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 CHAPTER XLVII

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