Or take the Lawrence strike. I have told the story of how conspirators of the great Woolen Trust planted dynamite in the homes of strike-breakers as a “frame-up” to discredit the strikers. The man who was convicted of this was a school commissioner and a prominent Catholic, a close friend of the mill-owners. When this dynamite was found, the Associated Press sent the story fully. When the plot was exposed, it sent almost nothing. These statements were made publicly at a conference at the University of Wisconsin by A. M. Simons, and never challenged by the Associated Press. And at this same conference it was stated by George French that the department-stores served notice upon all the Boston newspapers that if they featured this strike they would get no more Sunday advertising!
Or take the present struggle of the railroad brotherhoods for a living wage. The “Saturday Evening Post” published a series of articles by Edward Hungerford, full of gross falsehoods regarding the wages of railroad workers and managers under the Federal administration. These, mind you, were flat misstatements of facts officially recorded and available to any one. The brotherhoods asked a certain United States railroad administration official to prepare from official records a statement concerning these misrepresentations. This was formally submitted to the “Saturday Evening Post,” and was absolutely ignored.
Or take the case of Tom Mooney. The capitalist newspapers of San Francisco tried Tom Mooney, with the help of a million dollar corruption fund, raised by the Merchants and Manufacturers Association of the city. They found him guilty, but the prosecuting authorities didn’t have enough evidence to make good the verdict in court, so they manufactured the evidence. Mooney was a Socialist and a well-known labor organizer, so the case was taken up by the Socialists and the unions of the country, and became the great labor issue of the time—all without one word getting into the capitalist newspapers of the East! There were two or three million copy “protest editions” of the “Appeal to Reason” issued—and still not a word about it in the capitalist newspapers outside of California! Finally the Anarchists in Petrograd took up the matter; they attacked the American embassy, and the news was cabled back to New York that the attack was on account of a certain “Tom Muni.” The newspapers of New York didn’t know anything about the case, and couldn’t find out about it in time; they had to publish the name as it came over the cables—thus laying bare their shame to the whole world! Could any writer of farce-comedy have invented a greater satire upon New York Journalism than the fact that it had to get its San Francisco labor-news misspelled from Petrograd?
CHAPTER LVII
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS AND LABOR
Great strikes are determined by public opinion, and public opinion is always against strikers who are violent. Therefore, in great strikes, all the efforts of the employers are devoted to making it appear that the strikers are violent. The greatest single agency in America for making it appear that strikers are violent is the Associated Press. How does this agency perform its function?
In the first place, by the wholesale method of elimination. There are some violent strikers, needless to say, and Capitalist Journalism follows this simple and elemental rule—if strikers are violent, they get on the wires, while if strikers are not violent, they stay off the wires; by which simple device it is brought about that nine-tenths of the telegraphic news you read about strikes is news of violence, and so in your brain-channels is irrevocably graven the idea-association:
Strikes—violence! Violence—strikes!
What about the millions of patient strikers who obey the law, who wait, day after day, month after month, starving, seeing their wives fading, their little ones turning white and thin—and still restrain themselves, obeying the laws of their masters? What about the strike-leaders who plead day in and day out—I have heard them a hundred times—“No violence! No violence!”—what about them? Why, nothing; just nothing! The Associated Press will let a big strike continue for months and never mention it—unless there is violence! For example, the great coal-strike in West Virginia. It happens, through a set of circumstances to be explained in the next chapter, that I have before me the sworn complete file of all the dispatches which the Associated Press sent out during the sixteen months of this strike. The strike began April 1, 1912. The first dispatch sent by the Associated Press was on April 6; a very brief dispatch, telling of threats of violence. The second dispatch was on June 1; this also very brief, to the effect that “serious rioting is imminent.” The third dispatch was on July 23; also brief, telling of rioting, and of state troops sent in. Thus it appears that during one hundred and thirteen days of a great strike the Associated Press considered it necessary to send only two brief items—and these containing not one line about the causes of the strike, not one line about the demands of the miners, not one line about the economic significance of a ferociously bitter labor struggle! I have before me the affidavit of Thomas Cairns, president of the United Mine Workers’ West Virginia district, stating that during these sixteen months, which brought West Virginia to a state of civil war, not once did the correspondent of the Associated Press come to him for information about the strike!
And now, in 1919, there is more trouble in this district, and I pick up my morning paper and read that three thousand miners of Cabin Creek have taken up arms and are marching to battle against machine-guns. The strike has been going on for weeks, says the report; but this is the first hint I have heard of it—I who read four Associated Press newspapers, the “Los Angeles Times” and “Examiner,” and the “New York Times” and “World”!
The first point to be got clear is that in cases of big strikes the Associated Press is getting its news through its local newspaper member. I have shown that in Los Angeles it is content to co-operate with the unspeakable “Times.” In San Diego it works with the “Union,” personal organ of John D. Spreckles, the “sugar-king”; and a few years ago, when a murderous mob of bankers, lawyers and merchants was engaged in shooting, clubbing, tarring and feathering, throwing into prison, and there torturing, drugging, and starving the radicals of that city, the “San Diego Union” paid editorial tribute to the fact that the Associated Press was handling this situation to the satisfaction of the murderous mob of bankers, lawyers and merchants. The “San Diego Union,” which had done most of the inciting of this mob, stated editorially: