CHAPTER XXIX
THE SCANDAL-BUREAU
There is one other incident which must be told before I
finish with the subject of Denver, its criminal government and
prostitute newspapers. I had been in Denver before, also I
had read Ben Lindsey's "The Beast"; so I knew, before I
arrived, what I might expect to encounter. Standing in the
Pennsylvania station, bidding my wife farewell, I said: "Let
me give you this warning; whatever you read about me, don't
worry. If there is any scandal, pay no attention to it, for that
is the way they fight in Denver."
And when I reached my destination, I had cause to be glad of my forethought. John Reed, who had just come up from the coal-country, told me of the vile slanders which had been invented and circulated concerning the women of the coal-*fields who had been active in defense of their cause. The scandal-mongers had not even spared a poor, half-crazed Italian woman, whose three babies had been burned to death in the holocaust at Ludlow! Louis Tikas, a young Greek idealist, a graduate of the University of Athens, who had been trying to uplift his people and had been foully murdered by corporation thugs, they blackguarded as a "brothel hanger-on" before his corpse was under ground! John Reed himself they had got involved with a charming young widow in Denver; he had met her twice at dinner-parties! (In passing, to show you how far Colorado had progressed toward civil war, I might mention that this lady, upon learning what had been done to the strikers, sent to the East and purchased two machine-guns and hid them in her cellar, ready to be shipped to the strike-field for use by the strikers in case the militia attempted to return.)
Every Socialist and magazine-writer, even every writer for conservative publications, was taken in hand upon his arrival in Denver, and fitted out with a scandal. So far as I know, the only one who escaped was Harvey O'Higgins—and this because he took the precaution to bring his wife along. I had not brought my wife; also I was a "divorced man," and an
