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 CHAPTER XLVIII

POISON IVY

I have asked the difficult question, When is a bribe not a bribe? When it is "legitimate business"? When, for instance, the "New Haven" is discovered to have ordered 9,716 copies of the "Outlook" containing a boost of the "New Haven" system by Sylvester J. Baxter, a paid writer of the "New Haven"? You may read the details of this in "The Profits of Religion"; the president of the "Outlook" corporation wrote to me that the "New Haven" bought these copies "without any previous understanding or arrangement." They are so naïve in the office of this religious weekly; nobody had the slightest idea that if they boosted some railroad grafters in peril of discovery, these grafters might come back with a big order! And right now, while the railroads are trying to get their properties back, and all their debts paid out of the public treasury, the spending of millions of dollars upon advertising is perfectly legitimate—it does not have the slightest effect upon newspaper editorial policy! When the miners of Colorado go on strike, and the Rockefellers proceed to fill every daily and weekly newspaper in the state of Colorado with full-page broad-sides against the miners, this of course is not a bribe; the fact that on the page opposite there will appear an editorial, reproducing completely the point of view of the advertisements—that is a pure coincidence, and the editorial is the honorable and disinterested opinion of the newspaper editor! When the United States Commission on Industrial Relations exposes the fact that these attacks on the miners contain the most outrageous lies, and that the thousand-dollar-a-month press-agent of the Rockefellers knew they were lies—it is a pure coincidence that very little about this revelation is published in the Colorado newspapers!

This last incident is so important as to deserve fuller exposition. The thousand-dollar-a-month press-agent of the Rockefellers was a gentleman by the name of Ivy L. Lee, and after the strikers had experienced his methods for a while, they referred to him as "Poison Ivy." He took the published