CHAPTER LXI

"BOLSHEVISM" IN AMERICA

And what of those American radicals who have ventured to protest against this policy, and to expose this campaign of falsification? Here again it is only a question of how much space one is willing to give to anecdotes.

My friend Rose Pastor Stokes is a pacifist, under sentence of ten years in jail for pacifist activities; again and again the New York newspapers report her as calling for a bloody revolution in America, and refuse to publish her protest that this is false. You may not like pacifists; I myself admit that during the war I found some of them extremely trying to my patience. But do you believe that the proper way to treat them is to lie about them? Listen to the experiences of Mrs. Stokes on a lecture trip in the Middle West. The "Kansas City Star," a one-time "liberal" paper, sent a special writer to interview her on the laundry-workers' strike then in progress; but finding that this interview put her in a good light, they suppressed it, and sent another reporter to write up her address to the "Women's Dining Club." Says Mrs. Stokes:

The "Star" so garbled and twisted my speech that it was actually unrecognizable. For example, one of the things I was quoted as having said was that the Red Cross was a war camouflage. It so happened that I did not mention the Red Cross during the entire speech.

Then she went to speak in Springfield, Missouri, and the "Star" had a lurid account of how she had been arrested in Springfield, and admitted to bail, and has stolen out of the city at day-break, forfeiting the hundred-dollar bond of a Socialist comrade. Says Mrs. Stokes:

Except for the arrest, the story was a fabrication. I had left Springfield at a respectable hour, wholly cleared; and no bond was forfeited.

She came back to Kansas City, and a "Star" reporter was sent to interview her; she asked him to deny this Springfield story, and he turned in a denial, but not a word of it was published. As a direct result of this newspaper misrepresentation,