Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/294



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