A new journalism aided and was aided by the zeal to expose and the greed of the public for literature of exposure. In the later nineties city journalism was reorganized under the influence of the "yellow" papers, and sensational news was made a profitable commodity as never before. The range of the daily paper was, however, limited by a few hundred miles, and its influence could not become national. A new periodical literature, resembling the old literary monthlies, but using many timely and journalistic articles, sprang into life and gained national circulation and influence. S.S. McClure was one of its pioneers. _Everybody's_, the _Cosmopolitan_, _Munsey's_, the _American_, and weeklies like _Collier's_, the _Outlook_, and the _Independent_ were among the journals that helped to spread the conclusions and advocate reforms. Besides these a horde of imitators fattened for a time upon exposure. Journalism had a large part in directing the American revival, and private investigators furnished many of the facts. Public suits marked an attempt to act upon the facts and remedy them. In Missouri Joseph W. Folk conducted a series of prosecutions against grafters in St. Louis that elevated him in a few months to the head of his party and the governorship of his State. The Bureau of Corporations, attached to the new Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903, made a series of reports the most notable of which showed that the charges against the Standard Oil Company for extorting rebates, and against the meat-packers for unsanitary conditions, were founded upon fact. The most notable public exposure of indiscretion and wrongdoing in high finance occurred in New York. Here, during 1905, a quarrel over the management of the Equitable Life Insurance Company led to a legislative investigation by a so-called Armstrong Committee. One of the attorneys employed by the committee, Charles E. Hughes, soon became the spirit of the examination. One by one he called insurance officers to the witness stand, and drew from their reluctant lips the story of their relation to banking, to speculative finance, and to politics. He revealed the existence of a group among the bankers not unlike a money trust. He proved that for at least three national campaigns the insurance companies, like other corporations, had given heavy subsidies to the campaign funds, sometimes of both but always of the Republican party.