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PARTISAN REVIEW
zines, but the business office was not yet·dominant. Although adver–
tising income was important in the economics of newspaper and
periodical publishing, it had not yet become primary and decisive.
Moreover, the internal competitive conflicts of the business com–
munity were still so varied and intense that a publisher could afford
to attack one or even several business high-binders at once, without
risk of calling forth effective reprisals by an organized and inte·
grated business interest. Although in reality the era of small com·
petitive business was passing, the magazine-reading middle class
did not realize this. Monopoly capitalism was powerful, but not
yet respectable. The "Uncle Trusty" of Opper's cartoons was a
bandit, an obstructor of normal competitive economic traffic. It
was the business of the muckrakers to expose and denounce these
obstructors, and it was the business of the commercial magazines
to publish the muckrakers;
Fortune
had not yet been born to glorify
monopoly capitalism.
Then as now there were Congressional investigations and _
other forms of public muckraking, but government competition
with private industry in this field was not yet onerous; we lacked
the multitudinous New Deal agencies. Ordinarily government
entered the field only toward the end, to achieve the legislative
reforms for which the magazine muckrakers had prepared the way.
2.
Muckraking Became Bad Business
Although the story of what happened to the muckraking
periodicals of the nineteen hundreds has been told repeatedly,
social historians have yet to deal adequately with this period.
Briefly, Big Business, having consolidated its power, became exas–
pe!ated by the clatter of the muckrakers and shut them off, quite
simply, by buying up or otherwise eliminating the magazines that
published them. Increasingly, journalists of the "disruptive" sort
were obliged to write a book or hire a hall. Upton Sinclair sur–
vived, not as a magazine writer, but as a book writer who has fre–
quently been obliged to publish his own books.
Most of the muckrakers made practical adaptations to the
new order of things. Samuel Hopkins Adams became a popular
fictioneer. David Graham Phillips had turned wholly to the novel
some years before his death. Ray Stannard Baker became for an
interval the pastoral David Grayson, author of
Adventures in Con–
tentment,
Steffens went heavily philosophical and mystic.
