In New York City one of the Gimbel brothers, owners of a Philadelphia department store, was arrested, charged with sodomy, and he cut his throat. Not a single newspaper in Philadelphia gave this news! This was in the days before Gimbel Brothers had a store in New York, therefore it occurred to the “New York Evening Journal” that here was an opportunity to build up circulation in a new field. Large quantities of the paper were shipped to Philadelphia, and the police of Philadelphia stopped the newsboys on the streets and took away the papers; and the Philadelphia papers said nothing about it!
And this department-store interest supervises not only the news columns, but the editorial columns. Some years ago one of the girl-slaves of a New York department-store committed suicide, leaving behind her a note to the effect that she could not stand twenty-cent dinners any longer. The “New York World,” which collects several thousand dollars every day from department-stores, judged it necessary to deal with this incident. “The World,” you understand, is a “democratic” paper, a “liberal” paper, an “independent” paper, a paper of “the people.” Said the “World”:
There are some people who make too large a demand upon fortune. Fixing their eyes upon the standards of living flaunted by the rich, they measure their requirements by their desires. Such persons are easily affected by outside influences, and perhaps in this case the recent discussions, more often silly than wise, concerning the relation of wages to vice, may have made the girl more susceptible than usual to the depressing effects of cheap dinners.
And do you think that is a solitary instance, the result of a temporary editorial aberration? No, it is typical of the capitalistic mind, which is so frugal that it extracts profit even from the suicide of its victims. Some years ago an old man committed suicide because his few shares of express-stock lost their value. The “New York Times” was opposing parcel-post, because the big express-companies were a prominent part of the city’s political and financial machine; the “New York Times” presented this item of news as a suicide caused by the parcel-post!
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE EMPIRE OF BUSINESS
Let the reader not misunderstand my thesis. I do not claim that there exists in America one thoroughly organized and completely conscious business government. What we have is a number of groups, struggling for power; and sometimes these groups fall out with one another, and make war upon one another, and then we see a modern application of the ancient adage, “When thieves fall out, honest men come into their own.” If, for example, you had studied the press of New York City at the time of the life insurance exposures, you would certainly have concluded that this press was serving the public interest. As it happens, I followed that drama of life insurance with the one man in America who had most to do with it, the late James. B. Dill. Judge Dill ran a publicity bureau in New York for several months, and handed out the greater part of this scandal to the newspaper reporters. He told me precisely how he was doing it, and precisely why he was doing it, and I knew that this whole affair, which shook the nation to its depths, was simply the Morgan and Ryan interests taking away the control of life insurance money from irresponsible people like “Jimmy” Hyde, and bringing it under the control of people who were responsible—that us, responsible to Morgan and Ryan. The whole campaign was conducted for that purpose; the newspapers of New York all understood that it was conducted for that purpose, and when that purpose was accomplished, the legislative investigations and the newspaper clamor stopped almost overnight.
And all through this terrific uproar I noticed one curious thing—there was never in any single newspaper or magazine or speech dealing with the question the faintest hint of the one intelligent solution of the problem—that is, government insurance. I made several efforts to get something on the subject into the New York papers; I gave interviews—I have forgotten now to what papers, but I know that these interviews never got by the blue pencil. It took the emergency of war-time to force government insurance—and now the lobby of the private insurance companies is busy in Washington, trying to scuttle government insurance, as government telegraphs and telephones, government railroads, government shipping, government employment agencies, have all one by one been scuttled.
The thieves fall out; and also new thieves are continually trying to break into the “ring.” There is always an enormous temptation presented by our peculiar newspaper situation; our Journalism is maintaining a vacuum, with incessant pressure on the outside. The people want the news; the people clamor for the news; and there is always a mass of vitally important news withheld. The Socialist papers are publishing scraps of it, orators are turning it into wild rumor on ten thousand soap-boxes; if only the people could get it in a newspaper or a magazine, what fortunes they would pay! And of course there are wide-awake men in the world of Journalism who know this: what more natural than that one of them should now and then yield to the temptation to get rich by telling the truth?
The whole history of the American magazine-world is summed up in that formula. Some fifteen years ago our magazine publishers made the discovery of this unworked gold-mine; “McClure’s,” “Success,” “Everybody’s,” “The American,” “Hampton’s,” “Pearson’s,” the “Metropolitan,” even the staid and dignified “Century” jumped in to work this mine. Their circulations began to go up—a hundred thousand increase a month was not unknown in those days of popular delirium. Magazine publication became what it had never before been in American history, and what it has never been since—a competitive industry, instead of a camouflaged propaganda. Is it not a complete vindication of my thesis, that in a couple of years half a dozen magazines were able to build up half a million circulation, by no other means whatever than telling what the newspapers were refusing to tell? And is it not a proof of the pitiful helplessness of the public, that they still go on reading these same magazines, in spite of the fact that they have been bought up by “the interests,” and are filled with what one of their “kept” editors described to me, in a voice of unutterable loathing, as: “Slush for the women!”
For, of course, the industrial autocracy very quickly awakened to the peril of these “muck-raking” magazines, and set to work to put out the fire. Some magazines were offered millions, and sold out. Those that refused to sell out had their advertising trimmed down, their bank-loans called, their stockholders intimidated—until finally, in one way or another, they consented to “be good.”