Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/274

 "SOCIALISTS HOPE TO COMMUNIZE U. S. GIRLS, CLAIM."

The "Chicago Tribune" is in politics you see; and like Richard Croker, it is working for its own pocket all the time. Let us hear William Marion Reedy, a journalist of forty years' training:

In Chicago there is the case of two great newspapers, one of them Republican and the other Independent, which have been found clearly guilty of robbery of the school children of that city. Through the connivance of a school board, one of the members of which was an attorney for one of these newspapers, the land occupied by both these journals, in the very heart of the business center of Chicago, was leased to these great institutions for the moulding of public opinion, on a basis of a site-value absolutely absurd and ridiculous, and upon terms very much lower than those granted on similar lands to other lease-holders in the same neighborhood. This favor exacted of a public body, and at public expense was given solely through fear of attack by, or desire to stand well with the publications in question. When there came into power in the school board, under Mayor Dunne, a number of men who could not be reached by political or other interests, and these men attempted to set aside the outrageous lease in question, both these papers began a crusade against the honesty and intelligence of the school board, and developed the campaign into one for the election of a mayor who would oust these school board members who tried to win back the property for the school children. They rallied to their support all the corrupt and vicious element of the Chicago slums, likewise the forces that could be controlled by the street railways and other public service corporations, elected the mayor, and turned the honest members of the school board out of office. They have since been reinstated, but not until the corporation Mayor had appointed a sufficient number of "safe and sane" friends of the powers that be, to block any effort that might be made by the honest members to secure from these great publications a just compensation for the use of the land belonging to the public schools of Illinois and Chicago.

Reedy omits to give us the names of these two Chicago newspapers. As I am dealing with names in this book, I state that one of them is the most "respectable" of all Chicago's newspapers, the "Tribune," which carries on its front page the legend: "The World's Greatest Newspaper." The other is the most "liberal" of all Chicago's newspapers, the "Daily News," owned by Victor F. Lawson, who is generally cited as the one among the fifteen directors of the Associated Press who has any trace of progressive sympathy.