annual report of the Secretary-Treasurer of the United Mine Workers, which showed that the national vice-president of the union in charge of the Colorado strike had received a yearly salary of $2,395.72 and a year's expenses of $1,667.20. He put these two figures together, calling it all salary, $4,062.92; and then he added the expenses again, making a total of $5,730.12; and then he said that all this had been paid to the national vice-president for nine weeks' work on the strike—thus showing that he was paid over ninety dollars a day, or at the rate of thirty-two thousand dollars a year!
By the same method, he showed that another official was paid sixty-six dollars a day; that John R. Lawson had received $1,773.40 in nine weeks! Old "Mother" Jones was listed at forty-two dollars a day; the actual fact being that for her work as organizer she was paid $2.57 a day—and this not including the many months which she spent in jail for refusing to leave the strike-district! The "bulletin" containing these figures was published in all the newspapers, and was mailed out over the country to the extent of hundreds of thousands of copies; and when the miners exposed the falsity of the statements, "Poison Ivy" postponed correcting them until the strike was lost, and until he knew that the Walsh Commission was on his trail! Thirty-two separate "bulletins" this scoundrel sent out over the United States, and many of them were full of just such lies as this. If you want details, you may consult two articles by George Creel in "Harper's Weekly," for November 7th and 14th, 1914.
There are thousands of such press agents serving our predatory interests, but not often are we permitted to peer into their inmost souls, to watch them at their secret offices. The Walsh Commission was so cruel as to put "Poison Ivy" on the stand, and also to publish his letters to his master. An examination of these letters shows him performing functions not usually attributed to press-agents. We see him preparing and revising a letter for Governor Ammons to send to President Wilson. (You remember, perhaps, in my story of Governor Ammons, my charge that the coal operators wrote his lying telegram to the President? Maybe you thought that was just loose talk!) We see "Poison Ivy" arranging for the distribution of an enormous edition of a speech on the Colorado coal-strike by the "kept" congressmen of the coal-operators—the speech containing "Polly Pry," with the slanders against
