“We shall not be intimidated by threats. We will hear no more of this kind of argument. For one, I was willing to listen to what these people had to say and to hear them fairly and honestly, but when they come here with threats of death, of assassination and of mob rule, I will not hear them further.”
Now, concerning this account there is only one thing to be said: it was absolute fiction. I have never met a more agreeable gentleman than Mr. Pierson, president of the Tarrytown village board; he voted my way on every occasion, and from first to last we never exchanged a word that was not cordial. On reading this account I at once went to see him, and ascertained that both he and the other trustees considered the report to be false and inexcusable. I then sent a letter to the “Herald” informing them that they had libeled me, and threatening them with a suit. They sent a reporter to see me, and I explained to this reporter the basis of my complaint, and next morning the “Herald” published my letter of complaint, together with an article reiterating its statement, and quoting three of the trustees as supporting its statement. I quote the “Herald” reporter’s words:
I saw Frank R. Pierson, president of the village, and asked his opinion of the correctness of the account published in the “Herald.” Mr. Pierson carefully read the article and then said:
“Mr. Sinclair certainly made the remarks attributed to him in the ‘Herald,’ if I heard aright, and I did jump up and declare that we should not be intimidated by threats. Mr. Sinclair may not have intended to make a threat, but the inference was plain. The ‘Herald’ did not misquote either Mr. Sinclair or me.”
And concerning the above interview also there is only one thing to be said; it was absolute fiction. I went to see Mr. Pierson again, and he assured me that he had given no such interview, and would appear in court and testify accordingly. Another of the trustees wrote me that the “Herald” interview with him was a “fake,” and so I put the matter into the hands of my attorneys, and a libel-suit was filed against the “New York Herald.” It dragged for a year or two, and I came to California and dismissed the matter from my mind. When the time came for the suit to come to trial, I was unwilling to take the trip to New York, and asked my lawyers to have the matter dropped. You may imagine my consternation when I received a letter from them, telling me that they had been negotiating with the attorneys for the “Herald,” and had succeeded in settling the case upon the basis of a payment of twenty-five hundred dollars damages! Never, if I live to be as old as Methuselah, shall I spend money that will bring me more satisfaction than that twenty-five hundred dollars!
Throughout these Tarrytown adventures, which lasted several weeks, each newspaper had one reporter who followed the story day by day, and two or three of these men became friendly to me. Isaac Russell, reporter for the “Times,” invited me to lunch in a restaurant in Tarrytown, with a couple of other men. I explained that I was ill and not eating anything, but would sit and chat with them. As they were finishing, there came in the reporter for the “World,” who, as it happened, had been drunk during most of the time. Next morning there appeared in the “World” a particularly nasty account of the day’s events, in which it was described how I had come to Tarrytown with four women in my train, had had lunch with several reporters, and had permitted them to pay the bill. I took the trouble to go down to the office of the “World” and see Mr. Frank Cobb, managing editor; explaining to him that I had come alone to Tarrytown, had spoken to no woman in Tarrytown, and had eaten no lunch in Tarrytown. Mr. Cobb admitted that I had a grievance, and by way of recompense allowed me to dictate a column interview about the meaning of the free speech fight in Tarrytown; incidentally he took the drunken reporter off the assignment. From the other reporters I got the “inside” story of what had happened, and it throws an amusing light upon newspaper ethics. The drunken reporter had lost out in the contest with me, not because he had been drunk, nor because he had lied about a radical, but because he had implied in his article that a reporter was a social inferior! Was not a reporter privileged to invite an author to lunch, and to pay for the lunch if he saw fit?
CHAPTER XXXI
MAKING BOMB-MAKERS
It had been agreed by the trustees of Tarrytown that while we might not tell about the Ludlow massacre at a street-meeting, we might tell about it at a meeting in a theatre or hall. I set out to find a theatre or hall, but there was no theatre or hall that could be rented for that purpose. I then went up on the heights, where the Rockefellers live, and appealed to the sense of fair play of Mr. Rockefeller’s neighbors. This is the Pocantico hills country, a line of magnificent estates and palatial homes, of which you see pictures in the “Sunday supplements.” You might have thought it poor territory for radical propaganda; nevertheless, I was able to persuade one of the residents, Mrs. Charles J. Gould, to allow the use of her open-air theatre for a meeting in defense of free speech. Imagine, if you can, the excitement of the New York newspapers, when they learned that there was to be an I. W. W. meeting—so they called it—in an open-air theatre on a millionaire estate almost next door to the Rockefellers!
We held the meeting, attended by some three hundred people of the town, rich and poor, including a number of laborers from young Mr. Rockefeller’s estate. John W. Brown, organizer of the United Mine-workers, told the story of the strike, and we moved a resolution that it was the sense of the meeting that Mr. Rockefeller’s treatment of his strikers had been such that we called upon the President of the United States to confiscate his mines. We discussed that resolution for a couple of hours, and we carried it unanimously! But alas, it happened that Adolf Wolff, an Anarchist sculptor and poet, got up and delivered a tirade, abusing me for having pleaded for free speech with the trustees of Tarrytown. “We shouldn’t plead, we should take!” declared Comrade Wolff. A lady from the South got up and sang negro-songs to pacify the tumultuous meeting, and so the newspapers could make a joke of the whole affair—which they did.
In their last public session with us, the trustees of the village had admitted that there could be no interference with a meeting held upon the strip of property through which ran the city aqueduct—this property being under State control. So now the radicals whose friends were in jail wanted to hold a meeting on this aqueduct property. They asked me to come, but I happened to be ill. Leonard Abbott went with them, also a boy named Arthur Caron, whose story I must briefly tell. Caron had been one of the finest lads who had joined our Broadway demonstrations. He was a French-Canadian, whose wife and baby had starved to death during the Lawrence strike. He had come to New York and taken part in the unemployed demonstration of the previous winter, and the police had arrested him and beaten him in his cell, breaking his nose and one ear-drum. He was a non-resistant, he told us, and had been one of the most useful in helping us to keep our demonstration peaceable. Now he went, at my suggestion, to avail himself of the public assurance given by the Tarrytown trustees, that a meeting on the aqueduct would not be interfered with.