In the spring of 1929, a Yale friend helped Dwight Macdonald land a job writing for the business section of Time, the cheeky news digest started by Yalies Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, then only six years old but stunningly successful. Aside from his work in rayon, however, Macdonald actually had few qualifications.
Not that Henry Luce cared. As Macdonald later put it, Luce would “hire poets straight out of Yale or Princeton and set them to work writing about the price of steel rails.”
Knowledge was less important than talent. “A smart fellow can do anything he puts his mind to,” explained Macdonald, sympathetically, and “a brilliant amateur is likely to be more productive than a prosaic expert.”1
This smart fellow also became part of the team planning a new magazine, which, he told his friend Dinsmore, would be “devoted to glorifying the American businessman”—work the twenty-three-year-old “intellectual-artist-man of ideas” found “not unpleasant” but ultimately unsatisfying.2
Luce himself was not at all ironic about his new magazine, to be called Fortune. He stated its mission in a memo to the Time Inc. Board of Directors, using the breathless inverted phrasing that typified his preferred style of journalism. “Accurately, vividly, and concretely to describe Modern business is the greatest journalistic assignment in history.”
It was a “saga” with universal appeal. It united Americans of all kinds. Business was “the single common denominator of interest among the active leading citizens of the U.S.”
Fortune would be no simpering mouthpiece for industry; it would contain no “ghost-written banalities by Big Names.” It would be smart: “If Babbitt doesn’t like literature,” wrote Luce, evoking Sinclair Lewis’s well-known creation (whom Luce actually thought an unfair caricature of the American entrepreneur), “he doesn’t have to read it.”3
Printed on large sheets of thick, expensive paper, with great illustrations and the classic photographs of Walker Evans, Fortune would also be gorgeous. But pricey: a dollar an issue at a time when newspapers sold for pennies and Time cost fifteen cents. Its writers would include Archibald MacLeish and Dwight’s Exeter buddy James Agee, whom he helped get a job.
Proposed in November 1929, as the stock market was crashing—ending a bull market that had lasted six years—the plan for Fortune quickly won approval from Time’s corporate governors. The magazine debuted in February 1930.4
In 1931, the phrase American Dream was first recorded—just as the idea was losing its purchase on reality. Macdonald took little notice of the degenerating economy, though he found much to complain of: women who gave him the “go-by” and his job, “8 hours of mental tension” each day that left him famished for reading, conversation, and leisure. There was the consolation of alcohol, which despite Prohibition the young writer had little trouble obtaining. “I went to dinner with the James Hamills, drank 3 cocktails, and just managed to stay above the table.”
He berates his friend Dinsmore for being “one of these cover-to-cover readers of Time. I thought they were all automobile salesmen or professors of sociology,” naming two ultramodern types with a professional interest in American gullibility. He tells Dinsmore that he should be using his free time to read Dante, Cervantes, Plato, or even the great Russian novelists.
The rhetorical conventions of magazine journalism irritate him: the chatty, lighthearted style, the crumbled form of predigested information, the phony familiarity. “Another rule: be personal!” This he thinks inspired by “all these cigarette testimonials written by dukes and sea captains, trying to kid the straphanger, the homo boobiensis, that he is entering into some sort of personal relationship with the dukes and captains.” But for all his contempt, he is very good at his work, and, increasingly, he earns a handsome salary. Success, however, is neither humbling nor entirely gratifying.
Echoing the antidemocratic prejudices of H. L. Mencken, whose own magazine, the American Mercury, was one of several being eclipsed in the fullness of Time, Macdonald is drawn to those authors heavily favored by sensitive young men of worldly ambition. He reads Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and quotes approvingly Stendhal’s line that “the Tyranny of public opinion, and what opinion!, is as stupid in the small towns of France as in the United States of America.”
Inevitably, Macdonald is soon reading Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophy’s love poet to those tormented souls waiting to be hailed by a world they despise. Among a list of maxims he copies down for Dinsmore, one celebrates the spirited contrarian: “A sign of strong character, when once the resolution has been taken, [is] to shut the ear even to the best counterarguments.”5
The magazine he worked for he called “Lousy Fortune.” Each month he wrote one article about four to six thousand words long—which is highly productive for a magazine writer. Paid seventy-five dollars a week, he decided to ask for a raise.
Luce said, “You shouldn’t always be thinking about money, Dwight. You should trust us to look out for your interests and see you get well taken care of, so stop worrying and keep your eye on the ball.”6
But it worked. A raise soon came through. And despite all of Luce’s hoorah spirit concerning the saga of American business, the staff, led by the young man of letters Archibald MacLeish, pulled the magazine left. According to Macdonald, “Luce was journalist enough to see that the New Deal was news and that big business, temporarily, wasn’t.”7
Around the time Hooverville was coined as a name for the impromptu shack towns sheltering a growing number of homeless families, Fortune boldly staked a claim on the little-mentioned story of the growing economic and social crisis. The magazine ran an enormous feature piece, packed with photographs and reports from across the country, shaming the government for failing to address or even gather information on the crisis. Taking its title from Hoover’s callous and untrue remark that “No one has starved,” the article woke many other newspapers and magazines to the story of the Depression, which had until then been downplayed in the mainstream press.
In 1933, a year of bank runs and bank closings, of plummeting values and diminishing sales, Franklin Delano Roosevelt takes office, the first Democratic president since Woodrow Wilson, and, again like Wilson, a terrific speechmaker.
With upper-class Ivy League diction familiar to someone of Macdonald’s education, the new president sounds like a consummate highbrow as he delivers his inaugural address. He drops his final r’s as he promises “this great nation will endure as it has endured” and sounds a bit Shakespearean as he flattens the second a in again.8
He sounds not at all like Gertrude Stein when he repeats a word, but instead grand and classical: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Mixing the biblical and the social, he blames “the money changers” who “have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.”
As the New Deal begins to address the national tragedy of 23 percent unemployment, Macdonald develops a social conscience, or rather meets one. Nancy Rodman is a society girl with left-wing connections and literary tastes that complement her new boyfriend’s. They read Shakespeare together. A graduate of Brearley, the Manhattan prep school, and Vassar College, the former debutante has a grandfather who was president of the stock exchange and a brother who is a fixture on the burgeoning radical scene. “She’s a sweet girl,” says Dwight, “even if she does let me in for drearily long-winded, left-wing political meetings.”
She persuades him to read The Communist Manifesto and Trotsky’s autobiography. At the same time Macdonald’s journalism heads into the problems of labor and economics as a social issue. He has already adopted a stilted view of the great innovators of American business. “Take Ford out of his factory and Edison out of his laboratory, you would have two individuals indistinguishable in spirit, in taste, in intellectual scope, from millions of Americans.” Which, of course, is to say “spirit and taste” of a rather low variety. “If these men are the Lincolns and Napoleons of today, the human race has gone to hell.”9