Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/383

 merely for opposing the profiteers, and they received sentences which, for ferocity, exceed anything in the records of the Russian Tsardom. Some two thousand of them are still in jail, their sentences aggregating twenty-five thousand years.

It would have been a simple matter to persuade the Socialists to support the war. We know today that Nicholas Lenine asked only a promise of support from America, offering to repudiate the Brest-Litovsk treaty and join the war on Kaiserism. As to labor at home, an intelligent army officer showed the way in the Northwest; he gave the lumbermen an eight-hour day, decent living conditions, and generous wages, and so turned the I. W. W. of the spruce country into a patriotic society. But elsewhere the army officers were less intelligent, and the profiteers had their way; in the oil country of Kansas they threw scores of I. W. W. organizers into jail without trial, and held them there for a couple of years. They are holding some thirty of them still, and my mail is full of pitiful letters from poor devils who are asked to raise ten thousand dollars bail. All over the country this was done—in a frenzy of public excitement, deliberately created by the capitalist press.

The story of what the newspapers did to American radicals in this crisis would be unbelievable—if you had not read the rest of this book. Thus, for example, the case of Bannwart, a Boston pacifist, one of a committee which called upon Senator Lodge to protest against the declaration of war. Senator Lodge lost his temper and struck Bannwart in the face; and all over the country went the report that Senator Lodge had been assaulted in his office by a pacifist! The Senator became a national hero; the Boston newspapers printed columns and columns about the incident, and when Bannwart called upon the Senator to admit the truth, he not only refused to admit it, but gave out for publication many telegrams congratulating him upon his heroism. No newspaper would publish Bannwart's side, and he was helpless for two years, until his suit for damages was about to come up in court; then the Senator gave way, and admitted in writing that he had struck the first blow. You have been acquainted with the "Evening Transcript," organ of Boston's aristocracy of wealth and culture, which publishes half-page advertisements of "Harvard Beer 1,000 pure," and full-page advertisements of the arguments of gas company attorneys, and sends out "dope" for the "New