Digital Extra: The Journal's 175th Anniversary

07.21.2004

1924. Editor refuses Lt. Ggovernor's offer to censor reporters' copy

In 1924, the Rhode Island Senate headed toward a stalemate over voting districts. There would be a riot in the Senate chamber, a bromine gas stink bomb being set off there and Republican senators fleeing to rural Massachusetts. And The Providence Journal found itself caught in the crossfire.

Lt. Gov. Felix A. Toupin, a Democrat who was the presiding officer of the Republican-controlled Senate, took exception to The Journal's coverage. Toupin announced that the paper's reporters would be barred unless they cleared their stories with him to be sure they were correct.

The Journal refused.

"The sole judge of the correctness of such reports would be the Lieutenant Governor. That constitutes censorship," the paper explained in a box that first appeared on the front page of The Journal's afternoon paper, The Evening Bulletin, on April 1. "The Evening Bulletin will not submit to the censorship of its news reports by a political office holder. It will continue to serve its readers with true and uncensored reports of Senate proceedings, in the future as in the past."

The explainer box ran in The Journal and The Bulletin every day that either paper covered the Senate. Without divulging its sources, the paper continued to report on the Senate, despite being barred from the chamber, beginning March 28 and continuing through April, May and much of June.

In a statement in the April 23 Journal, Toupin gave his view:

Journal files

The state Senate was out of control in 1924, and The Evening Bulletin used a front-page editorial cartoon to urge the governor to maintain decorum. On the same front page - June 19 - The Bulletin offered a $1,000 reward for identifying the culprit who released a stink bomb in the Senate that morning.

"The presiding officer simply wants them to tell the truth about the facts and then let them condemn as they wish, but the freedom of the press does not convey the idea that a newspaper may be allowed to come into the Senate chamber for the sole purpose of telling lies. Freedom of the press leaves to the press the freedom of criticism if they wish, and they have that freedom."

Toupin's ban did not ease until after the bromine gas bomb incident on June 19. By the time Journal reporters were allowed back in the Senate, though, they found little to report. With the Republican senators in Massachusetts to avoid being forced back into session, all the Senate could do each day was adjourn to its next meeting.

The crisis passed in January 1925, after Republican electoral gains.