EDITORIALS

TAWNEY'S "ADMISSION" AND TAINTED NEWS ON JULY 19, about noon, the following news bulletin was received in the editorial offices of all the newspapers in the country that use the Associated Press...

...Here was news indeed...
...He said that Mr...
...Washington, July 19.—Editors: In Congress story Tawney statement insert following after first paragraph: " 'How much did Heney receive during the year 1908?' demanded Mr...
...And lastly, the recall was used to force Mayor Harper out of office for making important appointments that met with popular disapproval,— and for ether serious shortcomings,—and enabled the people to put in his place Mayor Alexander, a man who is really representing the people...
...No other interpretation of the dispatch was possible...
...It is the old rule that speech is free...
...The conditions that brought the recall into action in Los Angeles are not unusual...
...Hamid evidently found the business of ruling Turkey a most profitable enterprise...
...forms were unlocked, presses were halted, and into the early editions went the astonishing disclosure, with flaming prominence...
...The people know how to make use of it, and whenever they have done so, it has not failed them...
...Of course he had not performed any services during that year...
...Perhaps an answer may be suggested in the following paragraph from the San Francisco Call of the 20th...
...Again the big news flashed over the wires...
...The arrest of two hundred men for complicity in an anti-Diaz riot in the city of Mexico, would seem to prove that those are right wh© claim that the quiet of Mexico under Diaz is the quiet of terror and repression rather than of content...
...Tawney...
...The occasions for using the recall in Los Angeles are significant...
...Francis J. Heney—the foe of corruption, the mighty graft prosecutor, the reformer, the martyr to civic decency—officially accused of fraud—charged with grafting...
...Think what meat this was for the machine and corporation papers—papers owned or controlled by some of the "men higher up," whom Heney has been striving to bring within reach of the law...
...but it should be remembered that it is only within recent years that the right to do this would have been denied by anyone, and that the very right accorded by Judge Baker is conferred by statute in England...
...It forced an appointment on merit...
...If the public utility corporations control, it is absurd to expect them to lower their own charges...
...There is enough power available to furnish light and power to thousands of users all over the city...
...Three times the people of Los Angeles used this "instrument of representative democracy" to protect their interests from bad officials...
...And millions of trustful readers, from coast to coast, had a severe jolt given to their faith in the sincerity and integrity of this particular reformer, and, incidentally, of every other "soldier of the common good...
...Heney has not performed any active service for the last three years...
...Part of it had been paid...
...But at that his accumulation shows him to be old-fashioned...
...Bleriot's Crossing of the Channel THE flight of Louis Bleriot across the English Channel in an airship gives him fame...
...It was a rare tid-bit...
...Aldriches and McEnerys COLLIER'S magazine of July 24 contains an article by Mark Sullivan under the title "Democrats and Some Near-Democrats," which shows in a graphic manner how some of the Democratic Senators broke away from the principles of their party and became henchmen for "Boss" Ad-drich...
...That is, strikers have the right peacefully and without threats to labor with those still working, or with strike-breakers...
...The first bulletin was confirmed...
...This is a much more significant fact than Bleriot's spectacular and intrepid feat...
...Of course he had received the $23,000 during that year,—but apparently without any apology from Uncle Sam or Mr...
...The story of these victories is told on another page of this magazine by Charles Dwight Willard...
...One of them saved the trust $29,000,000 in fines...
...England is merely a high spot in a universal ocean of air in which swim machines carrying men—and maybe armed men...
...Tawney's "frank admission" as to scatter broadcast doubt in the minds of its millions of readers respecting the integrity of Mr...
...No one who reads it can fail to be impressed anew with the fact that the recall, as an agency of government, is thoroughly practical, and that it operates to make "people's rule" a reality...
...Why should the Associated Press have so transmitted the news of Mr...
...Sullivan tabulated the Democratic votes on the various schedules of the tariff bill in such manner that his readers may see at a glance what Democrats voted with Aldrich and how often they did so...
...He is one of the choice band of first-doers...
...Willard: "The net result of the recall episode is to give the city of Los Angeles a good mayor in the place of a bad one, to put the police force on a policy ef honesty and ability, to clean up the city generally, and to endear the recall more than ever to the voters of that municipality...
...First, the voters of the Sixth ward used it to put out of office their councilman who had voted to give the machine Republican newspaper the city printing at a figure of $15,000 above that bid by the anti-machine and independent journals...
...If the people govern, it is a poor reason...
...The historic Channel, the "narrow seas" in which the Armada met its fall, the watery bulwark of British insularity, the thing which made Britain an "alter orbis" and kept her—as she thought, at least—peculiar and distinctive, was for the first time crossed in just the way the same system of transportation would adopt in overpassing any other twenty miles...
...This is the striking thing...
...So out came the biggest headline...
...It is reported that ex-Sultan Abdul Hamid has deposited with the German Imperial Bank the sum of £T5,000,000...
...Murphy, democrat, of Missouri, 'and what service did he perform?' " 'He received $23,000 and performed no service for the government whatever during that year,' said Mr...
...It opened the eyes of the old-line politicians to a new order of things, where the people have a voice and will not permit offices to be handed out as plums to faithful henchmen...
...He was appointed November 7, 1903, and his active service continued for about three years and for which he received in all $69,000.'" So that was all there was to Mr...
...Let the Organs of Glorified Greed play their liveliest tune...
...The balance due was not paid until the year 1908...
...Zeppelin has sailed more than 800 miles without landing, in an airship capable of carrying twenty men and of mounting a machine-gun with which files of troops might be wiped out like a row of dolls swept by the stream from a garden hose...
...Heney and his good work for clean government will not suffer—at least not as much aa those who did the job had hoped...
...Heney's services to the government...
...The unlucky Latham, weeping with chagrin at being forestalled, mourned a real loss to the lover of reputation...
...Thanks to the loose manner in which the "frank admission" was made and reported, however, Mr...
...With aerial navigation a fact, Great Britain is no longer an island...
...This table is here reproduced...
...Well, that depends on who governs Chicago...
...Says Mr...
...The Call uses the Associated Press service...
...Now we have in mind a city where the recall was actually put into operation...
...Heney's course was run...
...They may be duplicated in every city of the country...
...Because it would cut down the prices to users...
...Out with the big headlines once more...
...But in how many cities are the people in a position to prevent ignorant or corrupt officials from giving away immensely valuable privileges to private corporations for nothing, or from loading down the police department with grafters and law breakers, or from turning the business of the city over to the exploitation of a few favored individuals...
...There it compelled the council to appoint a police marshall who had the confidence of the people...
...The recall was not actually used in this case, but the mere threat to use it did the work...
...Tawney for making him wait so long for it...
...Tawney's "frank admission...
...Any one of the tariff-fattened Trusts in control at Washington could have shown him a "get-rich-quicker" system that would put the slow methods of the Mohammedan sovereign to shame...
...This is, perhaps, the most significant and pregnant fact of the age...
...Let the merry Brethren of the Order of Graft all join hands and circle 'round...
...Then, an hour or so later, came a third bulletin...
...At that time we were thinking of Des Moines' experience with it...
...Why isn't it used...
...Heney, and in the nobility of personal sacrifice for the common good, bow their heads in grief...
...Somebody worked the Associated Press yesterday on behalf of the San Francisco graft defense, but it was done so clumsily that the pro-Calhoun organs will not be able to do much damage with the bogus ammunition thus provided...
...Subsequently Mr...
...Later in the afternoon came this bulletin, a "substitute for day bulletin:" "Washington, July 19.—That Francis J. Heney, special counsel of the Department of Justice and also assistant prosecutor in the so-called graft cases in San Francisco, received from the Government last year $23,000, for which he performed no service, was the frank admission of Chairman Tawney of the Appropriation Committee in the House today...
...Tawney said: 'As a matter of fact Mr...
...Not a good reason...
...Later, the people of the whole city, indignant at the ceuncil for voting to give away to a public utility corporation three miles of river bed, worth about $1,000,000, started a petition to recall every member of that body, and this so frightened the faithless city fathers that they hastily reversed their votes...
...Bad representatives fear the recall...
...Heney had received in all $69,000 from the Government...
...He will be criticized by some for letting down the bars...
...The Recall in Los Angeles SOME months ago we said, "The recall has a better moral effect on politicians than a religious revival...
...It took all the sting out of the other two...
...At Goshen, Indiana, on July 26, United States Judge Baker decided that picketing by strikers is a thing they have a right to do...
...But, while no one had done the thing before, we have all known for a year or more that it can be done...
...It tells its own story: Could any more convincing evidence be desired to prove that party names and party lines mean nothing to the Interests seeking special privileges from law makers...
...It was true, then...
...Heney discredited...
...Let those who believed in Mr...
...lf the corporation tax is really meant to be "an excise tax on the privilege of doing business," why not apply it to the holding companies and all their subsidiary corporations...
...good ones welcome it...
...Note it well...
...The Standard Oil Company has over seventy subsidiary corporations, and their "privileges" are quite valuable...
...It was a correction...
...Heney had worked for the government for three years...
...It may make, within ten years, all our armies and navies, as obsolete as the spontoon and firelock of our forefathers...
...The Republican party has its Aldriches, but there is no longer room for doubt that the Democratic party has its McEnerys...
...It is not a symptom of placid satisfaction...
...The Chicago Drainage Canal—a part of the proposed Lakes-to-the-Gulf Deep Waterway—falling over a rock barrier at Dresden Heights furnished power last year which cut down the cost of street lighting for Chicago by $72,542.82...
...Rioting in Mexico being only another term for suicide, this outbreak seems strange in a land in which no one can be found to run for President against the incumbent...
...TAWNEY'S "ADMISSION" AND TAINTED NEWS ON JULY 19, about noon, the following news bulletin was received in the editorial offices of all the newspapers in the country that use the Associated Press service: "Washington, July 19.—Representative Tawney of the House Appropriation Committee admitted in the House late today that Francis J. Heney received from the Government $23,000 last year for which he performed no service...
...Imagine the glee with which they "played it up" so that even the most careless reader would not fail to observe...
...He had earned his salary and had incurred considerable expense in bringing law-breakers to justice...

Vol. 1 • August 1909 • No. 31


 
Developed by
Kanda Sofware
  Kanda Software, Inc.