CHAPTER XXXVII
THE DREGS OF THE CUP
I would call the reader's attention to the fact that in this
book I am dealing with our standard magazines and newspapers,
the ones which are considered respectable, which all
ladies and gentlemen accept as they accept the doctor's pills
and the clergyman's sermons, the Bible and the multiplication
table and Marian Harland's cook-book. I have not made my
case easy by dwelling on the cultural content of the "mail
order" and "household" publications, of which there are scores
with a circulation of a million or more; or of the agricultural
papers of the country, whose total circulation amounts to tens
of millions. How I could freeze your blood if I were to
summarize the contents of the "Ladies' World," the "Gentlewoman,"
the "Household Guest," "Home Life," the "Household,"
"Comfort," the "Home Friend," "Mother's Magazine,"
"Everyday Life," the "People's Popular Monthly," the "Clover
Leaf" weeklies and the "Boyce" weeklies, the "Saturday
Blade" and the "Chicago Ledger"! If I were to tell about the
various "Family Story Papers," which are left in area-ways
for servants! Or the "fashion-papers," the "Butterick Trio,"
with close to two millions, the "Woman's World," with two
millions, and "Vogue," the "Delineator," the "Parisienne," the
"Ladies' Pictorial," "Needlecraft" with their half million or
more. Or the "fast" papers, which cultivate a taste for perfumed
smut—and which I will not advertise by naming! Or
the papers of the sporting and racing and gambling worlds,
down to the "Police Gazette," with its "leg-shows" and illustrated
murders!
Also the local papers, the small dailies, the weeklies and semi-monthlies and monthlies by the thousands and tens of thousands! If you wish to get a complete picture of American Journalism, you must take these into account; you must descend from the heights of metropolitan dignity into the filthiest swamps of provincial ignorance and venality. Hardly a week passes that someone does not send me a copy of some country paper which calls for the stringing-up of Socialists to
