silk-strikers, the writer was an eye-witness to the following scene: A reporter, whose identity we were unable to learn, in the basement of the Garden hurriedly printed the following words on an improvised banner, "No God and No Master, I. W. W." One of the illiterate strikers was asked to hold the banner aloft and pose while a newspaper photographer was taking a flashlight photo.
This Paterson pageant was a result of the effort of a few
literary men and women in New York, who saw the shameless
lying of the press and the shameless violation of law by the
authorities in Paterson. A group of people, including Ernest
Poole, Hutchins Hapgood, Leroy Scott, John Reed, Thompson
Buchanan, Margaret Sanger, and myself worked for weeks,
giving all our time and energy and a great deal of money, and
brought about a thousand strikers to New York City to rehearse
the story of their sufferings before an audience in
Madison Square Garden. This was so sensational that the
newspapers could not suppress it; therefore what they did
was to ridicule and betray it. They always make out that
labor-movements are rolling in wealth, and that "agitators"
are making fortunes. In this case they said that we were
planning to finance the strike by this pageant. Every newspaper
man knew this was absurd, for they knew the seating
capacity of the Garden and could figure the possible gross
receipts. The enterprise suffered a deficit of one or two thousand
dollars; so of course the poor, starving strikers, who had
read in the newspapers that they were to be "financed," were
bitterly disappointed. The "New York Times" thus had a
chance for a story to the effect that the strikers were accusing
us of having robbed them; and this while we were engaged in
making up the deficit out of our own pockets!
Or take the Lawrence strike. I have told the story of how conspirators of the great Woolen Trust planted dynamite in the homes of strike-breakers as a "frame-up" to discredit the strikers. The man who was convicted of this was a school commissioner and a prominent Catholic, a close friend of the mill-owners. When this dynamite was found, the Associated Press sent the story fully. When the plot was exposed, it sent almost nothing. These statements were made publicly at a conference at the University of Wisconsin by A. M. Simons, and never challenged by the Associated Press. And at this same conference it was stated by George French that
