“Our advertising,” writes a leading investment banker, “by reason of names being placed on our mailing list for circulation, etc., costs us several thousand dollars a year for postage, which would not be the case if we were not doing and had done advertising.”
In fact, there would be little left of the department’s profitable postage stamp sales were the big magazine houses crippled. The publishers are the largest buyers of lists of names used for circulation. To circularize these lists many millions of 2-cent stamps are bought every year.
“Our entire mail order book business,” writes a Western firm, “has been built up through magazine advertising. Last year our postal bill amounted to $12,298.57. This was used on circular matter and letters. If the circulation of the magazines should be reduced, and it is our opinion that it would be if the postage rate should be increased, our postage bill would be reduced proportionately.”
There is much more to be said in support of my contention that the advertising pages of our periodicals are their revenue-producing pages, but it cannot now here be said, as I must pass to another division of our general subject.
We have devoted most of our previous space to Mr. Hitchcock’s “rider,” to the influences and influencers that originated it and tried to push it—by methods adroit and scrupulously unscrupulous—into federal enactment—into operative law. At this point of our presentation of the general subject of Postal Riders and Raiders, it was my original intention to take up generally the raider features or elements as planned for discussion in this volume. I intended to start just here to discuss the Postoffice Department “deficit,” of which Mr. Hitchcock has had so much to say—and of which he made voluminous and eloquent use during his efforts to bring his “rider” a safe winner under the wire. I intended, as just said, to begin to write about the postal “deficit” just here—a deficit which never had real existence, since the days of the “pony post” and “mail coach,” save in quasi form—in methods covering political lootage and looters.
Well, I have changed my original plan a little. I’ll run a few lines through that “deficit”—twaddle-talk, a little further on. Here I will merely repeat what I have already said, in substance at least.
There never has been a postal deficit since the period I have indicated, save deficits created by official crooks and crookedness, by “interests” which hired the official crooks and bought the crookedness, and by department accounting methods which would put Standard Oil or a Western cow ranch on the financial blink inside of thirty-six months, or even in twelve.
We will discuss this artistic “deficit” later. Here I now desire to advert to, and animadvert on, another point which has been brought forcibly to my attention recently—weeks, some two months, after I climbed up here to take a look over the general situation, and then chanced, through the aid of a Congressman friend, to get my distance glasses focused on this postoffice foolery.
Foolery, I have written. I was wrong. There was no foolery about it. It was a calculated, a studied, a cold-blooded partisan stab at one of the greatest and most helpful—most up-building—industries in this country.
But we will let that point and the “deficit” rest for the present. It appears that one of Mr. Hitchcock’s much-worked arguments to harvest or glean votes for his rider amendment was that the amendment would “affect only a few magazine publishers,” or that “only a few magazine publishers, at most, would be affected by the amendment and that they had enriched themselves by the special privilege granted by the second-class mail rate statute of 1885,” etc., etc.