Macomb’s Ben Hampton became muckraker, multi-media man

Bill Knight column for 1-31, 2-1 or 2, 2019

            Benjamin Bowles Hampton was just 56 when he died 87 years ago this week, but the Macomb native packed a lot into his life, with careers ranging from a small-town newspaperman and groundbreaking muckraking publisher to a business executive and a groundbreaking filmmaker.

            “Hampton was a sort of covert idealist,” wrote film critic and historian Richard Griffith. “[The] pioneer movie financier and producer [had] a partisan point of view which finds comparatively few voices today.”

            Born in 1875 to a family of newspaper entrepreneurs. Hampton’s grandfather owned the then-weekly Macomb Journal off and on from the 1850s to the 1880s. He and son David then launched the Illinois By-Stander, where young Ben worked. Ben and his father in 1895 bought the Galesburg Evening Mail, where he introduced “novelties to the community,” wrote colleague, advertising innovator and author Earnest Elmo Calkins, “ – two and three-column heads, a greatly extended telegraph service, a broader treatment of the news, [and] a livelier pursuit of advertising.

            “Within three years,” Calkins added, we “were located in New York City.”

            There, in 1900, Hampton joined an ad agency where Calkins was head writer, and in 1904 he bought Broadway magazine, a 12,000-circulation, “feeble magazine,” as reporter Charles Edward Russell described it, a 10-cent girlie magazine.

            Within months, Hampton hired Theodore Dreiser as editor and started featuring notable writers including Rudyard Kipling, O. Henry, Joseph Conrad, Jack London and Gilbert Chesterton. By 1907, its title was Hampton’s, selling for 15 cents, and began publishing more hard-hitting material, what Russell biographer Robert Miraldi described as “classic muckraking: an effective combination of rhetorical flourishes, dramatic narrative, and facts.” In less than two years, its circulation grew to about 480,000.

            Stories Hampton’s broke included Admiral Robert Peary’s exclusive account of his “discovery” of the North Pole, well-documented exposes of prisons, Russell’s revelations about the Southern Pacific Railroad, and feminist reporter Rheta Childe Dorr’s series that became the 1910 book “What Eight Million Women Want.”

            Dreiser said Hampton was “a small, energetic, vibrant and colorful soul, all egotism and middle-class conviction as to the need of ‘push,’ ambition, ‘closeness to life,’ ‘punch,’ and whatnot else, American to the core, and descending on us hourly, demanding the ‘hows’ and the ‘whyfores’ of the dream which the little group I was swiftly gathering about me was seeking to make real.”

            It was a time when muckraking flourished, with McClure’s, Pearson’s, Collier’s, Harper’s Weekly, and other periodicals joining the fray.

            “Hampton’s was the greatest of the muckraking organs,” wrote Louis Filler in “Crusaders for American Liberalism.”

            Russell credited Hampton himself with his magazine’s success.

            “Hampton had an unusual editorial sense,” Russell wrote in “Bare Hands and Stone Walls,” his memoir. “He knew how to make his magazine interesting while he made it also an instrument of progress. It was the foremost muck-raking periodical of the world, but it contained more than expose stuff, so that its circulation rose and its entrenchments seemed assured.”

            Indeed, Hampton was influential, with friends and associates ranging from newspaper owner Roy Howard and journalist Lincoln Steffens to judge and social activist Ben Lindsey and education reformer John Dewey. However, in a couple of years, the mysterious theft of stockholders’ names, a whispering campaign allegedly engineered by Wall Street and big banks, and a possible conspiracy by influential corporations resulted in business setbacks that forced Hampton to sell the magazine.

            “Its shocking end had an indubitable effect on the morale of other organs with like inclinations,” Filler said.

            Russell added, “The public did not wish to have [muckraking] stopped, if circulation figures mean anything. [Hampton’s] was well known to be a popular and expanding enterprise.”

            Despite disappointment, Hampton remained an entrepreneur, becoming an American Tobacco Company executive until 1916, when he moved to California, where he was an independent filmmaker – producing 10 films, directing 4, writing 3 and supervising 2 – before writing “A History of the Movies,” published in 1931.

            Apart from all his work and success, though, Hampton’s leadership in muckraking is perhaps his legacy, a legacy that survives in some areas.

            “So long as there was muck, there had to be muckraking: It was a necessary agency in American life,” Filler wrote. “So long as its spirit endured, Hampton [once] declared, democracy as it was understood by Americans would prevail.”