Macomb’s Ben Hampton: the first modern multi-media man
Benjamin Bowles Hampton * owned and operated small-town newspapers in Macomb; then a larger daily in Galesburg; * worked in an early advertising agency in New York City; * helped Louis Liggett expand the Rexall drug-store chain; * published a muckraking magazine in New York, Hampton’s; * worked as a public relations and ad executive for the American Tobacco Company; * wrote and produced 10 films, and served as president of the General Film Company; and * authored books, including one of the first histories of the movies
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“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 what not 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” – Theodore Dreiser
“Hampton had an unusual editorial sense; 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� – Charles Edward Russell (leader of the muckrakers, said Louis Filler)
“Light-hearted, small, dapper Benjamin Bowles Hampton [is] a success fiend from Illinois who had prospered in the advertising business” – W.A. Swanberg, author of Dreiser
“Ben Hampton’s real newspaper genius, directed with tire-less energy and enthusiasm, brought prestige and power to the paper it had not known in its placid youth” – Frank Sisson, the ex-journalist vice president of the Guaranty Trust Co.
“Last of the great muckraking publishers” – Robert Cantwell, novelist and critic
“Hampton advocated a program for Alaska premised [on] public ownership of resources and railroads. It is worth underscoring that Hampton thus showed he was ready for state Socialism, and was more consistently, more responsibly, so than Hearst had been” – Filler