"Protests," laconically explained one of his editors."More than that, the majority threaten to stop their subscription unless you stop.""All right, that proves I am right," answered Bok."Write to each one and say that what I have written is nothing as compared in frankness to what is coming, and that we shall be glad to refund the unfulfilled part of their subscriptions."Day after day, thousands of letters came in.The next issue contained another editorial, stronger than the first.Bok explained that he would not tell the actual story of the beginning of life in the magazine--that was the prerogative of the parents, and he had no notion of taking it away from either; but that he meant to insist upon putting their duty squarely up to them, that he realized it was a long fight, hence the articles to come would be many and continued; and that those of his readers who did not believe in his policy had better stop the magazine at once.But he reminded them that no solution of any question was ever reached by running away from it.This question had to be faced some time, and now was as good a time as any.
Thousands of subscriptions were stopped; advertisements gave notice that they would cancel their accounts; the greatest pressure was placed upon Mr.Curtis to order his editor to cease, and Bok had the grim experience of seeing his magazine, hitherto proclaimed all over the land as a model advocate of the virtues, refused admittance into thousands of homes, and saw his own friends tear the offending pages out of the periodical before it was allowed to find a place on their home-tables.
But The Journal kept steadily on.Number after number contained some article on the subject, and finally such men and women as Jane Addams, Cardinal Gibbons, Margaret Deland, Henry van Dyke, President Eliot, the Bishop of London, braved the public storm, came to Bok's aid, and wrote articles for his magazine heartily backing up his lonely fight.
The public, seeing this array of distinguished opinion expressing itself, began to wonder "whether there might not be something in what Bok was saying, after all." At the end of eighteen months, inquiries began to take the place of protests; and Bok knew then that the fight was won.He employed two experts, one man and one woman, to answer the inquiries, and he had published a series of little books, each written by a different author on a different aspect of the question.
This series was known as The Edward Bok Books.They sold for twenty-five cents each, without profit to either editor or publisher.The series sold into the tens of thousands.Information was, therefore, to be had, in authoritative form, enabling every parent to tell the story to his or her child.Bok now insisted that every parent should do this, and announced that he intended to keep at the subject until the parents did.
He explained that the magazine had lost about seventy-five thousand subscribers, and that it might just as well lose some more; but that the insistence should go on.
Slowly but surely the subject became a debatable one.Where, when Bok began, the leading prophylactic society in New York could not secure five speaking dates for its single lecturer during a session, it was now put to it to find open dates for over ten speakers.Mothers' clubs, women's clubs, and organizations of all kinds clamored for authoritative talks; here and there a much-veiled article apologetically crept into print, and occasionally a progressive school board or educational institution experimented with a talk or two.
The Ladies' Home Journal published a full-page editorial declaring that seventy of every one hundred special surgical operations on women were directly or indirectly the result of one cause; that sixty of every one hundred new-born blinded babies were blinded soon after birth from this same cause; and that every man knew what this cause was!
Letters from men now began to pour in by the hundreds.With an oath on nearly every line, they told him that their wives, daughters, sisters, or mothers had demanded to know this cause, and that they had to tell them.Bok answered these heated men and told them that was exactly why the Journal had published the editorial, and that in the next issue there would be another for those women who might have missed his first.
He insisted that the time had come when women should learn the truth, and that, so far as it lay in his power, he intended to see that they did know.
The tide of public opinion at last turned toward The Ladies' Home Journal and its campaign.Women began to realize that it had a case;that it was working for their best interests and for those of their children, and they decided that the question might as well be faced.Bok now felt that his part in the work was done.He had started something well on its way; the common sense of the public must do the rest.He had taken the question of natural life, and stripped it of its false mystery in the minds of hundreds of thousands of young people; had started their inquiring minds; had shown parents the way; had made a forbidden topic a debatable subject, discussed in open gatherings, by the press, an increasing number of books, and in schools and colleges.He dropped the subject, only to take up one that was more or less akin to it.
That was the public drinking-cup.Here was a distinct menace that actual examples and figures showed was spreading the most loathsome diseases among innocent children.In 1908, he opened up the subject by ruthlessly publishing photographs that were unpleasantly but tremendously convincing.He had now secured the confidence of his vast public, who listened attentively to him when he spoke on an unpleasant topic; and having learned from experience that he would simply keep on until he got results, his readers decided that this time they would act quickly.So quick a result was hardly ever achieved in any campaign.Within six months legislation all over the country was introduced or enacted prohibiting the common drinking-cup in any public gathering-place, park, store, or theatre, and substituting the individual paper cup.Almost over night, the germ-laden common drinking-cup, which had so widely spread disease, disappeared; and in a number of States, the common towel, upon Bok's insistence, met the same fate.Within a year, one of the worst menaces to American life had been wiped out by public sentiment.
Bok was now done with health measures for a while, and determined to see what he could do with two or three civic questions that he felt needed attention.
