Panem et Circenses; bread and the Big Show. The diagnosis of the
satyr-like mathematician had been accurate. That same method whereby the
tyrants of Rome had sought to beguile the restless and unthinking
multitude, Banneker adopted to capture and lead the sensation-avid
metropolitan public through his newspaper. As a facture, a creation made
to the mind of the creator, The Patriot was Banneker's own. True,
Marrineal reserved full control. But Marrineal, after a few months spent
in anxious observation of his editor's headlong and revolutionary
method, had taken the sales reports for his determinative guide and
decided to give the new man full sway.
Circulation had gone up as water rises in a tube under irresistible
pressure from beneath. Nothing like it had ever been known in local
journalism. Barring some set-back, within four years of the time when
Banneker's introductory editorial appeared, the paper would have
eclipsed all former records. In less than two years it had climbed to
third place, and already Banneker's salary, under the percentage
agreement, was, in the words of the alliterative Gardner, whose article
describing The House With Three Eyes and its owner had gone forth on the
wings of a far-spreading syndicate, "a stupendous stipend."
Banneker's editorials pervaded and gave the keynote. With sublime
self-confidence he had adopted the untried scheme of having no set and
determined place for the editorial department. Sometimes, his page
appeared in the middle of the paper; sometimes on the back; and once,
when a most promising scheme of municipal looting was just about to be
put through, he fired his blast from the front sheet in extra heavy,
double-leaded type, displacing an international yacht race and a most
titillating society scandal with no more explanation than was to be
found in the opening sentence:
"This is more important to YOU, Mr. New Yorker, than any other news in
to-day's issue."
"Where Banneker sits," Russell Edmonds was wont to remark between puffs,
"is the head of the paper."
"Let 'em look for the stuff," said Banneker confidently. "They'll think
all the more of it when they find it."
Often he used inset illustrations, not so much to give point to his
preachments, as to render them easier of comprehension to the
unthinking. And always he sought the utmost of sensationalism in caption
and in type, employing italics, capitals, and even heavy-face letters
with an effect of detonation.
"Jollies you along until he can see the white of your mind, and then
fires his slug into your head, point-blank," Edmonds said.
With all this he had the high art to keep his style direct, unaffected,
almost severe. No frills, no literary graces, no flashes of wit except
an occasional restrained touch of sarcasm: the writing was in the purest
style and of a classic simplicity. The typical reader of The Patriot had
a friendly and rather patronizing feeling for the editorials: they were
generally deemed quite ordinary, "common as an old shoe" (with an
approving accent from the commentator), comfortably devoid of the
intricate elegancies practiced by Banneker's editorial compeers. So they
were read and absorbed, which was all that their writer hoped or wished
for them. He was not seeking the bubble, reputation, but the solid
satisfaction of implanting ideas in minds hitherto unaroused to mental
processes, and training the resultant thought in his chosen way and to
eventual though still vague purposes.
"They're beginning to imitate you, Ban," commented Russell Edmonds in
the days of The Patriot's first surprising upward leap. "Flattery of
your peers."
"Let 'em imitate," returned Banneker indifferently.
"Yes; they don't come very near to the original. It's a fundamental
difference in style."
"It's a fundamental difference in aim."
"Aim?"
"They're writing at and for their owners; to make good with the boss.
I'm writing at my public."
"I believe you're right. It's more difficult, though, isn't it, to write
for a hundred thousand people than at one?"
"Not if you understand them from study at first hand, as I do. That's
why the other fellows are five or ten-thousand-dollar men," said
Banneker, quite without boastfulness "while I'm--"
"A fifty-thousand-dollar a year man," supplied Edmonds.
"Well, getting toward that figure. I'm on the target with the editorials
and I'm going to hold on it. But our news policy is different. We still
wobble there."
"What do you want! Look at the circulation. Isn't that good enough?"
"No. Every time I get into a street-car and see a passenger reading some
other paper, I feel that we've missed fire," returned Banneker
inexorably. "Pop, did you ever see an actress make up?"
"I've a general notion of the process."
"Find me a man who can make up news ready and rouged to go before the
daily footlights as an actress makes up her face."
The veteran grunted. "Not to be found on Park Row."
"Probably not. Park Row is too deadly conventional."
One might suppose that the environment of religious journalism would be
equally conventional. Yet it was from this department that the "find"
eventually came, conducted by Edmonds. Edgar Severance, ten years older
than Banneker, impressed the guiding spirit of The Patriot at first
sight with a sense of inner certitude and serenity not in the least
impaired by his shabbiness which had the redeeming merit of being clean.
"You're not a newspaper man?" said Banneker after the introduction.
"What are you?"
"I'm a prostitute," answered the other equably.
Banneker smiled. "Where have you practiced your profession?"
"As assistant editor of Guidance. I write the blasphemous editorials
which are so highly regarded by the sweetly simple souls that make up
our _clientèle_; the ones which weekly give gratuitous advice to God."
"Did Mr. Edmonds find you there?"
"No," put in the veteran; "I traced him down through some popular
scientific stuff in the Boston Sunday Star."
"Fake, all of it," proffered Severance. "Otherwise it wouldn't be
popular."
"Is that your creed of journalism?" asked Banneker curiously.
"Largely."
"Why come to The Patriot, then? It isn't ours."
Severance raised his fine eyebrows, but contented himself with saying:
"Isn't it? However, I didn't come. I was brought." He indicated Edmonds.
"He gave me more ideas on news-dressing," said the veteran, "than I'd
pick up in a century on the Row."
"Ideas are what we're after. Where do you get yours, Mr. Severance,
since you are not a practical newspaper man?"
"From talking with people, and seeing what the newspapers fail to do."
"Where were you before you went on Guidance?"
"Instructor at Harvard."
"And you practiced your--er--specified profession there, too?"
"Oh, no. I was partly respectable then.
"Why did you leave?"
"Drink."
"Ah? You don't build up much of a character for yourself as prospective
employee."
"If I join The Patriot staff I shall probably disappear once a month or
so on a spree."
"Why should you join The Patriot staff? That is what you fail to make
clear to me."
"Reference, Mr. Russell Edmonds," returned the other negligently.
"You two aren't getting anywhere with all this chatter," growled the
reference. "Come, Severance; talk turkey, as you did to me."
"I don't want to talk," objected the other in his gentle, scholarly
accents. "I want to look about: to diagnose the trouble in the news
department."
"What do you suspect the trouble to be?" asked Banneker.
"Oh, the universal difficulty. Lack of brains."
Banneker laughed, but without relish. "We pay enough for what we've got.
It ought to be good quality."
"You pay not wisely but too well. My own princely emolument as a prop of
piety is thirty-five dollars a week."
"Would you come here at that figure?"
"I should prefer forty. For a period of six weeks, on trial."
"As Mr. Edmonds seems to think it worth the gamble, I'll take you on.
From to-day, if you wish. Go out and look around."
"Wait a minute," interposed Edmonds. "What's his title? How is his job
to be defined?"
"Call him my representative in the news department. I'll pay his salary
myself. If he makes good, I'll more than get it back."
Mr. Severance's first concern appeared to be to make himself popular. In
the anomalous position which he occupied as representative between two
mutually jealous departments, this was no easy matter. But his quiet,
contained courtesy, his tentative, almost timid, way of offering
suggestions or throwing out hints which subsequently proved to have
definite and often surprising value, his retiring willingness to waive
any credit in favor of whosoever might choose to claim it, soon gave him
an assured if inconspicuous position. His advice was widely sought. As
an immediate corollary a new impress made itself felt in the daily
columns. With his quick sensitiveness Banneker apprehended the change.
It seemed to him that the paper was becoming feminized in a curious
manner.
"Is it a play for the women?" he asked Severance in the early days of
the development.
"No."
"You're certainly specializing on femaleness."
"For the men. Not the women. It's an old lure."
Banneker frowned. "And not a pretty one."
"Effective, though. I bagged it from the Police Gazette. Have you ever
had occasion to note the almost unvarying cover appeal of that justly
popular weekly?"
"Half-dressed women," said Banneker, whose early researches had extended
even to those levels.
"Exactly. With all they connote. Thereby attracting the crude and roving
male eye. Of course, we must do the trick more artistically and less
obviously. But the pictured effect is the thing. I'm satisfied of that.
By the way, I am having a little difficulty with your art department.
Your man doesn't adapt himself to new ideas."
"I've thought him rather old-fashioned. What do you want to do?"
"Bring in a young chap named Capron whom I've run upon. He used to be an
itinerant photographer, and afterward had a try at the movies, but he's
essentially a news man. Let him read the papers for pictures."
Capron came on the staff as an insignificant member with an
insignificant salary. Personally a man of blameless domesticity, he was
intellectually and professionally a sex-monger. He conceived the
business of a news art department to be to furnish pictured Susannahs
for the delectation of the elders of the reading public. His _flair_ for
femininity he transferred to The Patriot's pages, according to a simple
and direct formula; the greater the display of woman, the surer the
appeal and therefore the sale. Legs and bosoms he specialized for in
illustrations. Bathing-suits and boudoir scenes were his particular aim,
although any picture with a scandal attachment in the accompanying news
would serve, the latter, however, to be handled in such manner as
invariably to point a moral. Herein his team work with Severance was
applied in high perfection.
"Should Our Girls Become Artists' Models" was one of their early and
inspired collaborations, a series begun with a line of "beauty pictures"
and spun out by interviews with well or less known painters and
illustrators, giving rich opportunity for displays of nudity, the moral
being pointed by equally lavish interviews with sociologists and
prominent Mothers in Israel. Although at least ninety-nine per cent of
all professional posing is such as would not be out of place at a church
sociable, the casual reader of the Capron-Severance presentation would
have supposed that a lace veil was the extent of the protection allowed
to a female model between sheer nakedness and the outer artistic world.
Following this came a department devoted (ostensibly) to physical
culture for women. It was conducted by the proprietress of a fashionable
reducing gymnasium, who was allowed, as this was a comparatively
unimportant feature, to supply the text subject to Severance's
touching-up ingenuity; but the models were devised and posed by Capron.
They were extremely shapely and increasingly expressive in posture and
arrangement until they attained a point where the post-office
authorities evinced symptoms of rising excitement--though not the type
of excitement at which the Art Expert was aiming--when the series took a
turn for the milder, and more purely athletic, and, by the same token,
less appetizing; and presently faded away in a burst of semi-editorial
self-laudation over The Patriot's altruistic endeavors to improve the
physical status of the "future mothers of the nation."
Failing any other excuse for their careful lubricities, the team could
always conjure up an enticing special feature from an imaginary foreign
correspondent, aimed direct at the family circle and warning against the
"Moral Pitfalls of Paris," or the "Vampires of High Life in Vienna." The
invariable rule was that all sex-stuff must have a moral and virtuous
slant. Thus was afforded to the appreciative reader a double
satisfaction, physical and ethical, pruriency and piety.
It was Capron who devised the simple but effective legend which
afterward became, in a thousand variants, a stock part of every news
item interesting enough to merit graphic treatment, "The X Marks the
Spot Where the Body Was Found." He, too, adapted, from a design in a
drug-store window picturing a sponge fisherman in action, the
cross-section illustration for news. Within a few weeks he had displaced
the outdated art editor and was in receipt of a larger salary than the
city editor, who dealt primarily in news, not sensations, _panem_ not
_circenses_.
Sensationalism of other kinds was spurred to keep pace with the sex
appeal. The news columns became constantly more lurid. They shrieked,
yelled, blared, shrilled, and boomed the scandals and horrors of the
moment in multivocal, multigraphic clamor, tainting the peaceful air
breathed by everyday people going about their everyday business, with
incredible blatancies which would be forgotten on the morrow in the
excitement of fresh percussions, though the cumulative effect upon the
public mind and appetite might be ineradicable. "Murderer Dabbles Name
in Bloody Print." "Wronged Wife Mars Rival's Beauty." "Society Woman
Gives Hundred-Dollar-Plate Dinner." "Scientist Claims Life Flickers in
Mummy." "Cocktails, Wine, Drug, Ruin for Lovely Girl of Sixteen."
"Financier Resigns After Sprightly Scene at Long Beach." Severance
developed a literary genius for excitant and provocative
word-combinations in the headings; "Love-Slave," "Girl-Slasher,"
"Passion-Victim," "Death-Hand," "Vengeance-Oath," "Lust-Fiend." The
articles chosen for special display were such as lent themselves, first,
to his formula for illustration, and next to captions which thrilled
with the sensations of crime, mystery, envy of the rich and conspicuous,
or lechery, half concealed or unconcealed. For facts as such he cared
nothing. His conception of news was as a peg upon which to hang a
sensation. "Love and luxury for the women: money and power for the men,"
was his broad working scheme for the special interest of the paper,
with, of course, crime and the allure of the flesh for general interest.
A jungle man, perusing one day's issue (supposing him to have been
competent to assimilate it), would have judged the civilization pictured
therein too grisly for his unaccustomed nerves and fled in horror back
to the direct, natural, and uncomplicated raids and homicides of the
decent wilds.
The Great Gaines, descending for once from the habitual classicism of
his phraseology, described The Patriot of Severance's production in two
terse and sufficient words.
"It itches."
That itch irked Banneker almost unendurably at times. He longed to be
relieved of it; to scratch the irritant Severance clean off the skin of
The Patriot. But Severance was too evidently valuable. Banneker did go
so far as to protest.
"Aren't you rather overdoing this thing, Severance?"
"Which thing? We're overdoing everything; hence the growth of the
paper."
Banneker fell back upon banality. "Well, we've got to draw the line
somewhere."
Severance bestowed upon the other his well-bred and delicate smile.
"Exactly my principle. I'm for drawing the line every issue and on every
page, if there's room for it. '_Nulla dies sine linea_.' The line of
appeal to the sensations, whether it's a pretty face or a caption that
jumps out and grabs you by the eye. I want to make 'em gloat."
"I see. You were in earnest more or less when in our first talk, you
defined your profession."
Severance waved a graceful hand. "Prostitution is the profession of all
successful journalism which looks at itself honestly. Why not play the
pander frankly?--among ourselves, of course. Perhaps I'm offending you,
Mr. Banneker."
"You're interesting me. But, 'among ourselves' you say. You're not a
newspaper man; you haven't the traditions."
"Therefore I haven't the blind spots. I'm not fooled by the
sentimentalism of the profession or the sniveling claims of being an
apostle of public enlightenment. If enlightenment pays, all very well.
But it's circulation, not illumination, that's the prime desideratum.
Frankly, I'd feed the public gut with all it can and will stand."
"Even to the extent of keeping the Tallman divorce scandal on the front
page for a week consecutively. You won't pretend that, as news, it's
worth it."
"Give me a definition of news," retorted the expert. "The Tallman story
won't alter the history of the world. But it has its--well, its
specialized value for our purposes."
"You mean," said Banneker, deliberately stimulating his own growing
nausea, "that it makes the public's mind itch."
"It's a pretty filthy and scabby sort of animal, the public, Mr.
Banneker. We're not trying to reform its morals in our news columns, I
take it."
"No. No; we're not. Still--"
"That's the province of your editorials," went on the apostle of
titillation smoothly. "You may in time even educate them up to a
standard of decency where they won't demand the sort of thing we're
giving them now. But our present business with the news columns is to
catch them for you to educate."
"Quite so! You lure them into the dive where I wait to preach them a
sermon."
After that conversation Banneker definitely decided that Severance's
activities must be curbed. But when he set about it, he suffered an
unpleasant surprise. Marrineal, thoroughly apprised of the new man's
activities (as he was, by some occult means of his own, of everything
going on in the office), stood fast by the successful method, and let
Banneker know, tactfully but unmistakably, that Severance, who had been
transferred to the regular payroll at a highly satisfactory figure, was
to have a free hand. So the ex-religious editor continued to stroll
leisurely through his unauthoritative and influential routine,
contributing his commentary upon the news as it flowed in. He would
saunter over to the make-up man's clotted desk, run his eye over the
dummy of the morrow's issue, and inquire;
"Wasn't there a shooting scrape over a woman in a big West-Side
apartment?... Being kept by the chap that was shot, wasn't she?... Oh, a
bank clerk?... Well, that's a pretty dull-looking seventh page. Why not
lift this text of the new Suburban Railways Bill and spread the shooting
across three columns? Get Sanderson to work out a diagram and do one of
his filmy line drawings of the girl lying on the couch. And let's be
sure to get the word 'Banker' into the top head."
Or he would deliver a practical lecture from a text picked out of what
to a less keen-scented news-hound might have appeared an unpromising
subject.
"Can't we round out that disappearance story a little; the suburban
woman who hasn't been seen since she went to New York three days ago?
Get Capron to fake up a picture of the home with the three children in
it grouped around Bereaved Husband, and--here, how would something like
this do for caption: '"Mamma, Mamma! Come Back!" Sob Tiny Tots.' The
human touch. Nothing like a bit of slush to catch the women. And we've
been going a little shy on sentiment lately."
The "human touch," though it became an office joke, also took its place
as an unwritten law. Severance's calm and impersonal cynicism was
transmuted into a genuine enthusiasm among the copy-readers. Headlining
took on a new interest, whetted by the establishment of a weekly prize
for the most attractive caption. Maximum of sensationalism was the
invariable test.
Despite his growing distaste for the Severance cult, Banneker was honest
enough to admit that the original stimulus dated from the day when he
himself had injected his personality and ideas into the various
departments of the daily. He had established the new policy; Severance
had done no more than inform it with the heated imaginings and
provocative pictorial quality inherent in a mind intensely if scornfully
apprehensive of the unsatiated potential depravities of public taste. It
was Banneker's hand that had set the strings vibrating to a new tune;
Severance had only raised the pitch, to the _n_th degree of
sensationalism. And, in so far as the editorial page gave him a lead,
the disciple was faithful to the principles and policies of his chief.
The practice of the news columns was always informed by a patently
defensible principle. It paeaned the virtues of the poor and lowly; it
howled for the blood of the wicked and the oppressor; it was strident
for morality, the sanctity of the home, chastity, thrift, sobriety, the
People, religion, American supremacy. As a corollary of these pious
standards it invariably took sides against wealth and power,
sentimentalized every woman who found her way into the public prints,
whether she had perpetrated a murder or endowed a hospital, simpered and
slavered over any "heart-interest story" of childhood ("blue-eyed tot
stuff" was the technical office term), and licked reprehensive but
gustful lips over divorce, adultery, and the sexual complications. It
peeped through keyholes of print at the sanctified doings of Society and
snarled while it groveled. All the shibboleths of a journalism which
respected neither itself, its purpose, nor its readers echoed from every
page. And this was the reflex of the work and thought of Errol Banneker,
who intimately respected himself, and his profession as expressed in
himself. There is much of the paradoxical in journalism--as, indeed, in
the life which it distortedly mirrors.
Every other newspaper in town caught the contagion; became by insensible
degrees more sensational and pornographic. The Patriot had started a
rag-time pace (based on the same fundamental instinct which the rhythm
of rag-time expresses, if the psychologists are correct) and the rest
must, perforce, adopt it. Such as lagged in this Harlot's Progress
suffered a loss of circulation, journalism's most condign penalty. For
there are certain appetites which, once stimulated, must be appeased.
Otherwise business wanes!
Out of conscious nothing, as represented by the now moribund News, there
was provoked one evening a large, round, middle-aged, smiling,
bespectacled apparition who named himself as Rudy Sheffer and invited
himself to a job. Marrineal had sent him to Severance, and Severance,
ever tactful, had brought him to Banneker. Russell Edmonds being called
in, the three sat in judgment upon the Big Idea which Mr. Sheffer had
brought with him and which was:
"Give 'em a laugh."
"The potentialities of humor as a circulation agency," opined Severance
in his smoothest academic voice, "have never been properly exploited."
"A laugh on every page where there ain't a thrill," pursued Sheffer
confidently.
"You find some of our pages dull?" asked Banneker, always interested in
any new view.
"Well, your market page ain't no scream. You gotta admit it."
"People don't usually want to laugh when they're studying the stock
market," growled Edmonds.
"Surprise 'em, then. Give 'em a jab in the ribs and see how they like
it. Pictures. Real comics. Anywhere in the paper that there's room for
'em."
"There's always a cartoon on the editorial page," pointed out Banneker.
"Cartoon? What does that get you? A cartoon's an editorial, ain't it?"
Russell Edmonds shot a side glance at Banneker, meaning: "This is no
fool. Watch him."
"Makes 'em think, don't it?" pursued the visitor. "If it tickles 'em,
that's on the side. It gets after their minds, makes 'em work for what
they get. That's an effort. See?"
"All right. What's your aim?"
"Not their brains. I leave that to Mr. Banneker's editorials. I'm after
the laugh that starts down here." He laid hand upon his rotund
waistcoat. "The belly-laugh."
"The anatomy of anti-melancholy," murmured Severance. "Valuable."
"You're right, it's valuable," declared its proponent. "It's money;
that's what it is. Watch 'em at the movies. When their bellies begin to
shake, the picture's got 'em."
"How would you produce this desirable effect?" asked Severance.
"No trouble to show goods. I'm dealing with gents, I know. This is all
under your shirt for the present, if you don't take up the scheme."
From a portfolio which he had set in a corner he produced a sheaf of
drawings. They depicted the adventures, mischievous, predatory, or
criminal, of a pair of young hopefuls whose physiognomies and postures
were genuinely ludicrous.
"Did you draw these?" asked Banneker in surprise, for the
draughtsmanship was expert.
"No. Hired a kid artist to do 'em. I furnished the idea."
"Oh, you furnished the idea, did you?" queried Edmonds. "And where did
you get it?"
With an ineffably satisfied air, Mr. Sheffer tapped his bullet head.
"You must be older than you look, then. Those figures of the kids are
redrawn from a last-century German humorous classic, 'Max und Moritz.' I
used to be crazy over it when I was a youngster. My grandfather brought
it to me from Europe, and made a translation for us youngsters."
"Sure! Those pictures'd make a reformer laugh. I picked up the book in
German on an Ann Street sidewalk stand, caught the Big Idea right then
and there; to Americanize the stuff and--"
"For 'Americanize,' read 'steal,'" commented Edmonds.
"There ain't no thin' crooked in this," protested the other with
sincerity. "The stuff ain't copyrighted here. I looked that up
particularly."
"Quite true, I believe," confirmed Severance. "It's an open field."
"I got ten series mapped out to start. Call 'em 'The Trouble-hunter
Twins, Ruff and Reddy.' If they catch on, the artist and me can keep 'em
goin' forever. And they'll catch."
"I believe they will," said Severance.
"Smeared across the top of a page it'll make a business man laugh as
hard as a kid. I know business men. I was one, myself. Sold bar fixtures
on the road for four years. And my best selling method was the laughs I
got out of 'em. Used to take a bit of chalk and do sketches on the
table-tops. So I know what makes 'em laugh. Belly-laughs. You make a
business man laugh that way, and you get his business. It ain't
circulation alone; it's advertising that the stuff will bring in. Eh?"
"What do you think, Mr. Banneker?" asked Severance.
"It's worth trying," decided Banneker after thought. "You don't think
so, do you, Pop?"
"Oh, go ahead!" returned Edmonds, spewing forth a mouthful of smoke as
if to expel a bad taste. "What's larceny among friends?"
"But we're not taking anything of value, since there's no copyright and
any one can grab it," pointed out the smooth Severance.
Thus there entered into the high-tension atmosphere of the
sensationalized Patriot the relaxing quality of humor. Under the
ingenuous and acquisitive Sheffer, whose twins achieved immediate
popularity, it developed along other lines. Sheffer--who knew what makes
business men laugh--pinned his simple faith to three main subjects,
convulsive of the diaphragmatic muscles, building up each series upon
the inherent humor to be extracted from physical violence as represented
in the perpetrations and punishments of Ruff and Reddy, marital
infidelity as mirrored in the stratagems and errancies of an amorous ape
with an aged and jealous spouse, and the sure-fire familiarity of aged
minstrel jokes (mother-in-law, country constable, young married cookery,
and the like) refurbished in pictorial serials through the agency of two
uproarious and imbecilic vulgarians, Bonehead and Buttinsky.
Children cried for them, and laughed to exhaustion over them. Not less
did the mentally exhausted business man writhe abdominally over their
appeal. Spread across the top of three pages they wrung the profitable
belly-laugh from growing thousands of new readers. If Banneker sometimes
had misgivings that the educational influence of The Patriot was not
notably improved by all this instigation of crime and immorality made
subject for mirth in the mind of developing youth, he stifled them in
the thought of increased reading public for his own columns.
Furthermore, it was not his newspaper, anyway.
But the editorial page was still peculiarly his own, and with that
clarity of view which he never permitted personal considerations to
prejudice, Banneker perceived that it was falling below pitch. Or,
rather, that, while it remained static, the rest of the paper, under the
stimulus of Severance, Capron, Sheffer, and, in the background but
increasingly though subtly assertive, Marrineal, had raised its level of
excitation. Change his editorials he would not. Nor was there need; the
response to them was too widespread and fervent, their following too
blindly fanatic, the opposition roused by them too furious to permit of
any doubt as to their effectiveness. But that portion of the page not
taken up by his writings and the cartoon (which was often based upon an
idea supplied by him), was susceptible of alteration, of keying-up.
Casting about him for the popular note, the circus appeal, he started a
"signed-article" department of editorial contributions to which he
invited any and all persons of prominence in whatever line. The lure of
that universal egotism which loves to see itself in the public eye
secured a surprising number of names. Propagandists were quick to
appreciate the opportunity of The Patriot's wide circulation for
furthering their designs, selfish or altruistic. To such desirables as
could not be caught by other lures, Banneker offered generous payment.
It was on this latter basis that he secured a prize, in the person of
the Reverend George Bland, ex-revivalist, ex-author of pious stories for
the young, skilled dealer in truisms, in wordy platitudes couched
largely in plagiarized language from the poets and essayists, in all the
pseudo-religious slickeries wherewith men's souls are so easily lulled
into self-satisfaction. The Good, the True, the Beautiful; these were
his texts, but the real god of his worship was Success. This, under the
guise of Duty ("man's God-inspired ambition to be true to his best
possibilities"), he preached day in and day out through his "Daily Help"
in The Patriot: Be guided by me and you will be good: Be good and you
will be prosperous: Be prosperous and you will be happy. On an adjoining
page there were other and far more specific instructions as to how to be
prosperous and happy, by backing Speedfoot at 10 to 1 in the first race,
or Flashaway at 5 to 2 in the third. Sometimes the Reverend Bland
inveighed convincingly against the evils of betting. Yet a cynic might
guess that the tipsters' recipes for being prosperous and happy (and
therefore, by a logical inversion, good) were perhaps as well based and
practical as the reverend moralist's. His correspondence, surest
indication of editorial following, grew to be almost as large as
Banneker's. Severance nicknamed him "the Oracle of Boobs," and for short
he became known as the "Booblewarbler," for there were times when he
burst into verse, strongly reminiscent of the older hymnals. This he
resented hotly and genuinely, for he was quite sincere; as sincere as
Sheffer, in his belief in himself. But he despised Sheffer and feared
Severance, not for what the latter represented, but for the cynical
honesty of his attitude. In retort for Severance's stab, he dubbed the
pair Mephistopheles and Falstaff, which was above his usual
felicitousness of characterization. Sheffer (who read Shakespeare to
improve his mind, and for ideas!) was rather flattered.
Even the platitudinous Bland had his practical inspirations; if they had
not been practical, they would not have been Bland's. One of these was
an analysis of the national business character.
"We Americans," he wrote, "are natural merchandisers. We care less for
the making of a thing than for the selling of it. Salesmanship is the
great American game. It calls forth all our native genius; it is the
expression of our originality, our inventiveness, our ingenuity, our
idealism," and so on, for a full column slathered with deadly and
self-betraying encomiums. For the Reverend Bland believed heartily that
the market was the highest test of humankind. _He_ would rather sell a
thing than make it! In fact, anything made with any other purpose than
to sell would probably not be successful, and would fail to make its
author prosperous; therefore it must be wrong. Not the creator, but the
salesman was the modern evangel.
"The Booblewarbler has given away the game," commented Severance with
his slight, ironic smile, the day when this naive effusion appeared.
"He's right, of course. But he thinks he's praising when he's damning."
Banneker was disturbed. But the flood of letters which came in promptly
reassured him. The Reverend editorializer was hailed broadcast as the
Messiah of the holy creed of Salesmanship, of the high cult of getting
rid of something for more than it is worth. He was organized into a
lecture tour; his department in the paper waxed ever greater. Banneker,
with his swift appreciation of a hit, followed the lead with editorials;
hired authors to write short stories glorifying the ennobled figure of
the Salesman, his smartness, his strategy, his ruthless trickery, his
success. And the salesmanhood of the nation, in trains, in hotel
lobbies, at the breakfast table with its Patriot propped up flanking the
egg and coffee, rose up to call him blessed and to add to his income.
Personal experiences in achieving success were a logical sequence to
this; success in any field, from running a city as set forth by His
Honor the Mayor, to becoming a movie star, by all the movie stars or
aspirants whom their press-agents could crowd into the paper. A
distinguished novelist of notably high blood-pressure contributed a
series of thoughtful essays on "How to be Irresistible in Love," and a
sentimental pugilist indulged in reminiscences (per a hired pen from the
cheap magazine field) upon "The Influence of my Mother on my Career." An
imitator of Banneker developed a daily half-column of self-improvement
and inspiration upon moral topics, achieving his effects by capitalizing
all the words which otherwise would have been too feeble or banal to
attract notice, thereby giving an air of sublimated importance to the
mildly incomprehensible. Nine tenths of The Patriot's editorial readers
believed that they were following a great philosopher along the path of
the eternal profundities. To give a touch of science, an amateur
astronomer wrote stirring imaginative articles on interstellar space,
and there were occasional "authoritative" pronouncements by men of
importance in the political, financial, or intellectual worlds, lifted
from public speeches or old publications. The page, if it did not
actually itch, buzzed and clanged. But above the composite clamor rose
ever the voice of Banneker, clear, serene, compelling.
And Banneker took his pay for it, deeming it well earned.