That was on Sunday morning. On Monday morning again, the “Times” had not a word about Bullitt, and not a word about the agitation over the peace treaty in Washington, the most important news of the day; the reason being simply that Washington was talking about the Bullitt report, and about nothing else! But on Tuesday, the British government issued a denial of some of Bullitt’s statements—one of those evasive denials whereby the gigantic trading corporation tells lies without quite telling them; so once more the “Los Angeles Times” was willing to mention William C. Bullitt!

I call up the “Los Angeles Examiner,” to ask if the Associated Press handled the Bullitt report. The “Los Angeles Examiner,” you understand, gets the Associated Press service—is one of the “forty-one vote” newspapers. Both the city editor and the telegraph editor assure me that the Associated Press did not send the “Examiner” a word of it—the most important news about Russia yet made available to the American people! Says the “Nation”:

No newspaper has printed Mr. Bullitt’s testimony in full or even in generous part; there were only three press representatives present when he testified, and he has had the invariable experience of having his testimony misquoted and altered, and interviews attributed to him which he never gave.

The Social Revolution came in Hungary. It came in an orderly and sensible way, without terror, without bloodshed; and how was it treated by Capitalist Journalism? It was treated just as the Russian Soviets had been treated—as an outcast and outlaw. All the power of World Capitalism was turned against the Hungarian Communist government. Poland, Roumania, the Ukraine, all made war upon it, with French officers and British tanks and American money; and at the same time the great lying-machine was put to work. The news agencies brought the report that Bela Kun had fled to the Argentine; and two days later that he was about to be overthrown in Budapesth! All the power of American Journalism was set to keeping the workers from realizing that a nation of fifteen or twenty million people had overthrown the profit system, and was making a success of the Co-operative Commonwealth.

I have before me some letters from a correspondent in Budapesth, representing one of the most influential and supposed-to-be-respectable of the great New York newspapers. This correspondent explains that she sends her articles with the instructions that they shall be published as written or not at all—and they are not published. “One of my confrères here had an article twisted and turned about so badly that it meant exactly the opposite of what he knew and wrote to be true.” And there is a group of correspondents in Budapesth, all having the same experiences, it appears:

Their economic sentences are cut out of articles and their radical articles are paid for but never printed. There isn’t a day passes that we don’t have an indignation meeting. One man wrote a long article for one of the prominent magazines two months ago alluding to the new order. He received a fat check with the letter announcing that the article could not be used; they wished him to write more moderately. Since my trip to Hungary and my conviction that Budapesth is the only honest place in Europe outside Russia, I am not any longer willing to write “moderately.”

Only once before in modern history was there a crime like this—when the kings and emperors of Europe went to war to wipe out the French revolution, which their hired propagandists described in precisely the same terms as we now see applied to the Bolsheviki. Then it was political revolution, now it is social revolution; but the program is the same—the earth is to be soaked with the blood of revolutionists, their new ideal is to be corrupted in the military campaign necessary to its defense, and the world is to be made safe for another Holy Alliance—this time of the profit-system, of Industrial Exploitation. It is for the people, who pay for all privilege and maintain all parasites, to decide whether history shall repeat itself to the full; whether the Holy Alliance of World Capitalism is to crush for another century the hopes of the working masses of the world.

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:

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.”

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.