I.F. Stone, What Few Know About the Tonkin Bay Incidents. I. F. Stone’s Weekly, 24 August 1964. “The American government and the American press have kept the full truth about the Tonkin Bay incidents from the American public.”
September 27, 1962
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962): Pesticides Are Killing Birds and Mammals
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin, 27 September 1962. Elizabeth Kolbert: “As much as any book can, “Silent Spring” changed the world by describing it. An immediate best-seller, the book launched the modern environmental movement, which, in turn, led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the passage of the Clean Air, the Clean Water, and the Endangered Species Acts, and the banning of a long list of pesticides, including dieldrin.” Silent Spring was first serialized in The New Yorker in June 1962.
Part I of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in The New Yorker, 16 June 1962, can be read here.
Part II of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in The New Yorker, 23 June 1962, can be read here.
Part III of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in The New Yorker, 30 June 1962, can be read here.
November 25, 1960
Harvest of Shame: The Plight of Migrant Agriculture Laborers
Edward R. Murrow, Harvest of Shame. CBS Reports, 25 November 1960. John Light: “The people who harvest our fruits and vegetables are, today [2013], among the country’s most marginalized. They earn well below the poverty line and spend a substantial portion of the year unemployed. They do not have the right to overtime pay or to collective bargaining with their employers. In some cases, workers have faced abuses that fall under modern-day slavery statutes…. This is not a new phenomenon….”
October 5, 1936
The Harvest Gypsies: Migrant Agriculture Laborers in California in the 1930s
John Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies. San Francisco News, 5-12 October 1936. PBS, Need to Know, 1 March 2013: “Before he wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck was commissioned by The San Francisco News to write a series of articles on the migrant laborers of the Salinas Valley. The result, ‘The Harvest Gypsies” (1936) were published consecutively from October 5 to October 12, 1936. In 1938 the Simon J. Lubin Society published The Harvest Gypsies, with an added eighth chapter, in pamphlet form under the title, Their Blood is Strong. Steinbeck’s reportage is stark. The images seen in the Farm Security Administration’s photos bear out his every word.”
November 1, 1909
The Daughters of the Poor: A Plain Story of the Development of New York City as a Leading Center of the White Slave Trade of the World, Under Tammany Hall
George Kibbe Turner, The Daughters of the Poor: A Plain Story of the Development of New York City as a Leading Center of the White Slave Trade of the World, Under Tammany Hall. McClure’s, November 1909.
June 1, 1908
A Burglar in the Making: The State of Georgia Leases Convicts to Private Persons and Corporations
Charles Edward Russell, A Burglar in the Making: The State of Georgia Leases Convicts to Private Persons and Corporations. Everybody’s Magazine, June 1908. Editor’s Note: “This terrible story of life in a Georgia convicts’ camp was related to Mr. Russell by a one-time criminal, now a man reformed and regenerated. For apparent reasons, the man’s identity must be carefully guarded here; but all the essentials of the narrative are exactly as recited. Many of them Mr. Russell has been able to verify from his own observations; the others can be accepted upon faith. They reveal clearly the shameful system by which the State of Georgia surrenders for profits the solemn duty of correcting her wrong-doers, and thereby insures day after day the perpetuation of evils that result in the murder of souls and the making of hardened and desperate criminals. There is a broader application of the momentous lesson of these facts than to the State of Georgia. In a way that you have never suspected, but is here made plain, the convicts’ camp in Georgia is but a symbol or type of conditions existing in every part of the United States.”
March 1, 1906
The Treason of the Senate: How the US Senate is Owned by ‘The Monied Interests’
David Graham Phillips, The Treason of the Senate: New York’s Misrepresentatives and Aldrich, The Head of It All. Cosmopolitan, March 1906. From New York’s Misrepresentatives: “Treason is a strong word, but not too strong, rather too weak, to characterize the situation in which the Senate is the eager, resourceful, indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be, and vastly more dangerous; interests that manipulate the prosperity produced by all, so that it heaps up riches for the few; interests whose growth and power can only mean the degradation of the people, of the educated into sycophants, of the masses toward serfdom.”
December 1, 1905
Railroad Rebates: Exposé of illegal railway rebates in the early 1900s
Ray Stannard Baker, Railroad Rebates. McClure’s, December 1905, second of a five-part series. “One of the chief purposes of taxation is to build and maintain roads…. The railroad, by all the laws of the nation, is quite as much a highway as is a wagon road. But instead of levying direct taxes for keeping up the rail-highways…we Americans ‘farm out’ the power of taxation to private individuals organized as a railroad corporation…. The instrument tat conveys this power upon a railroad company is a ‘charter.’ It gives the railroad company the right to operate the rail-highways and to charge a freight-rate (a tax) for doing it.” [Read more…]
November 4, 1905
The Patent Medicine Conspiracy Against Freedom of the Press
Mark Sullivan, The Patent Medicine Conspiracy Against Freedom of the Press. Collier’s, 4 November 1905. “In the Lower House of the Massachusetts Legislature one day last March [1905] there was a debate which lasted one whole afternoon and engaged some twenty speakers, on a bill providing that every bottle of patent medicine sold in the State should bear a label stating the contents of the bottle…. The debate at times was dramatic–a member from Salem told of a young woman of his acquaintance now in an institution for inebriates as the end of an incident which began with patent medicine dosing for a harmless ill….In short, the debate was interesting and important–the two qualities which invariably ensure to any event big headlines in the daily newspapers. But that debate was not celebrated by big headlines, nor any headlines at all…. Now why? Why was this one subject tabooed?”