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.