Or these two sentences, cut from the same dispatch:
Many strike-breakers imported into the trouble zone have deserted. Today hundreds of these men reached this city from the mining district and walked the streets.
It is especially interesting to note that the date of the dispatch from which the above two paragraphs were cut corresponds exactly with a date when Mr. French, according to his own testimony, sent a special correspondent to Charleston to report the news more fully. He sent a special man, and when this special man sent news favorable to the miners, Mr. French or his assistants sliced out whole chunks from his dispatches—practically everything giving the miners’ side!
On September 25, 1912, the Associated Press correspondent in Charleston was moved by some unaccountable impulse to tell the world the precise mechanism of the blacklist which the companies maintained—while insisting, of course, that they had never heard of a blacklist. Says the dispatch:
This it was shown was accomplished through a personal description of a miner on the back of house leases. If the miner was dismissed as undesirable other operators were given a copy of the description.
But was this dangerous information allowed to go out to the world? It was not!
Or again, take the dispatch of February 10, 1913, which tells how, whenever the militiamen came after the strikers, the strikers would dodge trouble; they would “defeat the purpose of the authorities by quietly retiring into the mountains.” Mr. French’s office makes such a slight change; it merely cuts out one word—the word “quietly”—thus turning a joke into a military operation! Or take the night dispatch of April 22, 1913, which tells how the Governor of West Virginia made a speech to the miners’ delegates. Among other things the Governor said: “I assure you that the laboring world has no better friend in public office than myself.” The Pittsburgh office of the Associated Press cut out this incendiary sentence from the Governor’s speech!
A still more illuminating method of approaching the problem is to compare the Associated Press dispatches as they actually reached the public with the facts as developed by sworn testimony of hundreds of witnesses before the Senate committee. I have made many such comparisons; I will give one.
Among the men who testified before the Senate committee was Lee Calvin, a mine-guard of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. Calvin later made an affidavit, in the course of which he told of his experiences on board the “Bull Moose Special,” an armored train which was taken up and down the railroads of these valleys, to shoot up the homes and tent-colonies of the strikers with a machine-gun. This “Bull Moose Special” was at the disposal, not merely of the state militia and of the mine-guards, but of the mine-operators as well. Calvin tells how he was invited by Quinn Morton, the largest coal-operator in the Kanawha Valley, to join a shooting party on the night of February 7, 1913. There were two or three dozen men with several boxes of guns; also the machine-gun. I quote from an affidavit by Calvin:
When we got near Holly Grove the brakeman commenced turning down the lights. When the engineer came in front of Holly Grove he gave two short blasts from the whistle. I was leaning out of the window and they commenced firing out of the baggage car. Flashes, lights, reports and cracks from the machine-gun took me all at once, and the train was a long stream of fire which commenced coming out of the Gatling gun. In about twenty or thirty seconds there came a flash here and there from the tents. About four came from the tents altogether, and they were about 100 feet apart, it would seem to me. No shots had been fired from the tents prior to the time the shots were fired from the train.