A Conflict Is Born
Reuters used its control frankly in the interest of the British Empire and of British business interests. Havas and Reuters combined to carry stories that would tend to ridicule American manufactures and America, but they refrained from such handling of Britain and France respectively. All over the world, news from America was top-heavy with Indians on the warpath, lynchings in the South, bizarre crimes in the North. Havas headed off American business competition with France in South America—a Havas exclusive territory—by stories belittling U.S. automobiles and other products. (Very reminiscent, one may note, of the American news industry’s deliberate belittling of Soviet industrial products and skills and planning, propaganda that misled even our highest authorities prior to Stalingrad.)
Anglo-French ridicule was gall and wormwood to American Big Business as it moved more and more into competition for world markets, world influence and world power. It was more immediately vexing to Associated Press but A.P. never went outside the gentlemanly bounds of the conspiracy. It used the cartel as a club to beat back United Press and other would-be rivals at home.
Nevertheless, an ultimate conflict between A.P. and Reuters was inevitable. The United States was building up industrial might and developing resources to overtake and pass Great Britain in the race for world power. This was somewhat obscured, for the general observer, by the rather more aggressive challenge of Germany. Germany, too, had built up a modern industrial productive apparatus far greater than that of Britain. It found the world already divided. Markets, raw materials, the slave labor of colonies and their investment opportunities, had been “parcelled out” among Britain, France and their satellites: Holland, Belgium, Portugal. British and French guns were levelled against any suggestion of sharing the plunder with the newcomers. So German imperialism levelled its guns, too, and World War I was on.