“Success” refused to “be good”; it persisted in exposing Cannonism, and maintaining a “People’s Lobby” in Washington; so “Success” was put out of business. The “National Post” adopted a radical policy, and it was put out of business; likewise “Human Life,” edited by Alfred Henry Lewis; likewise the “Twentieth Century Magazine,” edited by B. O. Flower; likewise the “Times Magazine”—a monthly having nothing to do with the “New York Times,” but edited by a young man of means who naïvely supposed that he would be allowed to tell the truth to the people of New York. “Pearson’s” of the old régime was brought to ruin, and it survives in its new form by the defiant genius of one man, Frank Harris. “Harper’s Weekly” started out bravely, with Norman Hapgood as editor, and Charles R. Crane as “angel”; for two or three years it fought the advertising boycott, and then it died.
In the “Profits of Religion” I told in detail the story of how “Hampton’s Magazine” was put out of business. I did not intend to repeat this story, but it happens that I have just met my old friend Ben Hampton again, and have gathered fresh details. I will let him tell his own story:
Never in the history of magazine-publishing was there such a great success in such a short time as that of “Hampton’s.” This is not my conversation. It is simply the records of the American News Company. We had, I think, 425,000 circulation, and we broke all records for the same length of time. No other magazine ever succeeded with an investment as small as ours. When they took the magazine away from me I think we had nearly thirty thousand dollars a month advertising.
But it is a peculiarity of magazines that when they grow too fast they lose money for a time. You have contracted for a year to publish advertisements, based on a circulation of a hundred thousand copies. If, three months later you have four hundred thousand circulation, you are giving four times as much as you were paid for; also, you have to have four times as much paper and press-work, for which you do not get returns until three months later. Hampton put in all his fortune and his wife’s, and then he started selling stock to his readers. He had just got by the difficult place; his printing-company and the bank which owned the printing-company had audited his books, and the bank-auditor had certified that in the first four months of 1911 the magazine “had earned a profit of not less than three thousand and not more than seven thousand dollars per month.”
Yet they put “Hampton’s Magazine” out of business! Hampton had started Charles Edward Russell’s articles exposing the “New Haven” swindle—two or three years before the truth broke out, you understand. An agent from the “New Haven” came to inform him that if he started this publication, he would be put out of business. I now learn for the first time the name of this agent—Sylvester J. Baxter. Readers of the “Profits of Religion” will give a start of recognition: the same gentleman who contributed that wonderful boost of the “New Haven” to the “Outlook,” organ of the Clerical Camouflage! And the “Outlook” pretended not to know that this was an official boost of the “New Haven,” and to have been astonished when the “New Haven” ordered a big edition of this issue!
Let Ben Hampton tell the rest of the story:
A nice young man got a job in our accounting department. He was one of the finest fellows we had ever had around. He was willing to work days and nights, and he did work days and nights, and one night when he was working, he took a copy of our list of stockholders. Of course, we did not find this out for months. In the meantime, a man and a woman, working separately, visited all our stockholders they could reach and told them I was robbing the Company. They said I had a large estate in the Adirondacks and a home in the Fifth Avenue district of New York City. At that time Mrs. Hampton and I were having a time to buy clothing for the children. We were drawing almost no salary from the magazine, and we had put all our money in the undertaking. In fact, we were near the line of desperation, we were so hard up.
Something like twenty brokers on the Wall Street curb began to advertise our five dollars par stock at four dollars, down to three dollars a share. We sent to them and offered to buy the stock and were never able to buy one share. One of the brokers afterwards admitted to us that they had none of the stock, and that they were paid to do the advertising.
All these methods, of course, created confusion in the minds of our stockholders, and practically killed our efforts to raise thirty thousand dollars, which was the insignificant sum of money needed to pay off our paper bill. We were entitled to a line of credit of three hundred thousand dollars at the paper makers. We owed the paper maker, I think, about forty thousand dollars and he notified us arbitrarily on a Monday that we would have to pay the bill Wednesday, or he would decline to furnish paper for the current edition, which was then on the press.
When I saw trouble coming I got together a committee of my stockholders in New York City, and a group of about a dozen men endorsed three notes of ten thousand dollars each. The net worth of these dozen men was over two million dollars. We took the notes to one bank in New York City. The bank accepted them. We checked against them, and got money on them, and the next day were notified we would have to take the notes out of the bank.