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
In their last public session with us, the trustees of the village had
admitted that there could be no interference with a meeting held upon
the strip of property through which ran the city aqueduct—this property
being under State control. So now the radicals whose friends were in
jail wanted to hold a meeting on this aqueduct property. They asked me
to come, but I happened to be ill. Leonard Abbott went with them, also a
boy named Arthur Caron, whose story I must briefly tell. Caron had been
one of the finest lads who had joined our Broadway demonstrations. He
was a French-Canadian, whose wife and baby had starved to death during
the Lawrence strike. He had come to New York and taken part in the
unemployed demonstration of the previous winter, and the police had
arrested him and beaten him in his cell, breaking his nose and one
ear-drum. He was a non-resistant, he told us, and had been one of the
most useful in helping us to keep our demonstration peaceable. Now he
went, at my suggestion, to avail himself of the public assurance given
by the Tarrytown trustees, that a meeting on the aqueduct would not be
interfered with.
But, as it happened, the “Tarrytown News” was carrying on a furious war
against the village trustees, because of their halfway-decent treatment
of the “agitators”; the “News” wanted us all exterminated, and it called
on the “law-abiding” citizens of the village to assemble at the aqueduct
and stop that meeting. So the speakers were met by a mob of rich men and
chauffeurs, who tooted horns and howled at them, threw rotten vegetables
and sand and stones into their faces, filling their eyes and mouth with
filth and streaming blood. Running through the village toward the
railroad-station, the little group was ridden down by mounted members of
the aqueduct police-force, who pursued them even on board the train, and
clubbed them over the heads when they sought refuge in the seats. These
incidents were described to me by several indignant newspaper reporters,
including my friend Isaac Russell, of the “Times.” But the “Times” cut
out from Russell’s story the incident of the clubbing on the train.
Here was another call for protest; but by this time the Sinclair family
had reached the point of exhaustion. My wife had been a semi-invalid at
the beginning of the affair, and was now near to nervous breakdown. We
had spent every dollar we owned, and a great many that we did not own;
so we were forced to retire, and let the Tarrytown rowdies and their
rowdy newspapers have their way. We remained in New York for a couple of
weeks to straighten our affairs; and on the very day we had planned to
leave for the country, the telephone rang, and my wife answered, and a
voice said: “This is the 100th St. Police Station. Do you know a man
named Arthur Caron?”
Yes, my wife knew Arthur Caron. “What about him?” she asked, and the
voice answered: “We found your name in a note-book in his pocket. Will
you come to the station and identify his body?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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