The confusion of thought which is at the bottom of these vagaries has been strikingly illustrated in connection with two matters upon which it may be profitable to dwell at some length. In both instances, the trouble is in part due to misinformation, or misconception of the facts; but in both instances the misinformation, or misconception, is inextricably bound up with the confusion of thought.
Closely allied to the false notion we have been discussing of what constitutes suppression of free speech by the authorities is the false notion, even more prevalent, of what constitutes suppression of the news by the newspapers. That there are some items of news that do not get the degree of publicity to which they are entitled may be quite true; and as regards the treatment by some newspapers of some whole classes of items, the accusation may be entirely justified. But that there exists anything like wholesale suppression of news, among the newspapers of the country generally, and especially by the Associated Press, is a charge absolutely without foundation. Regarded as a matter of large and fundamental public interest—not as a mere matter of ordinary criticism, dealing with imperfections of execution rather than with wrongfulness of intent—the question simply lapses for want of body to the accusation. The things charged as suppressions are so trivial in amount, in comparison with the vast mass of matter of precisely the same, or graver, nature carried in the papers, that the idea of the so-called suppression being anything more than defect in execution—even though sometimes due to the dishonesty of individuals and not always to accident or want of adequate equipment—should be peremptorily dismissed by any man who is accessible to ordinary argument on the subject.
But in the minds of its chief exponents, the idea that there exists a wholesale and systematic suppression of news in the interest of conservatism does not rest upon the omission, or the misrepresentation, of specific items in the record of what are generally regarded as the day’s happenings. Their conviction that the newspapers are guilty of a great and systematic crime against the truth cannot be overcome by any such comparison as I have indicated; simply because the scale of values which they habitually use is fundamentally different from the scale which is current in the community at large. To their minds, the one absorbing concern of mankind is to end the iniquities of the existing economic order; and accordingly, the ordinary news of the day is utterly trivial in comparison with anything that bears upon the social revolution which they are sure is impending. Now it would be perfectly possible to fill many columns of a newspaper every day with matter of this kind—indeed there would be no difficulty in making up an entire newspaper of nothing else. The world is very big—even the United States, even New York city, is very big; and a diligent search for tales of evil, of hardship, of injustice, of rapacity, of poverty, would be amply rewarded any day in the year. Moreover, there are strikes, little and big, in the thousands of industrial and mining centres; there is every now and then the formation of a Socialist club or the starting of a little Socialist newspaper; and then there are speeches, and meetings, and what not. From the point of view of the man who is convinced that the present order of society is on its last legs, and that the supreme duty of the journalist is to expose its rottenness, these are the things with which our papers ought to be filled, instead of the idle chatter about politics and business. This opinion they are, of course, fully entitled to entertain; but their charge that the newspapers suppress the news is essentially based on the notion that the owners or editors of the papers are themselves of that opinion, but have not the honesty or the courage to act upon it. And this is too absurd to call for denial.
The other illustration that I have in mind arises out of the history of the Chicago Anarchists of 1886. There has gradually spread throughout the country a notion that the execution of the four anarchist agitators who were hanged for instigation of the slaughter of the policemen in Haymarket Square was little better than a judicial murder. This opinion is expressed in only a little more extreme form than that which is widely current, by Charles Edward Russell (late Socialist candidate for Governor of New York) when he says:
The eight men were convicted, nominally by the jury, in reality by a misinformed public opinion resolutely bent upon having a hanging. Anything more like the spirit of a lynching I have never known under the forms of law.
That a man of Mr. Russell’s type should talk in this way is natural enough; but it is truly regrettable that an impression approximating this should be widely entertained among persons of intelligence and soberness, and having no sympathy at all with the Socialist, not to speak of the Anarchist, movement. The explanation of this phenomenon is to be found in part in the absence of knowledge of the actual facts; but it is to be found in at least equal measure in the failure to grasp the essential character, and the natural and rational limits, of the right of free speech.
At a time of great public excitement, arising in connection with a strike, a bomb was thrown into the midst of a platoon of policemen, wounding sixty-six of them, seven of whom died of their wounds. The men who were tried and convicted of this murder had, every one of them, been engaged in anarchist agitation; they had, every one of them, been members of a revolutionary society; the two most conspicuous were active promoters of a propaganda of violence as editors of revolutionary sheets and as public speakers. But it was not on these general grounds that the men were convicted. What was proved at the trial, to the satisfaction of the twelve jurymen and of the judge, was that these men were guilty of direct incitement to the precise kind of act that was actually committed—the killing of policemen as the defenders of the rights of property and the maintainers of law and order. Now the trouble with the tender-minded people who so easily accept the view that the executed Anarchists were martyrs of free speech and victims of something like lynch law is that they never ask themselves the question whether, in point of fact, these men were really instigators of the crime in the sense required by the law to make them murderers, or were not. The trial lasted nearly six weeks; it was perfectly orderly; and this question—the question of whether these men were legally guilty of murder—was put before the jury in the sharpest possible way by the judge. It was that question which they decided; it was upon that question that Judge Gary, who presided over the trial, declared, in a remarkable and convincing article written seven years later and published in the Century Magazine, that the verdict was absolutely sound, and involved no stretching of the law. Finally, it should be remembered above all—and yet it is constantly forgotten—that the Supreme Court of Illinois, a year after the trial, sustained the proceedings in a unanimous judgment; its opinion, covering 150 pages of the Illinois reports, being an exhaustive review not only of the law, but also of the facts of the case. To speak of a trial so conducted, and stamped with such approval, as being a proceeding in the nature of a lynching, is not only preposterous, but impudent.
In the foregoing discussion, and in the illustrations that have been adduced, what I have chiefly endeavored to bring out is the unreasonableness, and the practical absurdity, of the unthinking view which passes current with many for the noble and rational doctrine of freedom of speech and of the press. It may be well to add, in conclusion, a few words on a broader aspect of the matter. Just as religion may be made repulsive and odious by narrowness and bigotry; just as scientific or philosophic thought may be perverted by a spirit of intolerant dogmatism; so a high and inspiring doctrine of human conduct and polity may degenerate into an object of merited contempt when divorced from those considerations upon which its justification rests, and erected into a mere formula, to be followed with superstitious servility. That the absurdities which have been put forward in the name of the doctrine of free speech will actually have the effect of thus degrading and discrediting that doctrine, is not likely; but it is not likely only because common sense and sound feeling may be counted on to keep the folly from spreading. Yet it is the duty of men of light and leading to make clear their own position on the subject whenever it comes conspicuously to the front. They can in no better way serve the permanent interests of the cause of true freedom of speech than by showing, beyond the possibility of mistake, their contempt for the cheap counterfeit of it. In all the clamor that has been set up by the Bouck Whites and the Berkmans and the Upton Sinclairs, has any one pointed to a single doctrine that has been suppressed, a single teacher that has been silenced, a single truth, or alleged truth, that the authorities have endeavored to stifle? Time was when the champions of free speech have had to fight in order that men who had a message to deliver should have a chance to deliver it; what these make-believe apostles and martyrs have to fight for now is a chance to be suppressed. Nobody asks what it was that Bouck White or Becky Edelson wanted to say; what they ask is how he came to be dragged out of a church, or how she came to be arrested for being disorderly. And nobody asks the former question for two reasons—first, that the newspapers freely print what these people have to say; and secondly, that what they have to say is utterly familiar and commonplace. Suppression is not, with them, an obstacle to the spread of their teachings; on the contrary, it is their chief stock-in-trade, their sole claim to the attention of the public. What has elevated the doctrine of freedom of opinion and of speech to the lofty place which it holds in the estimation of mankind is the conviction, slowly acquired through ages of physical and spiritual struggle, that by that freedom can best be served the cause of truth, and hence the advancement of humanity. But with this neither the vulgar stage business of the New York Anarchists of today, nor the crazy appeals to the pistol and the bomb of the Chicago Anarchists of 1886, has anything whatever to do. To identify either with the great historic doctrine of free speech is to debase the intellectual and moral coinage of the race.