quoted earlier in the book. What can it mean, save that the "American Magazine" had to have advertisements, and to get the advertisements it had to please the sort of people who read advertisements? Or take the "Curtis Publications"; what is the obvious fact about this colossal advertisement-distributing machine? The owner of this machine, needless to say, is not in the business of distributing advertisements for his health. On the contrary, he has lost his health and made eleven million dollars. His price for advertisements is six thousand dollars per page. To carry these advertisements, he must have reading matter, and to select this reading matter he employs a group of men and women called "editors." These "editors" are, of course, in position to offer prices such as thrill the soul of every hungry author, and cause him to set diligently to work to study the personalities of the "editors," so as to know what they want. If he doesn't find out what they want, he doesn't write for the publications—that is obvious enough. On the other hand, if he does find out what they want, he becomes a new star in America's literary firmament—and at the cost of pretty nearly all his ideals of truth, humanity and progress.
Take up the "Saturday Evening Post." Here is Harry Leon Wilson, who used to show signs of brains, telling a story of how a labor union tried to take control of a factory. He exhausts his imagination to make this proposition ridiculous, to pour contempt over these fool workingmen. And here is a short story writer named Patullo, solemnly setting forth that Socialism means dividing up! And here is George Kibbe Turner, who I used to think was one of America's coming novelists, with a short story, which turns out not to be a short story at all, but a piece of preaching upon the following grave and weighty theme: that the trouble with America is that everybody is spending too much money; that the railroad brotherhoods are proposing to turn robbers and take away the property of their masters; and that a workingman who is so foolish as to buy a piano for his daughter will discover that he has ruined himself to no purpose, because workingmen's daughters ought not to have pianos—they are too tired to play them when they get through with their work!
