It happened a year or more ago that I had to undergo an operation for appendicitis. I requested the authorities at the hospital not to give out news about this operation, because I do not care to have purely personal matters exploited in the papers. Thus it was a couple of weeks later, after I was out of the hospital, before anything was known about my operation. A friend of mine called me on the phone to ask if I would meet the Pasadena correspondent of the “Times,” Robert Harwood, a decent young fellow who was trying to learn to write. I said that I could not meet him at that time, because I had just come out of the hospital. My friend explained these circumstances to Harwood, and Harwood sent in a news item, which appeared next morning under the headline: “_Anarchist Writer in Hospital_.” Now, of course, the editors of the “Times” know perfectly well that I am not an Anarchist. When they call me an Anarchist, they do it merely to hurt me. When in war-time they add the words: “Sinclair is still under surveillance,” they mean, of course, that their readers shall derive the impression that the “Anarchist writer” is under surveillance by the Department of Justice; but if I should sue them for libel, they would plead that they meant I was under surveillance by a surgeon! A couple of weeks later I met young Harwood, and he made an embarrassed apology for the item, explaining that he had turned in to the “Times” a perfectly decent and straight mention of my operation; the article had been rewritten in the “Times” office, and the false headline put on by the managing editor of the paper. The manuscript of the copy that Harwood had turned in had been read in advance by another man who was present at the dinner, Ralph Bayes, formerly city editor of the “Los Angeles Record,” so there were two witnesses to the facts. To call a man an Anarchist at this time was to place him in obloquy and in physical danger. Both Harwood and Bayes were willing to testify to the facts, and I considered the possibility of suing the “Times.” I consulted a lawyer who knows Los Angeles conditions intimately, and he said: “If you expect to win this suit, you will have to be prepared to spend many thousands of dollars investigating with detectives the records and opinions of every prospective talesman. The ‘Times’ will do that—does it regularly in damage-suits. If you don’t do it, you will find yourself confronting a jury of Roman Catholics and political crooks. In any case you will have a jury which has no remotest idea of any difference between a Socialist and an Anarchist, so the utmost you could possibly get would be six cents.” A few days later young Harwood came to see me again. He was anxious for me to bring suit, because he was sick of his job. There was a strike of the Pacific Electric Railway employes in Los Angeles. The city, you understand, is celebrated as an “open shop” town, and the “Times” is the propaganda organ of the forces of repression.