Chapter XLIV: The Advertising Boycott

If the newspaper fails to protect its big advertisers, the big advertisers will get busy and protect themselves. This happens every now and then, and every newspaper editor has seen it happen. Sometimes an editor gets sick of the game and quits, and then we have a story. For example, William L. Chenery, who was editor of the “Rocky Mountain News” during the Colorado coal-strike, tells me that “the business men of Denver attempted both an advertising and a social boycott in order to prevent the publication of strike news.... I was told that the owner of the paper would not be admitted to the Denver Country Club so long as our editorials seemed to support the cause of the strikers.”

Or take the case of Boston. George French, managing editor of a Boston paper, told how his paper lost four hundred dollars on account of one item which the “interests” had forbidden. Says Mr. French, “That led to a little personal conversation, and to my retiring from the paper.” He goes on to state:

You cannot get anything into the newspapers that in any way rubs up
against the business policy of the banks and department stores, or of
the public service corporations. Those three great departments of
business are welded together with bands ever so much stronger than
steel, and you cannot make any impression on them. News of department
stores that is discreditable, or in any way attracts unfavorable
attention, is all squelched, all kept out of the papers.

I have told how Otis of Los Angeles ran the “Times” as a Republican paper and an “open-shop” paper, and at the same time ran secretly the “Herald,” a Democratic paper and a “closed-shop” paper. Here is a glimpse of the “Herald” office, as narrated by Frank E. Wolfe, former managing editor of the paper.

The Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association took up the proposition
of an aviation meet at Domingues Field. This was managed by the
walking delegate of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association. The
manager gave out the concessions. I went to Domingues Field personally
after the meet had been running a few days and found conditions so
abhorrent there that I came back and personally wrote a story about
fourteen or sixteen “blind pigs” running....

Immediate reprisals came through the M. and M.—which controls all the
advertising placed in the newspapers of the city—by way of taking out
of the “Herald” the advertising of a certain department-store—the
manager or proprietor of this store being one of the chief moguls of
the aviation field. They took their ad out, and the business-manager
of the “Herald” came storming in to see me, as they always do in cases
of this sort, to see who wrote the story. And when I told him I wrote
it myself from facts I had, he wanted me to print an apology. That I
have not yet done.

There is a law against workingmen getting together and enforcing a boycott; the Danbury hatters tried it, and the courts fined them several hundred thousand dollars, and took away their homes and turned them out onto the street. But if big advertisers choose to get together and boycott a magazine, the law of course would not dream of being impolite. At the very time that this Danbury hatters case was in the courts, the late C. W. Post was explaining in “Leslie’s,” our barber-shop weekly, how he broke the newspapers and magazines to his will.

A friend of mine once had the honor of meeting Mr. Post and standing in his private vault and being permitted to handle a package containing four million dollars worth of government bonds. All this had been made out of advertisements, which had persuaded the public to buy package cereals, of precisely the same food-value as bread, at a price several times as high as bread. On January 23rd, 1913, Mr. Post published in “Leslie’s” an article, urging business men to organize and refuse to give advertisements to “muck-raking” publications; and “Leslie’s” contributed an illuminating cartoon, “The Fool Who Feeds the Monster!” On April 10th Mr. Post contributed another article, describing his methods. He had his clerks go over all publications, listing objectionable matter, and he sent a form letter to offending publications, threatening to withdraw his valuable advertising unless they promised to be “good” in the future.

Mr. Post told what he was doing. There were others who preferred to work in the dark. Perhaps the most significant case was that of “Collier’s Weekly” and the Ballinger “land fraud” scandals. Norman Hapgood and Robert Collier broke the Taft administration on that issue, and President Taft, a venomous old man when he was crossed, issued a furious denunciation of “Collier’s”: whereupon the National Association of Manufacturers, the most powerful organization in the country, took the field against “muck-raking” magazines. They not only applied the advertising boycott to “Collier’s,” they set the banks to work, as in the case of “Hampton’s,” and they took away control of the magazine from Robert Collier, and put it into the hands of a banking committee, where it stayed. “Robbie” took to flying aeroplanes, and a year or two ago he died, and “Collier’s” published a full-page obituary of him, telling the many services he had performed for the public—except the one really important service, that he had broken the Taft administration over the Ballinger “land fraud” issue! Imagine a magazine, that, on the death of its owner, does not dare to mention the greatest event of its owner’s life!

I had an opportunity to watch, from the inside, the operation of this advertising boycott, in the case of my article, the “Condemned Meat Industry.” Many pages of advertising were withdrawn from “Everybody’s Magazine”—not merely advertisements of hams and lard, but of fertilizers, soaps and railways. Lawson several times tried to publish the names of these boycotting advertisers, but “Everybody’s” would not let him. “Everybody’s” possibly reflected that it might not keep up this muck-raking business always; when it had secured enough readers, it might let down and become respectable, and then all the big advertisers would come back to it—as they have done!

The few men who really did mean business knew that the advertisers would never come back to them, so they fought the fight through to a finish—their own finish. So it was with “Hampton’s,” so it was with “Pearson’s” under the old régime. “Pearson’s” tried publishing on the cheapest newsprint paper and with no advertisements, and for two or three years “Pearson’s” was the only popular magazine in America from which you could get the truth. It was the only one which dared to fight the Railroad Trust and the Beef Trust, the only one which dared tell the truth about the Associated Press, and about Capitalist Journalism in general.

Early in 1914 it published a series of articles by Charles Edward Russell: “Keeping the Kept Press,” “The Magazine Soft-Pedal,” and “How Business Controls the News.” Russell told the story of the “Boston Traveller,” which was bought by a young reformer, and put under the control of a real newspaper man, Marlin E. Pew. The young reformer died, and the Shoe Machinery Trust bought the paper and ordered Pew to be good. He refused, and stood on the contract which he had with the paper. He had a story affecting a big financial house. Threats were made, the business manager was confronted with ruin, the paper was tied up, and Pew was forced to sell his contract for cash. I write this story, and the name of the paper sounds familiar to me. I search my memory. Oh, yes! It was the “Boston Traveller,” which, a couple of years ago, published a report to the effect that the authorities of Boston were about to confiscate copies of my magazine, and that copies had been thrown out of the library of Radcliffe College. I wrote to the librarian of Radcliffe College, and she replied that the report was a complete fabrication.

Also Russell told how someone tried to run an independent newspaper in Indianapolis, where the street-railway companies, by various manipulations, had boosted the capitalization of the railways from three million dollars to fifty-seven million dollars. The “Indianapolis Sun” exposed the fact that the congestion on these railways was caused by the fact that all the cars were forced to pass in front of certain big department-stores. Then the wage-slaves of the railways started to organize; the “Sun” backed them, and told how the companies had automobiles which threw their lights on the entrance to the hall where the men met, and took the name of every man who entered. Also the “Sun” reported how the railway-companies were having the union leaders slugged—and so the “Sun” reporter was slugged! The Merchants’ Association got busy, and the “Sun” advertisers were warned of a boycott. A “safety commission” of the Chamber of Commerce was organized, and a meeting was held, at which explicit instructions were given to all newspaper editors. The circulation of the “Sun” had gone up from seventeen thousand to forty thousand, but the advertising was cut off, and so the paper had to quit.

In the same way the “Akron Press” ventured to support a strike against the tire-companies, and was boycotted. The same fate befell the “Cincinnati Post,” which ventured to expose a peculiar procedure engineered by a street railway corporation. There was a limitation of twenty-five years upon public franchises, so the state legislature passed a bill, permitting fifty-year franchises. The city council of Cincinnati then passed one fifty-year franchise, after which the legislature repealed the bill permitting fifty-year franchises for anybody else!

In an article in the “Atlantic Monthly” for March, 1910, Prof. Ross explained just how tight the hold of the advertiser upon the newspaper had then become:

Thirty years ago, advertising yielded less than half of the earnings
of the daily newspapers. Today it yields at least two-thirds. In the
larger dailies the receipts from advertisers are several times the
receipts from the readers, in some cases constituting ninety percent
of the total revenues. As the newspaper expands to eight, twelve, and
sixteen pages, while the price sinks to three cents, two cents, one
cent, the time comes when the advertisers support the newspaper.

And in “Pearson’s,” Charles Edward Russell gave the figures for the magazines. He shows that at the prices then prevailing (1914), a magazine publishing four hundred thousand copies a month would support a net loss of over sixteen hundred dollars for manufacturing costs alone, not including the cost of illustrations, articles, salaries, rent, etc. All this, plus any profit from the enterprise, must come from the advertising. So largely did magazines depend upon the advertising that some of them were practically given away in order to get circulation. One large magazine was sold wholesale at an average price of three cents, another magazine was paying out a total of five dollars for every one dollar it took in through subscriptions.

And what if the advertising did not come? Why then, of course, the magazine or newspaper went out of business. One case of this sort I happened to see from the inside, as the experience befell one of my intimate friends—Gaylord Wilshire, the first of America’s heroic band of “millionaire Socialists.” Wilshire came from the West with a couple of hundred thousand dollars, and established a Socialist magazine in New York. He had got the figures from experts; he must have four hundred thousand circulation, and then he would be safe. So he set out to get this circulation. He had a subscription contest, with a trip around the world for a prize. He had another with a grand piano for a prize. He gave away small fortunes; also he published the truth about American public affairs, and he published the most penetrating editorial comment then to be read in America. So he got his four hundred thousand subscribers. But alas, he had reckoned without his advertisers! For some strange reason the packers of hams and bacon, the manufacturers of automobiles and ready-made clothing, of toilet perfumeries and fancy cigarettes, would not pay their money to a Socialist magazine! Wilshire was close to the rocks, and decided that to publish a Socialist magazine in America a man needed a gold-mine. He bought a gold-mine, and for the last twelve or thirteen years has been wrestling with it. He has just about got it ready to pay; I wonder, will he get his Socialist paper started before we have Socialism?