TESTIMONY UNDER OATH.
Senate Document No. 820 presents a reply by some publishers to Mr. Hitchcock’s loose or reckless statements on the point under consideration. I wish to appropriate for use here some very manifestly truthful statements made in that Senate Document No. 820. I shall summarize or quote as best fits my line of presentation.
In 1909 the publishers of five standard magazines, admittedly carrying “the largest amount of advertising” among the monthly periodicals, made a sworn statement covering their receipts, expenditures and net profits. That sworn statement is on file in the Department of Commerce and Labor and is easily accessible to the Postmaster General if he desires to know a little something of what the publishers know about their own business. The publishers of the five periodicals thus making sworn statements to the government of their incomes, expenditures and profits, are the publishers of “Everybody’s,” “McClure’s”, “The Review of Reviews,” “The Cosmopolitan” and “The American.”
The named periodicals, it will be at once recognized, if not the strongest, at least are among the strongest monthly periodicals of this country. Yet these sworn statements show that Mr. Hitchcock’s proposed increase of 3 cents a pound in their mailing rates would, under present conditions, exhaust “81.8 percent of their net profits.”
If Mr. Hitchcock’s proposal, prompted, it would appear, by ulterior motives, as was recently evidenced by his voluminous buttonholing of interested or “interests” Senators and Congressmen to put his “rider” over—no, maybe it is not really his, but it looks like him—for an increase on second-class matter would, if made operative, would so seriously impair the financial strength of five such strong periodicals as those named, what, it is the part both of duty and of honesty to ask, will become of the scores of smaller periodicals, especially of those periodicals which issue more than “two tons” at a mailing and which serve, inform and educate a reading patronage that needs them?
If Mr. Hitchcock’s actions in this matter are clean and open—not “influenced”—he might not only serve himself but a good and worthy cause as well, if he would give some pointers to these smaller publishers—those between his “4,000 pounds an issue” exemptions from his four-cent rate and the stronger periodical publications, five of which are before him in sworn statement. If he would give, I say, these middle-class publishers—we may so call them for the comparison in hand, though their published matter is of the highest class all the time—if he would give such publishers some method or scheme to keep from the financial rocks, they, I am quite sure, would greatly appreciate it. Possibly they would put him on their free lists in perpetuity.
Mr. Hitchcock appears to be a phenomenon at “figurin’” and for the devising of methods to obliterate postoffice “deficits;” also at following the ulterior motive and its “influence,” and still provide, by exemptions or otherwise, to protect the “fence-building” country newspapers,—indeed newspapers in general, now that I read him again. Likewise he protects the farm, the religious, the scientific, the mechanical and other publications whose influence, it appears, does not obstructively influence the “influences” which have directed his recent action.
I do not know who wrote that Senate Document No. 820. Whoever it was, he certainly knew “a gob of things,” as our splendid friend, the washerwoman, would put it, about the United States Postoffice Department, its management and its methods. I shall probably “crib” or plagiarize several times from this Senate Document No. 820, but just here I desire to quote a paragraph from it:
“Postmaster General Hitchcock’s profound ignorance concerning the relation of magazine advertising to magazine profits is shown by the fact that although these magazines received in 1909, $2,463,940.39 for advertising, the aggregate of their net incomes was only $230,734.57,—less than one-tenth of their advertising receipts.”