came out with a formal statement, denouncing the police, and saying that they had acted contrary to his orders!
Or take the experience of A. M. Simons, reporting an International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart, Germany, for the United Press, supposed to be a liberal organization. Simons received a dispatch from the London headquarters of his organization:
Wire three hundred words on probable split of Congress into
Bebelists, Herveists, and Laborites.
And Simons continues:
Now, there was not a single human being in that congress that
ever dreamed there would be a split. The particular question on
which they were supposed to split was passed by a unanimous vote. I
sent a straight news story out. At the close I put these three words
"Split talk rot." Judge of my surprise when I landed in New York
to find that that story of the split of the Socialist Congress had been
carried over the United Press wires to the paper I was serving!
And now, as this book is going to press, on November 11th,
1919, the Associated Press sends from 'the town of Centralia,
Washington, a series of dispatches telling how I. W. W. members
fired from windows of their meeting hall upon an Armistice
Day parade of returned soldier-boys. The dispatch does
not say directly that the firing was done in cold blood; it
simply tells in elaborate detail about the firing, and says not
one word about incidents occurring before the firing. It
leaves it to be assumed that the firing was done in cold blood,
and the whole country does assume that, and a perfect frenzy
seizes the returned soldiers and the government authorities;
they raid I. W. W. meeting rooms in a hundred places, and
beat up the members and throw them into jail. And I who understand
the infamies of our Journalism wait patiently, knowing
that in due course the truth will begin to leak. And sure
enough, three days later comes an Associated Press dispatch
from Centralia, Washington, mentioning, quite casually and
incidentally, that Dr. Frank Bickford, one of the marchers.
testified at the coroner's inquest that "the former soldiers
attacked the I. W. W. hall before any shots were fired." And
the Hearst service reports the same news with the comment
that "no special significance was attached to this testimony"!
Later: It appears that the soldiers were battering in the door, and the first shots were fired through it.
