Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/438

 raid. The man in charge, I might mention, was C. E. Sebastian, once mayor of the city, prosecuted for a sexual crime, kicked out of office by the people, and now working as a detective for the District Attorney's office!

The first thing this man did was to examine all Flowers' letters—letters on his desk, letters in the drawers of his desk, letters in his pockets. There were some hundred and fifty letters altogether, and they went over them all several times, studying the return addresses on the envelopes. They spent something like an hour and a half at it, and their balked anger was comically evident. In their whispered consultations Flowers heard them mention my name several times, and once he heard Sebastian say: "He's a slick one."

Flowers was haled before the Grand Jury, indicted under the Criminal Syndicalism law, and thrown into jail at once. The authorities fixed the bail at fifteen thousand dollars, which they hoped would be prohibitive, and denied Flowers the right to see his counsel that night. They have taken every scrap of paper belonging to the magazine. They have frightened off one printer and raided another, and so they think they have smashed the "Dugout."

Come to my lawyer's office for a minute and examine this mysterious "Paul" letter. It is a long letter, very abusive and stupid, and I won't waste space on it, except to point out one more of the subtle traps that were placed in it. One sentence denouncing the acts of the government agents adds the phrase: "as I stated in the papers." It so happens that out of the half million population of Los Angeles, just one person had been quoted in the newspapers as protesting against the raid on the "Dugout," and that one person was myself. So when this letter was published, the newspapers would be able to say: Upton Sinclair is carrying a secret correspondence with a pro-German conspirator, using the alias "Paul." But you see, he forgets and puts his name on the envelope! And also he gives himself away in the text of the letter—he identifies himself as the mysterious conspirator!

If you have any doubt that this was the plan, you have only to look at the "Los Angeles Times" next morning; a double-column, front page story about this second raid on the "Dugout," giving the full text of the first "Paul" letter as a part of Flowers' "conspirings" with the enemy—and without any hint that this mysterious "Paul" might be an imaginary