The Brass Check: A Study of American JournalismSinclair, Upton
General
The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism
Sinclair, Upton
Associated Press; Journalism -- United States; Press -- United States
Yet they put “Hampton’s Magazine” out of business! Hampton had started
Charles Edward Russell’s articles exposing the “New Haven” swindle—two
or three years before the truth broke out, you understand. An agent from
the “New Haven” came to inform him that if he started this publication,
he would be put out of business. I now learn for the first time the name
of this agent—Sylvester J. Baxter. Readers of the “Profits of Religion”
will give a start of recognition: the same gentleman who contributed
that wonderful boost of the “New Haven” to the “Outlook,” organ of the
Clerical Camouflage! And the “Outlook” pretended not to know that this
was an official boost of the “New Haven,” and to have been astonished
when the “New Haven” ordered a big edition of this issue!
Let Ben Hampton tell the rest of the story:
A nice young man got a job in our accounting department. He was one of
the finest fellows we had ever had around. He was willing to work days
and nights, and he did work days and nights, and one night when he was
working, he took a copy of our list of stockholders. Of course, we did
not find this out for months. In the meantime, a man and a woman,
working separately, visited all our stockholders they could reach and
told them I was robbing the Company. They said I had a large estate in
the Adirondacks and a home in the Fifth Avenue district of New York
City. At that time Mrs. Hampton and I were having a time to buy
clothing for the children. We were drawing almost no salary from the
magazine, and we had put all our money in the undertaking. In fact, we
were near the line of desperation, we were so hard up.
Something like twenty brokers on the Wall Street curb began to
advertise our five dollars par stock at four dollars, down to three
dollars a share. We sent to them and offered to buy the stock and were
never able to buy one share. One of the brokers afterwards admitted to
us that they had none of the stock, and that they were paid to do the
advertising.
All these methods, of course, created confusion in the minds of our
stockholders, and practically killed our efforts to raise thirty
thousand dollars, which was the insignificant sum of money needed to
pay off our paper bill. We were entitled to a line of credit of three
hundred thousand dollars at the paper makers. We owed the paper maker,
I think, about forty thousand dollars and he notified us arbitrarily
on a Monday that we would have to pay the bill Wednesday, or he would
decline to furnish paper for the current edition, which was then on
the press.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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