- sion that the "Anarchist writer" is under surveillance by the
Department of Justice; but if I should sue them for libel, they would plead that they meant I was under surveillance by a surgeon!
A couple of weeks later I met young Harwood, and he made an embarrassed apology for the item, explaining that he had turned in to the "Times" a perfectly decent and straight mention of my operation; the article had been rewritten in the "Times" office, and the false headline put on by the managing editor of the paper. The manuscript of the copy that Harwood had turned in had been read in advance by another man who was present at the dinner, Ralph Bayes, formerly city editor of the "Los Angeles Record," so there were two witnesses to the facts.
To call a man an Anarchist at this time was to place him in obloquy and in physical danger. Both Harwood and Bayes were willing to testify to the facts, and I considered the possibility of suing the "Times." I consulted a lawyer who knows Los Angeles conditions intimately, and he said: "If you expect to win this suit, you will have to be prepared to spend many thousands of dollars investigating with detectives the records and opinions of every prospective talesman. The 'Times' will do that—does it regularly in damage-suits. If you don't do it, you will find yourself confronting a jury of Roman Catholics and political crooks. In any case you will have a jury which has no remotest idea of any difference between a Socialist and an Anarchist, so the utmost you could possibly get would be six cents."
A few days later young Harwood came to see me again. He was anxious for me to bring suit, because he was sick of his job. There was a strike of the Pacific Electric Railway employes in Los Angeles. The city, you understand, is celebrated as an "open shop" town, and the "Times" is the propaganda organ of the forces of repression.
"Mr. Sinclair," said Harwood, "I was at the car-barns here in Pasadena all evening yesterday, and not a single car came in. I wrote the facts in my story, and the 'Times' altered it, reporting that the cars had run on schedule every ten minutes."
This is the regular practice of the "Times." All its accounts of strikes are hate-stories, entirely disregarding the facts; all its accounts of political events and conditions, local, state, or national, are class-propaganda. It will write its own
