And what of those American radicals who have ventured to protest against this policy, and to expose this campaign of falsification? Here again it is only a question of how much space one is willing to give to anecdotes.
My friend Rose Pastor Stokes is a pacifist, under sentence of ten years in jail for pacifist activities; again and again the New York newspapers report her as calling for a bloody revolution in America, and refuse to publish her protest that this is false. You may not like pacifists; I myself admit that during the war I found some of them extremely trying to my patience. But do you believe that the proper way to treat them is to lie about them? Listen to the experiences of Mrs. Stokes on a lecture trip in the Middle West. The “Kansas City Star,” a one-time “liberal” paper, sent a special writer to interview her on the laundry-workers’ strike then in progress; but finding that this interview put her in a good light, they suppressed it, and sent another reporter to write up her address to the “Women’s Dining Club.” Says Mrs. Stokes:
The “Star” so garbled and twisted my speech that it was actually unrecognizable. For example, one of the things I was quoted as having said was that the Red Cross was a war camouflage. It so happened that I did not mention the Red Cross during the entire speech.
Then she went to speak in Springfield, Missouri, and the “Star” had a lurid account of how she had been arrested in Springfield, and admitted to bail, and has stolen out of the city at day-break, forfeiting the hundred-dollar bond of a Socialist comrade. Says Mrs. Stokes:
Except for the arrest, the story was a fabrication. I had left Springfield at a respectable hour, wholly cleared; and no bond was forfeited.
She came back to Kansas City, and a “Star” reporter was sent to interview her; she asked him to deny this Springfield story, and he turned in a denial, but not a word of it was published. As a direct result of this newspaper misrepresentation, Mrs. Stokes was arrested by the Federal authorities and sentenced to ten years in jail. She tells me how this trial and sentence were reported, and points out the obvious motive of the falsifications:
Anything to frighten people away from Socialist meetings! If you want to see this motive running through the capitalist press of the entire country as a single thread, come and read the hundreds of editorials on my ten-year sentence. Every state and every important industrial community is represented. The wording is almost as if one man, let alone one spirit, had dictated them all.
And here is Judson King, writing to members of Congress:
For your information permit me to state that at the meeting at Poli’s Theatre Sunday afternoon at which I presided there was no advocacy of anarchy or violence, no attack upon the American form of government, and no propaganda that Bolshevism be adopted in our country. The well-nigh unanimous sentiment of audience and speakers was that American troops be withdrawn and Russia be permitted to settle her own fate in her own way.
The article in Monday’s “Washington Post” headed, “Urge Red America,” is an absurd perversion of the truth and a gross violation of journalistic ethics. Discussions in Congress regarding this meeting, based apparently upon this article, have proceeded under a misapprehension of facts. Whether any attempt was made to verify the truth of the article I do not know. No inquiry was made of me.