest. They call mass-meetings, they organize a new league and raise
defense funds, print leaflets and pamphlets and devise a system of
house-to-house distribution, call big strikes and parades of protest; by
this prodigious mass of effort they succeed in conveying some small
portion of the truth to some small portions of the population. Is it not
obvious that society cannot continue indefinitely to get its news by
this wasteful method? One large section of the community organized to
circulate lies, and another large section of the community organized to
refute the lies! We might as well send a million men out into the desert
to dig holes, and then send another million to fill up the holes. To say
that William Marion Reedy, after a study of our journalistic dishonesty,
could find no better solution of the problem than pamphleteering, is
merely to say that bourgeois thought is bankrupt.
The first remedy to which every good American takes resort is the law.
We pass fifty thousand new laws in America every year, but still we
cling to the faith that the next thousand will “do the business.” Let us
have laws to punish the lying of the press!
I, as a good American, have thought of laws that I would like to see
passed. For instance, a law providing that newspapers shall not publish
an interview with anyone until they have submitted the interview and had
it O.K.’d; or unless they have obtained written permission to quote the
person without such O.K.
Also, a law providing that when any newspaper has made any false
statement concerning an individual, and has had its attention called to
the falsity of this statement, it shall publish a correction of the
statement in the next edition of the publication, and in the same spot
and with the same prominence given to the false statement.
For example, the press sends out a report that the Rev. Washington
Gladden is about to resign his pulpit. His mail is full of letters from
people all over the country, expressing regret. Says Dr. Gladden:
The trouble with such a report is that you can never get it corrected.
I have done my best to get such correction, but in this I have
signally failed. Anything which discredits a man is “good stuff,”
which most newspapers are ready to print, provided it is not
actionable; any correction which is made of such a report is not so
apt to find a place on the wires, and is pretty sure to be
blue-pencilled by the telegraph editors.
It happens, while I am preparing this book for the printer, that I visit
a friend, and mention what I am doing; he says: “There was one newspaper
story which almost caused me to despise you. I wonder how much truth
there was in it.” He explains that he was in Chicago in the early days
of the war, attending a conference of the People’s Council, and in a
Chicago newspaper he read that I had denounced Emma Goldman to the
government, and had turned over some of her private letters to the
government.
I tell my friend what happened. An insane man had threatened my life,
and I had applied to the Los Angeles police department for permission to
carry a revolver. They promised to keep secret my application, but
within half an hour there were two newspaper reporters after me. I
refused to talk about the matter; so, as usual, they made up a story. It
happened that I had given to the chief of detectives what information I
had as to the insane man’s past conduct; among other things, that he had
caused a disturbance at a meeting of Emma Goldman’s. That was the way
her name came in, and the only way. I barely know Emma Goldman, having
met her twice at public meetings; I knew nothing whatever about her
activities at this time, and had no letters from her in my possession. I
now have one, for immediately I wrote to her to say that the published
story was false, and she replied that I need not have worried; she had
known it was false.
Now, I sent a denial of that story to every newspaper in Los Angeles,
and also to the Associated Press; but my denial went into the
waste-basket. And why? At this time the capitalist press was engaged in
hounding Emma Goldman to prison; the lie was useful to the hounders, so
it stood, in spite of all my protests.
Obviously enough, here is a gross injustice. Common sense dictates a law
that any newspaper which prints a false statement shall be required to
give equal prominence to a correction. The law should provide that upon
publication of any false report, and failure to correct it immediately
upon receipt of notice, the injured party should have the right to
collect a fixed sum from the newspaper—five or ten thousand dollars at
least. At present, you understand, the sum has to be fixed by the jury,
and the damages have to be proven. If the “Los Angeles Times” calls
Upton Sinclair an “Anarchist writer,” if the “Chicago Tribune” calls
Henry Ford an “Anarchist,” it is up to the plaintiffs to prove just how
and to what extent they have been damaged. The newspaper has the right
to question their character and reputation, to examine them about every
detail of their lives and opinions. Was Upton Sinclair justified in
divorcing his wife? Does Henry Ford know how to read? If not, then it is
all right to call them “Anarchists.”
Also there is the problem of the Associated Press, the most powerful and
most sinister monopoly in America. Certainly there will be no freedom in
America, neither journalistic freedom nor political freedom nor
industrial freedom, until the monopoly of the Associated Press is
broken; until the distributing of the news to American newspapers is
declared a public utility, under public control; until anyone who wishes
to publish a newspaper in any American city or town may receive the
Associated Press service without any formality whatever, save the filing
of an application and the payment of a fee to cover the cost of the
service. Proceedings to establish this principle were begun a year ago
by Hearst before the Federal Trade Commission. Hearst had been barred
from getting the “A. P.” franchise in certain cities, and I venture to
guess that his purpose was to frighten his enemies into letting him have
what he wanted. At any rate, he found himself suddenly able to buy the
franchises, so he dropped his proceedings against the “A. P.” The
attorney in this case was Samuel Untermyer, who writes me about the
issue as follows:
If the prevailing opinion is right, the monopoly of the Associated
Press over the news of the world is complete. Unless the courts will
hold, as I think they will, when the question comes before them, that
news is a public utility; that the Associated Press is engaged in
interstate commerce, using the cables, telegraph lines and telephones
and that it is, therefore, bound to furnish its service on equal terms
to all who choose to pay for it. If that is not the law, it should be
the law, and can readily be made the law by Federal legislation. Until
this is done, the monopoly of the Associated Press will continue
intolerable.
I have fought it for years and thus far in vain, but I shall continue
to fight until it is broken. The little clique that controls the
Associated Press is in turn under the complete domination of a few of
the most narrow-minded and reactionary of the great capitalists of the
country. If our Government fails to stand the strain of these terrible
times and if revolution and bloodshed follow—which God forbid!—the
responsibility will rest at the doors of men like Gary and lawbreakers
like the U. S. Steel Company who lack all vision and sense of justice.
Also there should be a law forbidding any newspaper to fake telegraph or
cable dispatches. At present, this is a universal custom in newspaper
offices; the most respectable papers do it continually. They clip an
item from some other newspaper, rewrite it, and put it under a
“telegraphic headline.” They will take the contents of some letter that
comes to the office, and write it up under a “London date-line.” They
will write their own political propaganda, and represent it as having
come by telegraph from a special correspondent in Washington or New
York. In “Harper’s Weekly” for October 9, 1915, there was published an
article, “At the Front with Willie Hearst.” Mr. Hearst’s “Universal News
Bureau” was shown to be selling news all over the country, purporting to
come from “more than eighty correspondents, many of them of world-wide
fame.” Every day, if you read this “Universal Service,” you became
familiar with the names of Hearst correspondents in London, Paris,
Vienna, Rome, Berlin, Petrograd. All these correspondents were imaginary
persons; all this news was written in the Hearst offices in New York,
being a re-hash for American afternoon papers of the news of the London
morning papers. This is obvious fraud, and the law should bar it,
precisely as it bars misbranded maple syrup and olive oil and strawberry
jam.
Such laws would help; and I could suggest others that would help;
nevertheless, the urging of such laws is not the purpose of this book.
It is a problem of cutting the claws of a tiger. The first thing you
have to do is to catch your tiger; and when I undertake the hard and
dangerous job of invading a jungle and catching a tiger and chaining him
down, am I going to be content with cutting off the sharpest points of
the beast’s claws, and maybe pulling one or two of his teeth? I am not!
CHAPTER LXIII
THE MENTAL MUNITION-FACTORY
A solution that comes at once to mind is state-owned or municipal-owned
newspapers. This is the orthodox Socialist solution, and is also being
advocated by William Jennings Bryan. Fortunately, we do not have to take
his theories, or anyone’s theories; we have facts—the experience of Los
Angeles with its public paper, the “Municipal News,” which was an entire
success. I inquire of the editor of the paper, Frank E. Wolfe, and he
writes:
The “Municipal News”? There’s a rich story buried there. It was
established by an initiative ordinance, and had an ample
appropriation. It was launched in the stream with engines going full
steam ahead. Its success was instantaneous. Free distribution; immense
circulation; choked with high-class, high-rate advertising; well
edited, and it was clean and immensely popular.
Otis said: “Every dollar that damned socialistic thing gets is a
dollar out of the Times’ till.” Every publisher in the city re-echoed,
and the fight was on. The chief thing that rankled, however, was the
outgrowth of a clause in the ordinance which gave to each political
party polling a three per cent vote a column in each issue for
whatsoever purpose it might be used. The Socialist Labor Party nosed
out the Prohibitionists by a fluke. The Socialists had a big margin in
the preceding elections, so the Reds had two columns, and they were
quick to seize the opportunity for propaganda. The Goo-goos, who had
always stoutly denied they were a political party, came forward and
claimed space, and the merry war was on. Those two columns for
Socialist propaganda were the real cause for the daily onslaught of
the painted ladies of Broadway (newspaper district of Los Angeles).
There were three morning and three evening papers. Six times a day
they whined, barked, yelped and snapped at the heels of the “Municipal
News.” Never were more lies poured out from the mouths of these
mothers of falsehood. The little, weakly whelps of the pornographic
press took up the hue and cry, and Blanche, Sweetheart and Tray were
on the trail. Advertisers were cajoled, browbeaten and blackmailed,
until nearly all left the paper. The “News” was manned by a picked
staff of the best newspaper men on the coast. It was clean, well
edited, and gave both sides to all controversies—using the parallel
column system. It covered the news of the municipality better than any
paper had ever covered it. It was weak and ineffective editorially,
for the policy was to print a newspaper. We did not indulge in a
clothes-line quarrel—did not fight back.
The “News” died under the axe one year from its birth. They used the
initiative to kill it. The rabble rallied to the cry, and we foresaw
the end.
The paper had attracted attention all over the English-reading world.
Everywhere I have gone I have been asked about it, by people who never
dreamed I had been an editor of the paper. Its death was a triumph for
reaction, but its effect will not die. Some day the idea will prevail.
Then I might want to go back into the “game.”
City-owned newspapers are part of the solution, but not the whole part.
As a Socialist, I advocate public ownership of the instruments and means
of production; but I do not rely entirely upon that method where
intellectual matters are concerned. I would have the state make all the
steel and coal and oil, the shoes and matches and sugar; I would have it
do the distributing of newspapers, and perhaps even the printing; but
for the editing of the newspapers I cast about for a method of control
that allows free play to the development of initiative and the
expression of personality.
In a free society the solution will be simple; there will be many groups
and associations, publishing their own papers, and if you do not like
the papers which these groups give you, you can form a group of your
own. Being in receipt of the full product of your labor, you will have
plenty of money, and will be surrounded by other free and independent
individuals, also receiving the full product of their labor, and
accustomed to combining for the expression of their ideas. The
difference is that today the world’s resources are in the hands of a
class, and this class has a monopoly of self-expression. The problem of
transferring such power to the people must be studied as the whole
social problem, and not merely as the problem of the press.
Fortunately there are parts of America in which the people have kept at
least a part of their economic independence, and have gone ahead to
solve the problem of the “kept” press in true American fashion—that is,
by organizing and starting honest newspapers for themselves. The editor
of the “Nonpartisan Leader,” Oliver S. Morris, has kindly written for me
an account of the experiences of the Nonpartisan League, which I
summarize as follows:
The League commenced organization work early in 1915 in North Dakota. By
the summer of the next year it had forty thousand members, yet no
newspaper in the state had given, even as news, a fair account of the
League’s purposes. Every daily paper in the state was filled with “gross
misinformation and absurd lies.” So the League started a little weekly
paper of its own. With this single weekly, against the entire daily
press of the state, it swept the primaries in June, 1916.
Then the League decided to have a daily paper. The “Courier-News” of
Fargo had been for sale, but the owners would not sell to the League.
The League went ahead to start a new paper, actually buying machinery
and taking subscriptions; then the “Courier-News” decided to sell, and
its circulation under League ownership now exceeds the total population
of Fargo.
The League at present has weekly papers in seven states, with a total
circulation of two hundred thousand, and another weekly, the
“Nonpartisan Leader,” published in St. Paul, with a circulation of two
hundred and fifty thousand. It is starting co-operative country weekly
papers, supervising their editorial policy and furnishing them news and
editorial service; over one hundred of these weekly papers are already
going. There is another League daily in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and
one at Nampa, Idaho. Finally, the League is going ahead on its biggest
venture, the establishment of a daily in Minneapolis. This paper is to
be capitalized at a million dollars, and the stock is being sold to
farmer and labor organizations throughout the state. Says Mr. Morris:
“Many wealthy professional and business men, disgusted with the
controlled press, have purchased stock, and are warm boosters for the
League publications.” Also he says:
One of the chief results of the establishment of a League press is a
different attitude on the part of many existing papers. With
competition in the field, many publishers who have hitherto been
biased and unfair have been forced to change their tactics. Few of
these papers have gone over to the League side of political and
economic questions, but they have been forced at least to print fair
news reports on both sides of the question in their news columns,
reserving their opposition to the movement for their editorial
columns. That, of course, is fair enough. The menace of the controlled
press in America is due to the fact that as a rule this press does not
confine its arguments and opposition to the editorial columns, but
uses the news columns for propaganda, and, failing to print the news,
printing only a part of it, distorting it or actually lying, sways
opinion through the news columns.
Such is the procedure in places where Americans are free. But what about
our crowded cities, with their slum populations, speaking forty
different languages, illiterate, unorganized, and dumb? Even in these
cities there have been efforts made to start newspapers in the interest
of the people. I know few more heroic stories than the twenty-year
struggle to establish and maintain the “New York Call.” It began as a
weekly, “The Worker.” Even that took endless campaigns of begging, and
night labor of devoted men and women who earned their livings by
day-time labor under the cruel capitalist grind. At last they managed to
raise funds to start a daily, and then for ten years it was an endless
struggle with debt and starvation. It was a lucky week when the “New
York Call” had money enough to pay its printing force; the reporters and
editors would sometimes have to wait for months. A good part of the
space in the paper had to be devoted to ingenious begging.
The same attempt was made in Chicago, and there bad management and
factional quarrels brought a disastrous failure. At the time of writing,
there are Socialist dailies in Butte, in Seattle, and in Milwaukee, also
a few foreign-language Socialist dailies. There are numerous weeklies
and monthlies; but these, of course, do not take the place of
newspapers, they are merely a way of pamphleteering. The people read
falsehoods all week or all month, and then at last they get what portion
of the truth the “Appeal to Reason” or the “Nation” or the “Liberator”
or “Pearson’s” can find room for. In the meantime the average newspaper
reader has had his whole psychology made of lies, so that he cannot
believe the truth when he sees it.
There are a few millionaires in America who have liberal tendencies.
They have been willing to finance reform campaigns, and in great
emergencies to give the facts to the people; they have been willing now
and then to back radical magazines, and even to publish them. But—I
state the fact, without trying to explain it—there has not yet appeared
in America a millionaire willing to found and maintain a fighting daily
paper for the abolition of exploitation. I have myself put the
proposition before several rich men. I have even known of cases where
promises were made, and plans drawn up. My friend Gaylord Wilshire
intended to do it with the proceeds of his gold-mine, but the gold-mine
has taken long to develop. I had hopes that Henry Ford would do it, when
I read of his purchase of the “Dearborn Independent.” I urged the matter
upon him with all the eloquence I could muster; he said he meant to do
it, but I have my fears. The trouble is his ignorance; he really does
not know about the world in which he finds himself, and so far the
intellectual value of the “Dearborn Independent” has been close to zero.
So our slum proletariat is left to feed upon the garbage of yellow
journalism. Year by year the cost of living increases, and wages, if
they move at all, move laggingly, and after desperate and embittered
strife. In the midst of this strife the proletariat learns its lessons;
it learns to know the clubs of policemen and the bayonets and
machine-guns of soldiers; it learns to know capitalist politicians and
capitalist judges; also it learns to know Capitalist Journalism!
Wherever in America the workers organize and strike for a small portion
of their rights, they come out of the experience with a bitter and
abiding hatred of the press. I have shown you what happened in Colorado;
in West Virginia; in Paterson, New Jersey; in Calumet, Michigan; in
Bisbee, Arizona; in Seattle, Washington. I could show you the same thing
happening in every industrial center in America.
The workers have come to realize the part which the newspapers play;
they have come to know the newspapers as the crux of the argument, the
key to the treasure-chamber. A modern newspaper, seen from the point of
view of the workers, is a gigantic munition-factory, in which the
propertied class manufactures mental bombs and gas-shells for the
annihilation of its enemies. And just as in war sometimes the strategy
is determined by the location of great munition-factories and depots, so
the class-struggle comes to center about newspaper offices. In every
great city of Europe where the revolution took place, the first move of
the rebels was to seize these offices, and the first move of the
reactionaries was to get them back. We saw machine-guns mounted in the
windows of newspaper-offices, sharp-shooters firing from the roofs,
soldiers in the streets replying with shrapnel. It is worth noting that
wherever the revolutionists were able to take and hold the newspapers,
they maintained their revolution; where the newspapers were retaken by
the reactionaries, the revolution failed.
In Petrograd the “Little Gazette,” organ of the “Black Hundreds,” became
the “Red Gazette,” and has remained the “Red Gazette.” The official
military organ, the “Army and Fleet,” became the “Red Army and Fleet.”
The “Will of Russia,” organ of Protopopov, last premier of the Tsar,
became the “Pravda,” which means “Truth.” In Berlin, on the other hand,
the “Kreuz-Zeitung,” organ of black magic and reaction, became for a few
days “Die Rothe Fahne,” the “Red Flag”; but, alas, it went back to the
“Kreuz-Zeitung” again!
Will it come this way in America? Shall we see mobs storming the offices
of the “New York Times” and “World,” the “Chicago Tribune,” the “Los
Angeles Times”? It depends entirely upon the extent to which these
capitalist newspapers continue to infuriate the workers, and to suppress
working-class propaganda with the help of subservient government
officials. I personally am not calling for violent revolution; I still
hope for the survival of the American system of government. But I point
out to the owners and managers of our great capitalist news-organs the
peril in which they place themselves, by their system of organized lying
about the radical movement. It is not only the fury of resentment they
awaken in the hearts of class-conscious workingmen and women; it is the
condition of unstable equilibrium which they set up in society, by the
mass of truth they suppress. Today every class-conscious workingman
carries about with him as his leading thought, that if only he and his
fellows could get possession of the means of news-distribution, could
take the printing-offices and hold them for ten days, they could end
forever the power of Capitalism, they could make safe the Co-operative
Commonwealth in America.
I say ten days, and I do not speak loosely. Just imagine if the
newspapers of America were to print the truth for ten days! The truth
about poverty, and the causes of poverty; the truth about corruption in
politics and in all branches of government, in Journalism, and
throughout the business world; the truth about profiteering and
exploitation, about the banking graft, the plundering of the railroads,
the colossal gains of the Beef Trust and the Steel Trust and the Oil
Trust and their hundreds of subsidiary organizations; the truth about
conditions in industry, the suppression of labor-revolts and the
corrupting of labor movements; above all, the truth about the
possibilities of production by modern machinery, the fact that, by
abolishing production for profit and substituting production for use, it
would be possible to provide abundance for all by two or three hours’
work a day! I say that if all this legitimate truth could be placed
before the American people for ten successive days, instead of the mess
of triviality, scandal, crime and sensation, doctored news and political
dope, prejudiced editorials and sordid and vulgar advertisements upon
which the American people are now fed—I say that the world would be
transformed, and Industrial Democracy would be safe. Most of our
newspaper proprietors know this as well as I do; so, when they read of
the seizing of newspaper offices in Europe, they experience cold chills,
and one great newspaper in Chicago has already purchased half a dozen
machine-guns and stored them away in its cellar!
For twenty years I have been a voice crying in the wilderness of
industrial America; pleading for kindness to our laboring-classes,
pleading for common honesty and truth-telling, so that we might choose
our path wisely, and move by peaceful steps into the new industrial
order. I have seen my pleas ignored and my influence destroyed, and now
I see the stubborn pride and insane avarice of our money-masters driving
us straight to the precipice of revolution. What shall I do? What can I
do—save to cry out one last warning in this last fateful hour? The time
is almost here—and ignorance, falsehood, cruelty, greed and lust of
power were never stronger in the hearts of any ruling class in history
than they are in those who constitute the Invisible Government of
America today.
CHAPTER LXIV
THE PROBLEM OF THE REPORTER
One important line of attack upon Capitalist Journalism occurred to me
some five years ago, after the Colorado coal-strike. I have saved this
story, because it points so clearly the method I wish to advocate. You
will find the story in “Harper’s Weekly” for July 25, 1914; “Hearst-Made
War News,” by Isaac Russell.
You remember how Hearst “made” the war with Spain. Sixteen years later,
in 1914, Hearst was busy “making” another war, this time with Mexico.
President Wilson, trying to avoid war, had arranged for arbitration of
the difficulty between Mexico and the United States by delegates from
Argentine, Brazil and Chile. This was the Niagara Conference, and to it
the “New York American” sent an honest reporter. It did this, not
through oversight, but because the usual run of Hearst reporters had
found themselves unable to get any information whatever. One Mexican
delegate had taken the card of a Hearst reporter, torn it to pieces, and
thrown the pieces into the reporter’s face. The delegates for the United
States refused to talk to the Hearst representatives, the other
newspaper-men refused to have anything to do with them. So the managing
editor of the “New York American” selected Mr. Roscoe Conklin Mitchell,
a man known to be honest.
Mr. Mitchell came to Niagara, and got the news—to the effect that all
was going well at the conference. He sent a dispatch to that effect, and
the “New York American” did not publish this dispatch. Day by day Mr.
Mitchell sent dispatches, describing how all was going well at the
conference; and the “American,” which was determined that the Conference
should fail, doctored these dispatches and wrote in false matter. Mr.
Mitchell had to explain to the delegates and to the other reporters how
he was being treated by his home office. On two occasions Mr. Mitchell
forced the “American” to send up another man to write the kind of
poisoned falsehoods it wanted; and on each occasion these men were
forced to leave, because no one would have anything to do with them,
they could get no information. Finally, in the midst of Mr. Mitchell’s
dispatches, the “New York American” inserted a grand and wonderful
“scoop”: “PRESIDENT CARRANZA’S CONFIDENTIAL MESSAGE TO THE MEDIATORS.”
Mr. Mitchell had sent no such dispatch, and upon inquiry he learned that
the document was a fake; no such “confidential message” had been
received from President Carranza. So Mr. Mitchell wired his resignation
to the “New York American.”
The managing editor of the “American” protested. “Please be good soldier
and good boy,” he telegraphed. Again he telegraphed: “Come home
comfortably, be philosophical. Good soldiers are patient, even if
superior officers make mistakes. Be resigned without resigning.” When
the news of Mitchell’s resignation reached the other reporters, they
formed an impromptu committee and rushed in automobiles to his hotel to
congratulate him. The American delegates to the convention held a
reception, during which the head of the delegation made to Mr. Mitchell
a speech of congratulation. Summing up the story, Isaac Russell puts
this question to you, the reader: Will you leave it to the men on the
firing line, the reporters, to fight out alone the question of whether
you are to receive accurate information concerning what is going on in
the world? Or will you help to find means whereby both you and your
agent, the reporter, may be less at the mercy of the unscrupulous
publisher, who finds that lying and misrepresentation serve his personal
ends?
Isaac Russell, you recall, was the reporter for the “New York Times” who
had stood by me through the struggle over the Colorado coal-strike. This
struggle was just over, and both Russell and I were sick and sore.
Russell was fighting with his editors day by day—they objected to his
having written this “Hearst-made War News,” by the way, and took the
first opportunity thereafter to get rid of him. Russell had word of an
impending break between Amos Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt, and wrote
it up. Gifford Pinchot, brother of Amos, made a furious denial,
whereupon the “Times” fired Russell. But very soon afterwards Amos
Pinchot broke with Theodore Roosevelt!
Russell and I talked over the problem of the reporter and the truth.
Must a reporter be a cringing wretch, or else a man of honor in search
of a job? Might not a reporter be a member of an honored profession,
having its own standards, its sense of duty to the public? Obviously,
the first trouble is that in his economic status the reporter is a
sweated wage slave. If reporting is to become a profession, the
reporters must organize, and have power to fix, not merely their
wage-scale, but also their ethical code. I wrote an article calling for
a “reporters’ union,” and Russell began to agitate among New York
newspaper-men for this idea, which has now spread all over the country.
What would be the effect upon news-writing of a reporters’ union? What
assurance have we that reporters would be better than owners? Well, in
the first place, reporters are young men, and owners are nearly always
old men; so in the newspaper-world you have what you have in the world
of finance, of diplomacy, of politics and government—a “league of the
old men,” giving orders to the young men, holding the young men down.
The old men own most of the property, the young men own little of the
property; so control by old men is property control, while control by
young men would be control by human beings.
I have met some newspaper reporters who were drunken scoundrels. I have
met some who were as cruel and unscrupulous as the interests they
served. But the majority of newspaper reporters are decent men, who hate
the work they do, and would gladly do better if it were possible. I feel
sure that very few of the falsehoods about Helicon Hall would have been
published if the reporters who accepted our hospitality had been free to
write what they really thought about us. I know that throughout our
“Broadway demonstration” a majority of the reporters were on our side.
They took us into their confidence about what was going on in their
newspaper offices; they went out of their way to give us counsel. Again
and again they came to my wife, to plead that our mourning “stunt” was
“petering-out,” and could we not think up some way to hold the attention
of the public? Would not my wife at least rescind her request that they
omit descriptions of that white military cape? After the last assault
upon the street speakers in Tarrytown, it was a reporter who warned my
wife that the situation was getting out of hand; the authorities would
not listen to reason, there was going to be violence, and she had better
persuade me to withdraw.
I have before me a letter from C. E. S. Wood, poet and lawyer:
You doubtless know more newspaper men than I do, but I know a great
many—fine fellows personally; themselves writhing in the detestable
position of moral bandits, the disgrace of which they feel as keenly
as any, and yet economic determinism keeps them there. They are in a
trap. They are behind the bars, and as the thief said to Talleyrand,
or some minister of France, “One must live.” I know of no other
profession that deliberately trains its neophytes to lying and
dishonor, which makes it a part of the professional obligation to ruin
man or woman by deliberate lies; which never honestly confesses a
mistake, and never has the chivalry to praise an adversary.
And again, William Marion Reedy:
To one who has lived all his life in cities, to one who has spent most
of his days and nights with the men who write the great daily papers
of the cities, it is perfectly evident that ninety out of one hundred
editorial writers on the press today are men who are in intellectual
and sympathetic revolt against present-day conditions. You will find
the average editorial writer a Socialist, and as for the reporter, he
is most likely to be an Anarchist. The reason of this is plain enough.
The men who make the newspapers are behind the scenes—they see the
workings of the wires—they note the demagogy of politicians, they are
familiar with the ramifications by which the public service
corporations control the old parties down to the smallest offices, and
even at times finance reform movements, which always stop at the
election of some respectable figurehead or dummy, but never proceed to
any attack upon the fundamental evils of our social and economic
system. It is my firm belief that were it not for the capitalists at
the head of the great daily newspapers, if it were possible for the
men who write the news and the editorials of all the newspapers in the
United States, to take absolute charge of their publications and print
the news exactly as they see it, and write their views exactly as they
feel them, for a space of three days, there would be such a revolution
in the United States of America as would put that of France to shame.
The only possible reason why this might not occur is that the
editorial writers and reporters actually believe in nothing—not even
in the various remedies, rational or wild-eyed, which occasionally, in
private, they proclaim.
And here is another letter, written by Ralph Bayes, for many years city
editor of the “Los Angeles Record,” and now laid up in a sanitarium with
tuberculosis.
I wonder as you gallop gaily along the way, throwing rocks in
gypsy-like abandon at the starched and frilled little children of
privilege—I wonder whether you will give your readers just one glimpse
of the tragedies that are the lives of the men hired by the system to
do the work you condemn. It isn’t merely that we journalists must
prostitute our own minds and bodies in answer to the call of that
inexorable tyrant, our collective belly. Every man who toils and
sweats for a wage is perforce doing the same thing. The bitterness of
our portion is this precisely: that we are hired poisoners, whose lot
it is to kill the things we love most. To kill them, not as bold
buccaneers in a stand-up fight, but to slay them artfully,
insidiously, with a half-true headline or a part suppression of fact.
In my ten years of experience on various sheets as reporter, editor
and Associated Press representative, I have come to know the masses
with whom I had to deal. Their intellects were the pawns with which I
must learn to play the editorial game. I knew for instance, sitting at
my desk, just how many extra papers I could sell with a scare-line on
a police scandal. I knew to how many men on the street the filthy
details of some married woman’s shame would prove a lure to buy. And
as I watched the circulation rise or fall, day by day, like a huge
beating pulse, I became familiar, somewhat, with the mental processes
of the average human animal. It was my tragedy, as it is the tragedy
of the majority of my fellows, that this knowledge, acquired always at
a tremendous cost of our life’s energies, must be used not for the
uplift, but for the further enslavement, the drugging of the minds of
men. How many times have I sat at my desk, and in apparently heartless
fashion, cut the big truth out of the stuff that honest reporters
wrote. Sometimes there were other moments in my life, as in the lives
of the rest of my kind, when there were opportunities for sly
sabotage—when we thought by the ridiculous speciousness of our alleged
facts, to make the pseudo-truths which we pretended to propound stand
forth in their gaunt shamelessness for the things they actually were.
Do you remember Harwood, of the “Los Angeles Times”? If I were only
with you now, I could point out to you in that daily concatenation of
lies, a few truths about things, peering covertly through the mass of
corruption, and seeming almost to be holding their figurative noses in
disgust. How we used to chuckle when he would succeed in passing a sly
sentence—a word—over the sleepy night editor at the desk! Poor
intellectual Pierrots that we were! Literary Pantaloons!
But out of the tragedy of my own experience, and out of the tragedies
of the experiences of the fellows I have known, I can glimpse a great
light ahead. For I’m an optimist, you see. I was talking the other day
to the editor of one of the sheets which poison public opinion in
Phoenix, Arizona. He is a thoroughly fine, and likable chap, but I had
always known him for an ultra-conservative—a kept man entirely. The
conversation drifted to Russia, and to my utter astonishment he quite
frankly, but confidentially, told me that he didn’t believe a word of
the dispatches put forth by the Associated Press—the Associated Press
which hitherto had been Almighty God to him. I glanced at him
curiously, and then: “You’re not a radical?” I said, dubiously. “I
don’t know what I am,” he replied. “I’ve lost my perspective and I
haven’t anchored to any economic philosophy as yet, but sometimes my
thoughts are so bitter that I’m afraid of them. I’ve just seen a man
sent to jail for twenty days,” he continued. “He had been in town but
half an hour, and his only crime was that he couldn’t obtain work and
that he had run out of money. God,” he said, “some day I may be that
man. I feel his feelings now, and I must hide them or lose my job.”
Poor fellow, his wife is dying of tuberculosis, and he is almost
distracted with the burden of his financial troubles.
It was just another journalistic tragedy I had seen, but joy burst in
upon me as I listened to him talk. “Things aren’t so bad after all,” I
thought, “for the press, at least, isn’t any more rotten or venal than
the rest of the system.” In the editorial rooms of the country there
are good fellows and true, sheer tired of the daily assassination in
which they participate. Their fine delusions are spent. Their faith in
the old is waning. And when the big day comes, I think you will find
the press full ripe—riper perhaps than most of our institutions—for
the change.
On page 149 I stated that the publisher of the “New York Times” gave a
dinner to his staff, and my friend, Isaac Russell, corrected me, saying:
“WE REPORTERS PAID FOR THAT DINNER.” Now let me give you another glimpse
into a reporter’s soul:
I can understand it now. We were trying to get together in an
association, but the big bosses always got in, and Mr. Ochs always
came TO OUR DINNER, and always made the principal speech, and always
dismissed the gathering after vaudeville stunts by “old vets.” I
remember that at that dinner I PAID, but sat away at the foot of a
horseshoe table, and the BIG GUNS of the “Times” all sat around the
center of the horseshoe, and the big guns thundered and sent us
away—me boiling, that we writers had to sit mute and dumb at our own
dinner, and could never talk over our affairs—the bosses rushed so to
every gathering we planned.
I wish you could print the menu card for that dinner—the illustration
on the cover. I kept it as the most humiliating example I ever saw of
the status of the news-writer.... The illustration showed Adolph S.
Ochs as a man with his coat off wielding a big sledgehammer. He was
knocking one of those machines where you send the ball away up in the
air, and get a cigar if the bell rings at the top of the column. Well,
a little figure stood behind the redoubtable plutocratic owner of the
“Times.” This little figure was labeled “THE STAFF.”
“STAFF” WAS FLUNKEYING IT FOR OCHS—holding the great man’s hat and
coat, if you will—while he hit the circulation ball a wallop!
CHAPTER LXV
THE PRESS SET FREE
Some years ago Allan Benson told me of his troubles as an honest
journalist; I asked him to repeat them for this book, and he answered:
I doubt if my experiences as a daily newspaper editor would serve your
purpose. When I was a daily editor I edited. I printed what I pleased.
If I could not do so, I resigned. I didn’t resign with a bank account
to fall back upon—I resigned broke.
I am sorry that I struck my friend Benson in an uncommunicative mood. It
doesn’t in the least interfere with my thesis to learn that some editors
resign; it is plain enough to the dullest mind that it doesn’t help the
public when an honest man resigns, and a rogue or a lickspittle takes
his place.
I am not one of those narrow radicals who believe that the pocket-nerve
of the workers is the only nerve, or even the principal nerve, by which
they will be moved to action. I know that the conscience of newspaper
men is struggling all the time. Now and then I come on a case of
truth-telling in a capitalist newspaper, which cannot be explained by
any selfish, competitive motive. What does it mean? If you could go
inside that office, you would find some man risking the bread that goes
into his children’s mouths, the shoes that go onto their feet, in order
that the knavery of Capitalist Journalism may be a little less knavish;
going to his boss and laying down the law: “I won’t stand for that. If
that goes in, I go out.” As a rule, alas, he goes out—and this reduces
the inclination of others to fight for honesty in the news.
One purpose of this book is to advocate a union of newspaper workers, so
that they may make their demands as an organization, and not as helpless
individuals. Events move fast these days; while I write, I learn that
there is already a “News-Writers’ Union” in Boston, and one in New
Haven; there is one being formed in Omaha, one in Louisville, one in
Seattle, one in San Francisco. In Louisville the “Courier-Journal” and
“Times” served notice on their staff that joining the union would
automatically constitute resignation. In San Francisco, I am told by an
editor of that city, the movement “was carried through swiftly and
silently at the start, the evening papers being one hundred per cent
organized, the morning papers about fifty per cent.” Then the publishers
got wind of it, and held a secret meeting in the St. Francis Hotel.
“That fearless backer of organized labor and the rights of the working
classes, to wit: William Randolph Hearst, preferred to carry out his
great program of betterment without consulting his handmaidens and
bondmen.” The “Chronicle,” the paper of “Mike” De Young, took the same
stand; so—
Upon the morning after the meeting every man on both papers who had
signed the charter roll of the proposed association was told to recant
with bended knee, or to go forth and earn his bread with a pick and
shovel. Some did and some did not—all honor to the latter.... It is
certain that the publishers of the morning papers will fight to the
last ditch.
My informant goes on to tell about his own position. You remember the
immortal utterance of President Eliot of Harvard, that the true
“American hero” of our time is the “scab.” How does this true “American
hero” feel about himself? Listen:
And I? Well, old man, I somewhat shamefully admit that I am at present
guarding my bread and butter, and looking to the future with one eye
on the boss’s and my own opportunities, and in my heart damning the
conditions that make me an undoubted renegade. I am drawing a little
better than forty per, am in the best of standing, being now —— and
with the possibility of being its head shortly, and with certain
advancement coming in both pay and rating. Now what the deuce? Shall I
tell Polly to support us and get in on the big game, or shall I eat my
bitter bread?...
I do know this, that there is going to be no present big success of
the union movement, that whoever joins it too prominently is going to
fight the owners for the rest of his life, and that the union can do
me myself no good at all from any standpoint.
You will remember that in my story of the “Los Angeles Times” I
mentioned a young reporter, Bob Harwood, who had told me of the “Times”
knaveries. Harwood is now in San Francisco, where you may have another
glimpse of him.
Bob told ’em all to go to hell, and is now organizing actively. There
is an addition coming to the Harwood family shortly. Why comment
further?
And then, let us see what is happening on the other side of the
continent. In New Haven the “News-Writers’ Union” goes on strike, and
while they are on strike, they publish a paper of their own! In Boston
the “News-Writers’ Union” declares a strike, and wins all demands.
Incidentally they learn—if they do not know it already—that the
newspapers of Boston do not publish the news! They do not publish the
news about the News-Writers’ strike; when the strike is settled, on the
basis of recognition of the union, not a single Boston newspaper
publishes the terms of the settlement!