Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/189

 Three days later the "Chicago Tribune" took up my definite charges concerning the guard. It said:

If, as he asserts, the Adjutant General's report shows any such abuse of the guard, the situation calls for prompt rebuke and effective action, if such action is possible under our laws We suggest the National Guard take cognizance of the above allegations of Sinclair, and if they are substantiated by the Adjutant General of Colorado that the guard publicly protest against the abuse.

Five days after that the "Chicago Tribune" published a letter from P. A. Wieting of Denver, as follows:

Referring to your editorial "Abusing the Guard," in your issue of June 5. If Upton Sinclair said that the official records of Adjutant General Chase showed that an overwhelming majority of the Colorado militia were mine guards and other employes of the coal companies, he deliberately lied. Mr. Chase's records showed nothing of the sort, and could not; for the statement is absolutely false and absurd. The National Guard of Colorado is made up like in other states, of young business and professional men, students, farmer boys and the like, and includes the sons of many of our best families.

It is surprising that a paper of the standing of the "Tribune" should accept offhand such a preposterous charge against a great state made by a professional muckraker. If you still entertain the slightest belief in Sinclair's foolish charge, any banker, any reputable business man, any college president in Colorado will tell you, as I do, that the man who made the statement quoted lied and knew that he lied.

Now here was a direct issue of fact. If P. A. Wieting were a real person, living in Denver, Colorado, and if he read a morning newspaper, he must have read the "Rocky Mountain News," because that was the only morning newspaper published in Denver. And on the entire front page of the "Rocky Mountain News" had been published the roster of Company A of the Colorado state militia, as given to the press by a committee of the state legislature, also a report of this committee of the legislature, giving all the facts as to these members of Company A, the capacity in which one hundred and nineteen out of one hundred and twenty-two of them were employed by the coal-operators or the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, and the wages they were paid by these concerns. The evidence was as complete and as authoritative as it was possible for evidence to be; and therefore, when P. A. Wieting wrote this letter to the "Chicago Tribune," deliberately accusing me of deliberate lying, he was deliberately lying himself.

I thought, of course, that the "Tribune," having taken a brave stand and called for the truth, really wanted the truth,