About Hampton's Magazine

Hampton's Magazine

Hampton's Magazine was a fifteen-cent illustrated monthly published in New York by Benjamin B. Hampton, appearing under that title from 1909 until its final phase in 1912. It was the continuation of Broadway Magazine, founded in 1898, through The New Broadway Magazine and Hampton's Broadway Magazine, and it ended, after a merger with Columbian magazine, as Hampton-Columbian and then The Hampton Magazine, ceasing with the May 1912 issue. At its peak it reached a circulation of 444,000, published Jack London, O. Henry, P. G. Wodehouse, Joseph Conrad and Charles Edward Russell, and pursued the muckraking policies that, in the standard accounts, left its owner unable to secure the bank loan he needed to continue publication. Frank Luther Mott included Hampton's Broadway Magazine among the magazine sketches in his History of American Magazines for 1905–1930.

Benjamin B. Hampton Before the Magazine

Benjamin Bowles Hampton was born on March 19, 1875, in Macomb, Illinois, the son of David Hail Hampton and Mary (Mamie) Hampton, née Bowles. He spent several years as a newspaper publisher and editor in Illinois before moving to New York in 1900. There he went into the advertising business and quickly became successful: his projects included large campaigns for companies that manufactured cigarettes, and the clients of the Ben B. Hampton Advertising Agency included S. H. Kress & Co., with 50 stores in cities in the southern United States. His connection with the American Tobacco Company also dated from 1900, when it was one of his advertising clients. The advertising fortune and the advertiser relationships came first; the magazine was bought with the proceeds, and the tension between the two businesses — a reform magazine dependent on the goodwill of banks and advertisers — ran through Hampton's Magazine to its end.

From Broadway Magazine to Hampton's

The title Hampton bought had a long prior life. Broadway Magazine ran from April 1898 to November 1907, continued as The New Broadway Magazine from December 1907 to September 1908, and became Hampton's Broadway Magazine from October 1908 to January 1909 after Hampton was able to buy the magazine for a low price. He added his last name to the name of the publication, put his brother Jesse in charge of the advertising agency so that he could focus on the magazine, and in 1909 shortened the title to Hampton's Magazine. Hampton published a couple of stories in Hampton's Broadway Magazine himself and held the copyrights on both Hampton's Magazine and Hampton's Broadway Magazine. The Online Books Page at the University of Pennsylvania, which preserves complete issues through HathiTrust, records volumes 21 to 28 across the Hampton titles, and Mott's later history treated the magazine Hampton built on the Broadway foundation as significant enough to merit its own sketch among the magazines of 1905–1930.

Editors and Contributors

The editors of the magazine in its Broadway and Hampton phases included Theodore Dreiser, Harris Merton Lyon and Ray Long — the same Ray Long who edited Red Book, Blue Book and Green Book in Chicago before moving to Cosmopolitan. At the time Joseph Conrad contributed to Hampton's Magazine, the managing editor was William Griffith, who afterwards, as editor of McCall's Magazine in 1912 and of The Semi-Monthly Magazine in 1913, wrote to Conrad directly to solicit further contributions, and who was also editing Current Opinion when it published two Conrad essays in 1918 and 1920. At its peak the magazine published the work of Jack London, O. Henry, P. G. Wodehouse, Ellis Parker Butler and Edwin Balmer. Hampton accepted Jack London's story Mauki after it was turned down by other publications — an editorial choice entirely in character for a publisher who remained committed to stories of social injustice.

Fiction in Hampton's: Conrad and London

The Conrad First project, which documents the first magazine appearances of Joseph Conrad's work, lists Hampton's Magazine as the first publisher of Conrad's story Il Conte in February 1909, placing the magazine in the bibliography of one of the era's major novelists at the very start of the Hampton's title. Jack London's presence was larger still. Beyond Mauki, London was the kind of writer Hampton's existed to print: his fiction of the South Seas and of labor carried the anti-capitalist charge that other magazines were beginning to refuse. Hampton's obituary record and the histories agree that Hampton remained committed to publishing stories of social injustice even after other publications had moved on, believing readership had lost interest in that type of anti-capitalist tale. That commitment defined the fiction side of the magazine as clearly as Charles Edward Russell defined its nonfiction.

Muckraking: Charles Edward Russell and the Railroads

Hampton's belonged to the last phase of the muckraking era, when the great general magazines that had exposed trusts and corruption in the previous decade were retreating from reform journalism. Its most consequential contributor was Charles Edward Russell. Russell's The Growing Menace of Socialism appeared in Hampton's in January 1909 and The Remedy of the Law in August 1910, and a collection of six of his articles on the Pacific system of railroads, which appeared in Hampton's Magazine, was reissued in book form. Most of the matter in Russell's Stories of the Great Railroads (1912) originally appeared in Hampton's Magazine in the form of separate articles. That book documented corruption in the railway industry — finances and mismanagement, monopolies and worker safety — and modern editions of it summarize the sequel plainly: railroad executives claimed Russell was publishing lies, and used their power to lead Hampton's Magazine to ruin. Whether or not every element of that publisher's summary can be proved, the standard scholarly summary in Conrad First reaches the same practical conclusion from the financial side: although the magazine had a circulation of 444,000 by 1911, the muckraking policies pursued by its owner Benjamin Hampton led to his being unable to secure a bank loan necessary to continue publication.

Circulation, Price and the Business Model

Hampton's was a fifteen-cent monthly, priced above the ten-cent magazines that had made the muckraking era possible but in line with the rising price of quality general magazines of its day; surviving copies of volume 25, numbers 2 and 3, from August and September 1910, confirm the fifteen-cent cover price and the publisher, Broadway Magazine, Inc. A circulation of 444,000 by 1911 placed it among the substantial general monthlies of the United States — large enough to matter to advertisers and to the railroads Russell attacked, yet dependent, as all such magazines were, on credit for paper, printing and distribution. That dependence is the key to its collapse: a magazine could be a circulation success and still die when its bankers declined to lend, which is exactly the fate the reference accounts record for Hampton's.

Merger with Columbian and the End in 1912

Hampton's Magazine merged with Columbian magazine in 1911. It was published as the Hampton-Columbian magazine from October 1911 to January 1912, before being renamed The Hampton Magazine, and it ceased with the May 1912 issue. Hampton's own biography records the merger more briefly as a merging with four other magazines in 1911. The sequence matters for cataloguers: issues of 1909 to 1911 belong to Hampton's Magazine proper, the Hampton-Columbian issues run from October 1911 to January 1912, and the final Hampton Magazine issues run from February to May 1912, preserved in HathiTrust as volume 28. The magazine Hampton had bought cheaply, renamed for himself and driven to nearly half a million circulation was gone within about six years of the purchase.

Hampton After the Magazine

The magazine's end did not end Hampton's career, which helps explain both his resources and his next ambitions. In September 1913 he became a vice-president and director of the American Tobacco Company, heading its smoking tobacco department — a role the Wall Street Journal reported he had been virtually filling for some months. In 1916 he became president of the General Film Company, led a plan to conglomerate film companies by acquisition, formed the Rex Beach Picture Company, was a partner in Zane Grey Pictures, and after selling the Rex Beach company in 1918 moved to Los Angeles to produce films, including The Westerners and Desert Gold in 1919 and Riders of the Dawn, The Money Changers and The Dwelling Place of Light in 1920. Health problems later caused him to step back from direct involvement in motion pictures. He was married first to Maria Somers Bartleson, who died in 1922, and later to the actress Claire Adams. He died on January 31, 1932, in Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.

A History of the Movies and Hampton's Place in History

Hampton's last act as a publisher of record was a book: A History of the Movies, published by Covici-Friede in 1932 and reprinted by Dover Publications in 1970 as History of the American Film Industry from Its Beginnings to 1931. Reviewers treated it as a work of first importance of its kind, covering the careers of performers, the changes the film industry had dealt with and its leaders, and Hampton emphasized in it the industry's widespread mass-market appeal in the United States. The man who had run a muckraking monthly became, in effect, the first historian of the industry that replaced magazines as America's dominant storyteller. Hampton's Magazine itself survives in the standard histories — in Mott's History of American Magazines, in the Conrad bibliography, in Russell's railroad book and in complete runs at HathiTrust — as a case study in the economics of reform journalism: a popular, profitable-looking magazine whose politics made it unbankable.

Profile at a Glance

Hampton's Magazine was published in New York from 1909 to 1912, continuing Broadway Magazine (1898–1907), The New Broadway Magazine (1907–1908) and Hampton's Broadway Magazine (1908–1909). Its owner was Benjamin B. Hampton (1875–1932), a former Illinois newspaper editor turned New York advertising executive; its editors included Theodore Dreiser, Harris Merton Lyon and Ray Long, with William Griffith as managing editor at the time of Joseph Conrad's February 1909 contribution. A fifteen-cent monthly reaching 444,000 circulation by 1911, it published Jack London, O. Henry, P. G. Wodehouse, Ellis Parker Butler, Edwin Balmer and Charles Edward Russell, merged with Columbian in 1911 as Hampton-Columbian, and ceased with the May 1912 issue as The Hampton Magazine.