I ran beside Schmittberger into the fracas, and he yanked and pulled cops over backwards to break up the thing. And finally he got them under control, and then gave them fits for acting without orders.
Russell, being an honest man, went back to the “Times” office, and wrote a story of how the New York police had been seized by a panic, and had broken out without orders; and that story went through. But it happened that up in the editorial rooms of the “Times” somebody was writing the conventional “Times” editorial, denouncing the Socialists for their May-day violence, and praising the police for their heroism. It never occurred to the editorial writer that the news editors could be so careless as to pass a story like Isaac Russell’s! So next day here was this comical discrepancy, and an organization of magazine editors, the “Ragged Edge Club,” invited Isaac Russell to come and explain to them the war between the news columns and the editorial columns of the “Times”! Russell was called up before his boss and, as he says, “roasted to a frazzle” for having written the truth. Arthur Greaves, city editor of the “Times,” told him that he had “got off all wrong in that situation.” But Russell’s job was saved—and how do you think? The police commissioner of New York came out with a formal statement, denouncing the police, and saying that they had acted contrary to his orders!
Or take the experience of A. M. Simons, reporting an International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart, Germany, for the United Press, supposed to be a liberal organization. Simons received a dispatch from the London headquarters of his organization:
Wire three hundred words on probable split of Congress into Bebelists, Herveists, and Laborites.
And Simons continues:
Now, there was not a single human being in that congress that ever dreamed there would be a split. The particular question on which they were supposed to split was passed by a unanimous vote. I sent a straight news story out. At the close I put these three words: “Split talk rot.” Judge of my surprise when I landed in New York to find that that story of the split of the Socialist Congress had been carried over the United Press wires to the paper I was serving!
And now, as this book is going to press, on November 11th, 1919, the Associated Press sends from the town of Centralia, Washington, a series of dispatches telling how I. W. W. members fired from windows of their meeting hall upon an Armistice Day parade of returned soldier-boys. The dispatch does not say directly that the firing was done in cold blood; it simply tells in elaborate detail about the firing, and says not one word about incidents occurring before the firing. It leaves it to be assumed that the firing was done in cold blood, and the whole country does assume that, and a perfect frenzy seizes the returned soldiers and the government authorities; they raid I. W. W. meeting rooms in a hundred places, and beat up the members and throw them into jail. And I who understand the infamies of our Journalism wait patiently, knowing that in due course the truth will begin to leak. And sure enough, three days later comes an Associated Press dispatch from Centralia, Washington, mentioning, quite casually and incidentally, that Dr. Frank Bickford, one of the marchers, testified at the coroner’s inquest that “the former soldiers attacked the I. W. W. hall before any shots were fired.” And the Hearst service reports the same news with the comment that “no special significance was attached to this testimony”!
Later: It appears that the soldiers were battering in the door, and the first shots were fired through it.
CHAPTER LIII
THE PRESS AND SEX
There is a whole field of problems connected with our sex-nature which we are only beginning to explore. Metchnikoff has told us something. Freud and Jung have told us more; but long after we have solved our economic problems we shall still be seeking knowledge about sex. And meantime men and women grope blindly, and are betrayed into entanglements and misunderstandings and cruel miseries. If they happen to be ordinary, respectable citizens, they keep these things under cover. If they are radicals, trying to square their preaching and their practice, they will get into weird and awful predicaments, and then there will be sport for predatory Journalism!