Frank Luther Mott .	. frontispiece
The American Mercury, 1927 .	2
Listerine advertisement, 1927 .	16
Appleton’s Booklovers Magazine, 1905 .	31
Victor Talking Machine advertisement, 1908 .	34
Coca-Cola advertisement, 1906 .	■ ■ ■ ■ 35
Fruit, Garden and Home, 1924 .	39
Better Homes & Gardens, 1928 .	40
Better Homes and Gardens, 1965 .	41
Current History, 1915 .	• • • 52
Current History, 1967 .	• • • • 53
The Editor and Publisher, 1901 .	60
Editor & Publisher, 1967 .	61
James Wright Brown of Editor & Publisher .	65
Everybody’s Magazine, 1904 .	■ • ■ ■ 77
The Golden Book Magazine, 1927 .	120
Good Housekeeping, 1885 .	127
Good Housekeeping, 1908 .	128
Good Housekeeping, 1967 .	129
A fashion column of 1919 .	■ • • • 135
Broadway Magazine, 1899 .	144
The House Beautiful, 1908 .	160
House Beautiful, 1967 .	161
The Little Review, 1915 .	170
The Midland, 1915 .	181
John T. Frederick of The Midland .	189
Herbert David Croly of The New Republic	194
The New Republic, 1914 .	198
The New Republic, 1967 .	199
Harriet Monroe of Poetry .	227
Poetry, 1919 .	. . . . 232
Poetry, 1967 .	.233
The Smart Set, 1908 .	. . . . 252
Henry L. Mencken .	• ■ ■ ■ 253
The South Atlantic Quarterly, 1905 .	■ • ■ 279
Success Magazine, 1906 .	289
Time, 1923 .	. . . 299
Time, 1945 .	. . 300
Time, 1967 .	301
Henry R. Luce of Time .	310
The Yale Review, 1918 .... ....	• 334
The Yale Review, 1967 .	■ ■ • 335

CREDITS

The following persons and periodicals have granted permission for the use of the illustrations on the pages indicated:

George W. Gardner, the frontispiece.

Better Homes and Gardens , pp. 39, 40, 41.

Current History, pp. 52, 53.

Editor & Publisher, pp. 61, 65 (supplied photograph for p. 65).

Good Housekeeping, pp. 129, 135. Illustration on p. 129 reprinted by permission from February 1967 issue of Good Housekeeping magazine, © 1967 by the Hearst Corporation. Illustration on p. 135 reprinted by permission from March 1919 issue of Good Housekeeping magazine.

John T. Frederick, pp. 181, 189 (supplied photograph for p. 189).

The New Republic, pp. 194, 198, 199 (supplied photograph for p. 194).

Poetry, pp. 227, 232, 233 (supplied photograph for p. 227).

Time, pp. 299, 300, 301, 310. Illustration for p. 299, courtesy Time, copyright Time Inc. 1923. For p. 300, courtesy Time, copyright Time Inc. 1945. For p. 301, courtesy Time, copyright Time Inc. 1967. Photograph for p. 310 supplied by Time and reproduced with permission of Time Inc.

The Yale Review, pp. 334, 335.

FOREWORD BY HOWARD MUMFORD JONES

S OME books have an air of having existed forever. The mind accepts the historical truth that there must have been a date when the world did not contain them, but this fact receives only notional acceptance, not what Newman would call real assent. Such titles are Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, the Anglican Prayer Book, the Encyclopaedia Bri- tannica, and Webster’s Dictionary. Their titles become, as it were, common nouns and categorize a whole species. “To look it up in Webster” means to look it up in any competent dictionary, an area of publishing in which Noah Webster is simply primus inter pares, the most powerful ghost in American lexicography. When in 1930 Frank Luther Mott issued his A History of American Magazines, 1741-1850 and announced that other volumes were to follow, he not only entered into his kingdom, he became one of these inevitable names. Others have written more fully about particular periodicals, others have been more detailed about particular eras in magazine publishing, but Mott is like Gibbon. You cannot think of the history of the Roman empire without thinking of Gibbon, and you cannot think of the history of the magazine in our country without thinking of Mott, the first book you turn to, the latest you consult.

Alas, as Longfellow wrote of Hawthorne,

The unfinished window in Aladdin’s tower Unfinished must remain.

The present Volume V, incomplete but majestic, is all we shall have from the Master of the Magazines, who died October 23, 1964. With affectionate care his daughter, advised and assisted by Theodore Peterson and John T. Frederick, has smoothed out a few rough spots, got rid of inconsistencies, and added some recent facts to the “biographies” of the magazines in the present volume. No one has attempted to write the judicious yet sweeping survey of the years 1905-1930 that only Mott could do.

Frank Luther Mott was born near What Cheer, Iowa, a felicitous name that still adorns the map, and his father published a weekly newspaper called The Patriot. Both names were good omens. The multivolume History of American Magazines from 1741 forward is the work of an American who believed in scholarship and who believed that scholarship had something to do with the national intelligence. His modesty led him to argue in the introduction to the first volume that the history of American periodicals might be a valuable addition to the stock of national intelligence. It is in 1968 difficult to think back over about four decades to a time when somebody as good as Mott was a little defensive on his topic. He pointed out that in the United States, magazines have contributed to the democracy of literature without necessarily lowering its tone, and were an important element in the economics of publishing and invaluable records of contemporaneous history. The creation of American Studies programs has not merely validated these modest assumptions but made Mott more and more useful to American historians as the decades drift by.

As for What Cheer, Iowa, a name that escaped the condescension of Matthew Arnold and the bewilderment of Henry James, that, too, was a good omen. No one who has read, or read in, any of the five volumes but must be aware of an author happy in his work and happily conscious of the comic side of men, matter, and opinions. By this I do not mean that Frank Luther Mott was a merry fellow only. In the hands of somebody else a compilation about the whole great body of American periodical publishing might have had the deadly impersonality of the telephone book. I can think of other vast surveys of this dull character. Endlessly patient, never tired, never disillusioned (or if he was, he concealed the fact), Frank Luther Mott displayed the same happy interest in the vagaries of his subject, whether he was dealing with a general magazine or a specialized periodical. He had an unquenchable thirst for the anecdote that illumines, the phrase that reveals. Who but he would have dredged up from the dusty closets of time the stern judgment of the Illinois Federation of Women’s Clubs that the use of the female figure in ad-

vertising “corrupts the youth of the land”? Or noted a clothing store advertisement in Browning’s Magazine: “the best fin de siecle clothing at moderate cost”? Or dryly quoted the judgment of the American Quarterly in 1834: “There is scarcely anything more remarkable in the character of the last five or six years than their sterility in literary production,” and then noted that Poe, Bryant, Whittier, Irving, Paulding, George Bancroft, Davy Crockett and others had brought out important titles in this “lustrum”? The real turning of the knife in the wound, however, is in the next sentence: “But there was also a poem by a dentist on diseases of the teeth, and Dr. McHenry spent some space on it.” Never was solemn stupidity more neatly pinned to the wall.

I think Mott brought to his gigantic enterprise some other salient characteristics. One of these was a function of his life as a newspaperman. He was at one time or another a practising newspaper editor; he wrote (incredible!) in the midst of his History of American Magazines a reliable history of American journalism, which he twice revised; he was chief of the journalism section of the American Army University of Biarritz; he was sent to Japan to advise General MacArthur’s staff about newspapers and newspaper ways; he taught journalism at the State University of Iowa and became dean of the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri, a post influential in both academic and newspaper circles. I think this rich and varied knowledge of the newspaper world helped him make the History of American Magazines the judicious, accurate, and sympathetic work it is.

In the first place the newspaperman has to write—endlessly, fluently, and immediately. In the next place he has to be accurate if he and his paper are to avoid quarrels, protests, and libel suits. In the third place, though his style may lack high distinction, it must have clarity, and it can be a style, as contemporary columnists demonstrate, of considerable range. Much is to be said about the mot juste , but much is also to be said against it, especially in the academic world and in certain provinces of the world of literature. Paralysis ensues when the writer feels he must pat every syllable into place or when the scholar becomes a devotee of perfection and ends

by writing nothing. The successful newspaperman, however much he may respect the styles of great poets and novelists, comes by and by to realize that an exercise in transcendental art is not for him. His business is to get the thing down on paper, responsibly, clearly, succinctly. Mott was a supreme journalist—a term likely to lead some artists and academicians to look upon his writing with profound suspicion. But a newspaperman cannot die of a rose in aromatic pain. To carry the burden of five large volumes, chronicles not merely of the vagaries of the publishing world but also of scores of individual periodicals, required an attitude towards writing the thing down that Mott clearly had. Some pages are of course better than others. It would be difficult for anybody to get up much warmth about faded theological reviews and obsolete agrarian magazines important in their time and therefore to be included. Whatever these and other obstacles, one never has to wonder what Mott is saying. He developed a style flexible, responsible, accurate, and tough enough to stand up under the strain of about 3,000 pages (perhaps more) of closely packed print. Moreover, he had to verify the details as he went along. How he found time to do all these things I do not know. There are slips in these volumes, but they are minor.

A second quality in newspaper writing at first sight looks like derogating the writer but on second thought will, I trust, be taken as the compliment I intend. The intelligent newspaperman makes his material, his judgment, and his style appeal to the average reader, a person of sense and some education to whom most publishing is intended to appeal. It would have been possible for somebody to write a history of American magazines that would deplore their banality, condemn the low level of the commercial world which supports them, and point with scorn to the venality of editors, hack writers, and others who live in the half-world that is neither journalism nor literature. It would also be possible to reverse this valuation, to insist that if highbrows had only got off their high horses, the history of magazine publishing and the history of the American mind would have been oh! so much better. One can hear the same argument today about television.

Mott refused to join either camp. When a good highbrow periodical swims into his ken, he notes its excellencies and its appeal—an example in this volume is his treatment of The New Republic. When a lowbrow magazine exhibits long life and exerts influence, he tries to estimate its virtues and defects —an example is the history of Leslie’s Weekly in Volume II. He can be interested in eccentric publications like Braun’s Iconoclast (Volume IV) and revel in the history of The National Police Gazette (Volume II). In the present volume nothing is more absorbing than his accounts of The Smart Set and The American Mercury. Specialized periodicals aside (that is, scientific, theological, agricultural or other publications restricting themselves to a particular public), Mott assumes that the editor and the publisher of a general magazine want circulation and must therefore appeal to that elusive yet powerful personage, the general reader. His judgments on a magazine qua magazine tend to rest upon the success or failure of editorial and publishing policies. I think this is a sound approach. Even books have to sell, but the problem of selling magazines is complex and was seldom solved among the periodicals of the colonial period, the Revolution, and antebellum America. The weakness of the criterion is not that there is something wrong about good business judgment; the weakness lies in the inescapable difficulty that Mott, who had done so much, could not (among other reasons, for lack of data) deal as richly with problems of advertising intake and circulation build-up as a total history would theoretically require.

I have spoken of Frank Luther Mott as if he were “only” a journalist. He taught courses in English, he co-edited an influential mid-Western literary periodical, he wrote critical essays, and he wrote fiction. One short story by him, “The Man with the Good Face/’ got into O’Brien’s The Best Short Stories of 1921 and continues to live the peculiar life of anthologized short stories; I find it a little stagey, but somebody has written in a copy of this anthology “A regular Hawthorne story set in New York,” and the unknown commentator may be a wiser critic than I am. The point, however, is that Mott’s sensibilities were literary no less than journalistic, a quality in him that raises him above the merely colloquial, the merely

contemporary. It is this side of him that gives us the sympathetic account of the Fugitive group in the present volume that balances the just estimate of the commercial success of Good Housekeeping, which he also chronicles. But when was there a really competent historian without some literary sense? Among the silly things said about the first volume the silliest was probably a phrase that appeared in the Times Literary Supplement: “No interest to the general reader.” Few there are who sit down to read through Gibbon or Bartlett, Webster or the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and I doubt that the general reader ever dreamed of reading Mott all the way through. When a reviewer of the 1957 volume said the whole work was “a sort of syllabus of our cultural history,” he was nearer the center of the target; and those who begin by consulting Mott for a particular point commonly find themselves reading on and on. Higher tribute cannot be paid to a standard history or a standard book of reference.

EDITORIAL NOTE BY MILDRED MOTT WEDEL

W HEN my father, Frank Luther Mott, died in 1964, he was hard at work on Volume V of A History of American Magazines. Volume I had appeared in 1930. It was followed in 1938 by Volumes II and III for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History the following year. In 1957 Volume IV was published, bringing the running history of magazine development up to the year 1905, and earning for him the Bancroft Prize in 1958.

Volume V was to deal with the next twenty-five years, 1905 to 1930. Like the previous volumes it would have consisted of (1) a general discussion of magazine publication in the period, with emphasis on the ways in which magazines reflected the history of the times, and (2) a series of historical sketches of certain magazines which were important and flourishing within this span of years (not necessarily begun in or limited to the period). There were to be thirty-one of these sketches. The author had planned for a sixth volume which would have brought the history up to the present.

At the time of Dr. Mott’s death, the completed portion of the manuscript for Volume V consisted of twenty of the separate magazine histories, with another substantially written. These twenty-one sketches are being published here. He had not made final revisions, and the stories of those magazines which are still publishing ended with the late 1950’s or early 1960’s, according to the date of writing. He had planned to update them just before publication.

Harvard University Press and I agreed we did not want to ask anyone else to write the uncompleted parts of the volume, with two exceptions. I asked John T. Frederick to complete the history of the Little Review which Dr. Mott was in process of writing in the late summer of 1964, and to supply a section for the Poetry sketch which my father had indicated he intended to insert. The Poetry insertion is enclosed in brackets and indicated by an asterisk footnote; the other and longer section is also plainly footnoted.

The ten magazines for which individual sketches were planned but not written are: Christian Century, Field and Stream, Liberty, Masses, Physical Culture, Pictorial Review, Reader’s Digest, Red Book, Saturday Review, and True Story.

Harvard University Press and I also agreed that changes were not warranted in the manuscript except where accuracy or clarity was concerned. Relatively few changes have been made, probably fewer than the author himself would have felt desirable in certain of the early-draft sketches. Although some of the current magazines which are treated in the volume are still pursuing the even tenor of their course as set down at the time the sketch was written, others have experienced notable expansion or change in editorial outlook. Such developments have been noted and other information presented in asterisk footnotes, for all of which I am responsible. Material in brackets in numbered footnotes was inserted by me, and I have updated the first footnote for each sketch. I also selected the illustrations and wrote the captions for them.

It is hoped that the inclusion (page 341) of a bit of personal history from Dr. Mott’s book of autobiographical essays will not seem merely a sentimental gesture but will be of genuine interest to those who have used and enjoyed the volumes composing A History of American Magazines. The cumulative index, made by Robert J. Palmer, includes many more subject headings than appear in the earlier volume indexes. The bibliography is, of course, only one part of Dr. Mott’s entire publication record which would include writings in the wider field of journalism and in American literature, as well as his short stories.

Theodore Peterson, Dean of the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Illinois and author of Magazines in the Twentieth Century, kindly consented to read the entire manuscript when plans were first set up for its publication. His suggestions touching on various aspects of the book have been valued and often followed. For updating information I am particularly grateful to Robert S. Clark, public relations department, Better Homes and Gardens; to Guy Henle, executive editor, House Beautiful; to Henry Rago, editor, Poetry magazine; and'to Frank R. Shea, assistant to

the managing editor, Time magazine. I appreciate also the generous help of Lawrence Spivak on certain matters relating to the sketch of the American Mercury.

In the preface to Volume II, my father composed a historians’ addition to the Litany, which went as follows: “From mistakes of omission and commission, from slips in dates, from transposition of citations, from blunders obvious and recondite, Good Lord, deliver us!” To this I emphatically add, “Amen!”

Washington, D.C.

February 1968

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