The account of the mutiny of the seamen on the French Black Sea Fleet, given by M. Goude in the French Chamber, rationally explains for the first time the extraordinary events which took place at Odessa on April 8, the day the city was evacuated by the Allies and by all the population who could get away.
Don’t you think those words, “for the first time,” are funny? Almost as funny as the story of “Tom Muni” from Petrograd!
And then President Wilson comes to Los Angeles, and there is held in the largest music auditorium in the city a mass meeting of two thousand citizens, which unanimously submits to the President a request for amnesty for political prisoners. The “Los Angeles Times” gave this meeting not one word. I am invited to address the City Club of Los Angeles, and I tell them of this failure of the “Times” to report the news. Whereupon the “Times” starts a campaign to have me put in jail! I quote its first editorial; they have followed it up, every other day for a couple of weeks—they are quite determined that I shall go to jail!
Get the I. W. W. Seditionists! And lock them up. Tight! Right! But why let Upton Sinclair roam at large? He spits more poison than the cheap skate. It is villainy to promote anarchy in these ticklish times. Blood will be on the heads of some of the civic club managers, male and female. It is a crime for them to invite disloyal speakers to spout for them; just for amusement. The City Club and some of the women’s clubs have boosted the Red cause. Bolshevism is no toy to play with, ladies and gentlemen. An “open forum” should not be open to mobocracy and treason.
As I have said, I know several of the men and women who help to edit the newspaper in which the above murderous raving is published. These men and women will read this book, and I now request the general public to step outside for a few moments, while I address these editors privately. I speak, not in my own voice, but in that of an old-time journalist, venerated in his day, John Swinton, editor of the “New York Tribune.” He is answering, at a banquet of his fellow-editors, the toast: “An Independent Press”:
There is no such thing In America as an independent press, unless it is in the country towns.
You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write his honest opinions, and if you did you know beforehand that it would never appear in print.
I am paid one hundred and fifty dollars a week for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with—others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things—and any of you who would be so foolish as to write his honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.
The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread.
You know this and I know it, and what folly is this to be toasting an “Independent Press.”