venomous old man when he was crossed, issued a furious denunciation of "Collier's": whereupon the National Association of Manufacturers, the most powerful organization in the country, took the field against "muck-raking" magazines. They not only applied the advertising boycott to "Collier's," they set the banks to work, as in the case of "Hampton's," and they took away control of the magazine from Robert Collier, and put it into the hands of a banking committee, where it stayed. "Robbie" took to flying aeroplanes, and a year or two ago he died, and "Collier's" published a full-page obituary of him, telling the many services he had performed for the public—except the one really important service, that he had broken the Taft administration over the Ballinger "land fraud" issue! Imagine a magazine, that, on the death of its owner, does not dare to mention the greatest event of its owner's life!
I had an opportunity to watch, from the inside, the operation of this advertising boycott, in the case of my article, the "Condemned Meat Industry." Many pages of advertising were withdrawn from "Everybody's Magazine"—not merely advertisements of hams and lard, but of fertilizers, soaps and railways. Lawson several times tried to publish the names of these boycotting advertisers, but "Everybody's" would not let him. "Everybody's" possibly reflected that it might not keep up this muck-raking business always; when it had secured enough readers, it might let down and become respectable, and then all the big advertisers would come back to it—as they have done!
The few men who really did mean business knew that the advertisers would never come back to them, so they fought the fight through to a finish—their own finish. So it was with "Hampton's," so it was with "Pearson's" under the old régime. "Pearson's" tried publishing on the cheapest news-print paper and with no advertisements, and for two or three years "Pearson's" was the only popular magazine in America from which you could get the truth. It was the only one which dared to fight the Railroad Trust and the Beef Trust, the only one which dared tell the truth about the Associated Press, and about Capitalist Journalism in general.
Early in 1914 it published a series of articles by Charles Edward Russell: "Keeping the Kept Press," "The Magazine Soft-Pedal," and "How Business Controls the News." Russell told the story of the "Boston Traveller," which was bought by
