the s

redhe

ich a

Ewing Galloway, New York

mer Governor of Arkansas, is director of the Utility Propaganda Bureau in that State.

IN 'N addition to speeches over the radio and from the platform (the Illinois Bureau alone caused more than one thousand speeches to be made in eighteen months by members of its Bureau), propaganda was distributed in magazine articles and books. To Richard Washburn Child, former Ambassador to Italy under President Harding, $7,500 was paid for writing a propaganda book. To Ernest Greenwood, formerly in charge of the labor office of the League of Nations, $5,000 was paid for writing "Aladdin, U. S. A.," published by Harpers,

to which I shall have occasion to recur presently. Theodore M. Knappen, a Washington free lance, wrote an article for the "Magazine of Wall Street," and another for the "Nation's Business," monthly organ of the United States Chamber of Commerce; the chairman of the Board of Governors of the "Nation's Business" is Philip H. Gadsden, Vice-President of the United Gas Improvement Association of Philadelphia, and vice-chairman of the joint propaganda committee of which I have spoken.

A Washington newspaper correspondent, who has been expelled from the Senate press gallery on this account, got $150 a month for reporting legislation which might affect utility interests; he denies that he has written anything for publication on behalf of the lobby. To a newspaper reporter, for five "special" articles, the munificent sum of $25 was paid. The General Federation of Women's Clubs got $30,000 for "an urban and rural home survey." Persons of prominence were induced to sign propaganda articles. How this was done, in some cases at least, was illustrated in the case of Mrs. L. H. Jennings, President of the South Carolina Federation of Women's Clubs. She signed an outgivWomen's Clubs. She signed an outgiving called "Better Homes," written and distributed to the press of that section by an "information" director.

N EWSPAPERS, of course, were the ob

vious channels of utility and power lobby propaganda, and they afforded the easiest way. Not since the Hughes insurance investigation of 1905 has the American press appeared in a light so discreditable as that thrown upon it by the Federal Trade Commission inquiry. The earlier inquiry revealed actual venality; some papers got a dollar a line for printing propaganda as news, a few charged as much as five dollars a line. There has been no such testimony in this case; but there is abundant evidence that newspapers all over the United States have printed propaganda as their own, both in news and editorial columns, either through complaisance, gullibility, or gratitude for advertising accounts. The chief propagandist in Iowa told the Commission:

"Of course you know," she wrote to him, "that the article which you wrote and which you so kindly allowed me to sign as my own has made quite a 'hit.' I appreciate the copies that you have sent me and am enjoying the delightful publicity caused by the various papers copying the article, although I feel quite an impostor."

Certainly no propagandist can be censured for exploiting such naïveté as that!

Without exception the public relations of those companies which advertise in the newspapers are better than those which do not. A newspaper could hardly be expected to take a favorable attitude toward a company which refused to advertise. Since taking my present position, I have been responsible for an increase of 1,000 per cent in the volume of paid advertising given to the newspapers of Iowa.

All the free publicity matter which this man put out in connection with the advertising, he was free to own, was propaganda.

"And was there nothing in it," he was asked, "to inform the reader that it had been written by an employee of the utility companies?"

"No," he replied; "but the newspapers knew who wrote it and they printed it." He boasted that in a single year he had got $80,000 worth of free space in Iowa papers.

Propagandists holding similar positions gave testimony (too lengthy to be repeated here) showing that thousands of pages of newspaper space had been devoted to their purposes; in Missouri alone 334 solid eight-column sheets, in Ohio half as much again, and so on. The expense attached to this, aside from the salaries of the propagandists, was about $25,000,000 a year for advertising. The publisher of a North Carolina paper wrote to a propagandist:

I wish you would find out for me if possible why the Carolina Power and Light Company does not give us our share of the advertising they put out in this section. . . . Our editorial staff has made a special effort to keep them in right with the public since their invasion of this territory.

Many such letters were introduced as exhibits. Moreover, the Associated Press and the United Press were induced to spread over their wires stories written by the propagandists. One of the propagandists wrote:

We concentrate on the Associated Press and the United Press. The International News Service [belonging to the Hearst papers] is not greatly interested in us.

L

ETTERS were introduced into the record from members of the Associated

Press and United Press services, thanking the propagandists for their stories and actually asking for more. The head of The head of the Missouri Bureau wrote: "I think word has gone down the line from the headquarters [of the Associated Press] to take care of our committees on public-utilities information." When these revelations were made, Karl A. Bickel, President of the United Press Associations, sent a circular letter to bureau managers and staff correspondents, warning them that this was "journalistic second-story work."

There is a real and legitimate field in America [he wrote] for men representing great and complicated industrial and financial establishments, in acting as liaison agents between the industries they represent and the press. But no man can hope to regard his work as legitimate and honorable who attempts to utilize it to pass on to a press association or a newspaper an item alleged to be news that is in reality propaganda aiming to mold public opinion on a controversial subject. . . . The fact that the press agent was underhanded enough, by shrewdness or bribery, direct or indirect, to put the item over, does not in any sense excuse the press association or newspaper. . . . We must at all times and in all ways be constantly and persistently on our guard against any effort on the part of any one to inject improper matter into the body of our service. . . . Keep the poisoners out.

T1

HERE is no proof that newspapers have been bought outright in order to further the interests of the power lobby; but it is a matter of record with the Investigating Commission that Ira C. Copley, who in 1926 sold the bulk of his public utility interests in Illinois to Samuel Insull, bought a string of small newspapers in Illinois and then invaded California. At San Diego he bought three newspapers, and discontinued the one which, it so happened, had supported Government ownership. He said at the time that he had "no connection

with any public utilities anywhere," although the record shows that he still held more than four million dollars' worth of bonds and stocks in two gas companies.

A single example will suffice to show the methods adopted by the utilities in dealing with State legislation. In California an act for the public development of the State's water power was submitted to the electorate in 1922. After the campaign, in which the measure was defeated, the Jones Legislative Investigating Committee examined utility agents and corporation executives who admitted that they had spent more than half a million dollars to manufacture public opinion against it. The outcome of this vote was widely used in the press of

other States, but no mention was made

of the money spent to influence the outcome, so far as the testimony before the Federal Trade Commission reveals.

A

QUESTION may arise as to why the utilities have spent millions of dollars to influence the public against Federal development of Muscle Shoals and Boulder Dam, and against State operation of enterprises although proclaiming constantly that Government ownership and operation must necessarily fail. Some light may be thrown on this by presenting here a table compiled by H. S. Raushenbush and Harry W. Laidler in their book "Power Control." Here is shown the gains in a typical list of utility stocks, from the high point in one year to the high point five years later:

panies, with their immediate sphere of influence, controlled 49.6 per cent, or nearly half, of this Nation's electri output in 1925; that the next eight com panies in size controlled another 22.6 per cent of the total, and that the next seven controlled 13.6 per cent. These twenty corporations, in other words, controlled 83 per cent of the Nation's elec tric output. In 1926 the process of consolidation continued, notably in the South, Southwest, and Middle We Unquestionably it is now much great than when the Commission compiled i figures. When it resumes in Septembe it will renew its inquiry, it announces. into holding companies, profits, and concentration.

caused

MUCH embarrassment has been cau

to the privately operated utilities by the Cleveland municipal plant, which sells electricity at three cents per kilowatt-hour, and by the Ontario sup power system, owned and operated by the Government, which sells electricity for domestic use at two cents per kiloNawatt-hour. Judson King, of the tional Popular Government League, has compiled figures of cost for domestic electric service in thirty-two American cities where it is supplied by private enterprise, as compared with all the twenty-two cities of more than ten thou sand population in Ontario, where the Government owns and administers the system. These figures show an average for American cities of 7.4 cents per kilowatt-hour over the 1921-6 per while the actual price to Ontario con sumers over the same period was 1.6 per cent. But, in order to be absolutely to private management, Mr. King a to the Ontario figure ten per cent to equalize its tax rate with the American rate, another ten per cent to pay dividends to private stockholders, and th per cent to equalize the difference be tween water generation, as in Canada. and generation from coal, the sourc twenty-three of the thirty-two Amer cities considered. These are generous allowances for private ownership, includ ing liberal profits; and yet even so it is shown that American consumers of elec

kilowatt

tricity must pay five cents per hour more than Canadian consumers that difference were applied to the whole 1925 output in the United States, it would allow to the electric utilities, alter paying a ten per cent profit to t stockholders, a total of three billion lars velvet.

In the circumstances, it is not diff to see why the utilities spend money lib (Please turn to continuation, page (i)

T

HE crudity of contemporary crit

icism is never more glaring than

By

Hawthorne, who did not lack critical insight, reported: "I read your poems over

American letters, its writers abandon historical perspective as unprofitable and proceed to evaluate the objects of their destructive irony as if these writers were living in the United States today. Longfellow lacks guts; Lowell lacks subtlety; Emerson lacks psychology; Bryant lacks humanity; and only with the acrid Thoreau, the enigmatic Hawthorne, and the febrile Poe are they at ease. But the classical writers are as they are, and it is surely the negation of common sense to complain that they do not have the qualities of somebody else. If they lacked a modernistic philosophy, it is because they matured in the era of Jacksonian democracy an era cloudy with seraphic hope in the perfectibility of man and the progress of the Republic. If they do not have the wit of Shaw, the gloom of Dreiser, or the psychological fantasies of Sherwood Anderson, why, neither did anybody else, such things being unthinkable in a nation of unlimited land, a limited educational system, and limitless faith in the freedom of the human will.

Longfellow has had more than his share of this uncritical abuse, a fate the more undeserved when one recalls the fortune of his compeers in Europe. French criticism does not take Lamartine as seriously as his generation took him, but it is not unfair to the author of "Les Méditations" as American criticism is unfair to the author of "Hiawatha." Freiligrath is a faded name, but it does not seem to arouse the Germans to the abuse or the scorn which the name of Longfellow evokes among our intellectuals. Tennyson undoubtedly wrote a rather silly poem about being queen of the May, but he also wrote a rather noble poem about being Ulysses, and a just estimate takes account of both. But because Longfellow wrote "A Psalm of Life" and "The Wreck of the Hesperus" the wits do not admit that he wrote, or could write, anything

better.

And yet I believe that any candid reader will conclude otherwise. poet who wrote "A Psalm of Life" at The thirty is no more the poet who wrote "The Saga of King Olaf" with its surge and thunder than the Tennyson of "Oriana" is the Tennyson of "In Memoriam." It is true that Longfellow's

August 8, 1928

Two or three generations ago LongFellow was a household word and his poems were loved and widely quoted. n our own school days "The Village Blacksmith" and "The Psalm of ife" could be found in every reader. And then a few years ago it became e fashion to sneer at his work and to smiss his poetry en masse as trivial d sentimental. How will coming nerations regard him?

Two weeks ago we published a new eimate of Edgar Allan Poe; this raluation of Longfellow is the second oa series on some of America's great lirary figures re-estimated in the light otontemporary criticism.

Howard Mumford Jones is an auth and poet and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the Univeity of North Carolina.

enorious popularity forced upon him the cntinual production of that pleasant, entimental verse which flowed too freely from his pen, but there is evidence that chafed against the necessity. He wrotein 1842:

Half of my life is gone, and I have let Th years slip from me and have not fulfilled

Th aspiration of my youth, to build

Some ower of song with lofty parapet. Not ǹdolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret

Of restless passions that would not be stilled,

But sorrow, and a care that almost killed,

Kept ne from what I may accomplish yet.

The tower of song was, of course, the "Christu" trilogy, which, except for "The Goden Legend," is a failure. But there is no appeasing the hounds of contemporary criticism. On the one hand, it is made a reproach that Longfellow was placilly satisfied with his accomplishments, and, on the other, that his reach exceeded his grasp, though heaven is said to exist on that account. yet there must be something to the man. Bryant, who was certainly no fool, wrote him that "the exquisite music of your verse dwells more than ever on my ear."

And

to read them at all my leisure hours; and they grow upon me at every reperusal." These sentences should give the judicious pause.

It is true they appear in letters to the poet. Mr. Herbert S. Gorman, in his "The Victorian American"-the fairest attempt at a critical estimate made in our time explains that, though "Henry deserves all this" (one loves the condescension of the Christian name!), the poet wrote only "for his day and for his people." Alas! Mr. Gorman writes for his day and his people, and, though he tries to be just, his bias is evident, as when he says that, "like all great Victorians," Longfellow "permits no more than a certain few facets of his days to reflect themselves in his work." One is tempted to inquire how many facets of Vergil's days appear in the Æneid. One is minded to ask how many facets of our day appear in Robinson's "Tristram." And then, remembering the remight inquire whether any important ligious problems of Longfellow's day, one facets of that question are missing from his poetry.

Of course one can answer: Why, the poetry of religious doubt. But before the answerer becomes too complacent, let him think whether the indifference of the earth to man is anywhere better expressed than in this poem:

The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveler hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness
calls;

The little waves, with their soft, white
hands,

Efface the footprints in the sands,

And the tide rises, the tide falls.
The morning breaks; the steeds in
their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveler to the shore,

And the tide rises, the tide falls. Incidentally, there are just five adjectives in this poem. Had it been signed by Arthur Symons or Shaemas O'Sheel or William Butler Yeats, people would be talking about Celtic magic. It ap

pears, as a matter of history, in “Ultima Thule," a volume in which Mr. Gorman finds only the "placid and industrious repeater." I can only say that these verses seem to me an astonishing performance for an old man, and, far from "dripping" from the pen of "the acknowledged ambassador of goodness,' they read to me like a heart-breaking cry of bewilderment. And yet, in the face of these lines and others like them, Mr. Gorman writes that "Henry is smug from the beginning to the end," though "he is absolutely unconscious of the fact."

Well, let us turn to "Morituri Salutamus:"

What then? Shall we sit idly down and say

The night hath come; it is no longer

day?

The night hath not yet come; we are not quite

Cut off from labor by the failing light; Something remains for us to do or

dare;

Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear.

Perhaps I have lost all my critical faculties, but if these noble lines are smug, what, pray is the "Epilogue to Asolando"? Regarding Mr. Gorman's astonishing judgments, one can only quote "The Golden Legend:"

B

From frailty and fallGood Lord, deliver us all!

UT we must be fair to Mr. Gorman.

He performs a useful service by reminding us how much there is in Longfellow we would rather forget. There is nothing new in the indictment, but it must be reckoned with if we are to see that other and better Longfellow who is obscured by "the children's poet." It must be admitted that he wrote too facilely and too much. He lacks the subtleties of Meredith or Browning. He is preachy and obvious. Again and again he begins a fine lyric only to fritter it away in a cheap moral lesson. Much of his verse lacks substance, and some of it has the mechanical regularity of a hammer beating on velvet. This is the Longfellow everybody knows.

Yet even here there is something to be said. Fashions in children's poetry change, but it requires positive genius to write for children in any fashion without writing down to them, and Longfellow succeeded where men of rarer intellect have failed. It is even something to prefer a hero in the strife to the happiness of dumb, driven cattle; at least we admire John Stuart Mill for a similar preference. In the midst of this earlier

verse one hears for a moment such sc emn, imaginative music as this:

I heard the trailing garments of th Night

Sweep through her marble halls! I saw her sable skirts all fringed wit light

From the celestial walls!

There is a simplicity of genius as welis a complexity of genius, and while ndern poets are carefully cultivating mplicity, let us ask whether they Ive written anything more effective thanhe utter simplicity of this picture?

The day is ending,

The night is descending;
The marsh is frozen,
The river dead.

Through clouds like ashes
The red sun flashes
On village windows
That glimmer red.

Unfortunately, lyrics that beg as effectively often dribble away. Here, for example, is some of the "exuisite music" in a poem called "Seaweec" When descends on the Atlantic The gigantic

Storm-wind of the equinox,
Landward in his wrath he scouges

The toiling surges,
Laden with seaweed from the rcks:
From Bermuda's reefs; from eges
Of sunken ledges,

In some far-off, bright Azore;
From Bahama, and the dashing
Silver-flashing

Surges of San Salvador.

If only the poet's better angl had stopped him with the fourth tanza! He did not, and one learns in for more stanzas that poems are the seaveed of wild emotions.

But let us leave these errors to Mr. Gorman. Let us put aside the moral exhorter and the facile versifier. Let us shut the village blacksmith in hissmithy, forget that the day is cold and cark and dreary, and leave the unfortunate skipper and his daughter to perish as perhaps they deserve to do. Let us put aside the plays (except "The Golden Legend") and let us forget the mawkish prose. Let us even put aside "Hiawatha," though there is much to be said for it (and Mr. Gorman, with admirable impartiality, says it), and ask ourselves what is left.

Well, there is a great deal left. In the first place, Longfellow is the greatest sea poet in American literature, and one of the finest in the English language. The magic and the mystery of the ocean are caught in "The Seaside and the Fire

side" and in certain lyrics as they have been rarely caught in English verse. At the other extreme is the wild, lawless beauty of the northern ocean in which "The Saga of King Olaf" is set, and if there be better sea fighting in verse than in this bluff narrative, I do not know where it is. Critics who deny energy to Longfellow had better read it, and read again "The Skeleton in Armor:"

Then launched they to the blast,
Bent like a reed each mast,
Yet we were gaining fast,

When the wind failed us;
And with a sudden flaw
Came round the gusty Skaw,
So that our foe we saw
Laugh as he hailed us.
And as to catch the gale
Round veered the flapping sail,
"Death!" was the helmsman's hail,
"Death without quarter!"

Mid-ships with iron keel
Struck we her ribs of steel;
Down her black hulk did reel

Through the black water! These are words like whips. And may I ask the reader to forget that "The Building of the Ship" has been torn to shreds in declamatory contests, and to consider such passages as these?

Only the long waves, as they broke
In ripples on the pebbly beach,
Interrupted the old man's speech.

The dim, dark sea, so like unto Death,
That divides and yet unites mankind!
The ocean old,
Centuries old,

Strong as youth and as uncontrolled,
Paces restless to and fro,
Up and down the sands of gold.
His beating heart is not at rest;
And far and wide,
With ceaseless flow,
His beard of snow

Heaves with the heaving of his breast. Even with the mixed figure, this is sheer magic..

N

the next place, Longfellow is the IN finest master of the sonnet in nineteenth-century American literature, and one of its principal masters in all English verse. There are, to prove the case, the six majestic sonnets for his translation of the "Divine Comedy." There are the sonnets to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, and Keats, each a portrait, and each the subtlest sort of ap preciative criticism. There is "The Cross of Snow" with its anguish, and "Mezz) Cammin" with its noble confession of failure. And there are the sea sonnets two of which seem to me to rival the more celebrated ones of Keats. Here for example, is "The Sound of the Sea:

ters, not merely analyze or dissect personalities. The setting and atmosphere must be raised above the level of the commonplace sufficiently to justify the use of verse rather than prose-a necessity that Crabbe usually forgot and Wordsworth sometimes failed to remember. And then the poet must not

let us feel at any moment that the easy management of his verse has got away from him. It is a genre in which Longfellow excels.

clusion of "A Shadow" to confute those who claim that Longfellow is a silly optimist:

Be comforted; the world is very old, And generations pass, as they have passed,

A troop of shadows moving with the sun;

Thousands of times has the old tale been told;

Familiarity and the killing conscientiousness of public-school teaching have dulled "Evangeline" and "The Courtship of Miles Standish," but, could we see them as they really are, we would see, I think, how artfully their stories are managed: how in "Evangeline" the author leads us again and again to hope that the lovers will meet, and yet makes us recognize the necessity for their not meeting; and how cleverly the plot in "Miles Standish" is made to turn upon the Captain's departure from Plymouth. The "Tales of a Wayside Inn" is full of good things. I do not myself care for the rattle of "Paul Revere's Ride," but there is plenty to offset it: dry, pithy narratives like "Kambalu," an anecdote, the cynicism of which will come as a shock to the intellectuals; the sardonic gloom of the painful "Torquemada," the vigor and ease of "King Robert of Sicily," and the pleasant humor of "The Birds of Killingworth." And, above all, there is "The Saga of King Olaf." Longfellow came to develop a swift, economical narrative style, a style which seizes upon the salient points and presents them in their dramatic aspects, a style undiscovered by the wits because they do not wish to find any good in him. It is found in the "Tales;" it is found in the later ballads; and it is found in the later narrative lyrics, of which "Jugurtha" is a specimen:

The world belongs to those who come" the last,

They will find hope and strength as

we have done.

And, in the third place, there are the narrative poems. Here we must distinguish. The art of writing good narrative verse is one of the rarest accomplishments in poetry. In English its masters are few-Chaucer, Dryden, Scott, Morris, Longfellow, Masefield, and one or two others. The narrative poet must, first of all, tell a good story, not merely decorate one. He must present us with objectified, lifelike charac

How cold are thy baths, Apollo!

Cried the African monarch, the
splendid,

As down to his death in the hollow
Dark dungeons of Rome he de-
scended,
Uncrowned, unthroned, unat-

tended;
How cold are thy baths, Apollo!

This has the sagacity, the dry Roman strength of Walter Savage Landor.