In establishing the rate for newspapers and other periodical publications Congress was not seeking to discriminate between good literature and bad literature or to establish a _censorship of the press with prizes for merit_. The thing it had in mind was not the goodness or badness of the information disseminated, but the _instrumentalities by which that dissemination might be accomplished_. It was not thinking of all the accumulated stores of sound and pure literature in the vast libraries of the world, _but it was thinking of how the mind of an inquiring and progressive people might be kept abreast of the times in all departments of human thought and activity_. Congress did not stand hesitating between a good book and a bad newspaper.
Another position taken by the Penrose-Overstreet Commission, and one which The Man on the Ladder strongly opposes, is that a periodical may not or “must not consist wholly or substantially of fiction.”
The words just quoted are exactly the words used in the sixth paragraph of Section 2 of the bill the enactment of which this commission recommended.
Now, whatever their wit or wisdom, their eloquence or adroitness of speech, their beauty of shape and apparel, or their loftiness of position, that “recommendation” should recommend the personnel of that commission, it seems to me, to some “wronghouse” for a long rest. Their conclusion, their _lex_ recommendation and their “argument” in support, taken collectively, are as thrilling, likewise amusing, as the point in a story “where the woman is turned on and begins to short circuit the hero,” putting it as near as I can remember in the language of Sewell Ford, Bowers, or some other “enlivening writer.”
Lest the reader think my adverse criticism of the commissioners too harsh, or not in keeping with the dignity of the gentlemen composing that 1906-7 commission, I shall here quote a few of the paragraphs it presents as basis for its recommendation. The reader will oblige by carefully noting the italics. They are mine, and, following the quotation, I shall comment on some of those italicized phrasings and statements:
“Not only does the element of fiction constitute the (1) _propulsive force behind the expansion of second-class matter_, but it serves at the same time (2) _to undermine the main statutory check upon the commercial exploitation of the second class_. Being free to make up a periodical which contains nothing but fiction, publishers find ready at hand the very thing with which to interlard and _disguise the advertising matter_, for the sake of which the publication is really issued. This they could not do if the advertisement carrying text was required to be news matter or critical matter of a current nature. (3) _Deprive the mail-order journals of the right to cloak_ their advertising with fiction and require them to publish something in the nature of a newspaper or review with expensive news-gathering apparatus and an editorial staff and (4) the _mail-order advertising journal will completely disappear_. It lives only by reason of two things, the cheapness of its fiction, with which it cloaks its advertising, and the cheapness of the postal rate which that fiction cloak enables it to obtain.