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 CHAPTER LXII

CUTTING THE TIGER'S CLAWS

Every day the chasm between the classes in America grows wider; every day the class struggle grows more intense. Both sides become more conscious, more determined—and so the dishonesty of American Journalism becomes more deliberate, more systematic. And what is to be done? It must be evident to any sensible man that the conditions portrayed in this book are intolerable. Mankind will not consent to be lied to indefinitely.

William Marion Reedy discussed the question ten years ago, and his solution was pamphleteering. We must return to the custom of the eighteenth century, printing and circulating large numbers of leaflets, pamphlets and books. And for the past ten years we have been doing this; the Socialist party, for example, is a machine for the circulating of pamphlets and leaflets, and the holding of public meetings to counteract the knaveries of the capitalist press. There are innumerable other organizations which serve the same purpose: the "People's Council," the "Civil Liberties Bureau," the "International Workers' Defense League," the I. W. W. groups, "The Rand School," the "People's College," the "Young People's Socialist League," the "Intercollegiate Socialist Society." But, obviously, this can only be a temporary solution. The workers of the country are in the condition of a frontier settlement besieged by savage Indians. They defend themselves with such weapons as they find at hand; but sooner or later, it is evident, they will organize a regular force, and invade the woods, and be done with those Indians once for all.

Take the Moyer-Haywood case, the Mooney case, the Ludlow massacre, the Bisbee deportations; and consider what happens. For days, for weeks, perhaps for years, the Associated Press and its thousand newspapers prepare a carefully constructed set of falsehoods, and twenty or thirty million copies per day of these falsehoods are sold to the public. Whereupon men and women of conscience all over the country are driven to protest. They call mass-meetings, they organize