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!
CHAPTER XLVI
THE BRIBE DIRECT
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.