CHAPTER XXX
THE CONCRETE WALL
I returned to New York, and at a meeting in Berkeley Hall
I told the story of conditions in Colorado. I did not get myself
arrested, however, so the New York newspapers printed only
a few words of what I said, and the Associated Press sent out
nothing. It was again the concrete wall, impenetrable, insurmountable:
on one side I, with my facts about the outrages
upon the miners; and on the other side the public—as far out
of reach as if it had been in the moon.
The greatest atrocity of the strike was the fact, previously set forth, that the state militia in the coal-fields had been recruited from strike-breakers and Baldwin-Felts gunmen. The facts had been refused, even to the state legislature; until finally the legislature appointed a committee to wait upon the militia general and not leave his office until they got the roster of the guard. So it was disclosed that in Company A of the state guard there had been one hundred and twenty-two members, and all but three of them coal-company employes, receiving the pay of coal-companies while they wore the uniform and carried the flag of the state!
It was an incredible prostitution of government; and what did the newspapers do with the story? What did the Associated Press do with it? I was unable to find the story in a single newspaper, outside of Denver. I brought the full-page story clipped from the "Rocky Mountain News" to New York with me, and tried the big New York dailies, and could not get one of them to publish it.
The "Chicago Tribune" had published in full a letter of mine to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., setting forth these facts in detail. Also the "Tribune" had published a very fair and just editorial, headed: "All the Truth," from which I quote:
Facts are charged by Mr. Sinclair—and others, it must be said—which,
if true, are a disgrace to the men responsible and to the community
in which they existed. To ascertain the truth and to deal with
the situation are duties which must be performed. . . . Let us have the
facts about this terrible industrial tragedy, and all the facts. Let us
know the guilty and all the guilty.
