Mr. Palmer’s answer was that he was forbidden to give official opinions on anything before publication, but he would be very glad to give me a personal, unofficial opinion. I answered that I would regard this as a favor, and Mr. Palmer read the manuscript. No doubt he spoke about it to others, and the “Times” must have heard of the matter. Some months later appeared the following paragraph on the editorial page of the “Times”:
Upton Sinclair has stuck his fingers in the Tom Mooney mess. Sinclair has dropped his pen that for some time has been engaged in preparing the manuscript of a book whose loyalty had to be passed on by the United States District-Attorney, and is therefore in a position to sympathize with those who might run afoul of the law.
Now, note the subtle treachery of this phrasing. The loyalty of my manuscript “had to” be passed on. Practically everybody who read that paragraph would understand from it that the government had taken some action in the matter, had placed me under compulsion to submit the manuscript. Nobody would get the impression that the compulsion in the matter was the compulsion of my own conscience and judgment, my wish to make sure that my piece of fiction was not open to misunderstanding. Needless to say, the “Times” didn’t mention the fact that Mr. Palmer, having read the manuscript, wrote cordially to assure me that there was no possibility of its being misunderstood, and no need of any changes being made.
Case two—and still more significant:
It happened a year or more ago that I had to undergo an operation for appendicitis. I requested the authorities at the hospital not to give out news about this operation, because I do not care to have purely personal matters exploited in the papers. Thus it was a couple of weeks later, after I was out of the hospital, before anything was known about my operation. A friend of mine called me on the phone to ask if I would meet the Pasadena correspondent of the “Times,” Robert Harwood, a decent young fellow who was trying to learn to write. I said that I could not meet him at that time, because I had just come out of the hospital. My friend explained these circumstances to Harwood, and Harwood sent in a news item, which appeared next morning under the headline: “Anarchist Writer in Hospital.”
Now, of course, the editors of the “Times” know perfectly well that I am not an Anarchist. When they call me an Anarchist, they do it merely to hurt me. When in war-time they add the words: “Sinclair is still under surveillance,” they mean, of course, that their readers shall derive the impression that the “Anarchist writer” is under surveillance by the Department of Justice; but if I should sue them for libel, they would plead that they meant I was under surveillance by a surgeon!
A couple of weeks later I met young Harwood, and he made an embarrassed apology for the item, explaining that he had turned in to the “Times” a perfectly decent and straight mention of my operation; the article had been rewritten in the “Times” office, and the false headline put on by the managing editor of the paper. The manuscript of the copy that Harwood had turned in had been read in advance by another man who was present at the dinner, Ralph Bayes, formerly city editor of the “Los Angeles Record,” so there were two witnesses to the facts.
To call a man an Anarchist at this time was to place him in obloquy and in physical danger. Both Harwood and Bayes were willing to testify to the facts, and I considered the possibility of suing the “Times.” I consulted a lawyer who knows Los Angeles conditions intimately, and he said: “If you expect to win this suit, you will have to be prepared to spend many thousands of dollars investigating with detectives the records and opinions of every prospective talesman. The ‘Times’ will do that—does it regularly in damage-suits. If you don’t do it, you will find yourself confronting a jury of Roman Catholics and political crooks. In any case you will have a jury which has no remotest idea of any difference between a Socialist and an Anarchist, so the utmost you could possibly get would be six cents.”
A few days later young Harwood came to see me again. He was anxious for me to bring suit, because he was sick of his job. There was a strike of the Pacific Electric Railway employes in Los Angeles. The city, you understand, is celebrated as an “open shop” town, and the “Times” is the propaganda organ of the forces of repression.
“Mr. Sinclair,” said Harwood, “I was at the car-barns here in Pasadena all evening yesterday, and not a single car came in. I wrote the facts in my story, and the ‘Times’ altered it, reporting that the cars had run on schedule every ten minutes.”