Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/356

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the department-stores served notice upon all the Boston newspapers that if they featured this strike they would get no more Sunday advertising!

Or take the present struggle of the railroad brotherhoods for a living wage. The "Saturday Evening Post" published a series of articles by Edward Hungerford, full of gross falsehoods regarding the wages of railroad workers and managers under the Federal administration. These, mind you, were flat misstatements of facts officially recorded and available to any one. The brotherhoods asked a certain United States railroad administration official to prepare from official records a statement concerning these misrepresentations. This was formally submitted to the "Saturday Evening Post," and was absolutely ignored.

Or take the case of Tom Mooney. The capitalist newspapers of San Francisco tried Tom Mooney, with the help of a million dollar corruption fund, raised by the Merchants and Manufacturers Association of the city. They found him guilty, but the prosecuting authorities didn't have enough evidence to make good the verdict in court, so they manufactured the evidence. Mooney was a Socialist and a well-known labor organizer, so the case was taken up by the Socialists and the unions of the country, and became the great labor issue of the time—all without one word getting into the capitalist newspapers of the East! There were two or three million copy "protest editions" of the "Appeal to Reason" issued—and still not a word about it in the capitalist newspapers outside of California! Finally the Anarchists in Petrograd took up the matter; they attacked the American embassy, and the news was cabled back to New York that the attack was on account of a certain "Tom Muni." The newspapers of New York didn't know anything about the case, and couldn't find out about it in time; they had to publish the name as it came over the cables—thus laying bare their shame to the whole world! Could any writer of farce-comedy have invented a greater satire upon New York Journalism than the fact that it had to get its San Francisco labor-news misspelled from Petrograd?