The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism

The third method by which the “kept” press is kept is the method of the advertising subsidy. This is the “legitimate” graft of newspapers and magazines, the main pipeline whereby Big Business feeds its journalistic parasites. Financially speaking, our big newspapers and popular magazines are today more dependent upon their advertisers than they are upon their readers; it is not a cynicism, but the statement of a business fact, that a newspaper or popular magazine is a device for submitting competitive advertising to the public, the reading-matter being bait to bring the public to the hook.

And of course the old saying holds, that “he who pays the piper calls the tune.” The extent to which the bait used in the game of journalistic angling is selected and treated by the business fishermen, is a subject which might occupy a volume by itself. Not merely is there general control of the spirit and tone of the paper; there is control in minute details, sometimes grotesque. For example, Arthur Brisbane wrote an article on dietetics, deploring the use of package cereals. The advertising men of the “Evening Journal” came to him, tearing their hair; he had knocked off a hundred thousand dollars a year from the “Journal’s” income! Brisbane wrote an editorial pointing out that stiff hats caused baldness, and the “Journal” office was besieged by the hat-dealers who advertised in the paper. Brisbane went to Europe and wrote editorials supporting a municipal subway. Said the advertising man: “Don’t you know that Mr. —— at Wanamaker’s is dead against that sort of thing?”

Max Sherover, in his excellent little pamphlet, “Fakes in American Journalism,” writes:

The editor of a New York paper wrote an instructive editorial on the right kind of shoes to wear. The editorial was not inspired by any advertiser. It was simply the result of the editor’s study and investigation of the problem of footwear. He advised against the wearing of the shoe with the curved point and urged in favor of the square-toed shoe. One of the big advertisers somehow got wind of the shoe-editorial that was intended to appear on the following day. It so happened that this store-keeper had a shoe-sale scheduled for the following week. He called up the business manager of the newspaper on the ’phone. After five minutes of conversation the editorial went to the waste-basket.

And if the advertisers censor the general ideas, needless to say they censor news about themselves. Henry Siegel owned a department-store in New York; his wife divorced him, and nothing about it appeared in the New York papers—that is, not until after the department-store failed! Our great metropolitan dailies are, as you know, strong protectors of the sanctity of the home; you saw how they treated Upton Sinclair, when he got tied up in the divorce-courts; you saw how they treated Gorky and Herron. But how about the late C. W. Post, of “Postum” fame, when he decided to divorce his wife and marry his stenographer? Hardly a line in the newspapers throughout the country!

I have told how the Philadelphia newspapers suppressed the suicide of one of the Gimbel brothers. This same firm has a store in Milwaukee, and I have before me a letter from the District Attorney of Milwaukee County, setting forth what happened when the vice-president of this firm was indicted for bribing an alderman:

Representatives of Gimbel Brothers requested, as I am credibly informed, the newspapers in which their commercial advertisements appeared to suppress the facts connected with the proceedings of Mr. Hamburger’s trial. With two exceptions, so insignificant as to justify their being entirely ignored, the English press did so. The five daily English newspapers published no account whatever of the trial, which occupied about one week and disclosed sensational matter which would have undoubtedly been published broadcast in an ordinary case. Some of these papers printed a very brief notice at the time the case was called, stating this fact, but not all of them did even this much.... It was shown that all the books of account of the Gimbel Brothers, together with their correspondence and legal documents pertaining to the transaction in connection with which the bribery was alleged were burned under the direction of the defendant immediately after it was brought to his attention that the grand jury which indicted him was in session and about to investigate this case. This destruction of the books and documents occurred within the period of the statute of limitation, and less than three years after some of the entries had been made in them. The only explanation for this singular proceeding given by defendant or his business associates was that they lacked room in their vault and found it necessary to do away with papers, books and documents which they felt they could dispense with. I mention this particular line of evidence because I am satisfied that if such a showing had been made in an ordinary case of bribery the facts disclosed would have been given the widest publicity by the daily press. That the proceedings of this trial were suppressed by the English papers of this city for commercial reasons which appealed to their advertising department is unquestioned. Every newspaper man of my acquaintance to whom I have mentioned the matter has admitted the fact and deplored it.

In the same way, when Wanamaker’s was detected violating the customs laws, only one Philadelphia newspaper reported the circumstances. There was organized a league for honest advertising, and you might have thought that such a league would have appealed to our highly moral newspapers; but when this league prosecuted a merchant in New York for selling furs under false names, not one newspaper mentioned the circumstances. This merchant was convicted, and again not one New York newspaper mentioned it. In Chicago various firms were prosecuted for misbranding goods, and the local papers suppressed the news. In Milwaukee four firms were prosecuted for selling a potted cheese doped with chemicals, and the newspapers withheld the names of the firms. Says Will Irwin: “I have never seen a story of a shop-lifting case in which the name of the store was mentioned.” Also he makes the following statement concerning the most august of the Brahmin newspapers of New England:

The “Boston Evening Transcript” published in its issue of April 8th the fact that a workman had fallen from a tree, that an aged pauper had been found dead in bed, that the Harvard Shooting Club was about to hold a meet, but not the fact that “Harvard Beer,” known to every consumer of malt liquors in Massachusetts, was in peril of the law for adulteration. Neither was the fact noted on Monday, April 10. But on Tuesday, April 11, “Harvard Beer—1,000 pure” appeared in the pages of the “Transcript”—as a half-page advertisement!

Every newspaper editor feels this pressure—even though he feels it only in his imagination. A horse that travels in harness does so, not because he likes to travel, but because he carries in his subconsciousness the memory of the whip and the bit which “broke” him in the days of his wild youth. And if, by any chance, he forgets this whip and bit, he is quickly reminded. William Winter, a dramatic critic who had served the “New York Tribune” for forty-four years, was forced to resign because his reviews of plays injured the advertising business of the “Tribune.” Certain managers were making money out of producing indecent plays; Mr. Winter rebuked these plays, the advertisers protested to the “Tribune,” and the managing editor of the “Tribune” censored Mr. Winter’s reviews. During the controversy, Mr. Winter wrote to the managing editor that he had desired to injure the business of the producers of indecent plays; to which the managing editor replied; “My instructions with regard to that page are that the articles are not to be framed with any such purpose.”

The same thing happened to Walter Pritchard Eaton, dramatic critic of the “New York Sun.” I learned of it just as my book was going to press, and wired Mr. Eaton for the facts. Here is his answer:

Syndicate withdrew ads from “Sun” after my review of Soul Kiss, demanding my discharge. Six months later I was fired, no cause given. Next Sunday all ads back in paper. No actual proof but conclusion pretty plain.

Everywhere in the world of Journalism, high and low, you see this power of the advertiser. I live in the beautiful millionaire city of Pasadena, and every afternoon I get my news of the world from a local paper, which is in some ways among the best. It publishes no scare headlines, and practically no scandal; but in its attitude toward its big commercial advertisers, the attitude of this newspaper is abject. There is a page of moving-picture advertisements, and side by side are columns of “write-ups” of these plays. Nine out of ten of these plays are unspeakable trash, but from the notices you would think that a new era of art was dawning upon Pasadena. All this is “dope,” sent out by the moving-picture exploiters; such a thing as an independent and educative review of a moving-picture is not conceivable in my local newspaper. And it is the same with “write-ups” of bargain-sales, and new openings of department-stores. It is the same with the chain of leisure-class hotels; the man who manages and finances these hotels is a local god, and everything he does and says takes the top of the column.

This system of publicity in return for advertising is a fundamentally dishonest one, but it is inseparable from the business of publishing news for profit, and the legitimate and the illegitimate shade into one another so gradually that it would be hard for an honest editor to know where to draw the line. The rule will differ with every newspaper; it may differ with every editor and every mood of every editor. I have made a little study of it with my local newspaper, and had some amusing experiences. Belonging to the Socialist local in Pasadena, I several times had occasion to solicit publicity for Socialist meetings. Being a naturally polite person, I did not go to the editor and say, “I’ll buy ten dollars worth of advertising space, if you’ll publish a quarter of a column of news about my radical venture.” What I did was to insert the advertisement, and then send to the editor the matter I wanted published, and it was published. So I thought this was a regular rule; but some time later, when the labor-men of Pasadena started a co-operative store, and I became vice-president of the enterprise, I inserted an advertisement of the store, and again presented my “copy” to the newspaper, and I did not get so much space. The advertising manager of the newspaper explained to the manager of the store that his paper could not boost a co-operative store, because the local merchants which supplied the bulk of its advertising were hostile to such an enterprise!

At the last election the people of California had to decide upon a social insurance measure, and a friend of mine wrote an article in favor of this measure, and could not get it published. I suggested that she publish it as an advertisement, but the “Pasadena Star-News” refused it, even in that form, and explained to me the reason—that the lady had referred to Christian Science as “a foolish belief”! The partisans of Christian Science are accustomed to rent a page in this paper every now and then, and to have their foolishness published without question.

A still stranger experience befell a gentleman in Boston, Sinclair Kennedy by name. In April, 1918, Mr. Kennedy learned that his state was falling far behind in the purchase of war savings and thrift stamps, and by way of helping his government in its thrift campaign, he prepared an advertisement consisting of three quotations, the first from a speech by President Wilson, the second from a speech by the Secretary of the Treasury, and the third from a speech by the Chairman of the National War Savings Committee: all three of the quotations urging that people should purchase only necessities, so that the energies of the country might go to war-production. The “Boston Herald and Journal” contracted to publish this advertisement in four issues; it published it in two issues, and then refused to publish it again, and paid to Mr. Kennedy the sum of five hundred dollars damages for breach of contract. The “Boston Post” refused to publish the advertisement at all, its manager giving the reason that it was “contrary to public policy”! I have read of many Socialists being sent to jail upon a charge of interfering with the government’s war activities, but if the manager of the “Boston Post” was sent to jail, the other newspapers did not report it!

What this amounts to is a censorship of the small and occasional advertisers by the large and permanent ones; this censorship is common, and sometimes it is made to wear the aspect of virtue. The best-paying advertisements are those of automobiles and other leisure-class luxuries; as such advertisers will not publish alongside cheap patent medicine fakes, publications like “Collier’s” and the “Outlook” make a boast of censoring their advertisements. But when it comes to protecting their high-priced advertisers, these publications are, as I have shown, every bit as unscrupulous as the sellers of cancer-cures and headache-powders. I, who wish to attack these high-priced advertisers, am forced to publish what I have to say in a paper which can only exist by publishing the advertisements of cancer-cures and headache-powders. This is very humiliating, but what can I do? Stop writing? If I could have my way, of course, I would write for a publication having a large circulation and publishing honest reading matter and honest advertising matter. But no such publication exists; and I have to decide the question, which does the least harm, a publication with honest advertising matter and dishonest reading matter, or a publication with honest reading matter and dishonest advertising matter.

Also, of course, there will be censorship of advertisements containing news. If the newspaper is suppressing certain facts, it will not permit you to make known these facts, even for money. The “Los Angeles Times,” although it bitterly opposed single tax, was willing to take my money for an advertisement in favor of single tax; but the “Times” would not take my money for an advertisement reporting a meeting at which the truth about Russia was told. The “Times” would not sell me space to make known that the Socialists of the city had challenged the Superintendent of Schools to debate the truth of certain false statements which he had made about Russia.

In Louisville is the “People’s Church,” conducted by an independent clergyman in a theatre, and attended by one or two thousand people every Sunday. The “Louisville Courier-Journal” and its evening edition, the “Times,” have not contented themselves with suppressing all news about these meetings for several years; they have also refused all advertisements of this “People’s Church.” (Since this was written they have put the “People’s Church” out of business!)

Some fifteen years ago the most important news being put before the American people was in the form of paid advertisements signed by Thomas W. Lawson. The “New York Times” refused to publish these advertisements, and tens of thousands of New Yorkers, myself among them, were obliged to buy other newspapers in consequence. It cost the “Times” large sums of money to refuse these Lawson broad-sides, but the “Times” made a virtue of it, because the broad-sides threatened the entire profit system, without which the “Times” could not exist. In the same way the newspapers of Baltimore and Boston refused advertisements of a magazine run by Thomas E. Watson in Georgia, on the ground that he was publishing in his magazine articles attacking foreign missions. If you do not believe that interests like this exercise pressure upon newspapers, just try to publish in any capitalist newspaper an advertisement of a book or pamphlet attacking the Roman Catholic Church!

Here in Los Angeles I know a man who set himself up in business as a land-appraiser, and interfered with the leading industry of our community, which is selling real estate to “come ons” from the East. He advised one client that some land in Imperial Valley was worthless, because it contained nearly three per cent of alkali; and this judgment was later vindicated by a report of the U. S. Bureau of Soils, which I have read. But it happened that this land lay perilously near to the tracts of a great land company, in which the heads of Los Angeles newspapers are interested. The three leading newspapers of Los Angeles broke their contracts with this land-appraiser, threw out his “copy” and ruined his business, and now he is working as a cowboy in the “movies.” And if you think that the power of the real estate sharks is confined to the places where they prey, consider the experience of Rob Wagner, who wrote two articles about the Southern California land-sharks for the “Saturday Evening Post.” The first article, being full of fun, a farce-comedy, was accepted and paid for at once; the second, giving the real story, and being full of meat, was turned down.

If the newspaper fails to protect its big advertisers, the big advertisers will get busy and protect themselves. This happens every now and then, and every newspaper editor has seen it happen. Sometimes an editor gets sick of the game and quits, and then we have a story. For example, William L. Chenery, who was editor of the “Rocky Mountain News” during the Colorado coal-strike, tells me that “the business men of Denver attempted both an advertising and a social boycott in order to prevent the publication of strike news.... I was told that the owner of the paper would not be admitted to the Denver Country Club so long as our editorials seemed to support the cause of the strikers.”

Or take the case of Boston. George French, managing editor of a Boston paper, told how his paper lost four hundred dollars on account of one item which the “interests” had forbidden. Says Mr. French, “That led to a little personal conversation, and to my retiring from the paper.” He goes on to state:

You cannot get anything into the newspapers that in any way rubs up against the business policy of the banks and department stores, or of the public service corporations. Those three great departments of business are welded together with bands ever so much stronger than steel, and you cannot make any impression on them. News of department stores that is discreditable, or in any way attracts unfavorable attention, is all squelched, all kept out of the papers.

I have told how Otis of Los Angeles ran the “Times” as a Republican paper and an “open-shop” paper, and at the same time ran secretly the “Herald,” a Democratic paper and a “closed-shop” paper. Here is a glimpse of the “Herald” office, as narrated by Frank E. Wolfe, former managing editor of the paper.

The Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association took up the proposition of an aviation meet at Domingues Field. This was managed by the walking delegate of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association. The manager gave out the concessions. I went to Domingues Field personally after the meet had been running a few days and found conditions so abhorrent there that I came back and personally wrote a story about fourteen or sixteen “blind pigs” running....

Immediate reprisals came through the M. and M.—which controls all the advertising placed in the newspapers of the city—by way of taking out of the “Herald” the advertising of a certain department-store—the manager or proprietor of this store being one of the chief moguls of the aviation field. They took their ad out, and the business-manager of the “Herald” came storming in to see me, as they always do in cases of this sort, to see who wrote the story. And when I told him I wrote it myself from facts I had, he wanted me to print an apology. That I have not yet done.

There is a law against workingmen getting together and enforcing a boycott; the Danbury hatters tried it, and the courts fined them several hundred thousand dollars, and took away their homes and turned them out onto the street. But if big advertisers choose to get together and boycott a magazine, the law of course would not dream of being impolite. At the very time that this Danbury hatters case was in the courts, the late C. W. Post was explaining in “Leslie’s,” our barber-shop weekly, how he broke the newspapers and magazines to his will.

A friend of mine once had the honor of meeting Mr. Post and standing in his private vault and being permitted to handle a package containing four million dollars worth of government bonds. All this had been made out of advertisements, which had persuaded the public to buy package cereals, of precisely the same food-value as bread, at a price several times as high as bread. On January 23rd, 1913, Mr. Post published in “Leslie’s” an article, urging business men to organize and refuse to give advertisements to “muck-raking” publications; and “Leslie’s” contributed an illuminating cartoon, “The Fool Who Feeds the Monster!” On April 10th Mr. Post contributed another article, describing his methods. He had his clerks go over all publications, listing objectionable matter, and he sent a form letter to offending publications, threatening to withdraw his valuable advertising unless they promised to be “good” in the future.

Mr. Post told what he was doing. There were others who preferred to work in the dark. Perhaps the most significant case was that of “Collier’s Weekly” and the Ballinger “land fraud” scandals. Norman Hapgood and Robert Collier broke the Taft administration on that issue, and President Taft, a venomous old man when he was crossed, issued a furious denunciation of “Collier’s”: whereupon the National Association of Manufacturers, the most powerful organization in the country, took the field against “muck-raking” magazines. They not only applied the advertising boycott to “Collier’s,” they set the banks to work, as in the case of “Hampton’s,” and they took away control of the magazine from Robert Collier, and put it into the hands of a banking committee, where it stayed. “Robbie” took to flying aeroplanes, and a year or two ago he died, and “Collier’s” published a full-page obituary of him, telling the many services he had performed for the public—except the one really important service, that he had broken the Taft administration over the Ballinger “land fraud” issue! Imagine a magazine, that, on the death of its owner, does not dare to mention the greatest event of its owner’s life!

I had an opportunity to watch, from the inside, the operation of this advertising boycott, in the case of my article, the “Condemned Meat Industry.” Many pages of advertising were withdrawn from “Everybody’s Magazine”—not merely advertisements of hams and lard, but of fertilizers, soaps and railways. Lawson several times tried to publish the names of these boycotting advertisers, but “Everybody’s” would not let him. “Everybody’s” possibly reflected that it might not keep up this muck-raking business always; when it had secured enough readers, it might let down and become respectable, and then all the big advertisers would come back to it—as they have done!

The few men who really did mean business knew that the advertisers would never come back to them, so they fought the fight through to a finish—their own finish. So it was with “Hampton’s,” so it was with “Pearson’s” under the old régime. “Pearson’s” tried publishing on the cheapest newsprint paper and with no advertisements, and for two or three years “Pearson’s” was the only popular magazine in America from which you could get the truth. It was the only one which dared to fight the Railroad Trust and the Beef Trust, the only one which dared tell the truth about the Associated Press, and about Capitalist Journalism in general.

Early in 1914 it published a series of articles by Charles Edward Russell: “Keeping the Kept Press,” “The Magazine Soft-Pedal,” and “How Business Controls the News.” Russell told the story of the “Boston Traveller,” which was bought by a young reformer, and put under the control of a real newspaper man, Marlin E. Pew. The young reformer died, and the Shoe Machinery Trust bought the paper and ordered Pew to be good. He refused, and stood on the contract which he had with the paper. He had a story affecting a big financial house. Threats were made, the business manager was confronted with ruin, the paper was tied up, and Pew was forced to sell his contract for cash. I write this story, and the name of the paper sounds familiar to me. I search my memory. Oh, yes! It was the “Boston Traveller,” which, a couple of years ago, published a report to the effect that the authorities of Boston were about to confiscate copies of my magazine, and that copies had been thrown out of the library of Radcliffe College. I wrote to the librarian of Radcliffe College, and she replied that the report was a complete fabrication.

Also Russell told how someone tried to run an independent newspaper in Indianapolis, where the street-railway companies, by various manipulations, had boosted the capitalization of the railways from three million dollars to fifty-seven million dollars. The “Indianapolis Sun” exposed the fact that the congestion on these railways was caused by the fact that all the cars were forced to pass in front of certain big department-stores. Then the wage-slaves of the railways started to organize; the “Sun” backed them, and told how the companies had automobiles which threw their lights on the entrance to the hall where the men met, and took the name of every man who entered. Also the “Sun” reported how the railway-companies were having the union leaders slugged—and so the “Sun” reporter was slugged! The Merchants’ Association got busy, and the “Sun” advertisers were warned of a boycott. A “safety commission” of the Chamber of Commerce was organized, and a meeting was held, at which explicit instructions were given to all newspaper editors. The circulation of the “Sun” had gone up from seventeen thousand to forty thousand, but the advertising was cut off, and so the paper had to quit.

In the same way the “Akron Press” ventured to support a strike against the tire-companies, and was boycotted. The same fate befell the “Cincinnati Post,” which ventured to expose a peculiar procedure engineered by a street railway corporation. There was a limitation of twenty-five years upon public franchises, so the state legislature passed a bill, permitting fifty-year franchises. The city council of Cincinnati then passed one fifty-year franchise, after which the legislature repealed the bill permitting fifty-year franchises for anybody else!

In an article in the “Atlantic Monthly” for March, 1910, Prof. Ross explained just how tight the hold of the advertiser upon the newspaper had then become:

Thirty years ago, advertising yielded less than half of the earnings of the daily newspapers. Today it yields at least two-thirds. In the larger dailies the receipts from advertisers are several times the receipts from the readers, in some cases constituting ninety percent of the total revenues. As the newspaper expands to eight, twelve, and sixteen pages, while the price sinks to three cents, two cents, one cent, the time comes when the advertisers support the newspaper.

And in “Pearson’s,” Charles Edward Russell gave the figures for the magazines. He shows that at the prices then prevailing (1914), a magazine publishing four hundred thousand copies a month would support a net loss of over sixteen hundred dollars for manufacturing costs alone, not including the cost of illustrations, articles, salaries, rent, etc. All this, plus any profit from the enterprise, must come from the advertising. So largely did magazines depend upon the advertising that some of them were practically given away in order to get circulation. One large magazine was sold wholesale at an average price of three cents, another magazine was paying out a total of five dollars for every one dollar it took in through subscriptions.

And what if the advertising did not come? Why then, of course, the magazine or newspaper went out of business. One case of this sort I happened to see from the inside, as the experience befell one of my intimate friends—Gaylord Wilshire, the first of America’s heroic band of “millionaire Socialists.” Wilshire came from the West with a couple of hundred thousand dollars, and established a Socialist magazine in New York. He had got the figures from experts; he must have four hundred thousand circulation, and then he would be safe. So he set out to get this circulation. He had a subscription contest, with a trip around the world for a prize. He had another with a grand piano for a prize. He gave away small fortunes; also he published the truth about American public affairs, and he published the most penetrating editorial comment then to be read in America. So he got his four hundred thousand subscribers. But alas, he had reckoned without his advertisers! For some strange reason the packers of hams and bacon, the manufacturers of automobiles and ready-made clothing, of toilet perfumeries and fancy cigarettes, would not pay their money to a Socialist magazine! Wilshire was close to the rocks, and decided that to publish a Socialist magazine in America a man needed a gold-mine. He bought a gold-mine, and for the last twelve or thirteen years has been wrestling with it. He has just about got it ready to pay; I wonder, will he get his Socialist paper started before we have Socialism?

Such was the fate of a magazine which rebelled. As for those which submitted, the answer is writ large on our newsstands. “McClure’s,” “Collier’s,” “Everybody’s,” the “American” have survived, as a woman without virtue, as a man without honor, of whom his friends say that he would better have died. The masters of finance have taken not merely the conscience from them, they have taken the life from them. If there was a man on the editorial staff with red blood in his veins, they turned him out to become a Socialist soap-boxer, and in his place they put a pithed frog. (You know, perhaps, how the scientist takes the nerves out of a frog’s body and puts in pith?)

Not merely have the money-masters stamped their sign upon the contents of the magazines, they have changed the very form to suit their purposes. Time was when you could take the vast bulk of a magazine, and rip off one fourth from the front and two fourths from the back, and in the remaining fourth you had something to read in a form you could enjoy. But the advertising gentry got on to that practice and stopped it. They demanded what they call “full position,” next to reading-matter. One magazine gave way, and then another; until now all popular magazines are cunning traps to bring your mind into subjection to the hawkers of wares. I pick up the current number of the “Literary Digest”; there are a hundred and twenty-eight pages, and the advertising begins on page thirty-five. I pick up the current number of the “Saturday Evening Post”; there are a hundred and fifty-eight pages, and the advertising begins on page twenty-nine. You start an article or a story, and they give you one or two clean pages to lull your suspicions, and then at the bottom you read, “Continued on page 93.” You turn to page ninety-three, and biff—you are hit between the eyes by a powerful gentleman wearing a collar, or swat—you are slapped on the cheek by a lady in a union-suit. You stagger down this narrow column, as one who runs the gauntlet of a band of Indians with clubs; and then you read, “Continued on page 99.” You turn to page ninety-nine, and somebody throws a handful of cigarettes into your face, or maybe a box of candy; or maybe it is the crack of a revolver, or the honk of an automobile-horn that greets you. The theme of the reading-matter may be the importance of war-savings, but before you get to the end of the article you have been tempted by every luxury from a diamond scarf-pin to a private yacht, and have spent in imagination more money than you will earn in the balance of your life-time.

The culmination of this process may be studied in the supreme product of Capitalist Journalism, the “Curtis Publications”; the peerless trilogy of the “Saturday Evening Post,” the “Ladies’ Home Journal,” and the “Country Gentleman.” How many boys in college are making fortunes in their spare time, selling this trilogy to all America? I don’t know, but if you write to the circulation department in Philadelphia, they will tell you, and perhaps let you join the opulent band. One hundred and thirty times every year these Curtis people prepare for their millions of victims a fat bulk of “high-class”—that is to say, high-paying—advertising. As street-urchins gather to scramble for pennies, so gather here all the profit-seekers of the country to compete for your attention; they wheedle and cajole and implore, they shriek and scream, they dance and gesticulate and turn somersaults. I say “they” do it; in reality, of course, they hire others to do it; they take the brains and vitality and eagerness of our youth—they waste in a single week enough writing talent and drawing talent to create an American literature and an American art.

The stake is a colossal one. Writing ten years ago, Hamilton Holt showed that the American people were spending a hundred and forty-five million dollars a year for advertisements in periodicals. Also he stated that one Chicago department-store had spent half a million in advertising to sell fifteen million in goods. At this rate of thirty to one, the public was being persuaded, by means of advertising, to purchase four and a half billion dollars worth of goods. Allowing for the increase in extravagance and in prices today, the expenditure cannot be less than ten or twenty billions. Such is the prize to be scrambled for; and when you realize it, you no longer wonder at the raptures to which our advertisement-writers are impelled, the exhibitions of language-slinging to which they treat us.

What is your literary taste? Are you poetical? Does your temperament run to the flowery and ecstatic? If so, you will be “landed” by the full-page advertisement which I find in my evening newspaper, displaying a spreading peacock and half a dozen peacock-ladies in a whirl of ruffles and frills. “THE RAINBOW OF FASHIONS,” runs the heading, and continues in this fine, careful rapture:

Other than this the impression is inadequate, that glimpse beheld of this Fashion Salon, this inimitable Third Floor of Goldstein’s.

What but the Rainbow with its inexpressible sunburst of color could be the source—the inspiration from which Fashion has modeled these veritable Exquisites—these beautiful new Frocks and Suits and Coats, these Skirts and Capes—these Blouses and Hats for Milady’s luxury?

Truly the Genii of Fashionery are leading us into glory Fields of Beauty never before attained, although it seemed for a time that Artists of Vogue had decided to paint indefinitely upon that picture of yesterday, with an occasional new tint perhaps to relieve somewhat the monotonous restrictions both in style and in fabric.

But now—today—at Goldstein’s—the picture is a new one—startling and irresistible—to be elaborated upon each day—for it is each day that new thoughts are added as new Express Packages are opened from Fashiondom.

Come, take a pencil peek with me—and ONLY as a pencil sees them—not at all as they are—or as you may see them if you come where these “Pretties” are all assembled—where fashions are wont to congregate at Goldstein’s.

Or does your taste run to humor? Are you bluff and hearty, a real fellow and a good sport? Then maybe your purse-strings will be loosened by the full-page advertisement which appears in all the magazines for August, 1919, portraying a stout and sensual gentleman with a pipe in his mouth and a wink in both eyes. Cries this gentleman:

SCRUB UP YOUR SMOKEDECKS AND CUT FOR A NEW PIPE DEAL! Say, you’ll have a streak of smokeluck that’ll put pep-in-YOUR smokemotor, all right, if you’ll ring-in with a jimmy pipe or the papers and nail some “Devil’s-dung” for packing!

Just between ourselves, you never will wise-up to high-spot-smoke-joy until you can call a pipe or a home-rolled cigarette by its first name, THEN, to hit the peak-of-pleasure you land square on that two-fisted-man-tobacco, “Devil’s-dung!”

Well, sir, you’ll be so all-fired happy you’ll want to get a photograph of yourself breezing up the pike with your smokethrottle wide open! TALK ABOUT SMOKE-SPORT!

And now, stop and consider what proportion of the total energies of the community are devoted to the production of poisonous filth such as this. I do not count the people who read and answer the advertisements; I count only those who write them and sell them, those who set the type and manufacture the paper, those who distribute the publications and keep the accounts of the complicated operations. There cannot be less than a million people thus occupied with the advertising business in America; and all of them buried to the eyes in this poisonous filth, all compelled to absorb it, to believe it, to have their personalities befouled by it! It means, of course, that these people are permanently excluded from the intellectual life. These people cannot know beauty, they cannot know grace and charm, they cannot know dignity, they cannot even know common honesty. To say that they are bound as captives to the chariot-wheels of Mammon is not to indulge in loose metaphor, but to describe precisely their condition. They are bound in body, mind, and soul to vulgarity, banality, avarice and fraud.

You, perhaps, are not connected with the advertising business, so you think you may ignore the fate of these pitiful captives. You are a banker, perhaps; you handle the money of advertisers, and your mind is shaped by the effort to understand them and their ways. Or you are a telegrapher, and send telegrams for the advertising business; or you are a farmer, and raise food for the million advertisement-makers; or you are a steel-worker, and help to make their typewriters, the nails for their shoes, and the rails over which their products are carried.

Or perhaps you are a person of leisure; you dwell alone in an ivory tower of art. Now and then, however, you have to know something about the world in which you live; and competitive commercialism ordains that when you seek to learn this, you shall have the maniac shrieks of advertisers resounding in your brain, you shall have the whirling dervishes of this new cult of Publicity for Profit cavorting about in your ivory tower. More than that, you shall have the intellectual content of everything you read distorted by the advertisements which adjoin them; your most dignified editor, your most aloof, “art for art’s sake” poet will be a parasite upon advertisements, and if he thinks the advertisements have nothing to do with him, it is only because the dignified editor and the aloof, “art for art’s sake” poet are fools.

Take the “American Magazine”; that awful flub-dub I quoted earlier in the book. What can it mean, save that the “American Magazine” had to have advertisements, and to get the advertisements it had to please the sort of people who read advertisements? Or take the “Curtis Publications”; what is the obvious fact about this colossal advertisement-distributing machine? The owner of this machine, needless to say, is not in the business of distributing advertisements for his health. On the contrary, he has lost his health and made eleven million dollars. His price for advertisements is six thousand dollars per page. To carry these advertisements, he must have reading matter, and to select this reading matter he employs a group of men and women called “editors.” These “editors” are, of course, in position to offer prices such as thrill the soul of every hungry author, and cause him to set diligently to work to study the personalities of the “editors,” so as to know what they want. If he doesn’t find out what they want, he doesn’t write for the publications—that is obvious enough. On the other hand, if he does find out what they want, he becomes a new star in America’s literary firmament—and at the cost of pretty nearly all his ideals of truth, humanity and progress.

Take up the “Saturday Evening Post.” Here is Harry Leon Wilson, who used to show signs of brains, telling a story of how a labor union tried to take control of a factory. He exhausts his imagination to make this proposition ridiculous, to pour contempt over these fool workingmen. And here is a short story writer named Patullo, solemnly setting forth that Socialism means dividing up! And here is George Kibbe Turner, who I used to think was one of America’s coming novelists, with a short story, which turns out not to be a short story at all, but a piece of preaching upon the following grave and weighty theme: that the trouble with America is that everybody is spending too much money; that the railroad brotherhoods are proposing to turn robbers and take away the property of their masters; and that a workingman who is so foolish as to buy a piano for his daughter will discover that he has ruined himself to no purpose, because workingmen’s daughters ought not to have pianos—they are too tired to play them when they get through with their work!

We are accustomed to the idea that in Europe there exists a “reptile press,” meaning a press whose opinions are for sale, not merely to politicians and governments, but to promoters and financiers; we read of the “Bourse press” of Paris, and understand that these papers accept definite cash sums for publishing in their columns news favorable to great speculations and industrial enterprises. I have heard America congratulated that it had no such newspapers; I myself was once sufficiently naïve so to congratulate America!

Naturally, it is not so easy to prove direct bribery of the press. When the promoter of an oil “deal” or of a franchise “grab” wishes to buy the support of a newspaper, he does not invite the publisher onto the sidewalk and there count a few thousand dollar bills into his hands. But as a person who steals once will go on stealing, so a newspaper proprietor who takes bribes becomes a scandal to his staff, and sooner or later bits of the truth leak out. America has been fortunate in the possession of one bold and truth-telling newspaper editor, Fremont Older; and when you read his book, “My Own Story,” you discover that we have a “reptile press” in America, a press that is for sale for cash.

The chances are that you never heard of Fremont Older’s book. It was published over a year ago, but with the exception of a few radical papers, American Journalism maintained about it the same silence it will maintain about “The Brass Check.” For twenty-five years Older was managing editor of a great newspaper, and now, in the interest of public welfare, he has told what went on inside that newspaper office. Older began as a plain, every-day hireling of privilege, but little by little his mind and his conscience awakened, he took his stand for righteousness in his city, and fought the enemies of righteousness, not merely at peril of his job, but at peril of his life. The first time I met Older, ten years ago, he had just been kidnapped by thugs and carried away in an automobile and locked under armed guard in a compartment of a sleeping-car, to be carried into Southern California, where the “S. P.” controlled everything, and could “put him away.” He told me the story, and to this day I remember my consternation. Two or three years later I happened to tell it in England, to a group of members of parliament; they were Englishmen, and were too polite to say what they thought, but I knew what they thought. It was hopeless to tell that story to Englishmen; such things did not happen—except in “movies”!

The story of the “San Francisco Bulletin,” as Fremont Older tells it, is a story of corruption, systematic and continuous. The “Bulletin” was controlled in all four of the ways I have described; not merely by the owner, by the owners of the owner, and by the advertising subsidy, but by the bribe direct. The owner of the “Bulletin” was a man named Crothers, and he had an itching palm. It was itching at the beginning of the story, when it was empty, and it was still itching at the end of the story, when it was full. Says Fremont Older:

In addition to this, the “Bulletin” was on the payroll of the Southern Pacific Railroad for $125 a month. This was paid not for any definite service, but merely for “friendliness.” Being always close to the line of profit and loss, it was felt the paper could not afford to forfeit this income.

These were in the early days, you understand, when Older was playing the dirty game for his owner. He tells us, quite frankly, how he did it. For example, here is a picture of a great newspaper in politics:

I hoped to convince Charley Fay, Phelan’s manager, to accept the same plan in Phelan’s fight that I used in the McKinley campaign; that is to get Phelan to buy a certain number of extra “Bulletin” editions. I suggested the idea to Fay that if I could be allowed several 10,000 editions of the “Bulletin” in addition to our regular circulation, for which we would charge $500, I thought I could hold the paper in line throughout the campaign.

But this was not enough for the itching palm, it appears:

He (Crothers) felt that the “Bulletin’s” support was worth more than an occasional $500. His pressure upon me for more money finally became so strong that I called on Charley Fay and told him that I would have to get out another extra edition to the number agreed upon between us.

And then, a year or two later:

The fight had barely started when Crothers came to me and said that W. H. Mills, who handled the newspapers of California for the railroad company, had agreed to raise the “Bulletin’s” pay from $125 to 50 a month if we would make only a weak support of the new charter.

And again:

Crothers felt that the influence of the “Bulletin” was worth more than the Southern Pacific had been paying. He insisted that I go to Mills and demand $25,000 from the railroad for supporting Gage. I told him that this was ridiculous, that they wouldn’t consider such a sum for a minute. He insisted that he would have 5,000 or he wouldn’t support Gage, and demanded that I tell Mills that.

In these campaigns the “Bulletin” had been supporting the Democratic candidate; but it was supposed to be a Republican paper, and in the next campaign the owner decided that unless the Democrats paid him more money, he would become really and truly “Republican.” So Older went on the hunt once more.

Poniatowski said: “I will do all I can, but the best I can do personally is $500 a month for three months through the campaign. I will put up the $1500 out of my own pocket.”

I did not dare to go to anyone else, and I hoped, but faintly, that this would be enough. I went to Crothers with the information that I had got $1500 to support Tobin, and he said, “It isn’t enough.”

I was in despair. Only one other ruse remained by which I might hold him. I asked former Mayor E. B. Pond, banker and millionaire; James D. Phelan, mayor and millionaire, and Franklin K. Lane, then a rising power in California, to call on Crothers and see if they could not prevail on him to stand by Tobin. Always greatly impressed by wealth, I felt that their prominence and financial standing might hold him. They called, and did their best, but made no impression.

A few days later the railroad paid Crothers $7500. It was paid to him by a man not openly connected with the railroad. I learned of it almost instantly. The report was confirmed by Crothers ordering me to support Wells.

And now Fremont Older has been forced out of the “Bulletin,” and the paper has become rancid in the cause of reaction, and carries at the top of its editorial page this proud slogan: “R. A. Crothers, Editor and Proprietor.”

And do you think that the owner of the “Bulletin” was alone among San Francisco newspaper owners in the possession of an itching palm? The “San Francisco Liberator,” organ of the reformers, showed how, in the effort to keep the president of “United Railroads” out of jail, every crime up to murder had been committed. Armed mobs had been organized to resist the city’s authority; thieves had been hired and safes broken open, juries had been bribed and witnesses spirited away; last, but not least, public sentiment had been corrupted through the press. The “Liberator” gives names and dates, a whole mass of detail, which would fill a chapter of this book. One example, well authenticated: One little local paper had been purchased for seventy-five dollars, and in a period of thirteen weeks had obtained thirty-two hundred and fifty dollars from the publicity-bureau of “United Railroads”!

And as I write there comes to me a letter from an editor of one of San Francisco’s largest newspapers, a man who knows the game from A to Z. He tells me the sordid history of “Mike” de Young’s “San Francisco Chronicle”:

The owner’s brother was murdered not many years ago, because of a blackmail story run in the paper. During the war it was he who got the San Francisco Publishers’ Association to charge the government full advertising rates for all war loan organizations, etc. He was a strong ally of the Southern Pacific when that road ran California, and still fights for the railroads whenever he gets a chance.

I write to others in San Francisco, to be sure that I am making no mistake. One sends me a letter by Arthur McEwen, a well-known journalist, made public twenty-five years ago. Mr. de Young, says McEwen, has a grammar of his own; he speaks of being “attackted,” and he made famous the phrase, “the tout ensemble of the whole.” He is a multi-millionaire, but for years had refused to pay fifteen dollars a month to keep his insane brother out of the paupers’ ward of the asylum. He plunders the big corporations mercilessly, “having never been able to see why he should not share in their prosperity.” Says McEwen:

He set up in court the contention that it is legitimate for a newspaper to sell its editorial columns, and though he was reviled by his startled contemporaries for that dangerous frankness, there is no reason to doubt that he was sincere or unaffectedly astonished at the notion of there being aught disgraceful in his admission.... Not until the archives of the Crocker family have been opened to the historian will it be known whether or not the common report be true which affirms that “the title deeds to his California street mansion are the intercepted love letters of a millionaire.”

Another friend sends me a poem by Ambrose Bierce, entitled “A Lifted Finger.” It is one of the most withering denunciations of a human being ever penned. As a sample I quote the last stanza, in which the victim is forbidden to kill himself: