CHAPTER LXI
"BOLSHEVISM" IN AMERICA
And what of those American radicals who have ventured
to protest against this policy, and to expose this campaign of
falsification? Here again it is only a question of how much
space one is willing to give to anecdotes.
My friend Rose Pastor Stokes is a pacifist, under sentence of ten years in jail for pacifist activities; again and again the New York newspapers report her as calling for a bloody revolution in America, and refuse to publish her protest that this is false. You may not like pacifists; I myself admit that during the war I found some of them extremely trying to my patience. But do you believe that the proper way to treat them is to lie about them? Listen to the experiences of Mrs. Stokes on a lecture trip in the Middle West. The "Kansas City Star," a one-time "liberal" paper, sent a special writer to interview her on the laundry-workers' strike then in progress; but finding that this interview put her in a good light, they suppressed it, and sent another reporter to write up her address to the "Women's Dining Club." Says Mrs. Stokes:
The "Star" so garbled and twisted my speech that it was actually
unrecognizable. For example, one of the things I was quoted as having
said was that the Red Cross was a war camouflage. It so happened
that I did not mention the Red Cross during the entire speech.
Then she went to speak in Springfield, Missouri, and the
"Star" had a lurid account of how she had been arrested in
Springfield, and admitted to bail, and has stolen out of the city
at day-break, forfeiting the hundred-dollar bond of a Socialist
comrade. Says Mrs. Stokes:
Except for the arrest, the story was a fabrication. I had left
Springfield at a respectable hour, wholly cleared; and no bond was
forfeited.
She came back to Kansas City, and a "Star" reporter was
sent to interview her; she asked him to deny this Springfield
story, and he turned in a denial, but not a word of it was published.
As a direct result of this newspaper misrepresentation,
