Willmar tribune. [volume] (Willmar, Minn.) 1895-1931, 1920-05-12

the true inwardness Of the railroad
mems strike and how the newspapers
strike. This course OF the press has so
embittered the mass Of the workers.,
especially in New York; and other large
cities. that they have come to fairly
skunk" They absolutely refuse to tell
newspaper men their side Of any story,
declaring that it is no use to tell re-
they say will be distorted or falsely
reported. This widespread feeling Of
hatred toward the press deprives even
those newspapers which try to be fair
Of any influence with the working peo-
pie. The only matter which they will
read is that printed in extremist journ-
ais and circulated in pamphlets. some
OF which are useful and many of which
are far from being useful or sensible
or course the result of all this is to
make make bad feeling worse. and this con-
which has been neither fair nor truth
iul nor even decent.
TO add to this bad condition of af-
fairs. the Postmaster General and his
thing. in their power to hinder the cir
culation and II possible, to destroy the
Very existence of those magazines and
newspapers which have practiced fair
Even the scholarly and altogether ad-
mirable "Nation'-probably best week.
~ publication in America-was held up
by the post office authorities because
commission headed by Sam Gompers
Another instance of this petty postof-
nee tyranny came to my attention this
week Art Young, the cartoonist and
humorlst, has begun to publish a week.
~ called Good Morning." In his first
issue Art offered prize for the best
suggestion of comic cartoon, and the
petty bureaucratic tyrant who presides
over the Second-Class Mail Department
in New York. debarred Good Morning"
from the mails on the ground that this
otfer to pay a cash prize to the person
making the cleverest suggestion for a
cartoon was lottery. II seems hard
to believe that even Mr.. Burlesons pos
tai service could harbor a head so en-
tlrely made of bone as this. But it
does.
This petty and unconstitutional and
offensive tyranny Of the bureaucrats of
the postal service is one of the things
that the people will not forget next
sib1y become heads of the Postoffice
Department in years to come, but the
people are going to see to it that the
next Congress deprives any future pos
tai bureaucrats of the power to injure
and to destroy the liberal press.
I may write too much about the con-
subserviency to the big interests; about
the unconstitutional and un-American
abridSement of the liberty of speech
and of printing; and about the way in
which You people are constantly mis-
informed and deceived. But to my mind
this is the most dangerous menace which
threatens the safety of our institutions
and the liberties of the land and it's
| people at the present time. And if l
can only wake YOU up to the truth that
nine tenths of the stuff which is sent
out by the controlled news agencies and
printed in the controlled and subsidized
newspapers of the great cities is de-
liberately colored and distorted and fall
sitied in order to deceive you as to the
true facts and to mislead YOU into
wrong conclusions and into voting
wrong. I shall feel that I have done
which an honest man owes to his coun-
try.
You were lied to before the war and
during the war and since the war And
that is exactly the reason why the
whole country is in the perplexed and
terrible condition that it is TO-DAY @' If
your newspapers had told you the truth
ana your Government had defended you
from foreign propaganda, both German
ana Allied. as it should have done, the
United States would be today the rich
est ana most prosperous and happiest
natlon that the sun ever shone on. That
water OF course has gone over the
wheel and there is no use wasting time
in crying over it. But there ought to
be common sense enough among the
whole million of us to put an end to
an abominable condition of censorship
suosldlzed and lying press, and estab-
llsh some means of giving to the people
the truth about events as they happen
II L am not mistaken that is going to
be one OF the real big issues of Ameri-
can politics IN the very near future.