Chapter XXX: The Concrete Wall

I returned to New York, and at a meeting in Berkeley Hall I told the story of conditions in Colorado. I did not get myself arrested, however, so the New York newspapers printed only a few words of what I said, and the Associated Press sent out nothing. It was again the concrete wall, impenetrable, insurmountable: on one side I, with my facts about the outrages upon the miners; and on the other side the public—as far out of reach as if it had been in the moon.

The greatest atrocity of the strike was the fact, previously set forth, that the state militia in the coal-fields had been recruited from strike-breakers and Baldwin-Felts gunmen. The facts had been refused, even to the state legislature; until finally the legislature appointed a committee to wait upon the militia general and not leave his office until they got the roster of the guard. So it was disclosed that in Company A of the state guard there had been one hundred and twenty-two members, and all but three of them coal-company employes, receiving the pay of coal-companies while they wore the uniform and carried the flag of the state!

It was an incredible prostitution of government; and what did the newspapers do with the story? What did the Associated Press do with it? I was unable to find the story in a single newspaper, outside of Denver. I brought the full-page story clipped from the “Rocky Mountain News” to New York with me, and tried the big New York dailies, and could not get one of them to publish it.

The “Chicago Tribune” had published in full a letter of mine to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., setting forth these facts in detail. Also the “Tribune” had published a very fair and just editorial, headed: “All the Truth,” from which I quote:

Facts are charged by Mr. Sinclair—and others, it must be said—which,
if true, are a disgrace to the men responsible and to the community in
which they existed. To ascertain the truth and to deal with the
situation are duties which must be performed.... Let us have the facts
about this terrible industrial tragedy, and all the facts. Let us know
the guilty and all the guilty.

Three days later the “Chicago Tribune” took up my definite charges concerning the guard. It said:

If, as he asserts, the Adjutant General’s report shows any such abuse
of the guard, the situation calls for prompt rebuke and effective
action, if such action is possible under our laws.... We suggest the
National Guard take cognizance of the above allegations of Sinclair,
and if they are substantiated by the Adjutant General of Colorado that
the guard publicly protest against the abuse.

Five days after that the “Chicago Tribune” published a letter from P. A. Wieting of Denver, as follows:

Referring to your editorial “Abusing the Guard,” in your issue of June
5. If Upton Sinclair said that the official records of Adjutant
General Chase showed that an overwhelming majority of the Colorado
militia were mine guards and other employes of the coal companies, he
deliberately lied. Mr. Chase’s records showed nothing of the sort, and
could not; for the statement is absolutely false and absurd. The
National Guard of Colorado is made up like in other states, of young
business and professional men, students, farmer boys and the like, and
includes the sons of many of our best families.

It is surprising that a paper of the standing of the “Tribune” should
accept offhand such a preposterous charge against a great state made
by a professional muck-raker. If you still entertain the slightest
belief in Sinclair’s foolish charge, any banker, any reputable
business man, any college president in Colorado will tell you, as I
do, that the man who made the statement quoted lied and knew that he
lied.

Now here was a direct issue of fact. If P. A. Wieting were a real person, living in Denver, Colorado, and if he read a morning newspaper, he must have read the “Rocky Mountain News,” because that was the only morning newspaper published in Denver. And on the entire front page of the “Rocky Mountain News” had been published the roster of Company A of the Colorado state militia, as given to the press by a committee of the state legislature, also a report of this committee of the legislature, giving all the facts as to these members of Company A, the capacity in which one hundred and nineteen out of one hundred and twenty-two of them were employed by the coal-operators or the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, and the wages they were paid by these concerns. The evidence was as complete and as authoritative as it was possible for evidence to be; and therefore, when P. A. Wieting wrote this letter to the “Chicago Tribune,” deliberately accusing me of deliberate lying, he was deliberately lying himself.

I thought, of course, that the “Tribune,” having taken a brave stand and called for the truth, really wanted the truth, and would push the controversy to the end. Therefore I sent to the “Tribune” by registered mail a copy of the “Rocky Mountain News,” containing the facts, and I looked to see this full-page report transferred to a page of the “Chicago Tribune.” Or I looked to have the “Tribune” have some representative in Denver look up the facts, as it might so easily have done. Instead of that, I saw not one line about the matter. What strings had been pulled in the “Tribune” office, I don’t happen to know. All I know is that I wrote several times, protesting, and that no attention was paid to my letters. Now, while I am preparing this book, I write to the “Tribune,” lest by any chance the “Tribune” published something in some edition which I missed, and which my clipping bureau missed; but the “Tribune” leaves my letter unanswered!

Also I write to Denver to find out about P. A. Wieting—if he is a real person. I find that he is assistant cashier of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Co., Mr. Rockefeller’s concern which broke the strike!

All this time, you must understand, the “kept” writers on the other side of the concrete wall were having their will with the public. Arthur Brisbane, for example, whose editorial against the strikers was submitted to Mr. Rockefeller by Mr. Rockefeller’s press agent as a proof of the press agent’s skill! And Elbert Hubbard of East Aurora—you will find a special chapter in this book devoted to the “Fra,” and in it you may read how he sought to sell out the Colorado strikers. And the Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis, a clerical gentleman whom we have seen spurning George D. Herron in public, and apologizing in tears before his congregation because his greed for money had led him into a mess of lawsuits. This clerical gentleman preached a sermon, in which he referred to our Broadway “pickets” as “a lot of silly people,” and incidentally told some score of lies about the strikers. Somebody, name unknown, was circulating this sermon in expensive pamphlet form by the hundreds of thousands of copies; so George Creel wrote to Hillis—but in vain. If you are near a library, look up Creel’s “Open Letter” in “Harper’s Weekly,” May 29, 1915, and see how many lies a greedy preacher can pack into one sermon. I also wrote to the reverend gentleman, and succeeded in getting a reply from him. I quote my final letter, which covers the case, I think:

REV. NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS,
Brooklyn, New York.
_My Dear Sir_:

I have your letter and note that you are going West to Colorado, and
that if you can find any errors in your sermon you will correct them.
I would say that definite and specific errors are pointed out in
George Creel’s letters; errors that you would not have to go to
Colorado to find out about. They are proven in the sworn testimony
given before the Congressional Investigation Committee and before the
hearings of the Commission on Industrial Relations. While you can, of
course, not recollect who gave you this or that detail of information,
you must certainly know from what source you took the definite false
statements of figures and facts to which Mr. Creel calls your
attention. Moreover, the most important questions in both Mr. Creel’s
letter and mine, you have entirely ignored. I wish to ask you, before
you go West, will you answer the following specific questions?

Who is circulating and paying for the expensive pamphlet form of your
sermon?

Second, did this party obtain your permission to circulate it in this
form?

Third, did you receive any payment for permitting this circulation?

Fourth, if, after investigation of Mr. Creel’s points in Colorado you
find that you were wrong and he was right, will you compel the party
who is circulating this pamphlet to give to your corrections the same
amount of circulation?

I have, of course no right to insist that you should answer any of
these questions. I will merely say that by failing to answer them, and
answer them promptly and explicitly, you will leave your name open to
exceedingly grave suspicions.

This letter remained unanswered; yet such utter lack of concern about his good name has not injured the pastor of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, with the great organs of capitalist opinion! Only recently “McClure’s Magazine” has selected him for its prize anti-Bolshevik liar. Please make a mental note of him, for reference when we come to the anti-Bolshevik liars and their lies.

It was still our hope that President Wilson could be persuaded to interfere in the strike and force the Rockefellers to some compromise. It being the way of public officials to move only in response to public clamor, we were driven to keep on butting our heads against the concrete wall. Our “mourning picket” demonstration had gathered about us a group of young radicals, who could not endure to see the effort die down and the strangling of the strike completed. Every day one would come to us with some new idea. One group wished to go up to Rockefeller’s home on Madison Avenue, and walk up and down in front of it. We objected to this, because we were not attacking Mr. Rockefeller personally, we were attacking his business policy, and his office seemed the proper place. Nevertheless, one boy ventured up on Madison Avenue, and was promptly arrested and sent to jail for sixty days.

There was another group which wished to visit Tarrytown, where young Rockefeller had retired to the seclusion of his country home, with a high iron fence all around it, and iron gates, and a score or two of armed guards patrolling day and night. This group tried to hold a street meeting in the village of Tarrytown, and were arrested. So I was driven into a campaign on behalf of free speech. I have told in Chapter XII of my experience with the “Tarrytown News”; I have now to tell of my experience with the “New York Herald.” It is one of the few of my newspaper adventures from the contemplation of which I derive satisfaction.

I had several sessions with the board of trustees of the village of Tarrytown. They were courteous, and permitted me to argue the issue of free speech—which I did courteously. I brought to them a charming letter from Georg Brandes, then a visitor in New York. They held a public session, addressed by Leonard Abbott, Theodore Schroeder, and myself, and in the course of my talk I pointed out that the result of repression of free speech was violence. In England, where the radicals were allowed to gather in Hyde Park and say what they chose, crimes of political violence were practically unknown. On the other hand, in America, where it was customary for the police to arrest radicals and club and jail them, such crimes were common. Only the other day the newspapers had told of the assassination of the chief of police of Seattle, where the I. W. W. had been prevented from speaking.

There were a dozen newspaper reporters present at this hearing, and accounts of it appeared in the New York papers next morning. The “Herald” stated that I had threatened the trustees of Tarrytown with violence in case they refused my request. I quote from the “Herald’s” narrative:

Suddenly Frank R. Pierson, president of the village, leaped to his
feet and said:

“We shall not be intimidated by threats. We will hear no more of this
kind of argument. For one, I was willing to listen to what these
people had to say and to hear them fairly and honestly, but when they
come here with threats of death, of assassination and of mob rule, I
will not hear them further.”

Now, concerning this account there is only one thing to be said: it was absolute fiction. I have never met a more agreeable gentleman than Mr. Pierson, president of the Tarrytown village board; he voted my way on every occasion, and from first to last we never exchanged a word that was not cordial. On reading this account I at once went to see him, and ascertained that both he and the other trustees considered the report to be false and inexcusable. I then sent a letter to the “Herald” informing them that they had libeled me, and threatening them with a suit. They sent a reporter to see me, and I explained to this reporter the basis of my complaint, and next morning the “Herald” published my letter of complaint, together with an article reiterating its statement, and quoting three of the trustees as supporting its statement. I quote the “Herald” reporter’s words:

I saw Frank R. Pierson, president of the village, and asked his
opinion of the correctness of the account published in the “Herald.”
Mr. Pierson carefully read the article and then said:

“Mr. Sinclair certainly made the remarks attributed to him in the
‘Herald,’ if I heard aright, and I did jump up and declare that we
should not be intimidated by threats. Mr. Sinclair may not have
intended to make a threat, but the inference was plain. The ‘Herald’
did not misquote either Mr. Sinclair or me.”

And concerning the above interview also there is only one thing to be said; it was absolute fiction. I went to see Mr. Pierson again, and he assured me that he had given no such interview, and would appear in court and testify accordingly. Another of the trustees wrote me that the “Herald” interview with him was a “fake,” and so I put the matter into the hands of my attorneys, and a libel-suit was filed against the “New York Herald.” It dragged for a year or two, and I came to California and dismissed the matter from my mind. When the time came for the suit to come to trial, I was unwilling to take the trip to New York, and asked my lawyers to have the matter dropped. You may imagine my consternation when I received a letter from them, telling me that they had been negotiating with the attorneys for the “Herald,” and had succeeded in settling the case upon the basis of a payment of twenty-five hundred dollars damages! Never, if I live to be as old as Methuselah, shall I spend money that will bring me more satisfaction than that twenty-five hundred dollars!

Throughout these Tarrytown adventures, which lasted several weeks, each newspaper had one reporter who followed the story day by day, and two or three of these men became friendly to me. Isaac Russell, reporter for the “Times,” invited me to lunch in a restaurant in Tarrytown, with a couple of other men. I explained that I was ill and not eating anything, but would sit and chat with them. As they were finishing, there came in the reporter for the “World,” who, as it happened, had been drunk during most of the time. Next morning there appeared in the “World” a particularly nasty account of the day’s events, in which it was described how I had come to Tarrytown with four women in my train, had had lunch with several reporters, and had permitted them to pay the bill. I took the trouble to go down to the office of the “World” and see Mr. Frank Cobb, managing editor; explaining to him that I had come alone to Tarrytown, had spoken to no woman in Tarrytown, and had eaten no lunch in Tarrytown. Mr. Cobb admitted that I had a grievance, and by way of recompense allowed me to dictate a column interview about the meaning of the free speech fight in Tarrytown; incidentally he took the drunken reporter off the assignment. From the other reporters I got the “inside” story of what had happened, and it throws an amusing light upon newspaper ethics. The drunken reporter had lost out in the contest with me, not because he had been drunk, nor because he had lied about a radical, but because he had implied in his article that a reporter was a social inferior! Was not a reporter privileged to invite an author to lunch, and to pay for the lunch if he saw fit?