And now, as this book is going to press, on November 11th, 1919, the Associated Press sends from the town of Centralia, Washington, a series of dispatches telling how I. W. W. members fired from windows of their meeting hall upon an Armistice Day parade of returned soldier-boys. The dispatch does not say directly that the firing was done in cold blood; it simply tells in elaborate detail about the firing, and says not one word about incidents occurring before the firing. It leaves it to be assumed that the firing was done in cold blood, and the whole country does assume that, and a perfect frenzy seizes the returned soldiers and the government authorities; they raid I. W. W. meeting rooms in a hundred places, and beat up the members and throw them into jail. And I who understand the infamies of our Journalism wait patiently, knowing that in due course the truth will begin to leak. And sure enough, three days later comes an Associated Press dispatch from Centralia, Washington, mentioning, quite casually and incidentally, that Dr. Frank Bickford, _one of the marchers_, testified at the coroner’s inquest that “_the former soldiers attacked the I. W. W. hall before any shots were fired_.” And the Hearst service reports the same news with the comment that “no special significance was attached to this testimony”! Later: It appears that the soldiers were battering in the door, and the first shots were fired through it. CHAPTER LIII THE PRESS AND SEX There is a whole field of problems connected with our sex-nature which we are only beginning to explore. Metchnikoff has told us something. Freud and Jung have told us more; but long after we have solved our economic problems we shall still be seeking knowledge about sex. And meantime men and women grope blindly, and are betrayed into entanglements and misunderstandings and cruel miseries. If they happen to be ordinary, respectable citizens, they keep these things under cover. If they are radicals, trying to square their preaching and their practice, they will get into weird and awful predicaments, and then there will be sport for predatory Journalism! I have told you the stories of Maxim Gorky, of George D. Herron, of Upton Sinclair. How many such stories would you care to hear? Would you care to hear about Charlotte Perkins Gilman? About Thorstein Veblen? About Jack London, Reginald Wright Kauffman, Clarence Darrow? About Marion Craig Wentworth, Mary Ware Dennett, Gaylord Wilshire, Oscar Lovell Triggs, George Sterling? This that I am giving you is not a list of the vital spirits of our time; it is merely a list of persons of my acquaintance who happen to have been caught upon the hook of an unhappy marriage, gutted, skinned alive, and laid quivering on the red-hot griddle of Capitalist Journalism.