Chapter LVII: The Associated Press and Labor

Great strikes are determined by public opinion, and public opinion is always against strikers who are violent. Therefore, in great strikes, all the efforts of the employers are devoted to making it appear that the strikers are violent. The greatest single agency in America for making it appear that strikers are violent is the Associated Press. How does this agency perform its function?

In the first place, by the wholesale method of elimination. There are some violent strikers, needless to say, and Capitalist Journalism follows this simple and elemental rule—if strikers are violent, they get on the wires, while if strikers are not violent, they stay off the wires; by which simple device it is brought about that nine-tenths of the telegraphic news you read about strikes is news of violence, and so in your brain-channels is irrevocably graven the idea-association:

Strikes—violence! Violence—strikes!

What about the millions of patient strikers who obey the law, who wait, day after day, month after month, starving, seeing their wives fading, their little ones turning white and thin—and still restrain themselves, obeying the laws of their masters? What about the strike-leaders who plead day in and day out—I have heard them a hundred times—“No violence! No violence!”—what about them? Why, nothing; just nothing! The Associated Press will let a big strike continue for months and never mention it—unless there is violence! For example, the great coal-strike in West Virginia. It happens, through a set of circumstances to be explained in the next chapter, that I have before me the sworn complete file of all the dispatches which the Associated Press sent out during the sixteen months of this strike. The strike began April 1, 1912. The first dispatch sent by the Associated Press was on April 6; a very brief dispatch, telling of threats of violence. The second dispatch was on June 1; this also very brief, to the effect that “serious rioting is imminent.” The third dispatch was on July 23; also brief, telling of rioting, and of state troops sent in. Thus it appears that during one hundred and thirteen days of a great strike the Associated Press considered it necessary to send only two brief items—and these containing not one line about the causes of the strike, not one line about the demands of the miners, not one line about the economic significance of a ferociously bitter labor struggle! I have before me the affidavit of Thomas Cairns, president of the United Mine Workers’ West Virginia district, stating that during these sixteen months, which brought West Virginia to a state of civil war, not once did the correspondent of the Associated Press come to him for information about the strike!

And now, in 1919, there is more trouble in this district, and I pick up my morning paper and read that three thousand miners of Cabin Creek have taken up arms and are marching to battle against machine-guns. The strike has been going on for weeks, says the report; but this is the first hint I have heard of it—I who read four Associated Press newspapers, the “Los Angeles Times” and “Examiner,” and the “New York Times” and “World”!

The first point to be got clear is that in cases of big strikes the Associated Press is getting its news through its local newspaper member. I have shown that in Los Angeles it is content to co-operate with the unspeakable “Times.” In San Diego it works with the “Union,” personal organ of John D. Spreckles, the “sugar-king”; and a few years ago, when a murderous mob of bankers, lawyers and merchants was engaged in shooting, clubbing, tarring and feathering, throwing into prison, and there torturing, drugging, and starving the radicals of that city, the “San Diego Union” paid editorial tribute to the fact that the Associated Press was handling this situation to the satisfaction of the murderous mob of bankers, lawyers and merchants. The “San Diego Union,” which had done most of the inciting of this mob, stated editorially:

Great credit is due the Associated Press for the manner in which it
has handled the news end of this matter.

In city after city, you will find the Associated Press thus tied up with the worst reactionary influences. In Louisville, for example, it co-operates with the “Courier-Journal,” whose serio-comic story I have told in detail. In St. Paul, Minnesota, we saw the Associated Press misquoting Senator La Follette in a manner calculated to ruin him. It sought at first to put the blame upon its “member paper,” the “St. Paul Pioneer Press.” You recall the charges made against this paper by Walter W. Liggett, quoted on page 268. Note that the Associated Press did not cease taking its news through a paper which had failed to resent such grave charges as these.

I cannot find that the “A. P.” ever did raise this issue with one of its member-papers. An interesting light is thrown on this very important subject by a controversy between the “Sacramento Bee” and the “San Francisco Star.” The “Bee” printed a long defense of the Associated Press, and the “Star” discussed it as follows:

Another damaging admission is that the Associated Press doesn’t care a
picayune what manner of pirates buy a newspaper that has an Associated
Press franchise. It mentions the case of the “San Francisco Globe,”
which bought the special privilege news service of the “Post” when it
bought the name of that paper. The franchise went with the name to a
band of industrial pirates who wanted a special privilege news service
to supplement their special privilege traction service in this city.

The “San Francisco Star” is a weekly, and so its editor does not need to be afraid of the Associated Press. I have a letter written by this editor, James H. Barry, to Prof. Ross of the University of Wisconsin:

You wish to know my “confidential opinion as to the honesty of the
Associated Press.” My opinion, _not_ confidential, is that it is the
damndest, meanest monopoly on the face of the earth—the wet-nurse for
all other monopolies. It lies by day, it lies by night, and it lies
for the very lust of lying. Its news-gatherers, I sincerely believe,
only obey orders.

In great labor centers, from which strike-news comes, you find this situation: that even if the Associated Press wished to deal with a fair newspaper, there is no fair newspaper to deal with. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, in Paterson, New Jersey, in Trinidad, Colorado, in Bisbee, Arizona, the newspapers are owned by the local industrial magnates and their financial and political henchmen. In Montana the Anaconda Mining Company, a Rockefeller concern, owns or controls practically every newspaper in the state; so of course the Associated Press sends no fair labor news from Montana. I asked Ex-Governor Hunt of Arizona how the Associated Press had treated him while he was giving the miners a square deal during the big copper strike. He answered: “They were so unfair that I quit dealing with them at all.” I said: “What paper in your state capital do they work with?” He answered: “There are only two—one owned by a millionaire land-speculator, the other owned by the ‘Ray’!” (The “Ray” is a copper company, one of the most powerful and most corrupt.) Said Ex-Governor Hunt: “I proposed a law in Arizona requiring that papers should carry the line: ‘This paper owned by the “Ray,” or the “Copper Queen,” or whatever the case might be.’” No wonder this ex-governor is an “ex”!

He comes to see me, and brings a clipping from the “Messenger,” an independent weekly of his state capital. It appears that the wealthy bandits of the copper companies, who two years ago seized over a thousand miners and deported them from their homes, are now being tried for their crime. Says the “Messenger”:

Associated Press reports from Bisbee and Douglas relative to the
preliminary trial of alleged kidnappers are enough to condemn that
service forever. It was bad enough to withhold service on July 12,
1917, the day of deportation, but the present stuff—

And then the “Messenger” goes on to explain in detail what is happening; the reporters of the local, copper-owned dailies of Bisbee and Douglas are acting as Associated Press correspondents, and are sending out “doctored stuff” to the country. Three times during one week of the trial at Douglas the “Bisbee Review” has had to apologize and correct statements attributed to a woman witness; these errors, “telegraphed broadcast” by the Associated Press, have been corrected “only by local mention”!

And here is the Central Trades Council of Tucson adopting a resolution, denouncing the “brazen one-sidedness” of the Associated Press reports of the trial:

Resolved, That to date we have not seen a single article that did not
feature some silly remark made by some foreigner or illiterate witness
for the state, and the vital news parts omitted.

In the case of the Colorado coal-strike, I have shown you what the Associated Press did in New York and in Denver. What was it doing meantime in the actual strike-field? In Walsenburg the publisher was “Jeff” Farr, whiskey-magnate, coal company sheriff and organizer of assassination, popularly known as the “King of Huerfano County.” In Trinidad there were two dailies owned by the chief attorney of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, whose son took command of one of the gunmen armies, and seized a United States mail-train to transport them. The “A. P.” day man was the editor of the evening paper; the “A. P.” night man was the telegraph-editor of the morning paper! Max Eastman tells me of interviewing one of them—introducing himself as a Chautauqua lecturer, desirous of getting the truth about the strike. The editor was in a mood of frankness, and said:

There’s no use coming to me for the truth. A man in my position
naturally gets only one side, the operators’ side.

And, of course, he sent out that side. During the latter part of the strike the “Rocky Mountain News” of Denver sent its own correspondent to the field, and one of the editors told me of a conversation with the Associated Press representative in Denver. Said the latter, “Why do you keep a man down there?” Said the editor, “Because you people refuse to send me the news.” And it was exactly the same during a strike in another part of the state, the “Northern field,” where several score labor leaders were thrown into jail, but when it came to trial were nearly all acquitted. George Creel writes: “The Associated Press furnished the newspapers with accounts of these cases, but lost interest when the verdicts were returned.”

As I write, there is a great steel strike, and from the “Panhandle” of West Virginia comes the following special dispatch to the “New York Call”:

The capitalist press representatives have so falsely reported the
existing strike conditions that steel strike leaders here now refuse
to make any statements at all to them. Several times, after having
promised to write, without alterations, the reports which the strike
leaders had given, the Associated Press representatives deliberately
reversed the statements.

So much for steel. And now hear what Charles Edward Russell has to say (Pearson’s for April, 1914) concerning the conduct of the Associated Press in the Calumet copper-strike. In a letter to me he writes:

I may say that the Associated Press made a loud squeal on the story
and blacklisted me for some years afterward, so you will see that the
subject is one on which they are sensitive.

I quote from the article, “The Associated Press and Calumet”:

Some of the richest copper deposits in the world are in the Upper
Peninsula of Michigan, most of them purporting to be owned or
controlled by a great corporation called the Calumet and Hecla. This
is a mining company that is also the holding concern for seventeen
other mining companies, owns a railroad or two, some smelting works,
some other profit-making devices and an organized system of politics
the equal of any.

It is one of the richest and most profitable enterprises in the world.
Except for a few railroads like those of Mr. Hill, the Calumet and
Hecla has made more money on a smaller investment than any other
corporation that ever existed. In the sixteen years ending with 1912
the smallest annual dividend has been 80 per cent, and in other years
it has been as much as 400 per cent.

As these dividends were declared upon a capital stock less than half
of which was ever paid for, a nominal dividend of 400 per cent was an
actual dividend of 800 per cent.

On every dollar ever invested in this company more than one hundred
dollars have been paid in dividends, while millions of dollars of
other profits have been diverted to the purchase of additional
profit-making ventures. With a par value of $25.00 on which only
$12.00 was paid in, the shares have now a value of $540.00 each.

This gigantic cornucopia is owned by the Shaws, Agassizs and Higginsons, leading families of Boston; and besides their dividends, they pay themselves enormous salaries as officers and directors of Calumet and Hecla, and of the seventeen subsidiary companies. Says Russell:

The Calumet and Hecla barony comprises one hundred and seventeen
miles. There is every reason to believe that it occupies and has
occupied this land without rightful title, and all the vast wealth it
has taken therefrom really belongs to the people of the United States.

There is also good reason to believe that it has consistently violated
its charter, and is now engaged in doing so every day and every hour
of every day: a fact that will not in the least astonish you when you
come to learn of some of its other activities, but that adds a rarely
piquant taste to the pious exclamations of its attorneys on the
subject of law-breaking.

And now, what of the men who worked for these copper barons? They were ill-paid and ill-treated, badly housed, worked for long hours at peril of life and limb; they lived in a community absolutely dominated by their masters; there was no other industry or source of wealth, and the politicians and the courts, the newspapers and the churches—everything was owned by “Copper.” It is the old, sickening story of the overthrow of American institutions, the subjection of political democracy to industrial autocracy.

The copper miners of the “Upper Peninsula” went on strike. They stayed on strike for many months, and during that time they were slugged and beaten up by imported gunmen, their offices raided, their leaders shot or jailed. During this entire affair the Associated Press sent out to the country a string of subtle and knavish falsehoods, of which Charles Edward Russell gives seven pages, printing them in parallel columns, first the falsehood, and then the result of careful investigations, backed by numerous affidavits. (I might add that the Congressional investigation vindicated these affidavits in every detail.)

The parallel columns which Russell gives would fill about twenty pages of this book. I give four samples, and the reader may take my word that these samples are typical of the rest:

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS THE FACTS

(From Washington Post.) Her name was Margaret Fazekes. She was not the daughter of a striker, Calumet, Mich., Sept. 1.—The copper and had no connection with the strike situation took a serious strike. There was no clash with any aspect today as a result of the picket. A Labor Day procession was fatal shooting of Margaret Faxakas, being held at Kearsarge. It had aged 15, daughter of a striker, at nothing to do with the strike. A the North Kearsarge mine, when a band of armed guards without excuse picket of strikers and women or occasion attacked the procession clashed with deputy sheriffs and broke it up, firing about 100 guarding a mine. shots from their revolvers. This girl was not in the procession. She was walking along the sidewalk, and a bullet from a gunman’s revolver pierced her skull.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS THE AFFIDAVITS

Calumet, Mich., October 22, 1913. For instance, Victor Ozonick swears that on July 31st he was walking To the Associated Press, Chicago, quietly along the public road when Ill. he was arrested, taken to Houghton and thrust into jail. After a time As a measure of precaution against he was taken into the sheriff’s possible disorder, the troops have office and searched. A deputy kept on the move bodies of strikers sheriff struck him in the face with who collect while men are going to his clenched fist and then kicked work in the morning, but this is him. He was then asked if he was a not construed as interference with member of the miners’ union. When any of the rights of the strikers. he said “yes” he was dragged back to a cell and locked up for twenty-four hours. After that he was released. No warrant was issued for his arrest, no charge was made against him, no proceedings of any kind were had.

There are sheafs of such affidavits relating the manner in which the
armed guards proceeded to obey the orders to “start something.” The
results of their efforts to obey their orders was a reign of terror
throughout the strike zone. Men, women and children were shot at,
beaten, ridden down by armed guards, or pursued along the highways. At
the road intersections shacks were erected, from the windows of which
the guards could command every house in a village, and the inmates
could not stir out of their dwellings except under the watchful eyes
of the gunmen and the muzzles of rifles.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS THE AFFIDAVITS

(From Chicago Record-Herald.) A mob composed chiefly of the gentlemen of the Citizens’ Alliance Calumet, Mich., Dec. 11.—Guerrilla gathered in Houghton and went by warfare, which raged in the South special train to South Range. There Range district of the copper the mob attacked the hall of the miners’ strike zone, was ended South Range branch of the Western today when a force of deputy Federation of Miners, broke down sheriffs invaded several towns the door, smashed all the there and made 39 arrests. The only furniture, seized all the books, person injured was Timothy papers and records, and destroyed Driscoll, a deputy sheriff, who was several thousand relief coupons shot and seriously wounded when he that had been prepared for the and other officers attempted to miners’ families. Henry Koski, the force an entrance into a union secretary of the branch, lived over hall. the hall. When the work of destruction had been completed the The trouble this morning centered mob rushed upstairs and began with around the hall of the Western rifles to beat down the door to Federation of Miners in the town of Koski’s rooms. He warned the South Range. Here Driscoll was shot rioters that if they did not desist and several of the arrests made. he would fire. They continued to Henry Oski, a striker, was batter the door, whereupon he fired specifically charged with wounding two shots, one of which passed the officer, and he is said to have through the belly of one of the implicated by his confession two rioters. other members of the union.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS THE FACTS

(From the Washington Post.) A mob broke into the room in Scott’s Hotel, Hancock, occupied by Calumet, Michigan, Dec. 26.—Charles Mr. Moyer and Charles Tanner, H. Moyer, president of the Western general auditor of the Western Federation of Miners, was put on a Federation of Miners, seized them train and sent out of the copper both, beat and kicked them, shot strike district tonight. The Moyer in the back and dragged them, deportation was the direct result both wounded, from the hotel into of a refusal of families stricken the street. by the Christmas Eve disaster here to accept relief from a committee, The two prisoners were held so that the majority of whose members they could not defend nor protect belonged to the Citizens’ Alliance, themselves, and in this position an organization combatting the five were dragged through the streets months’ strike of the federation. and across the bridge to Houghton, being incessantly kicked and At the local federation beaten. Mr. Moyer was bleeding and headquarters Moyer’s departure was weak from a revolver shot, and Mr. called “a kidnapping by the Tanner was bleeding from a wound Citizens’ Alliance.” The action was just below his right eye. said to have caused no great surprise, as it was said that In this condition they were placed threats of such a possibility had upon a train and under armed guard been received two weeks ago. taken out of the state, being threatened with lynching if they The relief committee, which had should return. collected $25,000, found itself unable to give away one cent when Nobody has been indicted nor it started today to deliver the arrested for these assaults, fund. although the persons that committed them are perfectly well known in Every bereaved household that was Hancock. approached told the men and women in charge of the distribution that But Mr. Moyer has been indicted for they had been promised adequate aid conspiracy. by the Western Federation of Miners, and nowhere was there any assistance wanted.

It might be worth while to summarize Russell’s narrative of the outcome of this last matter. The leader of the mob was an eminent Bostonian, James MacNaughton, vice-president and general manager of “Calumet and Hecla.” When he was accused, the Associated Press took the trouble to send out a dispatch explaining that he could not possibly have been the man, because of an elaborate and complicated alibi—which alibi was later proven to prove nothing. Mr. MacNaughton was never prosecuted in this matter; nor was the Associated Press prosecuted—except by Charles Edward Russell. We may believe the statement in Russell’s letter, that “the Associated Press made a loud squeal on the story!” I would ask: Why did they not prosecute Russell? Why is it that the general manager of the Associated Press makes nothing but a “loud squeal”? Why does he content himself with easy victories before church forums and chambers of commerce banquets? Why does he not come into court and vindicate his honor in an open contest before a jury?