PRINCE MacFADDEN of BUNKDOM

...Be it said for Bernarr's original honesty that he neither entertained the offer nor did he particularly angle for the thousand dollars of the simp...

...The circularizing of presidents of corporations throughout our city and environs, telling them how safe and sane a sheet the Graphic is, is positively Homeric...

...A fawning group of publicans surround and cheer him...

...It may be a few weeks, or a few months from now, when we shall hear him talked about as a mayoralty candidate...

...And he had no Boswell among his thirty dollar-a-week true story trans-scribes...

...The magazine was leaping and bounding Into growth...

...Millionaire editors were angling for its purchase from him...

...Mar knew, as any ordinary student of youth knows, the terrific impulses of unrequited affection...

...Line forms on this side...

...His last effort to make a paying proposition out of the Graphic is both tragic and ludicrous...

...Macfadden or Hylan —"L" or Subway—influenza or la grippe—the choice is extremely dit-ficult Bunk, Bunk, Bunk Our angle on Macfadden is purely economic...

...Getting Inspiration As the army and navy statistics during the draft proved years afterwards, Mac believed that our method of living, ths mad relay racing through drudgery and workaday of industrial civilisation, was breeding a. race of physical and mental subnormals 'There must have been a Lutheran fire in his eye and a Calvinistic swing to his pen as he diatrlbed against a social and industrial age that dwarfed men and women and children for its mad nses...

...Do Witt'$ article to appear eimuitaneouelg m both publioatiune...

...From whatever contact he had had with his readers, he had learned that they were all starved in body, brain and affection, men amd women alike...

...They have their own press, that has proven quite efficient in its brain and soul stultifying purposes to their employes...

...From the first, as a business proposition, the Graphic was doomed to failure, since it ran in direct competition 'to two lother powerful tabloid dailies that were more adroit at scandal, filthy gossip, and tawdry blatherskiting than the Macfadden offspring...

...Physical Culture in a general way attracted the chirken breasted flippers who were unable to attract to themselves pretty girls for social companionship...

...He must first develop a series of Interlocking maga|lnes, each one particularly catering to one of the several interlocking weaknesses of Americans...

...One can only conjecture that it came about in this manner: The Revelation One afternoon, a decade or so ago, there walked into Mac's office a thin, sedentary-looking, white-col-lared-clerk sort of an American who got down to brass tacks at once...

...nana ainre Sitting Bull threw hla last tomahawk and Lydia Pinkham boxed up her flret pill...

...Thousands of wan slaves and dwarfed bodies were already In the van...

...America waa just then at the high mark of success worship...

...In such an atmosphere, the Son of God might have fallen...

...For men, he would have magazines of adventure, virility, and dancing...

...The King Complex And now that our Caesar has no more need of the moneyed Pompeys and Crassi of his former struggles, he arrives at the King complex...

...Jefferson did not survive to the day when he might have gotten a fine rake off from a Tammany Subway Contract Mark it down as a thundering epigram tq the future years that it haa been the fate of every Messiah since the last dinosaur1— they never got in on the money...

...Let us suppose, then, that that is how the Graphic came into its lurid cross-worded babyhood...

...Tk$ New Leader wiekee to oe-ItnowUdge itt indebtedneee to tke editcr$ of Labor Age, v>ko Save mod's it poeeible for Mr...

...Kor he ts beyond argument the moat interesting of the species Amir...

...Since all this is merely conjecture, and we have no definite proof of anything said here, it might reasonably be said that we are only sore we did not succeed as well as Bernarr did, and we are just cooking up a lot of bunkum ourselves because of jealousy...

...Why Camel cigarettes or "The Follies of 1925" does not follow suit will always remain a publicity agent mvstery to us...

...Gosh I Who wouldn't sign him up for neasoi after »»v » circul or Mde show, Palace vaudeville or oiio, for the Columbia Burlesque...

...Here he was leading a chosen people out of the bondage of ugliness into freedom and beauty...

...We now see our Mac carried away on the shoul ders of his "Yes men...

...R. O., and headliner on the grandest circuit in creation, the wheel of Bunkerino...

...And shove all, since that sort of sordid advertising had paid royally for others, he decided to organize little companies,' offices, schools, etc., under separate managements, in different locations, and with totally dissimilar names, that would take in the entire range of Americai» ignorance and stunted ambition...

...Already there is afoot the White Star Brotherhood of his—a sort of orphaned, rickety twin brother to the Ku Klux Klan of late notoriety...

...To each magazine he would apply advertising that would get to the yearnings and earnings of its psrticular class of' inferiors...

...As fervent ly as Christianity started with Jssus, and Democracy with Jefferson, it was mem i to he a serious Messianic effort to imbue into ths varicose and purpural veins of A mer-ican youth and adulthood the elixir of athletics and the great outdoors...

...The advertisement that announced its coming birth remains in our mind as the most modernized version of the Sermon on the Mount as applied to heralding a new brand of goods on the market...

...He laid his plans and proceeded to carry them eat after an extensive survey of hla sphere of Influence...

...Bemarr Macfadden to stick to his own field of exploitation...

...The lad had a thousand dollars saved up, which he was anxious to spend pronto if Macfadden, the wizard of the Physique, would guarantee him, within one year at most, to add twelve inches more to his shoulders and three inches more to his half-inch chest expansion, with forty pounds of bleep muscle thrown In, etc...

...To us, as to history, an avowed political ambition is a certain sign of mental and moral disintegration...

...There were millions of young and old Americans everywhere, in the two score and eight States, like this visitor, who had ten-dollar bills, and hundred-dollar bills, and no shoulders, muscles, breasts, chests, or the form divine, all eager for the exchange...

...But there were mitigating circumstances of environment that might help us in being a trifle forgiving for this sin of his...

...t There must have been a John the Baptist ring in his voice as he called unto America to stretchy limb, ex pand chest, Inhale the zippy ozone, and go galavanting over the roads without end...

...Am athletic carriage, an expanse of breast,developed muscles aurely would "get them...

...It came to pass, that while Bernarr was struggling along on his magazine he saw the gross injustice of the past...

...But honestly, one has to put himself down as an out-and-out moron not to sense with his five riormal faculties the unmistakable odor of rot, after reading any of Bernarr's dozen or so publications and their beautiful array of advertised schools, courses, and schemes for making giants out of pigmies and gods out of twelve-and-one-half-dol-lar-a-week shipping clerks...

...What the Alexander Hamilton Institute, Elliot's Business Builders, and the like had done for American dollar lust, be was going to consolidate into the most colossal empire of physical culture and sex satiety bunk the world had ever known...

...Colonel Roosevelt was in' his heyday and his personality very fresh...

...Thousands of jyears afterward, mayhap, when the proposition got on a solid paying hauls, hangers-on and cheap bunk slinger* marched in and reaped the wages of another's virtue...

...And since this physical culture bunk does not go so well in metropolitan centres, where there is an awakening intelligence among the hoi-polloi, the paper did not go financially...

...He has been, and will continue to be, successful only if he works on the credulity of the small town son...

...That time he was what Moronil always terms a "nut...

...We would sincerely advise Mr...

...Time was when Bernarr had nothing but • shock of bristling hair, a la Royrrofter, his name on a few vegetarian hasheries that he never owned and a crusader's yearning to expresi himself in a physical culture journal...

...The correspondence school fakirs who advertised in his column how to become Pavlowas, Elmans, Benny Leonards, da Pachmanns and Joseph Conrads without any preliminary trouble at all were waxing fat Every scheming capitalizer of poor white credulity and craving for power utilized his advertising space and carried on profitably...

...It was almost a fanatic dream with most of them to become A polios, Jim Jeffries and Ted Coys...

...Ever since Macfadden crossed the Rubicon of doubt, and started his campaign of contests, magazines, true story awards, correspondence courses in how to become anything from an expert tangoist, banjoist or Steinmetz, to a "Red" Grange, Mo-ronia has stormed, and through the tempest has flooded a golden downpour...

...In such seraphic "go-ge'.tem" strain one might palm off "Red Hot Mamma" as an aria from the "Gotterdamme-rung...

...Mere Magasinea New magazines must be started...

...PRINCE MacFADDEN of BUNKDOM By SAMUEL A. DE WITT FOR the ideal man of the hour, captain and master of fate and soul, child of destiny (even If a trifle superannuated), allow us to present, ladies and gentleman, Bemarr Macfadden, From the rockbound roast of Labrador to the palm-swept .sands of Borneo, you will not i nd another sucl...

...Genius seldom indulges in memoirs...

...For this sort of bunk the employing class don't fall so readily...

...For women, true story, sex and sentiment dope, and beauty...

...A pip of a put it-acroHser—S...

...Because both the men and the women were blaming their loneliness upon their lack of jhysi-cal presence and charm, here iw a universe waiting in endless line to deliver their dollars into the coffers of the first inspired man of destiny that would not scruple to give them sublimed abstracts of bunk for what they lacked in sad fact Fighting Temptation We may also imagine that Macfadden spent many days and nights battling the demons of temptation, even as Christ did in the desert...

...How the great golden revelation came to him will perhaps never be known...

...But we are hardly interested in his political ambitions...

...From the feminine angle, he noticed by active inquiry that all the cosmetic advertisers, the purveyors of facial and body charm who paid him so well for bruiting about their brutal bunk, were doing a wonderful business...

...So it bebooles us to imagine that ths only o(n%r raison d'etre for the project is that he intends to build around it his edifice of power...

...pressed Lotharios, Dob Juaaa, Napoleons, Messalinas and Gloria Swan sons...

...The cattle were snouting and grunting about in the stables of yellow publicity, fakes, the press agent and blustering bluff...

...What marks Macfadden great tut than Christ, Jefferson, Luther, Calvin, John and the others who started great movements, is that he at least has lived to see, and still continues to make, his ideals—PAY, Christ did not !ive long enough to help share in the fat missionary funds of his present-day followers...

...It seems, however, to be the eternal -way with "nuts" that they gather unto themselves a few sentimental angels, the,"joiner" stripe, and »o Mac's red-blooded vehicle of virility, vim and vigor, came into print as the Physical Culture Magazine...

...like the Lord, in this, loo, he yielded...

...The young man left with some advice and several Macfadden pamphlets...

...non-pareil, jro getter, deal closer, champ eig/i-ontbe-dotted liner...

...Feed them panacoss tor power, beauty, glory, talent—promise to sell them the secrets of the gods, collect their fees, and give them those aeatly printed formulae of undiluted, unadulterated BUNK...

...and since the daily newspaper is reputed to make and unmake rulers, he decides to start a newspaper of his own, towards a mayorship, a governorship or some such stepping-stone to the Presidency...

...Most of these men were sex-starved, most of the women mate-hungry...

...By the strange procesa of reasoning that genius is addict to, Mac concludes that he is meant to rule men...

...He proceeds in almost childish naivete to assure the employers that ho intends to run his sheet so close to the line of industrial ethics that they will be secure from strikes, dissension, and foreign revolutionary tendencies, if their employes will only read his paper...