Chapter LXVI: A Frame-Up That Fell Down

In concluding this, the most important and most dangerous book I have ever written, I have a personal word to leave with the reader. I have here attacked the most powerful interests in America, and it seems to me hardly conceivable that they will permit the attack to go out to the world, to be circulated among the general public, without some attempt at interference.

What will they do? I cannot say. There are things on every page of this book which are libelous unless they are true. If I am brought into court and required to prove them, I may be facing a judge who has been appointed by the interests I have exposed, a jury which has been selected by the interests I have exposed, a prosecuting attorney who is looking to these interests for his campaign-funds and his publicity at the next election. The trial will be conducted on this simple basis—that everything favorable to me is kept from the public, and everything that can be made to seem unfavorable to me is sent by telegraph and cable all over the world.

I would not mind losing what little property I own in the world; I would not mind going to jail for this book. There are only two things I would mind—first, having the book barred from circulation, and second, being discredited in the eyes of those I seek to influence in favor of Social Justice. So in this, the last word I may be able to get to you on the subject, I wish to warn you of one crucial fact, which is this:

Our police and prosecuting authorities, our political machines and Big Business interests, are many of them practiced in the art of producing in court whatever testimony may be required in an emergency. There are few traction interests or other public service corporations in America which do not regularly employ perjured witnesses in case of need; and those which have given up the custom have done so merely because they have got the courts and the jury system so completely in their hands that they no longer care what evidence is introduced against them. We have seen Tom Mooney held in jail for three years, entirely upon the basis of perjured testimony. Even the trial judge has written that he is satisfied that Tom Mooney is innocent—but still Tom Mooney stays in jail!

I am doing what I can to get this book to the people. I intend to go on doing what I can to that end. Meantime I say to you, my readers, what I said to my wife when I went out to Colorado on behalf of the coal-strikers: “Whatever you read about me, don’t worry. If there is any scandal, pay no attention to it, for that is the way they fight in Denver.”

That is the way Big Business fights all over America.

The above was written in August. In November I am reading the page proofs of the book, and “Big Business” steps forward to prove me a prophet. A plot is laid against me, so wanton and so utterly without basis of truth that no less than an assassin could have planned it. I escaped—but by a margin so narrow that it is unpleasant to think about it. Literally by a minute or two of time I missed having printed on the front page of every big newspaper in America convincing evidence that I am a secret German conspirator, contriving underhand plots for the undermining of my country! My wife remarks: “I have been watching the radical movement for seven or eight years, and I have heard much about ‘frame-ups.’ I always thought it was foolish talk, cheap melodrama; but now I know that the ‘frame-up’ is a real thing, and it has changed my whole view of the class struggle.”

I have mentioned on page 399 how I made a speech before the City Club of Los Angeles, exposing the dishonesty of the “Los Angeles Times,” whereupon the “Times” opened up a furious attack upon me, demanding that I should be put in jail. I have quoted one sample of its ravings. Every day or so for a week it printed similar abuse, and it continues the attack, both editorially and in its news columns. I have stated publicly in the “Appeal to Reason” that I am collecting evidence against the “Times,” and preparing a book exposing it; so the “Times” proclaims me as “the trumpet of Bolshevism,” and will be satisfied with nothing short of a life sentence for me.

There is in Los Angeles a returned soldiers’ paper, the “Dugout.” The editor, Sydney R. Flowers, is an American citizen who was in South Africa at the outbreak of the war, and was so anxious to fight the Kaiser that he left his wife and baby and enlisted. Invalided to England, he tried again to enlist, and finally enlisted in Canada, and served for three years in Belgium and France. He was twice wounded and once gassed, and has only one lung as a result. Returning to his home in Los Angeles with his wife and child, he found the war veterans’ organization being courted as a strike-breaking agency by the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association of the city. Flowers rebelled, and started a rival organization, the Allied World War Veterans, and with the support of these veterans he started the “Dugout.” I met him, and heard him speak several times, and gave him my support to the extent of raising some money. He told me of the efforts of the “M. and M.” to bribe him, and of their plots against him; he knew, and I knew, that there were spies in his office.

There came to the office a letter from a stranger who signed himself “Paul Rightman.” The envelope bore a Chicago return address, but had been mailed in Los Angeles. It was typewritten, and the type was bad, the ribbon double, with traces of red showing here and there. “Paul” suggested to Flowers that he should send sample copies of his paper to Socialist and labor papers abroad. Flowers, who is out to prevent the next war by the spirit of international fraternity, thought this a good idea; his impulse was encouraged by a mysterious Austrian who happened into his office a few minutes after the letter arrived, and suggested to him exactly the sort of letter he should write to these foreign editors—most of whom, by a curious coincidence, happened to be in Silesia, where American troops are going!

Flowers wrote the letters and mailed them, and an hour or two after he had mailed them, two men who have been seen frequently in the offices of the “M. and M.,” called upon Flowers’ wife and terrified her by the announcement that her husband had committed a crime which would cause him to be sent to jail for life; his only chance was to drop the “Dugout,” and he had one hour in which to make his decision. Flowers was summoned by a telephone call, purporting to come from the United States District Attorney’s office. He obeyed this call, and in the hallway of the Federal Building was met by two mysterious persons who exhibited shields of authority, and informed him that he had three minutes in which to decide whether he would drop the “Dugout” or be sent to jail for life.

He refused to decide so quickly, and telephoned me for advice. I advised him to stand firm. I went to his office, and in my hearing he gave orders over the telephone for the printing of the next issue of his paper. In less than one hour after he had given that order, someone, identity unknown, came to the United States Attorney with “definite” information that Flowers was in relation with enemy publications abroad, and a search warrant was issued and served. I happened to be present in the office of the “Dugout” and witnessed the events, and can testify that the Federal agents, in defiance of the law, refused to permit Flowers to read the search warrant; that they held him against his will in violation of the law; that they raided the office of the Allied World War Veterans, which they had been given no authority to enter; and finally that they left the place a wreck.

Next morning there appeared in the “Los Angeles Times” a front page two-column story about the uncovering of a nest of treason. Among other things, it was stated that Flowers had been publishing seditious material before the armistice, and had been warned by the Federal authorities and forced to change his tone; the fact being that at this time Flowers was in the trenches in France, and did not start the publication of the “Dugout” until four or five months after the armistice!

I have said that the raid was brutally conducted. I might mention that I protested to one of the Federal agents against the unnecessary rowdyism, and this man remarked concerning the other man, his chief: “He’s a rough-neck. I don’t believe in rough-house business myself, there’s no sense at all in it.” Also I might mention that I brought two assistant U. S. Attorneys to the scene, and they arrived five minutes after their agents had left, and admitted to me that the proceedings were wholly unwarranted; one of them called up Flowers’ home and very angrily ordered the agents to desist from the search they were making of that place. But next morning the “Los Angeles Times” reported:

VIOLENCE FAKED

The government agents disturbed no property in the office, simply
carrying away the papers they desired. After the inspectors had gone,
witnesses say that certain known followers of Flowers took possession
of the offices, tore down an American flag which was on the wall,
threw it on the floor, and generally wrecked the place. Then they sent
for a “Los Angeles Examiner” photographer to make a photograph of the
offices, with the apparent desire to have the publication of the
photograph give the impression that the Federal officers had
desecrated the flag and destroyed the office property.

Prior to this episode I had been too busy with my own writings to have even read a copy of the “Dugout” through. But I knew the record of Flowers in the war, and I knew his purpose since the war, and when I saw this plot to destroy his magazine, I made up my mind to stand back of him. I engaged a lawyer for him, and I sent long telegrams about the case to the “Appeal to Reason” and other Socialist papers over the country. So the masters of Los Angeles decided to get me in the same net with Flowers.

There came to Flowers’ office a second letter signed by the mysterious “Paul.” This letter was written on the same bad typewriter, with a double ribbon showing traces of red. But this time the return address on the envelope was not “Paul Rightman, Chicago, Illinois”; this time it was “Upton Sinclair, Pasadena, California!”

Flowers called me on the ’phone, and said; “Did you mail me a letter yesterday?” I answered, “No, I haven’t written you any letter.” “Well,” said Flowers, “here is a letter with your name on the envelope. Evidently somebody wants it to appear that you are writing me letters signed with an assumed name.” “What is in the letter?” I asked, and Flowers started to read it to me over the ’phone. It was a letter of violent denunciation of the government, full of the most venomously treasonable sentiments, and offering to supply Flowers with more names of papers in Germany with which he might correspond. I waited to hear only about half of it, then I cried: “Get that letter out of your office!”

“But wait—” said Flowers.

“Don’t wait for anything,” I insisted. “Drop what you are doing and take that letter to my lawyer as quickly as you can run.”

Flowers promised me he would do that, and I hung up the receiver. Two or three minutes after he left his office with the letter in his pocket there were two agents of the District Attorney’s office of Los Angeles County looking for him at his office. When he returned there were four of them on hand, and they held him up and proceeded to make another raid. The man in charge, I might mention, was C. E. Sebastian, once mayor of the city, prosecuted for a sexual crime, kicked out of office by the people, and now working as a detective for the District Attorney’s office!

The first thing this man did was to examine all Flowers’ letters—letters on his desk, letters in the drawers of his desk, letters in his pockets. There were some hundred and fifty letters altogether, and they went over them all several times, studying the return addresses on the envelopes. They spent something like an hour and a half at it, and their balked anger was comically evident. In their whispered consultations Flowers heard them mention my name several times, and once he heard Sebastian say: “He’s a slick one.”

Flowers was haled before the Grand Jury, indicted under the Criminal Syndicalism law, and thrown into jail at once. The authorities fixed the bail at fifteen thousand dollars, which they hoped would be prohibitive, and denied Flowers the right to see his counsel that night. They have taken every scrap of paper belonging to the magazine. They have frightened off one printer and raided another, and so they think they have smashed the “Dugout.”

Come to my lawyer’s office for a minute and examine this mysterious “Paul” letter. It is a long letter, very abusive and stupid, and I won’t waste space on it, except to point out one more of the subtle traps that were placed in it. One sentence denouncing the acts of the government agents adds the phrase: “as I stated in the papers.” It so happens that out of the half million population of Los Angeles, just one person had been quoted in the newspapers as protesting against the raid on the “Dugout,” and that one person was myself. So when this letter was published, the newspapers would be able to say: Upton Sinclair is carrying a secret correspondence with a pro-German conspirator, using the alias “Paul.” But you see, he forgets and puts his name on the envelope! And also he gives himself away in the text of the letter—he identifies himself as the mysterious conspirator!

If you have any doubt that this was the plan, you have only to look at the “Los Angeles Times” next morning; a double-column, front page story about this second raid on the “Dugout,” giving the full text of the first “Paul” letter as a part of Flowers’ “conspirings” with the enemy—and without any hint that this mysterious “Paul” might be an imaginary person! If the second “Paul” letter had been found, that too would have been published in full, and the entire country would have read a story to the effect that both letters had come from Upton Sinclair, who was thus caught red-handed in a vile German conspiracy against his country!

Maybe you are like my wife; maybe you never believed in the “frame-up.” But study this case, and see what else you can make of it. Ask yourself: How comes it that the raids of both the Federal agents and of the Los Angeles County officers are so precisely timed to the arrival of letters from a mysterious “Paul” whom nobody has ever seen? And how comes it that this mysterious “Paul” puts the name of Upton Sinclair on his envelope? If “Paul” is afraid to put his own name on the envelope, why does he not mail it without return address, as millions of letters are mailed every day? And why does he employ the words: “As I stated in the papers”—when he hasn’t stated anything whatever in the papers, and when Flowers must know he hasn’t stated anything? Is it not plain that some dark agency is here working behind the scenes, plotting to ruin Upton Sinclair, and “tipping off” both the Federal authorities and the county authorities at the precise critical moment?

What is this agency? I do not know, and my lawyer, who takes this conspiracy very seriously, will not permit me to guess in public. But he admits my right to study these “Paul” letters, and to point out a peculiar bit of internal evidence. It would seem that this dark agency which is plotting to ruin Upton Sinclair is also interested in injuring the “Los Angeles Examiner.” The first “Paul” letter offers to supply Flowers with the names of more German papers, if he will insert a request in the personal columns of the “Examiner”; and the “Times” publishes this letter in full, calling particular attention to the damaging mention of the “Examiner.” Day after day the “Times” is attacking the “Examiner,” calling it a pro-German sheet; and here is a German conspirator using this pro-German sheet as a medium for his schemes!

The above is what is done to me before this book comes out. What will be done after my enemies have actually read the book, I cannot imagine. All I can do is to repeat my warning to you. Twenty years ago old “One-hoss” Wayland told me he had made it the rule of his life never to write a letter that he would not publish in the “Appeal to Reason.” And that is the principle upon which I have always carried on my propaganda. I have no secrets. What I have to say is said once a week in a full page of the “Appeal,” and the opposition to violence and conspiracy in the class struggle which I there write in public I advocate just as vigorously in private, and all my friends know it. So, if at any time you read that a carload of dynamite bombs has been found in my home, or that I have been carrying on a cipher correspondence with some foreign assassins, or that I have poisoned my wife and eloped with a chorus girl, or that I have taken a job on the “Los Angeles Times”—please go back and read this warning, and understand what is being done to both of us.