NEW YORK, July 2, 1895.—The strike of the American Authors’ Guild continues to hold public attention. No event in the history of trades-unionism since the great railroad strike of last year has equaled it in interest. Nothing else is talked of here. In some parts of the city all business is suspended and the excitement grows more intense hourly.
At about 10 o’clock this morning a non-union author attempting to enter the premises of D. Appleton & Co. with a roll of manuscript was set upon by a mob of strikers and beaten into insensibility. The strikers were driven from their victim by the police, but only after a fight in which both sides suffered severely.
New York, July 3.—Rioting was renewed last night in front of the boycotted publishing house of Charles Scribner’s Sons, 153–157 Fifth avenue. Though frequently driven back by charges of the police, who used their clubs freely, the striking authors succeeded in demolishing all the front windows by stone-throwing. One shot was fired into the interior, narrowly missing a young lady typewriter. Mr. William D. Howells, a member of the Guild’s board of managers, declares that he has irrefragable proof that this outrage was committed by some one connected with the Publishers’ Protective League for the purpose of creating public sympathy.
It has been learned that the non-union author so severely beaten yesterday died of his injuries last night. His name is said to have been Richard Henry (or Hengist) Stoddard, formerly a member of the Guild, but expelled for denouncing the action of President Brander Matthews in ordering the strike.
Later.—Matters look more and more threatening. A crowd of ten thousand authors, headed by Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, is reported to be marching upon the Astor Library, which is strongly guarded by police, heavily armed. Many book-stores have been wrecked and their contents destroyed.
Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, who was shot last night while setting fire to the establishment of Harper & Bros., cannot recover. She is delirious, and lies on her cot in the Bellevue Hospital singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Boston, July 3.—Industrial discontent has broken out here. The members of the local branch of the American Authors’ Guild threw down their pens this morning and declared that until satisfactory settlement of novelists’ percentages should be arrived at not a hero and heroine should live happily ever afterward in Boston. The publishing house of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. is guarded by a detachment of Pinkerton men armed with Winchester rifles and a Gatling gun. The publishers say that they are getting all the manuscripts that they are able to reject, and profess to have no apprehension as to the future. Mr. Joaquin Miller, a non-union poet from Nevada, visiting some Indian relatives here, was terribly beaten by a mob of strikers to-day. Mr. Miller was the aggressor; he was calling them “sea-doves”—by which he is said to have meant “gulls.”