Of course you say this is an illegal proceeding, and can’t be done. I assure you it was done. We were thrown out of that bank, after the bank had accepted our paper, and after we had checked against it. The manager of the bank told me that he was powerless—that the “down-town” folks had thrown us out. Several other banks that had loaned me money for ten years told me that they could not do anything for me now—that I was in bad “down-town.”
One banker who flatly said he would loan us money whether Morgan’s crowd wanted him to or not, was put out of business himself within a few months. This man’s name is Earle. He was then running the Nassau Bank. I do not know whether Earle would tell his story or not, but the way the Morgan crowd drove him out of the banking business was one of the coldest-blooded things I ever heard of. They punished him for trying to accept perfectly good banking-paper to help me out of my crisis.
The foregoing facts are dictated hurriedly but there are some points in them that I believe you will want. Of course you know the finish of the properties. Within ten days after the thing began to close in on me, I had to turn my affairs over to the lawyers, and then a group of people appeared who were said to be the “International Correspondence” group of Scranton, Pa. They brought in letters from bankers, etc., showing they were very reputable and high-classed, and I had the choice of going into the hands of the receiver, or letting them take the property. They paid me just money enough so I could get my stock out of hock. The rest of the money they were to pay me was evidenced by a contract. I turned the contract over to my attorneys for protection of my preferred stockholders. Within a few weeks’ time we became convinced that the fellows who had taken over the property intended to loot it. The bookkeeper told me they took one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars out of the property in a few months, and took the books down to the East River and threw them off the bridge.
The result of it all was that I worked with the United States Government and had the crowd indicted. In time we brought them to trial. The trial lasted four or five weeks. We literally could not prove anything. We did prove that “Hampton’s Magazine” was a valuable piece of property and that it was making money, but we could not prove that the fellows who got it were crooks. All the records were destroyed. The result was, the judge threw the case out of court, after it had been in court for four or five weeks, and we never got back any of the money. Of course, the property in the meantime had been ruined.
I have told about several of the magazines which consented to “be good.” I have shown the pitiful plight of the “American,” and the miserable piffle they are publishing. And what is the meaning of it? The meaning was given in an item published in the “New York Press” early in 1911, when the “American Magazine” was taken over by the Crowell Publishing Company. The “Press” stated that this concern was controlled by Thomas W. Lamont, of J. P. Morgan and Company, and declared “The ‘American’ will do no more muck-raking.” In answer, the “American” in its next issue made a statement, haughtily announcing that the same editors, John S. Phillips, Ray Stannard Baker, Ida Tarbell and Finley Peter Dunne were remaining in charge, and that “the policy of the magazine will be unchanged.” To a discussion of this, my own language is inadequate; I have to employ the vocabulary of my son, a student in high school: “The poor boobs!” Four years these editors stuck it out, and then they quit, and a couple of young fellows who had been their office-clerks are now the “editors” of the “American Magazine”—which boasts a million circulation, and fifty-eight thousand lines of advertisements per month! Now, as I write, I learn that this Crowell Publishing Company has purchased “Collier’s,” and we shall see the same thing happening to our “National Weekly”!
In the same tragic way, my old friend Ridgway, who published the “Condemned Meat Industry,” is out of “Everybody’s,” and a new and wholly “tame” staff is in charge, acceptable to the Butterick Publishing Co. In the same way S. S. McClure was turned out of his magazine, which once published Ida Tarbell’s exposure of Standard Oil, and now publishes the solemn futilities of Cleveland Moffett, and anti-Socialist propaganda by the unspeakable Newell Dwight Hillis. It happened the other day that I was glancing over a back number of “McClure’s,” and my eye was caught by the opening instalment of a serial, announced in this style:
At last! A great new novel by the author of “The Broad Highway.” “BELTANE THE STRONG,” by JEFFREY FARNOL, who also wrote “The Amateur Gentleman” and “The Money-Moon.” This is no ordinary story. Many novelists would have written three books, some six, in the time Jeffrey Farnol has given to this tremendous love-tale of Beltane and Lady Helen. The result is the finest thing of its kind “McClure’s” has ever printed—by all means the novel of the year.
And opposite this is a full-page pink and purple illustration of a misty, mystical girl in a thrilling state of semi-nudity, with this quotation:
Breathless and as one entranced he gazed upon her: saw how her long hair glowed a wondrous red ’neath the kisses of the dying sun; saw how her purpled gown, belted at the slender waist, clung about the beauties of her shapely body: saw how the little shoe peeped forth from the perfumed mystery of its folds—and so stood speechless, bound by the spell of her beauty.
“The perfumed mystery of its folds!” Such is the perfumed garbage now being fed to the American public in the name of Sam McClure!