Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/374



Many strike-breakers imported into the trouble zone have deserted. Today hundreds of these men reached this city from the mining district and walked the streets.

It is especially interesting to note that the date of the dispatch from which the above two paragraphs were cut corresponds exactly with a date when Mr. French, according to his own testimony, sent a special correspondent to Charleston to report the news more fully. He sent a special man, and when this special man sent news favorable to the miners, Mr. French or his assistants sliced out whole chunks from his dispatches—practically everything giving the miners' side!

On September 25,1912, the Associated Press correspondent in Charleston was moved by some unaccountable impulse to tell the world the precise mechanism of the blacklist which the companies maintained—while insisting, of course, that they had never heard of a blacklist. Says the dispatch:

This it was shown was accomplished through a personal description of a miner on the back of house leases. If the miner was dismissed as undesirable other operators were given a copy of the description.

But was this dangerous information allowed to go out to the world? It was not!

Or again, take the dispatch of February 10, 1913, which tells how, whenever the militiamen came after the strikers, the strikers would dodge trouble; they would "defeat the purpose of the authorities by quietly retiring into the mountains." Mr. French's office makes such a slight change; it merely cuts out one word—the word "quietly"—thus turning a joke into a military operation! Or take the night dispatch of April 22, 1913, which tells how the Governor of West Virginia made a speech to the miners' delegates. Among other things the Governor said: "I assure you that the laboring world has no better friend in public office than myself." The Pittsburgh office of the Associated Press cut out this incendiary sentence from the Governor's speech!

A still more illuminating method of approaching the problem is to compare the Associated Press dispatches as they actually reached the public with the facts as developed by sworn testimony of hundreds of witnesses before the Senate committee. I have made many such comparisons; I will give one.