| Publication information |
|
Source: Truth Seeker Source type: magazine Document type: editorial Document title: “An Over-Zealous Reporter” Author(s): anonymous Date of publication: 21 September 1901 Volume number: 28 Issue number: 38 Pagination: 596-97 |
| Citation |
| “An Over-Zealous Reporter.” Truth Seeker 21 Sept. 1901 v28n38: pp. 596-97. |
| Transcription |
| full text |
| Keywords |
| McKinley assassination (news coverage); The Sun [New York, NY]; Truth Seeker; McKinley assassination (news coverage: criticism). |
| Named persons |
| Leon Czolgosz; Charles J. Guiteau; Robert G. Ingersoll; William McKinley. |
| Document |
An Over-Zealous Reporter
If you see it in the Sun it is so if it isn’t so. A veracious reporter of that journal came around the other day to inspect The Truth Seeker quarters and to make observations, preliminary, we infer, to defining the degree of our responsibility for the assassination of President McKinley. Last Sunday’s Sun contains his report, for which he prepares the reader in the following paragraph:
“One effect of the assassination of President McKinley has been the removal from the windows of stores where radical literature is sold of the cheap prints and cartoons designed to encourage class hatred and strongly tainted with anarchy.”
And then his discovery is announced:
“At the office of The Truth Seeker, an organ of the Freethinkers, published at 28 Lafayette place [sic], such trash was freely displayed in the window a week or more ago, but yesterday the window was bare. There wasn’t a sign of a cartoon or pamphlet.”
The reporter must report; otherwise he will
not earn his money, but lest any reader of the Sun should take him at his word
we will state:
1. That a week or more previous to the appearance
of the above report in the Sun the windows of the Truth Seeker book store [sic]
contained, and there were displayed in them, the following books and pamphlets,
none of which is anarchistic:
| Agnostic View of the Resurrection. Zoroaster. The Origin of Christianity. Old Testament Stories. A Tale of a Halo. The Order of Creation. Pray, You, Sir, Whose Daughter? Pushed by Unseen Hands. Facts and Fictions of Life. Pictorial Text-Book. Is This Your Son, My Lord? Men, Women, and Gods. Big Bible Stories. Age of Reason. Sinai and Olympus. Travels in Faith. |
Sister Lucy and Her Awful Disclosures. Declaration of the Free. Ingersoll as He Is. The Wilderness of Worlds. Reasons for Unbelief. Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar. Life of Jesus. All in a Lifetime. Canon of the Bible. Maria Monk. The Reason Why. Priestly Celibacy. Secret Instructions of the Jesuits. Blue Laws of Connecticut. |
2. That these thirty books were all in the window
on Saturday, September 14, when the Sun reporter says the window was bare, and
no other [596][597] books had been in the window
for at least ten days.
3. That there has not been a cartoon in the window
for two months, and hence its removal was not “one effect of the assassination
of President McKinley.” It was taken down in August to facilitate washing the
window.
Therefore the reporter told a falsehood when he
said that “cheap prints and cartoons designed to encourage class hatred and
strongly tainted with anarchy” were formerly freely displayed in the windows
of The Truth Seeker office; and he told another when he said that the windows
were bare on Saturday.
For only one truthful statement can we give this
reporter credit. He says: “The Truth Seeker came out as usual yesterday.” That
is admitted. The Truth Seeker came out as usual for the reason that it always
comes out as usual. Nothing had happened to prevent. Whether a President be
struck down by a Czolgosz who professes to be an Anarchist, or by a Guiteau
whose specialty is auswering [sic] Ingersoll before Young Men’s Christian Associations,
The Truth Seeker comes out. Having nothing to do with Young Men’s Christiau
[sic] Associations or with anarchist literature, its issue is not delayed in
either case.