Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/250

 "McClure's." So you see a vast commercial machine building itself up. There is Street and Smith, with no less than eight magazines, all of them having enormous circulations, and devoted exclusively to trash. There is the Butterick Company, with seven; "Vanity Fair" and the Crowell Company, with four each; the Curtis Company, "Munsey's," the "Atlantic," the "World's Work," the "Smart Set," the "Red Book"—each with three. In England we have seen great chains of publications built up in connection with the selling of cocoa and soap; in America we see them built up in connection with the selling of dress-patterns, as with the Buttericks; with the boosting of moving pictures, as formerly done by "McClure's"; with grocery-stores and stock-manipulation, as "Munsey's"; with the selling of subscription-books, as "Collier's," or dictionaries, as the "Literary Digest." Or perhaps it will be a magazine run by a book-publisher, as a means of advertising and reviewing his own books; and if you investigate, you find that the book-publisher in turn is owned by some great financial interest, which sees that he publishes commercial stuff and rejects all new ideas. This process of centralization has continued in England until now Lord Northcliffe owns fifty or sixty magazines and newspapers of all varieties.

Northcliffe had a personal quarrel with Lloyd George, and that part of British "Big Business" which makes its profits out of the Lloyd George policies felt the need of more publicity, and went into the market and bought the "Chronicle" for several million dollars. When the masters of industry pay such sums for a newspaper, they buy not merely the building and the presses and the name; they buy what they call the "good-will"—that is, they buy you. And they proceed to change your whole psychology—everything that you believe about life. You might object to it, if you knew; but they do their work so subtly that you never guess what is happening to you!

By way of illustration, let me tell you the amusing story of one American newspaper which was thus bought in the open market. Some years ago there was a Standard Oil magnate, H. M. Flagler, who took a fancy to the state of Florida, and entertained himself by developing it into a leisure-class resort. He owned all the railroads, and a great chain of hotels, and also, as a matter of course, the State legislature. He had the misfortune to have an insane wife, and the laws of Florida