THE SOCIALIZATION OF MUCKRAKING
93
The war extinguished what was left of the earlier muckraking
tradition. Socialists like Upton Sinclair and William English
Walling joined the Wilsonian crusade. Others of the muckraking
tribe went into more or less complete retirement.
Not only were they without magazine markets;
it
would seem
that to a degree
at
least their audience
had
shifted its allegiance.
The moment of tension that the muckrakers articulated was one of
transition between two phases of the American capitalist evolution.
During this period, large corporate business progressively liqui·
dated and absorbed the small manufacturing and mercantile
proprietors. It was they, with their various peripheral groups,
who constituted the middle class magazine-reading audience. It
may be hazarded that these readers became less interested in
muckraking. The battle was over, and consciously or unconsciously
they had changed sides; the on-coming generation at least, knew on
which side its bread was buttered. Both the muckraking journals
of the nineteen hundreds and the post-war compendia of escape
fiction and "inspirationals" had large audiences; the inte,resting
thing to note is that, in terms of social and economic status, they
were pretty much the
same
audiences, although the policy of the
magazines changed categorically.
3.
The Birth of a Magazine: Modem Style
In the field of social communication, the growth of monopoly
capitalism through the processes of merger, syndication, etc., has
tended to give both newspapers and magazines the character of
business properties and advertising media. Formerly, it was cus–
tomary for a magazine to be started by an editor. Today, such
enterprises are more likely to result from the pecuniary and intel–
lectual cohabitations of bankers and advertising men. The idea is
to find an unoccupied sector in the spectrum of periodical publish–
ing: a group of buyers whom an appropriate editorial formula
may serve to assemble and hold, so that they may be sold at so
much a head to advertisers. The editorial formula is more or less
of an after-thought; frequently it is purchased ready-made from a
de luxe "publisher's consultant," who is merely a special kind of
an advertising man. The latter may not be a genius, but he is never
so naive as to suggest a bona fide muck-raking formula.
If
it is
desired to assemble a "class" audience, the editorial formula is
