Chapter XLVI: The Bribe Direct

We are accustomed to the idea that in Europe there exists a “reptile press,” meaning a press whose opinions are for sale, not merely to politicians and governments, but to promoters and financiers; we read of the “Bourse press” of Paris, and understand that these papers accept definite cash sums for publishing in their columns news favorable to great speculations and industrial enterprises. I have heard America congratulated that it had no such newspapers; I myself was once sufficiently naïve so to congratulate America!

Naturally, it is not so easy to prove direct bribery of the press. When the promoter of an oil “deal” or of a franchise “grab” wishes to buy the support of a newspaper, he does not invite the publisher onto the sidewalk and there count a few thousand dollar bills into his hands. But as a person who steals once will go on stealing, so a newspaper proprietor who takes bribes becomes a scandal to his staff, and sooner or later bits of the truth leak out. America has been fortunate in the possession of one bold and truth-telling newspaper editor, Fremont Older; and when you read his book, “My Own Story,” you discover that we have a “reptile press” in America, a press that is for sale for cash.

The chances are that you never heard of Fremont Older’s book. It was published over a year ago, but with the exception of a few radical papers, American Journalism maintained about it the same silence it will maintain about “The Brass Check.” For twenty-five years Older was managing editor of a great newspaper, and now, in the interest of public welfare, he has told what went on inside that newspaper office. Older began as a plain, every-day hireling of privilege, but little by little his mind and his conscience awakened, he took his stand for righteousness in his city, and fought the enemies of righteousness, not merely at peril of his job, but at peril of his life. The first time I met Older, ten years ago, he had just been kidnapped by thugs and carried away in an automobile and locked under armed guard in a compartment of a sleeping-car, to be carried into Southern California, where the “S. P.” controlled everything, and could “put him away.” He told me the story, and to this day I remember my consternation. Two or three years later I happened to tell it in England, to a group of members of parliament; they were Englishmen, and were too polite to say what they thought, but I knew what they thought. It was hopeless to tell that story to Englishmen; such things did not happen—except in “movies”!

The story of the “San Francisco Bulletin,” as Fremont Older tells it, is a story of corruption, systematic and continuous. The “Bulletin” was controlled in all four of the ways I have described; not merely by the owner, by the owners of the owner, and by the advertising subsidy, but by the bribe direct. The owner of the “Bulletin” was a man named Crothers, and he had an itching palm. It was itching at the beginning of the story, when it was empty, and it was still itching at the end of the story, when it was full. Says Fremont Older:

In addition to this, the “Bulletin” was on the payroll of the Southern
Pacific Railroad for $125 a month. This was paid not for any definite
service, but merely for “friendliness.” Being always close to the line
of profit and loss, it was felt the paper could not afford to forfeit
this income.

These were in the early days, you understand, when Older was playing the dirty game for his owner. He tells us, quite frankly, how he did it. For example, here is a picture of a great newspaper in politics:

I hoped to convince Charley Fay, Phelan’s manager, to accept the same
plan in Phelan’s fight that I used in the McKinley campaign; that is
to get Phelan to buy a certain number of extra “Bulletin” editions. I
suggested the idea to Fay that if I could be allowed several 10,000
editions of the “Bulletin” in addition to our regular circulation, for
which we would charge $500, I thought I could hold the paper in line
throughout the campaign.

But this was not enough for the itching palm, it appears:

He (Crothers) felt that the “Bulletin’s” support was worth more than
an occasional $500. His pressure upon me for more money finally became
so strong that I called on Charley Fay and told him that I would have
to get out another extra edition to the number agreed upon between us.

And then, a year or two later:

The fight had barely started when Crothers came to me and said that W.
H. Mills, who handled the newspapers of California for the railroad
company, had agreed to raise the “Bulletin’s” pay from $125 to 50 a
month if we would make only a weak support of the new charter.

And again:

Crothers felt that the influence of the “Bulletin” was worth more than
the Southern Pacific had been paying. He insisted that I go to Mills
and demand $25,000 from the railroad for supporting Gage. I told him
that this was ridiculous, that they wouldn’t consider such a sum for a
minute. He insisted that he would have 5,000 or he wouldn’t support
Gage, and demanded that I tell Mills that.

In these campaigns the “Bulletin” had been supporting the Democratic candidate; but it was supposed to be a Republican paper, and in the next campaign the owner decided that unless the Democrats paid him more money, he would become really and truly “Republican.” So Older went on the hunt once more.

Poniatowski said: “I will do all I can, but the best I can do
personally is $500 a month for three months through the campaign. I
will put up the $1500 out of my own pocket.”

I did not dare to go to anyone else, and I hoped, but faintly, that
this would be enough. I went to Crothers with the information that I
had got $1500 to support Tobin, and he said, “It isn’t enough.”

I was in despair. Only one other ruse remained by which I might hold
him. I asked former Mayor E. B. Pond, banker and millionaire; James D.
Phelan, mayor and millionaire, and Franklin K. Lane, then a rising
power in California, to call on Crothers and see if they could not
prevail on him to stand by Tobin. Always greatly impressed by wealth,
I felt that their prominence and financial standing might hold him.
They called, and did their best, but made no impression.

A few days later the railroad paid Crothers $7500. It was paid to him
by a man not openly connected with the railroad. I learned of it
almost instantly. The report was confirmed by Crothers ordering me to
support Wells.

And now Fremont Older has been forced out of the “Bulletin,” and the paper has become rancid in the cause of reaction, and carries at the top of its editorial page this proud slogan: “R. A. Crothers, Editor and Proprietor.”

And do you think that the owner of the “Bulletin” was alone among San Francisco newspaper owners in the possession of an itching palm? The “San Francisco Liberator,” organ of the reformers, showed how, in the effort to keep the president of “United Railroads” out of jail, every crime up to murder had been committed. Armed mobs had been organized to resist the city’s authority; thieves had been hired and safes broken open, juries had been bribed and witnesses spirited away; last, but not least, public sentiment had been corrupted through the press. The “Liberator” gives names and dates, a whole mass of detail, which would fill a chapter of this book. One example, well authenticated: One little local paper had been purchased for seventy-five dollars, and in a period of thirteen weeks had obtained thirty-two hundred and fifty dollars from the publicity-bureau of “United Railroads”!

And as I write there comes to me a letter from an editor of one of San Francisco’s largest newspapers, a man who knows the game from A to Z. He tells me the sordid history of “Mike” de Young’s “San Francisco Chronicle”:

The owner’s brother was murdered not many years ago, because of a
blackmail story run in the paper. During the war it was he who got the
San Francisco Publishers’ Association to charge the government full
advertising rates for all war loan organizations, etc. He was a strong
ally of the Southern Pacific when that road ran California, and still
fights for the railroads whenever he gets a chance.

I write to others in San Francisco, to be sure that I am making no mistake. One sends me a letter by Arthur McEwen, a well-known journalist, made public twenty-five years ago. Mr. de Young, says McEwen, has a grammar of his own; he speaks of being “attackted,” and he made famous the phrase, “the tout ensemble of the whole.” He is a multi-millionaire, but for years had refused to pay fifteen dollars a month to keep his insane brother out of the paupers’ ward of the asylum. He plunders the big corporations mercilessly, “having never been able to see why he should not share in their prosperity.” Says McEwen:

He set up in court the contention that it is legitimate for a
newspaper to sell its editorial columns, and though he was reviled by
his startled contemporaries for that dangerous frankness, there is no
reason to doubt that he was sincere or unaffectedly astonished at the
notion of there being aught disgraceful in his admission.... Not until
the archives of the Crocker family have been opened to the historian
will it be known whether or not the common report be true which
affirms that “the title deeds to his California street mansion are the
intercepted love letters of a millionaire.”

Another friend sends me a poem by Ambrose Bierce, entitled “A Lifted Finger.” It is one of the most withering denunciations of a human being ever penned. As a sample I quote the last stanza, in which the victim is forbidden to kill himself:

Pregnant with possibilities of crime,
And full of felons for all coming time,
Your blood’s too precious to be lightly spilt
In testimony to a venial guilt.
Live to get whelpage and preserve a name
No praise can sweeten and no lie unshame.
Live to fulfill the vision that I see
Down the dim vistas of the time to be:
A dream of clattering beaks and burning eyes
Of hungry ravens glooming all the skies;
A dream of gleaming teeth and fetid breath
Of jackals wrangling at the feast of death;
A dream of broken necks and swollen tongues—
The whole world’s gibbets loaded with de Youngs!

Let us go to Denver, where there lives another fighter and teller of truth, Ben Lindsey. I have made you acquainted with the “Denver Post,” and with one of its owners, Mr. F. G. Bonfils, who made his “pile” as a lottery-promoter, and went into partnership with another man. Now let Judge Lindsey introduce us to this other man:

The “Post” was then as independent as a highwayman. One of its
proprietors, H. H. Tammen, had begun life as a bar-keeper, and he
would himself relate how he had made money by robbing his employer.
“When I took in a dollar,” Tammen said, “I tossed it up—and if it
stuck to the ceiling, it went to the boss.” He had a frank way of
making his vices engaging by the honesty with which he confessed them;
and he had boasted to me of the amount of money the newspaper made by
charging its victims for suppressing news-stories of a scandalous
nature in which they were involved. He admitted that he supported me
merely because it was “the popular thing to do”—it “helped
circulation.” I knew it was a very precarious support, although the
editorial writer, Paul Thieman, seemed to me an honest and
public-spirited young man.

Or come to Kansas City, where William Salisbury is working on the “Times.” There is a fight on with the gas companies, which have formed a trust and doubled the price of gas. A solitary alderman named Smith has spoken against the ordinance.

When I returned to the “Times” office that night the city editor came
up to my desk, sat down, and said, confidentially: “We’ll have to
print a favorable story on this consolidation. I wouldn’t give much
space to that man Smith’s remarks. I don’t know what the gas people
have done here in this office, but you can guess. They’ve bought the
Council.”

Mr. Salisbury, you see, is only a reporter, so all he gets is gossip and suspicion. He notes that the Kansas City, Pittsburg & Gulf Railway is completing a line to Port Arthur, Texas; the railway company is advertising heavily in the “Times,” and he is sent to write up “a two-column interview upon the beauties of Port Arthur.” Again, he tells us:

I could write columns about Cuban revolutions, and anti-cigarette and
anti-high hat laws. But there were things that I couldn’t write about
at all, and other things that I had to write as the city editor told
me, and as the owner or managing editor told him to tell me. These
included street railway and paving and gas and telephone and other
corporation measures, and anti-department store bills. And the City
Hall reporters of the three other newspapers wrote of such things just
as I did—from dictation.

Again, in Kansas City are great packing-houses, and the people of Kansas City think they should have cheaper meat. The newspapers take up the campaign, and Mr. Salisbury tells what comes of it:

I did some detective work. At the end of several days I found that all
the packing-houses were represented at a meeting each week in the
Armour Building, at Fifth and Delaware Streets. I gave a negro porter
five dollars to show me the room. It was his business to bring the
packers wine and cigars during the sessions at which they fixed the
prices of food for millions of people. He pointed out the chairs in
which each of them sat. He told me their names. He was willing to
arrange for me to listen in the next room when the meeting was held
again.

I returned to the “Times” office in a fever of excitement. I told what
I knew. The managing editor consulted with the business manager. Then
he came to me and said: “We won’t print any more meat trust stories
for a while.”

Several days later I saw packing-house advertisements in all the
newspapers. But none of the papers published any more news about the
price of meat for a very long time.

I quote this story, and then I realize that I have got out of my classification; this isn’t a bribe, this is an advertisement! I can only plead that it is hard to keep to a classification, because those who are corrupting the press do not keep to it. They use various methods; and sometimes the methods shade into one another, so that only a legal expert could sort them out!

When is a bribe not a bribe? When it is an order for extra copies? When it is a share in a land deal? When it is a nomination for senator? When it is an advertising contract? For example, is this a bribe? Arthur Brisbane, the most highly paid and most widely read editorial writer in America, serves announcement to the public that he is going to follow with regard to the drama a policy of “constructive criticism”; he is going to tell the people about the plays that are really worth seeing, so that the people may go to see them. He writes a double-column editorial, praising a play, and two or three days later there appears in the “Evening Journal” a full-page advertisement of this play. Brisbane writes another editorial, praising another play, and a few days later there appears a full-page advertisement of this play. This happens again and again, and all play-producers on Broadway understand that by paying one thousand dollars for a full-page advertisement in the “New York Evening Journal,” they may have a double-column of the “constructive criticism” of Arthur Brisbane!

Or is this a bribe? There is a fight for lower gas-rates in Boston, and Louis Brandeis, now a Justice of the Supreme Court, makes a plea in the interest of the public. One Boston newspaper gives half a column of Brandeis’ arguments; no other Boston newspaper gives one word of Brandeis’ arguments; but every Boston newspaper prints a page of the gas company’s advertisements, paid for at one dollar per line!

If you will count these things as bribery, you are no longer at a loss for evidence. You discover that great systems of corruption of the press have been established; the bribing of American Journalism has become a large-scale business enterprise, which has been fully revealed by government investigations, and proven by the sworn testimony of those who do the work.