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 impres-
