Mr. Sinclair's Rights

Upton Sinclair, Socialist novelist, was arrested for " breach of the peace and obstruction of traffic," at San Pedro (port of Los Angeles). There had been a strike of marine transport workers in San Pedro. It was charged to the I. W. W. Los Angeles (which probably comes nearer to being a non-union city than any other place of its size; memories of the McNamara dynamiting help to keep it so) threw a number of I. W. W. members into a prison stockade. Sinclair summoned a protest meeting on Liberty Hill, and started to read Article I of the Constitution of the United States. He was promptly arrested and released on $500 bond. Mayor George E. Cryer had refused permission for the meeting, and denied Sinclair's " constitutional rights," charging that the novelist had forgotten his " constitutional duties." The Chief of Police declared that "If Sinclair felt that any city law invaded his rights he should have proceeded against it in a legal manner."