brought before a jury. But the city editors and managing editors of the Los Angeles newspapers, to whom I took the evidence of this "frame-up," were not moved to any fervors. I was able to get one or two small items published, but I was not able to find a spark of human feeling, nor yet an ideal of public welfare in the management of the journals upon which I called. But suppose that I had gone to them with the news that I was about to build a new million dollar hotel in Los Angeles; or that I had purchased the Catalina Islands, and was about to develop them for tourists; or that I was about to start an airplane service up the coast!
Quite recently a great rubber concern has started a six million dollar factory in Los Angeles; and such ecstasies as seize our papers! Columns and columns, day after day; pictures of the wondrous structure, and of the president of the company—I think I have had the features of this pudgy little person thrust upon me not less than a dozen times! And his ideas—not merely about the rubber business and the commercial prospects of Southern California, but about the League of Nations, and the "Plumb plan" and labor unions and strikes and Bolshevism!
On the other hand, there is a movement now under way to organize the actors in the motion-picture industry in Southern California; and how much space does this get from the Los Angeles newspapers? On August 18, 1919, there was held in the Hollywood Hotel a mass meeting of members of the theatrical profession, to inform them concerning the meaning of the actors' strike in New York, and to solicit donations for the strikers. Not a line about this meeting in any Los Angeles paper! And not a line about the strike of the moving picture workers which came soon afterwards!
Now, as I finish this book, the office of the "Dugout," a returned soldiers' paper, is raided by the Federal authorities. The editor, Sydney R. Flowers, served three years as a volunteer in the Canadian army, was twice wounded, and once gassed. He joined a veterans' organization in Los Angeles, but found it was being courted by the Merchants' and Manufacturers' Association as a strike-breaking agency; so he rebelled, and started a rival organization, and now the "M. and M." plotters have persuaded the government to raid his rooms and break up his propaganda. It happened that I myself was present, and saw the raid, and half a dozen witnesses can
