Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/448

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HISTORY OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM

because it was not authorized by the statute upon which it rested. The World then urged that the matter be taken to the Supreme Court, which the Department of Justice did on January 3, 1911. Judge Hough handed down an opinion in which he quashed the indictment on the ground that the Federal Government had no jurisdiction. On January 4, 1911, The World thus summed up the results:—

The unanimous decision handed down by the United States Supreme Court yesterday in the Roosevelt-Panama libel case against The World is the most sweeping victory won for freedom of speech and of the press in this country since the American people destroyed the Federalist Party more than a century ago for enacting the infamous Sedition Law.


EXPERIMENTS IN JOURNALISM

The Period of Social Readjustment saw many experiments in journalism. When the United States undertook to dig a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, it later found itself also engaged in quite a different thing that of publishing a newspaper. Employees who worked on "the big ditch" had to have news printed in English. There was nothing else for the Government to do but to establish The Canal Record. This paper, practically a country weekly for the Isthmus, was a letter from home and a diary of local events. It was distributed without charge to all the Government employees engaged in any sort of work on the Canal. Other new ventures in the field of journalism are outlined somewhat more in detail in the paragraphs which follow.


THE ADLESS DAILY PAPER

The endowed newspaper and the "adless" newspaper have frequently been the subject of academic discussion. No attempt has been made to establish the former and but one of the latter. On September 28, 1911, The Day Book, an adless daily newspaper, appeared in Chicago. Several issues were published before it was placed on sale and the circulation was kept to two hundred divided between two routes of one hundred each. With the carrier on Saturday went a personal representative of the paper to talk with the subscribers. Its object was to secure all its

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