Or take St. Paul, Minnesota. Here is the grain country, entirely possessed by the milling interests, with their allied railroads and banks. Until the Farmer’s Nonpartisan movement arose, the politics and journalism of Minnesota were exclusively in the hands of these interests. In the “Nonpartisan Leader” for May 27, June 3 and June 10, 1918, appeared a series of articles by Walter W. Liggett, formerly exchange editor of the “St. Paul Pioneer Press” and its evening edition, the “St. Paul Dispatch.” Mr. Liggett made a great number of damaging charges against these newspapers, and in order to make sure of the facts, I address their managing editor, inquiring if he has ever published any denial of the charges, or if he cares to deny them to me. His answer is:
We never made any reply at all to them.... Nor do I care, as you suggest, to make any denial to you personally. It seems to me the record of the “Dispatch” and the “Pioneer Press” is the important thing, and this is open to anybody who cares to read our files.
The letter concludes by warning me of the risk I shall run if I reprint “the assertions of a dismissed employe.” I reply to the writer, Mr. H. R. Galt, managing editor of the “Dispatch” and the “Pioneer Press,” that his letter is unsatisfactory. The strong point about Mr. Liggett’s three articles is that they are based upon precisely the thing Mr. Galt invites—a study of the files of the newspapers. Mr. Liggett states that certain things are found in these files. I offer to send Mr. Galt copies of the articles, which he says he does not possess; I again invite him to point out to me in detail which of Mr. Liggett’s charges are false. I also ask him why, if the charges are false, he did not take Mr. Liggett up at the time, and inflict upon him the legal penalties with which he threatens me. I suggest that any jury of Americans will display curiosity about that point. To which Mr. Galt replies:
I shall be content to advise you again, as I did in my previous letter, that the articles upon which you have apparently based your verdict are untruthful in every particular in which they reflect upon the “Dispatch” and “Pioneer Press,” and that in republishing them or any part of them, or in repeating any statements reflecting on these newspapers which may be contained in them, you will not only be publishing falsehoods, but having been advised in advance that they are falsehoods, you will publish them maliciously.
Now pray proceed with your indictment of American Journalism as reported by Mr. Liggett, and do not worry yourself about the curiosity of any jury so far as we are concerned. At the proper time we shall be abundantly able to satisfy any curiosity on this point.
Now, when a man comes at me making a face like that, I have but one impulse in my soul—that is, to jump into a pair of seven-league boots, and turn and skedaddle as hard as I know how to the other side of the world and hide in a coal-bin. I am not joking; that is really the way I feel. There is nothing in the world I dread so much as a personal wrangle, and these fierce and haughty and powerful men throw me into a tremble of terror. The things I enjoy in this world are my books and my garden, and rather than go into a jury-room, and wrangle with fierce and haughty and powerful men, I would have my eye-teeth pulled out. But then I think, as I have thought many times in my life before, of the millions of pitiful wage-slaves who are exploited by these fierce and haughty and powerful men. I think of the millions of honest and true Americans who swallow the poison that is fed to them by our capitalist newspapers; and so I clench my hands and bite my lips together and turn on the fierce and haughty and powerful men with a yell of rage. Then a strange and startling, an almost incredible thing happens—the fierce and haughty and powerful men jump into their seven-league boots, and turn and skedaddle to the other side of the world and hide in a coal-bin!
Why is this? Is it because I am an especially terrifying person, with an especially terrifying face? No; it is simply because, in these contests, I have always taken one precaution at the outset—I have made certain of having the truth on my side. I have cast in my lot with the truth; whereas these fierce and haughty and powerful men with whom I enter the lists of combat have made all their success out of falsehood, and fear truth as they fear nothing else on God’s earth.
Before I go to the bat with Mr. Galt, managing editor of the “St. Paul Dispatch” and “Pioneer Press,” I will point out one important fact about my life, as follows:
In the course of my twenty years career as an assailant of special privilege, I have attacked pretty nearly every important interest in America. The statements I have made, if false, would have been enough to deprive me of a thousand times all the property I ever owned, and to have sent me to prison for a thousand times a normal man’s life. I have been called a liar on many occasions, needless to say; but never once in all these twenty years has one of my enemies ventured to bring me into a court of law, and to submit the issue between us to a jury of American citizens. Several times they have come near to doing it. I was told, by a lawyer who was present at the event, that there was a conference, lasting three days and a good part of three nights, between Mr. J. Ogden Armour and his lawyers, in which Mr. Armour insisted upon having me arrested for criminal libel, and his lawyers insisted that he could not “stand the gaff.” As you have seen in this book, Mr. William E. Corey threatened to sue me for libel; I am informed that young Mr. Rockefeller desired ardently to do it, and Madame Tingley, the “Purple Mother” of Theosophy, actually sent her lawyers after me for my jests about her in “The Profits of Religion.” But, if Mr. H. R. Galt actually files a suit against me, he will be the first of our captains of privilege who has ventured that far.
Now, to return to the “St. Paul Dispatch” and “Pioneer Press”: I have not made a detailed study of the files of these papers, but I have made a study of the Nonpartisan League movement and its “Nonpartisan Leader,” also I have made a study of Mr. Walter W. Liggett, formerly exchange editor of the “Dispatch” and the “Pioneer Press.” Mr. Liggett assures me that every statement he makes can be abundantly proven from the files of the papers, and I believe Mr. Liggett. Accordingly I take the risk of summarizing the statements which Mr. Liggett published concerning these two papers, and which these two papers allowed to pass unchallenged. My guess is that Mr. H. R. Galt will do one of two things: either he will do what Mr. Ogden Armour did, and what Mr. Corey did, and what Mr. Rockefeller did, and what Madame Tingley did—that is, nothing. Or else he will do what the Associated Press did in the case of the “Masses”—he will file a suit, or ask for an indictment, and thus get occasion to publish in his papers a high-sounding and dignified statement of his own righteousness; he will put me to the expense of employing lawyers and making a thorough study of his files; and then, when the case comes up, he will drop it, and say not one word about it in his papers!