candidacy. Likewise, Mayor Mitchel of New York was defeated for reëlection in 1917, although all the New York papers except two Hearst papers and the New York Call supported him. In Boston, in a recent election, a man was elected as mayor who had been convicted of a penal offense, and elected in the face of the practically united opposition of all the newspapers of that city. How would such authors as Everett Dean Martin, Walter Lippmann and Upton Sinclair explain these incidents? How, on the theory of the regimentation of the public mind by the daily press, can such thinkers explain the sharpness with which the public sometimes rejects the advocacies of a united press? These instances are not frequent; but they show that other influences beside the press enter into the making of a public opinion and that these forces must never be disregarded in the estimate of the quality and stability of a prevalent public opinion.
Francis E. Leupp, writing in the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1910, on “The Waning Power of the Press,” remarks that Mayor Gaynor’s comments shortly after his election in 1909 “led up to the conclusion that in our common sense generation nobody cares what the newspapers say.” Mr. Leupp continues: “Unflattering as such a verdict may be, probably the majority of a community if polled as a jury would concur in it. The airy dismissal of some proposition as ‘mere newspaper talk’ is heard at every social gathering until one who is brought up to regard the press as a mighty factor in modern civilization is tempted to wonder whether it has actually lost the power it used to wield among us.”
And H. L. Mencken, writing in the same magazine for March, 1914, declares that “one of the principal marks of an educated man, indeed, is the fact that he does not take his opinions from newspapers—not, at any rate, from the militant, crusading newspapers. On the contrary, his attitude toward them is almost always one of frank cynicism, with indifference as its mildest form and contempt as its commonest. He knows that they are constantly falling into false reasoning about