Part 16

as at once the most forbidding preventive and the swiftest and surest corrective of evil. For the haunting possibility of newspaper exposure, men who know not at all the fear of God pause, hesitate, and turn back from contemplated rascality. For fear "it might get into the papers," more men are abstaining from crime and carouse to-night than for fear of arrest. But these are trite things--only, what if the newspapers fail us? Relying so wholly on the press to undo evil, how shall we deal with that evil with which the press itself has been seduced into captivity?_ In the Lower House of the Massachusetts Legislature one day last March there was a debate which lasted one whole afternoon and engaged some twenty speakers, on a bill providing that every bottle of patent medicine sold in the state should bear a label stating the contents of the bottle. More was told concerning patent medicines that afternoon than often comes to light in a single day. The debate at times was dramatic--a member from Salem told of a young woman of his acquaintance now in an institution for inebriates as the end of an incident which began with patent medicine dosing for a harmless ill. There was humor, too, in the debate--Representative Walker held aloft a bottle of Peruna bought by him in a drug store that very day and passed it around for his fellow-members to taste and decide for themselves whether Dr. Harrington, the Secretary of the State Board of Health, was right when he told the Legislative Committee that it was merely a "cheap cocktail." The Papers did not Print One Word. In short, the debate was interesting and important--the two qualities which invariably ensure to any event big headlines in the daily newspapers. But that debate was not celebrated by big headlines, nor any headlines at all. Yet Boston is a city, and Massachusetts is a state, where the proceedings of the legislature figure very large in public interest, and where the newspapers respond to that interest by reporting the sessions with greater fullness and minuteness than in any other state. Had that debate {073}been on prison reform, on Sabbath observance, the early closing saloon law, on any other subject, there would have been, in the next day's papers, overflowing accounts of verbatim report, more columns of editorial comment, and the picturesque features of it would have ensured the attention of the cartoonist. Now why? Why was this one subject tabooed? Why were the daily accounts of legislative proceedings in the next day's papers abridged to a fraction of their usual ponderous length, and all reference to the afternoon debate on patent medicines omitted? Why was it in vain for the speakers in that patent-medicine debate to search for their speeches in the next day's newspapers? Why did the legislative reporters fail to find their work in print? Why were the staff cartoonists forbidden to exercise their talents on that most fallow and tempting opportunity--the members of the Great and General Court of Massachusetts gravely tippling Peruna and passing the bottle around to their encircled neighbors, that practical knowledge should be the basis of legislative action? I take it if any man should assert that there is one subject on which the newspapers of the United States, acting in concert and as a unit, will deny full and free discussion, he would be smiled at as an intemperate fanatic. The thing is too incredible. He would be regarded as a man with a delusion. And yet I invite you to search the files of the daily newspapers of Massachusetts for March 16, 1905, for an account of the patent-medicine debate that occurred the afternoon of March 15 in the Massachusetts Legislature. In strict accuracy it must be said that there was one exception. Any one familiar with the newspapers of the United States will already have named it--the Springfield _Republican_. That paper, on two separate occasions, gave several columns to the record of the proceedings of the legislature on the patent-medicine bill. Why the otherwise universal silence? The patent-medicine business in the United States is one of huge financial proportions. The census of 1900 placed the value of the annual product at $59,611,355. Allowing for the increase of half a decade of rapid growth, it must be to-day not less than seventy-five millions. That is the wholesale price. The retail price of all the patent medicines sold in the United States in one year may be very conservatively placed at one hundred million dollars. And of this one hundred millions which the people of the United States pay for patent medicines yearly, fully forty millions goes to the newspapers. Have patience! I have more to say than merely to point out the large revenue which newspapers receive from patent medicines, and let inference do the rest. Inference has no place in this story. There are facts a-plenty. But it is essential to point out the intimate financial relation between the newspapers and the patent medicines. I was told by the man who for many years handled the advertising of the Lydia E. Pinkham Company that their expenditure was $100,000 a month, $1,200,000 a year. Dr. Pierce and the Peruna Company both advertise more extensively than the Pinkham Company. Certainly there are at least five patent-medicine concerns in the United States who each pay out to the newspapers more than one million dollars a year. When the Dr. Greene Nervura Company of Boston went into bankruptcy, its debts to newspapers for advertising amounted to $535,000. To the Boston _Herald_ alone it owed $5,000, and to so small a paper, comparatively, as the Atlanta _Constitution_ it owed $1,500. One obscure {074}quack doctor in New York, who did merely an office business, was raided by the authorities, and among the papers seized there were contracts showing that within a year he had paid to one paper for advertising $5,856.80; to another $20,000. Dr. Humphreys, one of the best known patent-medicine makers, has said to his fellow-members of the Patent Medicine Association: "The twenty thousand newspapers of the United States make more money from advertising the proprietary medicines than do the proprietors of the medicines themselves.... Of their receipts, one-third to one-half goes for advertising." More than six years ago, Cheney, the president of the National Association of Patent Medicine Men, estimated the yearly amount paid to the newspapers by the larger patent-medicine concerns at twenty million dollars--more than one thousand dollars to each daily, weekly and monthly periodical in the United States. [IMAGE ==>] {074} Silence is the Fixed Quantity. Does this throw any light on the silence of the Massachusetts papers? {075} Naturally such large sums paid by the patent-medicine men to the newspapers suggest the thought of favor. But silence is too important a part of the patent-medicine man's business to be left to the capricious chance of favor. Silence is the most important thing in his business. The ingredients of his medicine--that is nothing. Does the price of goldenseal go up? Substitute whisky. Does the price of whisky go up? Buy the refuse wines of the California vineyards. Does the price of opium go too high, or the public fear of it make it an inexpedient thing to use? Take it out of the formula and substitute any worthless barnyard weed. But silence is the fixed quantity--silence as to the frauds he practices; silence as to the abominable stewings and brewings that enter into his nostrum; silence as to the deaths and sicknesses he causes; silence as to the drug fiends he makes, the inebriate asylums he fills. Silence he must have. So he makes silence a part of the contract. Read the significant silence of the Massachusetts newspapers in the light of the following contracts for advertising. They are the regular printed form used by Hood, Ayer and Munyon in making their advertising contracts with thousands of newspapers throughout the United States. On page 80 [IMAGE ==>] {080} is shown the contract made by the J. C. Ayer Company, makers of Ayer's Sarsaparilla. At the top is the name of the firm, "The J. C. Ayer Company, Lowell,, Mass.," and the date. Then follows a blank for the number of dollars, and then the formal contract: "We hereby agree, for the sum of............ Dollars per year,........to insert in the............. published at............... the advertisement of the J. C. Ayer Company." Then follow the conditions as to space to be used each issue, the page the advertisement is to be on and the position it is to occupy. Then these two remarkable conditions of the contract: "First--It is agreed in case any law or laws are enacted, either state or national, harmful to the interests of the T. C. Ayer Company, that this contract may be canceled by them from date of such enactment, and the insertions made paid for pro-rata with the contract price." This clause is remarkable enough. But of it more later. For the present examine the second clause: "Second--It is agreed that the J. C. Ayer Co. may cancel this contract, pro-rata, in case advertisements are published in this paper in which their products are offered, with a view to substitution or other harmful motive; also in case any matter otherwise detrimental to the J. C. Ayer Company's interest is permitted to appear in the reading columns or elsewhere in the paper." This agreement is signed in duplicate, one by the J. C. Ayer Company and the other one by the newspaper. All Muzzle-Clauses Alike. That is the contract of silence. (Notice the next one, in identically the same language, bearing the name of the C. I. Hood Company, the other great manufacturer of sarsaparilla; and then the third--again in identically the same words--for Dr. Munyon.) That is the clause which with forty million dollars, muzzles the press of the country. I wonder if the Standard Oil Company could, for forty million dollars, bind the newspapers of the United States in a contract that "no matter detrimental to the Standard Oil Company's interests be permitted to appear in the reading columns or elsewhere in this paper." Is it a mere coincidence that in each of these contracts the silence {076}clause is framed in the same words? Is the inference fair that there is an agreement among the patent-medicine men and quack doctors each to impose this contract on all the newspapers with which it deals, one reaching the newspapers which the other does not, and all combined reaching all the papers in the United States, and effecting a universal agreement among newspapers to print nothing detrimental to patent medicines? You need not take it as an inference. I shall show it later as a fact. [IMAGE ==>] {076} "In the reading columns or elsewhere in this paper." The paper must not print itself, nor must it allow any outside party, who might wish to do so, to pay the regular advertising rates and print the truth about patent medicines in the advertising columns. More than a year ago, just after Mr. Bok had printed his first article exposing patent medicines, a business man in St. Louis, a man of great wealth, conceived that it would {077}help his business greatly if he could have Mr. Bok's article printed as an advertisement in every newspaper in the United States. He gave the order to a firm of advertising agents and the firm began in Texas, intending to cover the country to Maine. But that advertisement never got beyond a few obscure country papers in Texas. The contract of silence was effective; and a few weeks later, at their annual meeting, the patent-medicine association "Resolved"--I quote the minutes--"That this Association commend the action of the great majority of the publishers of the United States who have consistently refused said false and malic