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When newspapers were in infancy, in infancy which knows no morals, they made no distinction between advertising and news. For pay or for influence, they advertised in the form of news whatever they chose. Now the larger papers, having acquired a sense of responsibility to their readers, sedulously rule out of their news columns all advertisements. This led to the development of press agents, who manufactured news that would render incidental advertisement. With a detective eye the best newspapers watch and reject this stuff.
Last week, however, several leading editors were apparently outwitted by a press agent. A man, who signed himself "John Cromartie," wrote to the Director of the Bronx Zoo,'New York City, and suggested that the Zoo was incomplete without a specimen of the human race, and offered himself for exhibit in the monkey house. The New York Times printed this information and reported what the Zoo-Director said he had replied to the offer:
"As an honest and upright citizen, with no police record and with no axe to grind at some other man's expense, you would be a perfectly legitimate exhibit here alongside our upright apes and bounding baboons from the African outdoors. But it will not do to install you here, as your presence would be denounced as a reproach to the majority of the proletariat and an insult to predatory man.
"The minority is too weak to defend you, even on the basis of a harmless, but necessary, educational exhibit. It can not now defend itself. The times, and possibly the world and sun also, are out of joint."
A similar offer was received by a Zoo-Direptor in Boston. Arthur Brisbane, Hearst editor and omnivorous reader, saw this and of course commented. It remained for Franklin P. Adams (F. P. A.), of The New York World, to remark: 'Here's one original thought,' writes Mr. Brisbane in The American. 'John Cromartie, citizen of New York, writes to the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston, saying he'd like to be exhibited in the monkey house with the other primates, to show how much man resembles the ape." It is, as Mr. Brisbane so well puts it, an original thought. Original, it must be added, with Mr. David Garnett, author of the just-published A Man in the Zoo.* By a strange coincidence Mr. Garnett hit upon the name John Cromartie also. And Mr. Cromartie had himself exhibited in a cage in the Royal Zoological Gardens, London, with this card on it: 'Homo Sapiens, MAN. This specimen, born in Scotland, was presented to the Society by John Cromartie, Esq. Visitors are requested not to irritate the man by personal remarks.' Oh, well, even Mr. Brisbane can't read everything. The press agent, if such he was, had succeeded in outwitting the combined intelligences of two Zoo-Directors, the City Editor of The New York Times, Arthur Brisbane, an editorial-writer on the New York Herald-Tribune, and doubtless several others.
*COBB OF THE WORLD—Edited by John L. Heaton (his colleague)—Button ($3.50); limited edition ($10.00). *A MAN IN THE Zoo—David Garnett— Knopf ($1.75) was reviewed in TIME, June 30.