Page:The Newspaper and the Historian.djvu/156

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1920 .

journalists and consequent questions of hours, wages, duties, vacations, and similar matters.34 In America, since the close of the war, there has been an evi

dent tendency on the part of some newspapers to minimize the importance of the question of unemployment. The newspaper is concerned with questions of mail trains, of automobile stage routes, and of railway rates . As a business enterprise it is called on to meet every question that confronts

every other occupation while recording the situation in the busi ness world as regards all other industries. These facts must be taken into consideration by the historian and must put him on

his guard against a too implicit reliance on the press when he

turns to it for facts and discussions of industrial situations, espe cially those that affect the newspaper industry .

The press and social welfare are intimately associated . The newspaper raises fresh air funds for city children and vacation funds for working girls ; it investigates and reports " the one

hundred neediest cases

in the city, collects funds to alleviate

their necessities, and distributes them through its own agencies; it receives and publishes subscriptions to aid sufferers from fire finds homes for motherless children ; it entertains orphans at the theaters; it opens up undeveloped woodlands into communi ties of bungalow homes;36 it starts back -yards gardening move

ments, and it persuades real estate agents to offer vacant lots for gardening purposes. In its own special field it is concerned with the Newspaper

men 's Benevolent League, with clubs and lodging houses for 34 W . Williams, The Press Congress of the World , University of Missouri, Bulletin X , January, 1918 . The full text of the statute is given. 35 The Christian Herald under Louis Klopsch in eighteen years collected nearly three and a half million dollars for eighty -four different major and minor charities and funds, in addition to much relief work for individuals.

C . M . Pepper , Life -Work of Louis Klopsch, pp . 345 -357. The London Times in the first six months of the recent war raised £1,000, 000 for the sick and wounded and during the war a total of more than

£10 ,000 ,000 for the Joint War Committee of the British Red Cross and the

Order of St. John. - New York Evening Post, February , 1915, May 18 , 1918.

36 The New York Tribune frankly stated, May 14 , 1916, that this was done “ as a means of stimulating circulat