Chapter XLVII: The Bribe Wholesale

Every now and then some pillar of Capitalism is overthrown, and a mess of journalistic worms go wriggling to cover. For example, the “New Haven” scandal: Some five years ago the Interstate Commerce Commission revealed the fact that the band of pirates who had wrecked the great “New Haven” system had been paying four hundred thousand dollars a year to influence the press; and more significant yet, the president of the railroad swore that this was “relatively less than was paid by any other large railroad in the country!” The “New Haven” had a list of reporters to whom it paid subsidies, sometimes two hundred dollars in a lump, sometimes twenty-five dollars a week. It was paying three thousand dollars a year to the “Boston Republic.” “Why?” was the question, and the answer was, “That is Mayor Fitzgerald’s paper.” The agent of the road who had handled this money stated that “All the newspapers and magazines knew what it was for.” He had paid money to over a thousand papers, among them the “Boston Evening Transcript,” for sending out railroad “dope.” This “New Haven,” you understand, was the road which wrecked “Hampton’s” for refusing to be bought. It was a “Morgan” road.

It was the same way with the Mulhall revelations, brought out by a committee of the United States Senate. Here was the “National Association of Manufacturers” and the “Merchant Marine League,” spending enormous subsidies for propaganda with newspapers. When the La Follette Seamen’s Law was being fought in the Senate, it was shown that the great newspapers were distributing every year two million dollars for shipping advertisements, and they claimed and got their return in the form of bitter opposition to this bill. During the Life Insurance investigations in New York, it was shown that every one of these great financial enterprises maintained not merely an advertising bureau, but a “literary bureau.” The Mutual Life Insurance Company had employed a certain “Telegraphic News Bureau,” which supplied newspapers with propaganda which they published as reading matter. For one item, supplied to about one hundred different papers, the agent had been paid over five thousand dollars. What the newspapers were paid was not brought out, but the agent testified that he had been paid one dollar a line, while the papers had been paid as high as five dollars a line. Also there was another agency, through which the Mutual Life was sending out what it called “telegraphic readers.” The big newspapers had special advertising agents to solicit this kind of paid material, and they had regular printed schedules of rates for publishing it.

In the same way Attorney-General Monnett of Ohio brought out that the Standard Oil Company maintained the “Jennings Advertising Agency” to distribute and pay for propaganda upon this contract:

The publisher agrees to reprint on news or editorial pages of said
newspaper such notices, set in the body type of said paper and bearing
no mark to indicate advertising, as are furnished from time to time by
said Jennings Agency at the rate of —— per line, and to furnish such
agency extra copies of paper containing such notes at four cents per
copy.

In the same way the Standard Oil Company was shown to have paid from five hundred to a thousand dollars for the publication of a single article in Kansas newspapers. The Standard Oil had a subsidized press of its own—for example, the “Oil City Derrick”—and it had subsidized “Gunton’s Magazine” to the extent of twenty-five thousand dollars a year.

In the same way it was brought out by Governor Hunt of Arizona, during the recent great copper strike, that the mine-owners had been bribing the local newspapers in Greenlee County for printing “plate-matter” favorable to them. It was shown that the liquor lobby had maintained an enormous “slush” fund for the press. It was shown that the great public utility interests of the Middle West had maintained a publicity bureau to send out material against municipal ownership. It was shown that the high tariff interests had been maintaining a Washington bureau and sending out “news letters,” all paid for. It was shown that the railroad companies were doing the same thing; in a single office of their publicity department—that in Chicago—they had forty-three employes, and the manager stated to Ray Stannard Baker that before this bureau began its work, four hundred and twelve columns of matter opposed to the railroads had appeared in the newspapers of Nebraska, but after the bureau had been in operation for three months, in one week the newspapers of Nebraska had published two hundred and two columns favorable to the railroads, and only four columns against them!

And year by year, as the plundering of the people increases, this “bribe wholesale” becomes a greater menace; today, as I write, it has become a nation-wide propaganda. Testifying before the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry of the United States Senate, January 14, 1919, Frank Heney shows that to defeat the bill for government regulation of the packing industry now before Congress, Swift & Company alone are spending a million dollars a month upon newspaper advertising! Heney testifies that he has had an examination made of every newspaper in California, and every one has published the full-page advertisements of this firm. Senator Norris testifies that he has had an examination made in New York State, and has been unable to find a single paper without the advertisements—which, it is pointed out, are not in any way calculated to sell the products of Swift & Company, but solely to defeat government regulation of the industry. Armour & Company were paying over two thousand dollars a page to all the farm publications of the country—and this not for advertisements, but for “special articles”! J. Ogden Armour was put on the stand, and some amusement developed. He had given a banquet to the editors of these farm-journals; he did not expect this banquet to have any influence upon the advertising, but he did have a vague hope that both banquet and advertising might dispose the editors to look with less disfavor upon the Armour business!

Day by day the money-masters of America become more aware of their danger, they draw together, they grow more class-conscious, more aggressive. The war has taught them the possibilities of propaganda; it has accustomed them to the idea of enormous campaigns which sway the minds of millions and make them pliable to any purpose. They have been terrified by what happened in Russia and Hungary, and they propose to see to it that the foreign population of America is innoculated against modern ideas. They form the “Publishers’ Association of the American Press in Foreign Languages,” whose purpose it is “to foster unswerving loyalty to American ideals”—that is to say, to keep America capitalist. Then a group of our biggest exploiters, headed by Coleman du Pont of the Powder Trust, buy the “American Association of Foreign Language Newspapers.” They give a dinner to the heads of all the newspaper advertising agencies, at the Bankers’ Club of New York, and explain that in future all advertising must be placed through this great association. So the massed advertising power of American corporations is to be wielded as a club, to keep the newspaper columns and the editorial columns of foreign language newspapers free from radicalism. So when there is a strike anywhere in the “Powder barony,” and Poles and Hungarians are being bayonetted and shot, the powder barons will know that Polish and Hungarian newspapers are printing no news of the shooting, and giving no encouragement to the strike.

I write the above _a priori_; that is to say, I understand American Capitalism so well that I venture to guess what it plans to do with its foreign-language press machine. And six months later, as I am sending this book to the printer, I discover that I have guessed correctly! The great steel-strike is on, and the following appears in an Associated Press dispatch from Youngstown, Ohio:

Managers of five foreign language newspapers today decided to publish
special editions of their papers explaining to their countrymen that
if they are satisfied with present mill-conditions they should meet
and vote on the question of returning to work.

And, on the other hand, if the foreign-language newspapers decide to get along without advertising, and to stand by the workers, what then? Then we denounce them as Bolsheviks, and demand deportation of their editors and publishers; we raid their offices and confiscate their lists and bar them from our mails. If necessary, some of our corrupt interests “frame up” evidence against them, and throw their editors and publishers into jail.

The above may sound to you an extreme statement. But as this book is going to press I come upon definite evidence of precisely such a case, and you will find it in full in the last chapter.