Was Anna M. Tarbell’s exposures of Standard Oil fiction?
Was the exposure of the Waters-Pierce Oil Company’s connection with the great Senatorial “I” of Texas fiction? Was the shake-up of the “Big Three” life insurance companies fiction? Were the hundreds of other trenchant write-ups and exposures of wrong practices, of impositions, of crookedness and crooks in official, corporation and private life, “fiction?”
The man who reads and will attempt to answer any of those questions affirmatively needs to have his brain dusted up—that is, of course, on the presumption that he is not paid for vocal gyrations.
And yet it was the telling write-ups and exposures of these independents which greatly increased their circulation and, consequently, increased second-class tonnage.
(2) There is no such “main statutory check.” Moreover, the “commercial exploitation” given in the advertising pages of our standard periodicals to merchants, manufacturers, etc., is, as previously shown, not only just and due to the vast commercial interests of the country, but it is safely within both the letter and the intent of the statute.
(3) As previously intimated, a sextet of experienced legislators who could not frame up a law that would put the “mail-order journals” and other abusers and abuses of the second-class mail-rate privilege out of business without ruinously restricting and obstructing the vast legitimate periodical interests of the country, that sextet ought to do one of two things, either send their thought equipment to a vacuum cleaner to get the dust blown off and then try again, or they should turn the task over to some other legislators. There most certainly are scores of legislators in the Senate and the House fully equipped to prepare such a piece of legislation.
(4) In comment under (3) I noted this “mail order advertising journal.” I did so to indicate that the Penrose-Overstreet Commission, as it appears to me, worked the “mail order” print stuff overtime for the purpose of reaching certain legitimate publications.
(5) There is no such distinction between “a fiction-carrying periodical and the non-fiction carrying periodical” as that named. Fiction in a periodical is just as permissible under the act as is the series of war stories, or reminiscences, now (May, 1911), running in one of the magazines; as in the series of articles on the civil war now running in one of the Chicago newspapers, or as would be a series of articles on “the Panama Canal,” on the “Development of the Reaping Machine,” on “Treason in Our Senate,” on “The Depletion of American Forests,” on “The Railroads’ Side of the Railway Mail Pay,” or on any other subject of the historical past or active present.
In fact, most of the current fiction, whether in serial or short-story, published in the standard monthly, weekly and other periodicals of large general circulation presents far more of truth than do the stories, reminiscences and “historical narratives about the civil war,” written forty-five years after the events, and, if based on personal experience, written from fading memory of the facts.
(6) While one may agree with the thought expressed by the commission at (6), its wording expresses a desire or tendency to censor the periodical press of the people by legislative restrictions and departmental rulings which not only contravene the Federal Constitution, but which are inimical to the personal rights and liberties guaranteed by that constitution.