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?
CHAPTER XLV
THE ADVERTISING ECSTASY
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?