Everybody's
Magazine was
founded in 1899. The editor, John O'Hara Cosgrave,
was fully committed to investigative journalism. In August,
1902 the magazine published an article by Frank
Norris exposing corrupt business dealings in agriculture. This
was followed by another article on the treatment of miners, Life
in the Mining Region (September, 1902). These articles
established Everybody's as a magazine
concerned with social justice. However, its critics described it as
muckraking journalism.
By 1903 Everybody's Magazine had achieved a circulation of 150,000
and with an increase in advertising revenue was making a small profit.
Other outstanding journalists who worked for Everybody's
Magazine included Charles Edward
Russell (The Greatest Trust in the World,
February, 1905, Where Did You Get It, Gentlemen?
August, 1907), Upton Sinclair (The
Condemned Meat Industry May, 1906), Thomas
Lawson (Frenzied Finance,
July, 1904; Fools and Their Money,
May, 1906 and The Muckraker,
August, 1906), Ambrose Bierce (Have
We A Navy? October, 1909), Lincoln
Steffens, (An Exposition of the Sovereign
Political Power of Organised Business, September, 1910)
and C. P. Connolly (Big
Business and the Bench, February, 1912).
The series, Frenzied Finance,
lasted for over three years (July 1904 - February 1908) and to help
sales, the author, Thomas Lawson, spent
$250,000 of his own money to advertise it. This was highly successful
and sales reached 750,000 by 1908. Circulation dropped at the end
of the series to 500,000, but as the owners of the magazine were selling
150 pages of advertising a month, they still made a healthy profit.
During the First World War, Everybody's
Magazine argued that the United States should support Britain
against Germany. The former president,
Theodore Roosevelt, wrote a pro-war
article, America - On Guard! (January,
1915) and Samuel Hopkins Adams produced
a piece on the dangers of German propaganda. In January, 1916, a group
of British authors, including H. G. Wells,
George Bernard Shaw and G.K.
Chesterton, contributed to the series, America's
Neutrality as England Sees It.
After the First World War sales dropped dramatically.
In December 1926, the owners of the magazine brought an end to its
campaigning political articles, and decided to concentrate instead
on fiction. This failed to halt the slide in sales and by 1928 the
magazine was selling only 50,000 copies a month. Everybody's
Magazine ceased publication in March 1929.
John
O'Hara Cosgrave
(1)
Thomas
Lawson, Everybody's Magazine
(July, 1904)
Through its workings during
the last twenty years there has grown up in this country a set of
colossal corporations in which unmeasured success and continued immunity
from punishment have bread an insolent disregard of law, of common
morality, and of public and private right, together with a grim determination
to hold on to, at all hazards, the great possessions they have gulped
or captured. It is the same "System" which has taken from
the millions of our people billions of dollars and given them over
to a score or two of men with power to use and enjoy them as absolutely
as through these billions had been earned dollar by dollar by the
labour of their bodies and their minds.
(2)
John O'Hara Cosgrave, Everybody's Magazine (1909)
Wall Street cannot gull the
public as it once did. Insurance is on a sounder basis. Banking is
adding new safeguards. Advertising is nearly honest. Food and drug
adulteration are dangerous. Human life is more respected by common
carriers. The hour of the old-time political boss is stuck. States
and municipalities are insisting upon clean administrators. The people
are naming their own candidates. Protection is offered to the weak
against the gambling shark and saloon. Our public resources are being
conserved. The public health is being considered. New standards of
life have been raised up.
It is a new era. A new world. Good signs, don't you think. And what
has brought it about? Muckraking. Bless your heart, just plain muckraking.
By magazine writers and newspapers and preachers and public men and
Roosevelt.
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