Born Leonel Campbell, tabloid journalist Polly Pry made a splash with her scandalous stories in the Denver Post . Her most sensational story was about a man who was in jail for eating five men while trapped in a snowstorm.
Oddly enough, Pry used this story to try to change the legal system's rules for punishing crimes. She went to the parole board and looked at public documents about criminals. She noticed that many murderers and rapists had been pardoned, so she wrote that a cannibal shouldn't be treated more harshly. Her writing campaign had an effect, and the man was paroled a year later, after spending 20 years in jail. He became a bodyguard for the publishers who had helped him.
Pry was known for her descriptive, dramatic writing. She investigated mine workers and miners' unions, and when union workers started boycotting the Post because of her stories, she left and started her own publication, the Polly Pry . When she started writing about how the mine owners used cheap immigrant labor, and how the American unions physically attacked the immigrants, many men became angry and threatened her. In 1904, a man tried to shoot her in her home. She was so popular among the townspeople that Colorado's Governor offered to post a militia to guard her house. Young newsboys stood watch at her home, and her friend Winifred Bonfils came to her defense, saying that she had helped write the articles, and that if the men wanted to kill someone, to come by the newsroom and shoot her instead.
In her later years, Pry helped organize a benefit for French war orphans, worked in public relations in Greece and Albania during World War I, and covered a revolution in Mexico. Although she was often accused of being a writer who used scandals to gain readers, she made a point to attack people in her articles who she thought tried to control people unfairly, like labor leaders and politicians. She stood up for the rights of the ordinary person, and especially for free speech and the ability of journalists to expose the truth without fearing for their lives.
Because of the anger and violence surrounding some of her articles, Pry became especially supportive of free speech. Today, some politicians want to decide what is appropriate for children to be exposed to, and prevent them from seeing certain kinds of web sites and buying certain music albums. In the past, many famous, classic books and works of art have been censored because someone in charge thought they were "dirty." Do you think this is fair? Should people decide what they want to see, or should the government try to "protect" them from certain kinds of information? Our Constitution says everyone has a right to free speech, and the Supreme Court supports free speech as long as what is written or broadcast is the truth. Schools have often censored what students write in school papers, and kept certain books out of school libraries. Has this happened at your school? Learn about censorship and free speech, and stand up for free speech for everyone. Write about the importance of free speech, and how everyone benefits from a free flow of information.