Chapter LVI: The Press and Labor

I have told many stories of newspaper lies about myself, and perhaps you thought that was just one person who was wronged, and it didn’t make much difference; but when it comes to lying about the labor movement, thousands and even millions of people are wronged, and that surely does make a difference. When newspapers lie about a strike, they lie about every one of the strikers, and every one of these strikers and their wives and children and friends know it. When they see deliberate and long-continued campaigns to render them odious to the public, and to deprive them of their just rights, not merely as workers, but as citizens, a blaze of impotent fury is kindled in their hearts. And year by year our newspapers go on storing up these volcanic fires of hate-against the day when labor will no longer be impotent!

Imagine, if you can, the feelings of a workingman on strike who picks up a copy of the “Wall Street Journal” and reads:

We have a flabby public opinion which would wring its hands in anguish
if we took the labor leader by the scruff of his neck, backed him up
against a wall, and filled him with lead. Countries which consider
themselves every bit as civilized as we do not hesitate about such
matters for a moment.

Whenever it comes to a “show-down” between labor and capital, the press is openly or secretly for capital—and this no matter how “liberal” this press may pretend to be. Says Professor Ross:

During labor disputes the facts are usually distorted to the injury of
labor. In one case (Chicago), strikers held a meeting on a vacant lot
enclosed by a newly-erected billboard. Forthwith appeared, in a yellow
journal professing warm friendship for labor, a front-page cut of the
billboard and a lurid story of how the strikers had built a “stockade”
behind which they intended to bid defiance to the blue-coats. It is
not surprising that when the van bringing these lying sheets appeared
in their quarter of the city, the libeled men overturned it.

During the struggle of carriage-drivers for a six-day week, certain
great dailies lent themselves to a concerted effort of the liverymen
to win public sympathy by making it appear that the strikers were
interfering with funerals. One paper falsely stated that a strong
force of police was being held in reserve in case of “riots,” and that
policemen would ride beside the non-union drivers of hearses. Another,
under the misleading headline, “Two Funerals Stopped by Striking
Cabmen,” described harmless colloquies between hearse-drivers and
pickets. This was followed up by a solemn editorial, “May a Man Go to
His Long Rest in Peace?”—although, as a matter of fact, the strikers
had no intention of interfering with funerals....

That was in Chicago, ten years ago. And now, as I write, the employes of the packing-houses, my old friends of “The Jungle,” are on strike again, and the Chicago newspapers are at their usual game of deliberate lying: “Violence is Expected,” “Situation is Critical,” and so on. It happens that an honest man, Alfred W. McCann, is on the scene. He writes:

I say it isn’t true. To the shame of the press, no foundation can be
discovered for the wild stories now filling their columns, spreading
public anxiety and inciting labor to outbursts of indignation against
what is called “the deliberate misrepresentation of the press.”

The packers advertise heavily in Chicago newspapers; and so also do the Chicago department-stores. Says Prof. Ross:

In the same city (Chicago), during a strike of the elevator men in the
large stores, the business agent of the elevator-starters’ union was
beaten to death, in an alley behind a certain emporium, by a
“strong-arm” man hired by that firm. The story, supported by
affidavits, was given by a responsible lawyer to three newspaper men,
each of whom accepted it as true and promised to print it. The account
never appeared.

Try, for a moment, to put yourself in the position of a girl-slave of one of these big department-stores. You resist the flirtatious advances of the floor-walker, and continue to eat your twenty-cent dinners; but after a few years you grow desperate, and in the face of the heaviest pressure you organize and declare a strike for better pay. How much chance do you stand for fair play from the newspapers? Why, they won’t even print the names of the stores against which you are striking! Says Max Sherover:

While addressing a street meeting, held under the auspices of the
Retail Clerks’ Union, in front of Stern Brothers’ department-store,
Miss Elizabeth Dutcher was arrested at the instigation of one of the
store-managers. Miss Dutcher is highly prominent in social and labor
circles, and the papers did not dare to be entirely silent about the
arrest. Every paper in New York, except one—and that one does not
carry department-store advertising—spoke of a meeting at the doors of
a “large retail establishment.” They also referred to an earlier
incident as a disturbance at the doors of a “Sixth Avenue Store,” not
daring to mention the name, Gimbel’s.

Or again, Prof. Ross:

In New York the salesgirls in the big shops had to sign an exceedingly
mean and oppressive contract, which, if generally known, would have
made the firms odious to the public. A prominent social worker brought
these contracts, and evidence as to the bad conditions that had become
established under them, to every newspaper in the city. Not one would
print a line on the subject.

And not only do they exclude the news; they keep watch over the general ideas which go into their columns, to make sure there is nothing to injure the sensibilities of department-stores, or to favor the girl-slaves of department-stores. Would you think I was absurd if I were to declare that there is a whole set of philosophical ideas which the newspapers forbid you to know about, because the department-stores ordain? Yes, even so! You must believe in free will, you must not believe in economic determinism! You must think that prostitution is a sexual phenomenon; you must not learn that prostitution is an economic phenomenon. Anybody who advocates the heretical, anti-department-store doctrine that white-slavery is caused by low wages will be suppressed, and if necessary will be slandered as an immoral person. You remember the “New York World,” its solemn editorial about twenty-cent dinners? Some years ago the “World” was under contract to publish every week a short story by O. Henry. They received the manuscript of what posterity has come to recognize as O. Henry’s masterpiece, “The Unfinished Story”; they refused to publish this “Unfinished Story,” because it was injurious to department-stores!

Or consider what happened when the Illinois Vice Commission made an investigation of the causes of prostitution, and submitted one of the best reports on this subject ever written. The report was highly sensational, also it was highly important; it was news in every possible sense of the word. But it attributed prostitution to low wages, and therefore only one Chicago newspaper gave an adequate account of this report!

You saw the “Boston Herald” and “Journal,” and also the “Boston Post,” forbidding you to know that President Wilson was urging you not to spend money on luxuries. In the same way, when there is a crisis of unemployment, the department-stores and other advertisers command that falsehoods shall be told you. If you know that business is bad, you may be cautious and save your money; whereas the department-stores want you to spend your money, and the kept press wants its share of this money for advertisements. Says Prof. Ross:

The alacrity with which many dailies serve as mouth-pieces of the
financial powers came out very clearly during the recent industrial
depression. The owner of one leading newspaper called his reporters
together and said in effect, “Boys, the first of you who turns in a
story of a lay-off or a shut-down, gets the sack.” Early in the
depression the newspapers teemed with glowing accounts of the
resumption of steel-mills and the revival of business, all baseless.
After harvest-time they began to cheep “Prosperity,” “Bumper Crops,”
“Farmers Buying Automobiles.” In cities where banks and employers
offered clearing-house certificates instead of cash, the press usually
printed fairy tales of the enthusiasm with which these makeshifts were
taken by depositors and workingmen. The numbers and sufferings of the
unemployed were ruthlessly concealed from the reading public. A mass
meeting of the men out of work was represented as “anarchistic” or
“instigated by the Socialists for political effect.” In one daily
appeared a dispatch under the heading “Five Thousand Jobs Offered;
Only Ten Apply.” It stated that the Commissioner of Public Works of
Detroit, misled by reports of dire distress, set afoot a public work
which called for five thousand men. Only ten men applied for work, and
all these expected to be bosses. Correspondence with the official
establishes the fact that the number of jobs offered was five hundred,
and that three thousand men applied for them.

That was twelve years ago, in the Middle West. Six years ago we had another unemployment crisis, and I watched the newspapers handling it in New York. You might have thought they would not have been able to fool _me_; but they did! A boy out of this unemployed army, Frank Tanenbaum by name, led a number of starving men to the Catholic Church of St. Alphonsus to request shelter on a winter’s night. I read several newspapers, in the hope of getting the truth from one of them; on this occasion all the papers agreed that the unemployed men and their leader abused and threatened the priest, and were noisy and blasphemous in their behavior. I was heartsick about it. Oh, what a pity! If only those poor devils had had the sense to go to the churches in a quiet and respectful way, their position would have been impregnable. Christian churches would not have dared to turn out starving men on a winter’s night!

But Christian churches did! And the capitalist press backed them up! The leader, Frank Tanenbaum, was arrested, and he called as witnesses the very newspaper men who had written the stories of his “raid.” These men had been willing to lie in what they wrote—that was part of the newspaper game; but they were unwilling to lie under oath—that was _not_ part of the game! So they testified that these unemployed men had been entirely peaceful in their conduct, that Tanenbaum had addressed the priest with politeness and respect, and that the crowd had left the church when told that they must do so!

Some years ago there was a strike of the hotel-workers in New York, an I. W. W. strike—and of course there is nothing with which the newspapers deal more freely than the I. W. W. They quoted Joe Ettor as having advised the strikers to put poison in the soup which they served to hotel patrons; also as having insulted the American flag. Ettor denied vigorously having made any such statements, but of course his denial went for nothing. Some of us who knew Ettor thought that the public ought to get a little of the truth about conditions under which these hotel-workers were forced to live—conditions menacing not only to themselves, but to the public they served. Therefore the Intercollegiate Socialist Society called a meeting in Carnegie Hall to hear the I. W. W. leaders. A fiery little New York politician who held the office of sheriff saw an opportunity to leap into the limelight. He would attend that meeting with a large force of deputies, and protect the American flag from insult! He brought some thirty deputies, to whom the county paid three dollars each; and we provided them with seats on the platform, and all the orators made speeches to them, and the young ladies who passed the collection-plates took away a part of their three dollars. And next morning the newspapers reported that the gallant sheriff had protected the American flag and tamed the seditious fury of the I. W. W.!

You remember, perhaps, my story of the Paterson silk-strikers, and how the “New York Times” quoted me as telling them that they “had the police at their mercy.” Here is another glimpse of this strike, through the eyes of Max Sherover:

At the I. W. W. pageant held about two years ago at Madison Square
Garden, New York, for the benefit of the Paterson, N. J.
silk-strikers, the writer was an eye-witness to the following scene: A
reporter, whose identity we were unable to learn, in the basement of
the Garden hurriedly printed the following words on an improvised
banner, “No God and No Master, I. W. W.” One of the illiterate
strikers was asked to hold the banner aloft and pose while a newspaper
photographer was taking a flashlight photo.

This Paterson pageant was a result of the effort of a few literary men and women in New York, who saw the shameless lying of the press and the shameless violation of law by the authorities in Paterson. A group of people, including Ernest Poole, Hutchins Hapgood, Leroy Scott, John Reed, Thompson Buchanan, Margaret Sanger, and myself worked for weeks, giving all our time and energy and a great deal of money, and brought about a thousand strikers to New York City to rehearse the story of their sufferings before an audience in Madison Square Garden. This was so sensational that the newspapers could not suppress it; therefore what they did was to ridicule and betray it. They always make out that labor-movements are rolling in wealth, and that “agitators” are making fortunes. In this case they said that we were planning to finance the strike by this pageant. Every newspaper man knew this was absurd, for they knew the seating capacity of the Garden and could figure the possible gross receipts. The enterprise suffered a deficit of one or two thousand dollars; so of course the poor, starving strikers, who had read in the newspapers that they were to be “financed,” were bitterly disappointed. The “New York Times” thus had a chance for a story to the effect that the strikers were accusing us of having robbed them; and this while we were engaged in making up the deficit out of our own pockets!

Or take the Lawrence strike. I have told the story of how conspirators of the great Woolen Trust planted dynamite in the homes of strike-breakers as a “frame-up” to discredit the strikers. The man who was convicted of this was a school commissioner and a prominent Catholic, a close friend of the mill-owners. When this dynamite was found, the Associated Press sent the story fully. When the plot was exposed, it sent almost nothing. These statements were made publicly at a conference at the University of Wisconsin by A. M. Simons, and never challenged by the Associated Press. And at this same conference it was stated by George French that the department-stores served notice upon all the Boston newspapers that if they featured this strike they would get no more Sunday advertising!

Or take the present struggle of the railroad brotherhoods for a living wage. The “Saturday Evening Post” published a series of articles by Edward Hungerford, full of gross falsehoods regarding the wages of railroad workers and managers under the Federal administration. These, mind you, were flat misstatements of facts officially recorded and available to any one. The brotherhoods asked a certain United States railroad administration official to prepare from official records a statement concerning these misrepresentations. This was formally submitted to the “Saturday Evening Post,” and was absolutely ignored.

Or take the case of Tom Mooney. The capitalist newspapers of San Francisco tried Tom Mooney, with the help of a million dollar corruption fund, raised by the Merchants and Manufacturers Association of the city. They found him guilty, but the prosecuting authorities didn’t have enough evidence to make good the verdict in court, so they manufactured the evidence. Mooney was a Socialist and a well-known labor organizer, so the case was taken up by the Socialists and the unions of the country, and became the great labor issue of the time—all without one word getting into the capitalist newspapers of the East! There were two or three million copy “protest editions” of the “Appeal to Reason” issued—and still not a word about it in the capitalist newspapers outside of California! Finally the Anarchists in Petrograd took up the matter; they attacked the American embassy, and the news was cabled back to New York that the attack was on account of a certain “Tom Muni.” The newspapers of New York didn’t know anything about the case, and couldn’t find out about it in time; they had to publish the name as it came over the cables—thus laying bare their shame to the whole world! Could any writer of farce-comedy have invented a greater satire upon New York Journalism than the fact that it had to get its San Francisco labor-news misspelled from Petrograd?