newspapers published on their front page the report that Governor Johnson had repudiated this interview; and when he declared that the report was false, they refused to correct it.
Charles Zueblin is a radical—a very quiet and conservative one, who lectures on municipal ownership to ladies' clubs. I write to ask him what his experiences have been, and he tells me they are "too personal to be quoted." He gives me one illustration, which I take the liberty of quoting:
The "Kansas City Journal" has pursued me every season I lecture
there because it is an organ of the local public utilities. At one time
they twisted some statement of mine in a report of a lecture which
they headed: "Zueblin Believes Every Woman Should Marry a
Negro." There was no doubt this was done solely to queer other
things that might be said which had no connection with this invention.
Senator La Follette is a radical—and here is a public man
who has been almost wiped out by deliberate newspaper boycott.
The story of what was done to La Follette in the 1912
presidential campaign can hardly be made to sound like reality;
it is a plot out of an old-time Bowery melodrama. La Follette
was a candidate for the Republican nomination. He was conducting
a tremendous campaign all through the Middle West,
and the Associated Press was suppressing the news of it. At
an open conference of newspaper-men, held at the University
of Wisconsin, the editor of the "Milwaukee Journal," a strong
capitalist paper, openly stated that the Associated Press was
sending—"something, of course—but so little that it amounted
to nothing." But when the governor of the state made an
attack upon La Follette—"Well, the Associated Press suddenly
woke up, and sent out that entire address word for
word!"
Nevertheless, La Follette was winning, and stood an excellent chance to get the nomination. He was invited to a dinner of the Periodical Publishers' Association in Philadelphia, and at that dinner he told a little about the control of newspapers by the big advertising agencies—such facts as fill Chapter XLVII of this book. After the dinner was over the newspaper-men got together on the proposition, and decided that they would end the career of La Follette that night. They cooked up an elaborate story, describing how he had raged and foamed at the mouth, and rambled on and on for hours, until the diners had got up and left him orating to the empty seats and dinner-plates. It was evident, said the story, sym-
