The Brass Check: A Study of American JournalismSinclair, Upton
General
The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism
Sinclair, Upton
Associated Press; Journalism -- United States; Press -- United States
It may have been, of course, that there was some one impersonating me. A
friend of mine, a school-teacher, told me the other day that one of her
pupils had assured her quite solemnly that he knew me well; I was a
cripple, and went about in a wheel-chair. Also, I was told by a waiter
in a Los Angeles hotel that a bald-headed man had reserved a table in my
name, and given an elaborate dinner, and that the hotel staff had
thought they were dining me. I am wondering what would have happened in
the newspapers if that bald-headed man had drunk too much champagne, and
had thrown a bottle through one of the dining-room mirrors?
I came back to America, and made an investigation of the Colorado
coal-strike, and so began one of the most sensational episodes of my
life. It is a long story, but I shall tell it in full, because it is not
a personal story, but a story of eleven thousand miners with their wives
and children, living in slavery in lonely mountain fortresses, making a
desperate fight for the rights of human beings, and crushed back into
their slave-pens by all the agencies of capitalist repression.
I had been to Colorado, and knew intimately the conditions. Now the
strike was on, and the miners and their families living in tent-colonies
had been raided, beaten, shot up by gunmen. Finally a couple of
machine-guns had been turned loose on them, their tent-colony at Ludlow
had been burned, and three women and fourteen children had been
suffocated to death. I sat in Carnegie Hall, New York City, amid an
audience of three thousand people, and listened to an account of these
conditions by eye-witnesses; next morning I opened the newspapers, and
found an account in the “New York Call,” a Socialist paper, and two
inches in the “New York World”—and not a line in any other New York
paper!
I talked over the problem with my wife, and we agreed that something
must be done to break this conspiracy of silence. I had trustworthy
information to the effect that young Rockefeller was in charge of what
was going on in Colorado, though he was vigorously denying it at this
time, and continued to deny it until the Walsh commission published his
letters and telegrams to his representatives in Denver. Evidently,
therefore, Mr. Rockefeller was the shining mark at which we must aim. It
happened that one of the speakers at the Carnegie Hall meeting had been
Mrs. Laura G. Cannon, whose husband was an organizer for the United Mine
Workers, and had been thrown into jail by the militia and kept there
without warrant or charge for a considerable time. So we called on Mrs.
Cannon to go with us to the offices of Mr. Rockefeller.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account