The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism

Conditions are critical tonight in Paint and Cabin Creeks, Kanawha County, where a coal strike has been on over a year. A Chesapeake and Ohio passenger train was shot up late tonight; the town of Mucklow, W. Va., was riddled with bullets and a physician, with a man dying driving through the district, was fired upon. When the physician with his patient arrived at the hospital, the patient was dead.

The Chesapeake and Ohio passenger train ran for half a mile under fire, but no one was injured. At Mucklow a majority of houses bear marks from rifles, but in this place no one was injured.

Late tonight a conference was held with Governor Glasscock, during which Sheriff Bonner Hill asked the governor that troops be sent into the strike territory. Sheriff Hill notified the governor that the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad would have a special train ready to move the troops at once.

At midnight striking miners were gathering from Paint and Cabin Creeks in the vicinity of Mucklow. There is anxiety here as to the next move of the strikers.

The engineer and two passengers were injured when the passenger train on the Chesapeak and Ohio was fired upon. (CORRECT.)

Deputy sheriffs waiting for such an attack as occurred tonight were prepared. The officers directed bullets into Mucklow from rapid fire guns and rifles. The miners’ camp was subjected to a heavy fire and whether the shots were effective is not known.

Mucklow is surrounded by mountains and the fighting between strikers and the authorities is difficult.

These are your night dispatches. Next day more details come in, and you send a message to the effect that the sheriff and his deputies cannot get into the miners’ camp to see if any of the campers have been killed or injured. Then, realizing that serious trouble is coming, you wonder whether you may not have distorted the news a little more than is permitted, even to an Associated Press correspondent. You fear that you have put in a fatal dose of poison, and decide to protect yourself by sending a small quantity of antidote—such a wee, small quantity of antidote! You write:

Shooting from the train, attacked on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad during the night, was in the direction of the camp, and it was feared that if any of the women and children had been hurt the sheriff and his men would be unable to restrain the angry men as they outnumber the posse ten to one, and are said to be well armed.

Such is the news, and all the news which the Associated Press sent to the public about that exploit of the “Bull Moose Special” on the night of February 7, 1913. And now do you think, or do you not think, that the editors of the “Masses” were justified in their cartoon alleging that this news was “Poisoned at the Source”? I think so; also I think that Senator John W. Kern of Indiana was justified in his statements made in the United States Senate three months later, regarding the suppression of other news from this coal strike:

But to me the most startling fact bearing on the subject under discussion was this: Here was a proceeding not only unusual but almost unheard of being carried on almost in sight of the capital of West Virginia and within 300 miles of the National capital. One of the best-known women in America—a woman past her eightieth year—a woman known and loved by millions of the working people of America for the promotion of whose welfare and for the amelioration of whose condition she had dedicated her life—a woman so honored and beloved by these millions that she was known to all of them in every humble home as Mother Jones, was being tried in this unusual way before this mock tribunal.

The fact of the trial was sensational. The subject matter of the trial was of the deepest interest The incidents of such a trial would be of necessity, not only sensational, but would interest the country.

And yet the great news-gathering agencies of the country, active, alert, with a large, intelligent force searching everywhere for items of news, were not able to furnish a line of information to their newspaper patrons concerning this astonishing proceeding.

This fact speaks volumes as to the conditions in that terror-stricken country. A zone had been established for these infamous proceedings for the purpose of suppressing information concerning them.

I was informed by a representative of the greatest of all these news-gathering agencies that the proceedings were not reported because the conditions there were such that it was not safe for newspaper men to enter the field to secure the facts for publication.

This same agency has had a representative in the City of Mexico throughout the period of the recent revolutions. He was not afraid to remain there and report faithfully the news while the streets were being plowed and mowed by the deadly missiles from the cannons of contending armies. But in West Virginia the situation was such that the American reading public was kept in profound ignorance of the startling happenings there because of a reign of terror which could not be braved by the dauntless representatives of the American Press associations.

This single fact alone will justify fully the most searching investigation.

I have discussed in Chapter XLII the mystery of why the Associated Press dropped the case against the “Masses.” I always prefer to give both sides of a question, and it was my hope that I might be able to give the Associated Press explanation of this mystery. My hope was roused by Mr. Stone himself, who entered into correspondence with me, and made the flat-footed statement: “I am glad to give anyone information respecting this organization.” I, being a trusting person, took Mr. Stone at his word, and wrote him a courteous letter, putting to him four questions, as follows:

1. Was any investigation made of my wife’s complaint to you of the false report sent out by the Associated Press that she was arrested on April 29, 1914, in New York City? And why was no correction of this false report ever made, in spite of my wife’s written request? Every New York newspaper and every other press association in America sent out a correct report of my arrest, only the Associated Press reported that my wife was arrested.

2. What was the result of the investigation which you promised to make concerning my article published in the “Appeal to Reason” in the latter part of May, 1914, telling of the refusal of the Associated Press to send out a report of a deliberate lie told by Gov. Ammons of Colorado to President Wilson? Mr. John P. Gavit of the “New York Evening Post” showed me your letter, promising to investigate this matter.

3. What was the reason the Associated Press decided to drop the libel suit against the “Masses”?

4. What action, if any, did the Associated Press take concerning the charges published in “Pearson’s Magazine” by Charles Edward Russell, dealing with its gross and systematic misrepresentation of the Calumet strikers?

I put these four questions politely, and in entire good faith, and instantly my correspondence with Mr. Stone comes to an end! I wait day by day; I wait with sorrow and yearning, but no answer comes from Mr. Stone. I delay sending my book to the printer for more than two months, hoping to get a reply from Mr. Stone; but I get no reply!

I now publicly address to Mr. Stone one final communication. I implore him, for the sake of the honor of the great institution which he represents, for the sake of the good name of all American Journalism, not to swallow in silence the charges published in a book called “The Brass Check.” I implore him to have the author of that volume arrested for criminal libel—and when the case is ready for trial, not to drop it!

My wife reads this chapter and asks me to omit the last paragraph. She says I am “bow-wowing” at Mr. Stone.

I think it over and decide to accept the metaphor. I picture a big dog walking down the street, a stately and dignified dog, and a very little dog comes up behind him and says “bow-wow,” and the big dog puts his tail between his legs and runs. However we may think about this incident, one thing certainly has been accomplished—the big dog has been robbed of his pose. Never again will we regard him as a stately and dignified dog!

War came upon the world, and the writer, as a student of Journalism, watched the great tide of public opinion. There had been newspapers in America which had kept a careful pretense of impartiality; under the pressure of war this pretense was forgotten. For example, the “New York Times.” Everyone would admit that the editorial page of the “Times” is class-propaganda, but the “Times” tries not to let you know that its news-columns are class-propaganda. It avoids the cruder blunders, such as false headlines. But when the threat of war came, and the “Times” was trying to force the country into war, the “Times” forgot even that precaution. On Thanksgiving Day, 1915, some twelve hundred clergymen in New York preached sermons. The “Times” selected eleven of these sermons and put them all under this headline:

Then you read the sermons, and what did you find? Three of them contained utterances which might be construed as urging preparedness; the other eight contained not a word in reference to preparedness!

And the same with the magazines. There had been magazines which in the old days would give excuses for not publishing this or that—they were concerned with questions of dignity, of art; they could not lend their columns to propaganda. But now these magazines became frankly organs of propaganda. Long before America entered the war, “McClure’s” turned all its energies to a campaign for “preparedness.” The “American,” the “Metropolitan,” the “Outlook” did the same. “Current Opinion” abandoned its policy of reprinting from other publications, and introduced propaganda of its own. The “Literary Digest,” supposed to be an impartial survey of public opinion, became a partisan organ of hate. Says a writer in “Reedy’s Mirror”:

The standardizing of the press had already proceeded to inordinate lengths before the war. As one sectional bookcase may differ from another of the same pattern only in its greater or lesser number of sections, so differs one American newspaper from another American newspaper. However, some small opportunity for individuality, for thought or pretense of thought, still existed, but even this has ended. With the opening of the war the American press ceased to think. The abstention has been so complete and prolonged that it may never be possible to resume the habit of thinking.

Look over these newspapers as they come in from the mails. Flag-waving of the cheapest, most brainless sort, Liberty Bonds, Thrift Stamps, Red Cross. This is the gamut that has countless repetition from New York to San Francisco, supplemented only by supercensored, mercilessly standardized stuff from the fighting fronts.

The writer of this book gave his support to the war against Germany, and has no apology to make for that course. He believed that the world would be a safer place for radicals to work in when the Kaiser had been overthrown; he still believes this—even though at the moment it seems that the result of our fighting has been to set up new imperialisms in Italy, France, England and America.

But my support of the war did not mean that I had given myself into the hands of war-profiteers. I saw that the old-time plunderers of America were among the war’s most ardent supporters, and they went right on with their plundering—becoming “dollar-a-year” men in Washington, with a great cry of patriotism, and letting themselves contracts out of which hundreds of millions of profit were made! The Beef Trust, the Steel Trust, the Oil Trust, the Powder Trust, multiplied many times over the profits they were taking from the necessities of the people; also they dictated legislation which spared their profits, and saddled the cost of the war upon future generations. A war has to be won with materials then existing in the world, or immediately produced; it manifestly cannot be won with materials produced a generation later. The only question is, shall the necessary materials be taken from the owners by means of taxes, or shall they be borrowed, shall the labor of future generations be pledged in exchange? This is clear and simple; but if you tried to explain it to the people during the war you would be lynched, or sent to jail for twenty years.

It was the grand chance for the plunderers of America to put their enemies, the radicals, out of the way. Many of these radicals opposed the war, but others were put out of the way merely for opposing the profiteers, and they received sentences which, for ferocity, exceed anything in the records of the Russian Tsardom. Some two thousand of them are still in jail, their sentences aggregating twenty-five thousand years.

It would have been a simple matter to persuade the Socialists to support the war. We know today that Nicholas Lenine asked only a promise of support from America, offering to repudiate the Brest-Litovsk treaty and join the war on Kaiserism. As to labor at home, an intelligent army officer showed the way in the Northwest; he gave the lumbermen an eight-hour day, decent living conditions, and generous wages, and so turned the I. W. W. of the spruce country into a patriotic society. But elsewhere the army officers were less intelligent, and the profiteers had their way; in the oil country of Kansas they threw scores of I. W. W. organizers into jail without trial, and held them there for a couple of years. They are holding some thirty of them still, and my mail is full of pitiful letters from poor devils who are asked to raise ten thousand dollars bail. All over the country this was done—in a frenzy of public excitement, deliberately created by the capitalist press.

The story of what the newspapers did to American radicals in this crisis would be unbelievable—if you had not read the rest of this book. Thus, for example, the case of Bannwart, a Boston pacifist, one of a committee which called upon Senator Lodge to protest against the declaration of war. Senator Lodge lost his temper and struck Bannwart in the face; and all over the country went the report that Senator Lodge had been assaulted in his office by a pacifist! The Senator became a national hero; the Boston newspapers printed columns and columns about the incident, and when Bannwart called upon the Senator to admit the truth, he not only refused to admit it, but gave out for publication many telegrams congratulating him upon his heroism. No newspaper would publish Bannwart’s side, and he was helpless for two years, until his suit for damages was about to come up in court; then the Senator gave way, and admitted in writing that he had struck the first blow. You have been acquainted with the “Evening Transcript,” organ of Boston’s aristocracy of wealth and culture, which publishes half-page advertisements of “Harvard Beer 1,000 pure,” and full-page advertisements of the arguments of gas company attorneys, and sends out “dope” for the “New Haven” plunderers; so you will be prepared to hear that the “Transcript” buried this apology of Senator Lodge in a remote corner, and without comment!

Or take the experience of my friend Feigenbaum, Socialist Assemblyman of New York State. The Socialist assemblymen had been protesting against the custom of the machine gang to drive through bills without consideration. They resolved to put a stop to the custom; whereupon the machine leaders set a little trap for the Socialists. A bill was introduced, without being read, and the speaker asked unanimous consent to advance it to the second reading. The leader of the Socialist group immediately objected. The bill had not been read, he declared, no one on the floor knew what was in the bill, no one even knew the name of the bill. The speaker cut him short: “No explanation is necessary. Your objection is sufficient.” So the bill, under the rules, went over to the next day. Says Feigenbaum:

The members drifted out to the cloak-rooms, or they remained at their desks. They didn’t know what the bill was about, because nine-tenths of them hadn’t read it, and not more than four or five were in the secret of the day’s mysterious doings.

But next morning the Socialists found out what had happened. The bill was to turn over certain lands in Saratoga County to the War Department, and the Socialists had been guilty of stopping war legislation which was desperately needed! The “New York Tribune” carried an elaborate account of a tempestuous scene, in which the speaker had “scathingly rebuked,” the Socialist leader. The members had swarmed around the Socialists, shaking their fists in their faces, threatening them with physical violence; also, the Socialist leader had refused to stand at the playing of the national anthem. Says Feigenbaum: “The whole story was a fabrication, pure and simple, out of whole cloth.” And he tells what happened afterwards—

A campaign of vilification hitherto unheard of. It went so far that Albany papers called for the raiding of the rooms we occupied, called for a boycott of us by shop-keepers and restaurant-men in Albany, and gave high praise to a drunken ruffian, an ex-prizefighter, member of the Assembly, who in a drunken fit of temper called for the lynching of the Socialists. This speech was highly praised editorially in Albany and Troy.

During the war our industrial autocracy has learned to organize for propaganda; it has learned the arts of hate. Today all the energies which were directed against the Kaiser have been turned against the radicals; also the spy-system which the government developed for the war has been turned against the radicals. Government agents raid their offices and seize their letters, and these letters are spread broadcast in the capitalist press—duly doctored, of course, and supplied with commentaries to distort their meaning.

For example, the “Lusk Committee” of the New York State Legislature holds a secret session with the executives of the New York newspapers (June 3, 1919, at the Murray Hill Hotel), and lays out its campaign in detail. It then proceeds, with a carload of soldiers and detectives, to raid the Rand School of Social Science; taking along a secret service agent of the British government, which is shooting radicals in Ireland and India, and wishes to find out all it can about their supporters in America. They find a manuscript, outlining a plan for propaganda among negroes. It was a rejected manuscript, as it happens; but the Lusk Committee “accepts” it, and spreads it broadcast. I shiver, contemplating the day when they raid my office, and publish all the queer manuscripts that arrive in my day’s mail! Manuscripts of health-cures, manuscripts of bible-prophecies, manuscripts of plans to abolish money, to communicate with Mars, to exterminate the vermin in the Los Angeles County Jail!

Also they find a circular of the Rand School, saying that the Socialists “must prepare to take over the government.” They publish this in the newspapers with horrified clamor: Sedition! Treason! Let the charter of the Rand School be annulled! As if there were any political party or political association in America which does not propose to take over the government! As if there were anything else which any political party or political association could propose!

Among the other seditious documents are some copies of “The Profits of Religion,” which gives occasion for sarcasm from the investigators. They propose to investigate “the profits of agitation”; so they spread broadcast the fact that Scott Nearing was paid six hundred dollars by the Rand School—and deny Nearing an opportunity to testify that part of this was payment for lectures delivered outside of the school, for which the school had collected the money on a percentage basis; and the balance for lecturing at the school, at a rate approximating ten cents per week for each student!

They lie about the pacifists and those whom they call Bolsheviks; they lie equally about a man like myself, who supported the war, and is opposing Bolshevism. In the accounts of the proceedings of the Senate Committee investigating “Bolshevism in America,” there was submitted, according to newspaper accounts, a long list of writings “urging the overthrow of the United States government by violence”; among the writers named being Upton Sinclair. I at once wrote to Solicitor Lamar of the postoffice department, to Major Humes, and to Senator Overman—these being the parties who had compiled the writings in question. I explained to these gentlemen that for twenty years I had been writing for the precise purpose of avoiding “the overthrow of the United States government by violence,” and I requested to know what writings of mine could have justified their charge. I have letters from all three of these parties, stating that nothing of mine was included, or had been included in the list; the published report of the Overman Committee reveals that this statement is correct; yet the dispatch including my name was sent broadcast over the country by the Associated Press—and I am without redress!

The listing of anecdotes of this sort is merely a question of the amount of space one is willing to give. The United States government is deporting Hindu revolutionists to be executed by the British government when they reach India. Prof. Richard Gottheil of Columbia University writes to the “New York Times” denying that this is so. Robert Morse Lovett, editor of the “Dial,” writes to the “Times,” citing case after case, upon British official authority. And the “Times” refuses to print Mr. Lovett’s letter! A friend of mine writes to Prof. Gottheil about it, and he answers that he wishes the “Times” would print Mr. Lovett’s letter, because he believes in fair play. But the “Times” does not believe in fair play!

In the same way, the “Times” attacks “Jimmie Higgins.” In the last chapters of this story an American soldier is represented as being tortured in an American military prison. Says the “Times”:

Mr. Sinclair should produce the evidence upon which he based his astounding accusations, if he has any. If he has simply written on hearsay evidence, or, worse still, let himself be guided by his craving to be sensational, he has laid himself open not only to censure but to punishment.

In reply to this, I send to the “Times” a perfectly respectful letter, citing scores of cases, and telling the “Times” where hundreds of other cases may be found. The “Times” returns this letter without comment. A couple of months pass, and as a result of the ceaseless, agitation of the radicals, there is a congressional investigation, and evidence of atrocious cruelties is forced into the newspapers. The “Times” publishes an editorial entitled, “Prison Camp Cruelties,” the first sentence of which reads: “The fact that American soldiers confined in prison-camps have been treated with extreme brutality may now be regarded as established.” So again I write a polite letter to the “Times,” pointing out that I think they owe me an apology. And how does the “Times” treat that? It alters my letter without my permission! It cuts out my request for an apology, and also my quotation of its own words calling for my punishment! The “Times,” caught in a hole, refuses to let me remind its readers that it wanted me “punished” for telling the truth! “All the News that’s Fit to Print!”

Or take the case of Henry Ford, who brings suit against the “Chicago Tribune” for libel, and cites five lies in one single news item:

Lie No. 1. That guardsmen employed by Ford would lose their places.

Lie No. 2. That no provision would be made for their dependents.

Lie No. 3. That their families could get along as best they might.

Lie No. 4. That when they returned they would have to apply for their old jobs as strangers.

Lie No. 5. That this rule applied to the Ford plants everywhere.

At the trial it was proven that all these statements were false. All the Ford workers who were drafted to Mexico had their wages paid to their families while they were away. On the other hand it was shown, through the testimony of Joseph Medill Patterson, one of the editors of the “Tribune,” and a renegade Socialist, that he had ordered the stopping of the pay of all those “Tribune” men who were drafted to Europe! I quote the testimony.

“How many of your employes went to the great war?”

“About two hundred and sixty-eight.”

“None of them drew salaries?”

“No.”

“But you drew your salary when you went over-seas, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And your salary is about twenty thousand dollars a year, isn’t it?”

Witness admitted that it was.

“The World’s Greatest Newspaper.”

Or take the Nonpartisan League of North Dakota. All through the war the newspapers strove to make this appear a disloyal organization. The League held a convention at St. Paul, at which hundreds of speeches were made; and the Associated Press found it possible to make one of the speakers, La Follette, appear disloyal by misquoting him. So it featured La Follette—and reported the other speakers hardly at all. As this book is going to press, the League bank is raided, and the farmers by thousands come pouring into Fargo in the rain, and at two enormous gatherings they pledge themselves to make their bank the biggest in the state. The bank is reopened, and on the first day forty-five thousand dollars is put in and only nine thousand taken out. And how is all this handled by the Associated Press? Hear the “Idaho Leader”:

Several newspaper representatives from St. Paul and Minneapolis were present to send as unfavorable reports of the great meeting to their papers as they could, and the Associated Press, the news agency which supplies the “Boise Statesman” with its daily fables from North Dakota, evidently fearing that their local manager was not capable of falsifying in the manner which big business demands, sent a special representative out from St. Paul to report the meeting. And this “A. P.” representative did himself proud, or rather he did the bidding of his masters.

Among other highly colored and untrue statements which the Associated Press representatives made was that “when the speaking was ended in the auditorium and a recess taken before the evening meeting, the crowds made a rush for the doors to get away so that they would not have to subscribe for stock in the Scandinavian bank!”

The crowd did make a rush but it was not for the doors. The crowd rushed, jostled, and pushed, in the anxiety of dozens of men to reach the front of the building, where a number of persons took subscriptions for stock. Those handling the subscriptions were swamped, and many men were forced to stand in line for a long time before they were waited on.

But the perfect case of journalistic knavery, the case which in the annals of history will take precedence over all others, past or present, is the case of Russia. You might say that all previous experience of the capitalist press of America in perverting and distorting news was but training for what it was to do to the Russian revolution. Say to yourself as follows: American Journalism did thus and so to an American author who advocated the abolition of privilege and exploitation; what would this Journalism do to a hundred and eighty million people who rose up and actually put an end to privilege and exploitation upon the half of two continents?

Let me make clear at the outset my point of view, oft repeated. I am not a Bolshevik, and have never been a Bolshevik. I understand that a Bolshevik is one who repudiates political action, and wishes to accomplish the social revolution by mass action of the proletariat, the direct overthrow of our present capitalist government and the setting up of a government by councils of the workers, something corresponding to our present trade union councils and conventions. For my part, I agree with the syndicalists in thinking that the best way to govern industry is through trade unions; that is the only real industrial democracy. But I believe that the trade unions can get this power by the ballot, backed by the mass strike. I don’t believe that it will be necessary for the workers to seize guns and turn the politicians out of office; I believe that they can elect their own politicians, or force even capitalist legislatures pass laws recognizing union control of industry.

I am well aware that this method will be slower, but I believe it will be quicker in the long run, because it will avoid the waste incidental to civil war, and the possibilities of failure and temporary reaction. Anybody can see that, as a matter of business, it would pay the workers better to continue working for the capitalists a few months or even a few years longer, than to take a course which might result in burning down the factories and getting the best leaders of the movement stood up against a wall and shot.

But such a program, of course, can be effective only in a country where political rights are recognized. Russia was not such a country. The Russian people had been held down by an utterly ruthless and utterly corrupt despotism, deprived of all opportunity to organize and to educate themselves, to acquire experience in government affairs; so, when they rose, they turned upon their oppressors the weapons they had been taught to understand. We, who were born in a more fortunate land, and have learned to use, if only half successfully, the ballot and public discussion in the settlement of our affairs—what attitude were we to take towards the Russian people, striking out blindly against their oppressors, groping for liberty and life?

The first revolution, the Kerensky revolution, was a political one, and that suited us fairly well; it made no threat against property, and it proposed to support our war. Our capitalist newspapers had no difficulty in getting the news about it, and had no objection to letting us read this news. But then came the second revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, and that did threaten property, and proposed to withdraw from our war. How did we treat that?

We had been training ourselves for a generation, so as to be instantly ready; we had been training ourselves in the office of Mr. Hearst’s “Cosmopolitan Magazine,” where Mr. Hearst had a twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year journalistic wizard by the name of Edgar Sisson. When we needed a molder of opinion for Russia, we sent this Hearst wizard across the seas, where he came upon a set of documents proving that Lenin and Trotsky were German agents. These documents had been examined and rejected as forgeries by Raymond Robins, also by the British Embassy, none too favorably disposed to the Bolsheviks; but matters like that do not trouble Hearst editors, who have learned to think in headlines. The “Sisson documents” were shipped to Washington, and issued under the authority of the United States government, and published in every newspaper in America.

We know today who were the real pro-Germans in Russia. Viscount French, in his recently published book, has told us that the Russian Court was rotten with pro-Germanism, and that if it had not been for treason among the Russian aristocracy, the war would have been won two years earlier. As for Lenin and Trotsky, not only were they bitter enemies of the German government, they were at this time offering to reject the Brest-Litovsk treaty, if America would support them; but America was a virtuous capitalist nation, and the entire capitalist press of America was a unit in proclaiming that our country should have no relations with men who refused to pay interest on the Tsar’s debts to J. P. Morgan & Company.

All the lying power of our Journalism was turned against the Russian Soviets; and if you have read this book without skipping, you know what that lying power is. No tale was too grotesque to be believed and spread broadcast. In the same week we would read that Trotsky had fled to Spain, that he had been put in jail by Lenin, that he had been seeking a job on the “Appeal to Reason,” Girard, Kansas! They published so many inventions that they couldn’t keep track of them. Here are two paragraphs from a single issue of one newspaper:

Nicolai Lenin, the Bolshevist Premier, is the only prominent Bolshevist left who appears to lead an austere life.—“New York Times,” February 26, 1919.

Premier Lenin, refugees say, is not affected by the food problem. His bill for fruit and vegetables in a recent month amounted to sixty thousand rubles.—“New York Times,” February 26, 1919.

In his book, “Russia in 1919,” Arthur Ransom tells how in Finland he read detailed accounts of mutiny and revolt in Petrograd, the city being bombarded by naval guns. He went into Petrograd and found the city peaceful, and everybody laughing at his tales. Returning to England he found that the tales had been forwarded to England, and published and universally believed. As I write these words, I read in my paper every other day of the fall of Petrograd. The accounts are detailed, some of them are “official,” and they continue for weeks. But finally I read that the anti-Bolshevik armies are in retreat from Petrograd!

Or take the “nationalization of women,” the most grotesque scarecrow ever constructed to terrify a highly moral people. I have shown you how the imagination of “kept” journalists runs to foul tales about sex orgies of radicals. A comic paper in Moscow published such a “skit” on Bolshevism, and the outcome is explained in the following from the “Isvestija,” the official organ of the Central Soviet Government, May 18, 1918:

Moscow Soviet decision.—The Moscow newspaper, the “Evening Life,” for printing an invented decree regarding the socialization of women, in the issue of the 3rd of May, No. 36, shall be closed for ever and fined 25,000 roubles.

And then again, in the city of Saratov, in central Russia, the Anarchists were making trouble, and some wag, to discredit the Anarchists, invented an elaborate decree, signed, “The Free Association of Anarchists of Saratov.” This decree was discovered one morning, posted in several parts of the city. An American official, Oliver M. Sayler, who was in Saratov, wrote the story in the “New Republic,” March 15, 1919. He visited the Anarchist clubs, and found them boiling with indignation—calling it a “Bolshevist plot”! Needless to say, of course, the decree had no relation to reality; the Anarchists never had any power to enforce any decree, whether in Saratov or anywhere else in Russia; several hundred Anarchists had been jailed by the Bolsheviki. But that, of course, made no difference to the editors of capitalist newspapers in America, to whom Anarchists, Bolsheviki, and Socialists were all the same; from one end of the country to the other this decree took the front page. The “Los Angeles Times” published it with a solemn assurance to its readers that the authenticity of the decree might be accepted without question. And forthwith all our capitalist clergymen rose up in their pulpits to denounce the Bolsheviki as monsters and moral perverts, and a good part of the moving picture machinery of Southern California has been set to work constructing romances around this obscene theme.

The “New Europe,” which had first published the story, made a full retraction and apology. Harold Williams, who had sent the story to England, also apologized. The American State Department denied the story officially, February 28, 1919. Jerome Davis, of the American Red Cross, denied it from first-hand knowledge in the “Independent,” March 15, 1919. But did you read these apologies and denials in American capitalist newspapers? You did not! It would not be too much to say that nine people out of ten in America today firmly believe that women have been “nationalized” in Russia, or at any rate that the Bolsheviki attempted it. In the “World Tomorrow,” for July, 1919, I come upon a letter signed Remington Rogers, Tulsa, Oklahoma. I find something very quaint and pathetic about this letter. How does it strike you?

I find that like most radical papers, you assume that your reader knows a great many things that may be trite in the discussion of parlor Socialists, but with which the average citizen is not in the least familiar. For example, in your May issue, page 141, I find the assertion that the reports purporting to show how family life had been officially demoralized in Russia are “now happily proved false.” If this is the fact, no such proof has leaked into the newspapers or other periodicals to which I subscribe, and in view of the fact that we have what purport to be authentic copies of the official edicts and decrees, I cannot believe that these reports have been proved false.

And here is a letter from Alice Stone Blackwell, which, needless to say, could only be published in some radical paper. It appeared in the “Public,” New York:

Catherine Breshkovsky “the Grandmother of the Russian Revolution,” is getting badly misquoted. She is astonished to see how different some of the press reports are from what she really said. She tells me she declared the other day that she would work twenty years longer to keep Russia from having another Tsar, and she was reported as saying that she would work twenty years longer to get the Tsar back.

She also denied that women have been “nationalized,” or “made common property,” or that the Government puts any compulsion upon them in matters of sex. She said to me: “Women have more freedom in Russia now than they ever had before.” As Madame Breshkovsky is strongly opposed to the Bolshevist régime, her denial of this particular accusation may be accepted as conclusive.

I have at several places in this book portrayed the degeneracy of “McClure’s Magazine,” since it has become an organ of privilege; also I have mentioned Newell Dwight Hillis, agent of the Clerical Camouflage, and his knavish pamphlet against the Colorado strikers. Now we see “McClure’s” hiring Hillis to vilify the Russian Soviets. After all these denials have been published, and are available to all honest men, this agent of the Clerical Camouflage contributes to “McClure’s” (June, 1919) a long article calling for the blood of the Russian people. “McClure’s” puts over the article a picture representing a hideous fiend with a torch and bomb; also this editorial statement:

Dr. Hillis’s articles have brought in a flood of letters of commendation. He writes as he preaches, fearlessly, truthfully.

I ask: Could the re-crucifixion of Christ go farther than the application of the words “fearlessly, truthfully,” to the following dastardly lie:

It is now conceded that the interior towns and cities of Russia have gone over to this nationalization of women.

This agent of the Clerical Camouflage of course portrays Russia as a chaos of murder and bloodshed; in which our whole capitalist press agrees. We now know that most of the time Petrograd and Moscow were the most orderly capitals in Europe; but our newspaper correspondents in Stockholm and Copenhagen and Odessa and Omsk, meeting in the cafés with exiled Russian noblemen, thought nothing of standing a few thousand Russians against the wall of the Kremlin and shooting them in a news despatch. For weeks they harrowed us with a projected “St. Bartholomew’s Eve Massacre,” in which all the bourgeoisie in Russia were to be destroyed. Bartholomew’s Eve came, and next morning I looked in the papers, and saw that there had been a general amnesty for political prisoners in Russia—something for which I am still petitioning the President of my own country! I saw no mention of the massacre; but this did not surprise me. I, too, have been lied about by Capitalist Journalism on the front page, and have seen the retraction buried in small print among the advertisements.

That there was much killing in Russia, I do not doubt; but whether there was more killing than under the government of the Tsar—that is the real question. Frazier Hunt tells us that in the first fourteen months of their rule, the Bolsheviki executed four thousand, five hundred persons, mostly for stealing and speculation; whereas, in twelve months after the 1905 revolution, Stolypin, minister of the Tsar, caused the execution of thirty-two thousand, seven hundred and seventy-three persons. That is about the usual proportion of the White Terror to the Red, and the proportion that would have prevailed had the Allies succeeded in their plan of getting Kolchak to Moscow.

Our papers were giving us lurid accounts of the Bolsheviki advancing in the Baltic provinces, burning and slaying as they went; but the conspiracy slipped a cog, and there crept into an Associated Press dispatch a little paragraph which gave the game away. In reading it, understand that these provinces are a part of Russia, which the Russians were taking back from the Germans:

Warsaw, Dec. 29.—The Bolsheviki are advancing rapidly toward Vilna, and are favored by mild weather. Their advance guards are said to be orderly, well clothed and well armed. They have committed no depredations except where they met with resistance.

And here is another from Berlin, Feb. 15, 1919, which gives us the real reason for the world-wide dread of the Bolsheviki. Ralph Rotheit, correspondent of the Berlin “Vossische Zeitung,” visited the Bolshevik line at Vilna.

He pictured the situation as extremely pessimistic, although so far the Bolsheviki have always been defeated by the Germans whenever they ventured skirmishing. However, Rotheit writes, the Bolsheviki do not rely so much on fighting as on corrupting opponents by never-ceasing wireless propaganda, and by sending emissaries into the districts still occupied by the Germans, and by Bolshevik literature with which the latter’s positions are flooded. Rotheit says unfortunately the effect of this propaganda at Kovno, headquarters of the German commander, was only too evident, as in many other places on German territory, as well as the Russian and Polish.

Here we have the real quarrel with the Soviets, the real reason why they must not, cannot be permitted to survive. They are propagandists; day and night they agitate, they preach and they print—and for some reason, the more loudly we proclaim that their propaganda is false, the more deeply we seem to dread its success! Since when have we lost our faith in the might of truth? Since when have we decided that error must be fought with bullet and machine-gun? Surely there must be some dark secret here, some skeleton in our family closet!

The truth is that we have seen in Russia a gigantic strike, an I. W. W. strike, if you please; and it has been successful. The workers have seized the factories, and now we call for the militia to drive them out. The very existence of capitalism depends upon their being driven out; as the phrase is, they must “be made an example of.” And so the capitalist press is called in, our great lying-machine is given the biggest job in its history. The Associated Press does for Russia precisely what Charles Edward Russell showed it doing for Calumet, what I showed it doing for Colorado. All our newspapers, big and little, do what they are accustomed to do whenever there is a strike in America—telling everything evil about the strikers and nothing good about them, clamoring for violence against them, justifying every crime committed against them in the name of “law and order.”

Recently the Soviets, pressed by starvation, have bowed so far to the will of world-capitalism as to agree to pay interest on the Tsar’s debts; they have offered to pledge some of the vast natural resources of Russia to pay for the machinery and supplies they must have. So Allied diplomacy hesitates and falters; dare the diplomats risk the terrors of Bolshevist propaganda, that mysterious black magic? Dare they allow the world to see a prospering social revolution, a government of the workers, by the workers, for the workers, which does not perish from the earth?

They decided upon a conference with the Bolsheviki, on a remote island in Turkish waters. Our newspapers printed the fact that the invitation had been extended to the Bolsheviki: but they did not print the Bolshevik acceptance. They did not print the text of the Russian foreign minister’s appeal to the French Socialist, Longuet, as to the meaning of the Allied proposals. They did not print the fact that the conference was abandoned because William Allen White, American delegate and man of honor, insisted upon full publicity.

President Wilson sent a confidential mission to Russia, composed of William C. Bullitt and Lincoln Steffens. They came back and reported that there was order in Russia; that the Russian people were satisfied with the Soviet régime; that the “nationalization of women” in Russia was an absurd yarn; that the cause of the starvation and misery in Russia was the allied blockade; and that Lenin wanted peace, and was willing to do almost anything to get peace. President Wilson, for reasons presumably known to him, turned down the advice of this commission. Steffens made a public statement as to his position, which was reported in the “London Daily Herald,” but in no American newspaper or magazine. Bullitt resigned from the Peace Commission, and addressed to President Wilson a brief and dignified letter, explaining his reasons: which letter was published in the “New York Nation,” but in no capitalist newspaper in America, so far as I could find out.

Then Bullitt was summoned before the Senate committee, and the Associated Press sent out a brief and inadequate report of his testimony. Next day he submitted the confidential report about Russia which he had delivered to President Wilson. This was the most important information about Russia yet available to the American people; and the “Los Angeles Times,” from which I get my first news of the world, gave not a line of this report! More than that, in order to avoid having to mention the report, the “Times” cut out that day every word of its news about the struggle over the peace treaty in the Senate! Instead, it gave two columns, of which I quote the headlines: