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 had been agreed by the trustees of Tarrytown that while we might not
tell about the Ludlow massacre at a street-meeting, we might tell about
it at a meeting in a theatre or hall. I set out to find a theatre or
hall, but there was no theatre or hall that could be rented for that
purpose. I then went up on the heights, where the Rockefellers live, and
appealed to the sense of fair play of Mr. Rockefeller’s neighbors. This
is the Pocantico hills country, a line of magnificent estates and
palatial homes, of which you see pictures in the “Sunday supplements.”
You might have thought it poor territory for radical propaganda;
nevertheless, I was able to persuade one of the residents, Mrs. Charles
J. Gould, to allow the use of her open-air theatre for a meeting in
defense of free speech. Imagine, if you can, the excitement of the New
York newspapers, when they learned that there was to be an I. W. W.
meeting—so they called it—in an open-air theatre on a millionaire estate
almost next door to the Rockefellers!
We held the meeting, attended by some three hundred people of the town,
rich and poor, including a number of laborers from young Mr.
Rockefeller’s estate. John W. Brown, organizer of the United
Mine-workers, told the story of the strike, and we moved a resolution
that it was the sense of the meeting that Mr. Rockefeller’s treatment of
his strikers had been such that we called upon the President of the
United States to confiscate his mines. We discussed that resolution for
a couple of hours, and we carried it _unanimously_! But alas, it
happened that Adolf Wolff, an Anarchist sculptor and poet, got up and
delivered a tirade, abusing me for having pleaded for free speech with
the trustees of Tarrytown. “We shouldn’t plead, we should take!”
declared Comrade Wolff. A lady from the South got up and sang
negro-songs to pacify the tumultuous meeting, and so the newspapers
could make a joke of the whole affair—which they did.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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