Chapter 10 - "Print The Truth or You Don't Print at All"

Now, what is true of the railroad workers is also true of the newspaper workers. Of course one can hardly imagine any more conservative element to deal with than the railroad workers and the newspaper workers. Sometimes you will read a story in the paper that is so palpably false, a story about strikers that planted dynamite in Lawrence for instance (and it came out in a Boston paper before the dynamite was found), a story of how the Erie trains were "dynamited" by strikers in Paterson; but do you realize that the man who writes that story, the man who pays for that story, the owners and editors are not the ones that put the story into actual print? It is put in print by printers, compositors, typesetters, men who belong to the working class and are members of unions. During the Swedish general strike these workers who belonged to the unions and were operating the papers rebelled against printing lies against their fellow strikers. They sent an ultimatum to the newspaper managers: "Either you print the truth or you'll print no papers at all." The newspaper owners decided they would rather print no paper at all than tell the truth. Most of them would probably so decide in this country, too. The men went on strike and the paper came out a little bit of a sheet, two by four, until eventually they realized that the printers had them by the throat, that they could not print any papers without the printers. They sent for them to come back and told them, "So much of the paper will belong to the strikers and they can print what they please in it."

But other printers have accomplished the same results by sabotage. In Copenhagen once there was a peace conference and a circus going on at the same time. The printers asked for more wages and they didn't get them. They were very sore. Bitterness in the heart is a very good stimulus for sabotage. So they said, "All right, we will stay right at work, boys, but we will do some funny business with this paper, so they won't want to print it tomorrow under the same circumstances." They took the peace conference, where some high and mighty person was going to make an address on international peace and they put that man's speech in the circus news; they reported the lion and the monkey as making speeches in the peace conference and the Honorable Mr. So-and-so doing trapeze acts in the circus. There was great consternation and indignation in the city. Advertisers, the peace conference, the circus protested. The circus would not pay their bill for advertising. It cost the paper as much, eventually, as the increased wages would have cost them, so that they came to the men figuratively on their bended knees and asked them, "Please be good and we will give you whatever you ask." That is the power of interfering with industrial efficiency by bad service. It is not the inefficiency of a poor workman, but the deliberate withdrawal of efficiency by a competent worker.