This time, Woodhull shocked the newspapers into silence. People who had been unable to get into the hall looked through the morning papers in vain. No word of Woodhull's speech appeared in the Tribune, the Times, or the Standard. The Herald, usually so generous in its reporting of Woodhull's words, described the milling crowd at Irving Place, but omitted the main event, in the Weekly's judgment making "a tremendous effort to say nothing and succeeding admirably." The Sun similarly described the size of the crowd but limited its report on the speech, saying vaguely, "Several passages of the speech were enthusiastically applauded, as much of what she said appealed directly to the prejudices of the audience."

Only the World, among the major New York dailies, reported the contents of the speech. A dozen lines referred eliptically to the slavery of the laboring classes, the evils of railroad and money monopolies, and the relation of Christianity to politics.

The mighty New York press, which had spared no ink covering Woodhull's defense of free love, controversial as it was, closed its columns to condemnation of the capitalist system. Not a single word of Woodhull's criticisms of Vanderbilt, Astor, and Stewart, mild and impersonal as those criticisms were, appeared in print. Nor did the unspeakable word, "communism."

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