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In the meantime I had been interviewing the executive committee of the University Club of Pasadena, holding over the heads of these gentlemen the threat of a slander suit, and thereby inducing each of them in turn to state upon exactly what basis he had repeated the statements about Mr. Burns and myself. So the report was definitely traced to Mr. Irwin Hays Rice, president of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association of Los Angeles, and one of the chiefs of the Black Hand. Mr. Rice, in a conversation over the telephone, had stated to the secretary of the club that Mr. Burns had described me as “a parlor pink and a dangerous enemy of the United States government.”

So now I had a clean-cut issue of veracity between Mr. Rice and Mr. Burns, and it seemed worth a trip to Los Angeles to find out which was the liar. I went in on a Monday morning, and fate was unkind to Mr. Rice—he had been out of town over the week-end, and had not read anything about the controversy, nor had anyone in the University Club taken the trouble to call him up and warn him. I took the precaution to bring my brother-in-law, Hunter Kimbrough, as witness to the interview, and Mr. Rice received us in his private office. I explained my point of view: he and I were antagonists on opposite sides of the class struggle; I had my opinion of him, and freely granted him the right to have his opinion of me. The only thing I took exception to was the fact that in discussing me he had made use of the name of Mr. Burns.