THE EDITOR and PUBLISHER

A JOURNAL FOR NEWSPAPER MAKERS.

You. 1., No. 4.

NEW YORK, July 20, 1901.

■ Aft

mm

MELVILLE E. STONE,

GENERAL MANAGER OP THE ASSOCIATED PRESS.

CENSORSHIP REMOVED.

THE KING OBJECTS

EDWARD DISLIKES AND RESENTS THE ESPIONAGE OF THE NEWSPAPER MEN.

Thinks that His Movements Should

Not Be Reported Except When They

Concern Matters of State—Much

Amazed by the Report that He Was

Going to Sail on Shamrock II.

The Prince of Wales and King Edward are two different personalities. When the King was the Prince he treated the newspaper representatives with great consideration, and often went out of his way to assist them in obtaining news. Since the Prince became King his attitude, so a correspondent of the New York Sun says, has changed.

It seems that the King objects to his movements being reported except where they concern matters of State. He thinks that then the newspapers should be contented with the official record as supplied by the court news man.

ANNOYED RY REPORTS.

His majesty was much annoye'd a couple of months ago when the newspapers announced that he was going to sail on the Shamrock II., and that certain ladies would be of the party, and he was irritated last week when his intention to go to Windsor Castle in a motor car was made known by the same means.

This week he has been exasperated by the publication of a harmless paragraph seating that Lord Rosebery had an interview with him lasting a full hour. Apparently the gravity of the offense lay in the statement regarding the duration of the visit. It is showed, said his majesty’s private secretary, that Marlborough House was being watched and such an intolerable state of things would have to be stopped.

EJECTED FROM MARLBOROUGH.

An unhappy coincidence was that the day following the report of the visit a wholly irresponsible newspaper announced that Lord Rosebery was about to be married to the Duchess of Albany, the King’s sister-in-law.

When a reporter called at Marlborough House to inquire as to the truth of the report, he was ordered out, and orders were issued to the servants that he never again be permitted to pass the threshold.

The private secretary scornfully refused to say a word of confirmation or denial of what was described as a monstrous assertion. Inquirers were left to guess whether the adjective applied to the idea that Lord Rosebery was engaged to the Duchess of Albany or to the unauthorized and unofficial publication.

New Paper at Nashville.

The Nashville (Tenn.) Daily News is the newest venture in Southern journalism. It made its appearance July 15. and promises to make a place for itself as a profitable venture in short order.

The News is equipped with an eight- page Scott perfecting press and five linotypes. The paper is backed with $45,000 in cash and $55,000 more available.

The backers are prominent men, who intend that the paper shall become a political power in the State and nation.

Manila Editors Take Advantage of Their Freedom to Make Charges.

Recent dispatches from Manila indicated that the abolition of the severe military press censorship has resulted in the publication of some severe criticisms of military and civil officials.

The Daily American, of which Franklin Brooks, now in this country, is the editor, recently accused Prof. Worcester, of the Philippine Commission, of exploitation. It subsequently apologized, however.

An article in the Federal organ, signed by the party president, openly instructed the provincial committees to institute demonstrations against the friars. Then the latter vilified the Federals.

Last week the Freedom recklessly attacked Gov. Whitmarsh and Secretary Speerer, of Banguet. The American devotes its first page to reproducing in its largest type an article from the Liberta of Thursday, which It holds up for execration, but as a matter of fact the article is no worse than some that are printed daily in the United States.

It violently attacks President McKinley’s policy and the Philippine Commission. The Liberta, however, is owned and edited by friars, and it frequently indulges in spasms of venom and filth, attacking persons without reserve.

Gov. Taft recently stated that the newspapers would b®ve every opportunity to obtain the fullest justice, but the publication of libels or other lawbreaking articles would be severely punished. A special translator reviews the newspapers daily, but the situation is steadily becoming aggravated.

-o-

Verdict Against London Mail.

Hettie Chattell, the actress, a single woman, brought suit against the London Daily Mail for libel because that paper printed a paragraph on Feb. 25 to the effect that Rosie Boote, the actress, who married the Marquis of Headfort, was a daughter of Miss Chattell.

The libel suit was based on the ground that this suggested that Miss Chattell was immoral.

The jury awarded Miss Chattell £2,500 damages.

-o-

Receiver for St. Paul Paper.

Eli S. Warner has been appointed receiver of the St. Paul (Minn.) Saturday Evening News and directed to sell the property. This was brought about by the suit of H. M. Kalscheuer against A. E. Donaldson et ah, the latter being the proprietors of the paper In question. It was claimed that the concern was Insolvent and unable to pay Its obligations.

$1 a Year, 5 Cents a Copy.

MELVILLE E. STONE.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ASSOCIATED PRESS'S GENERAL MANAGER.

The Part He Has Played in the

Newspaper History of Chicago—His

Success—How He Got Even with a

Milwaukee Man Who Objected to an

Article.

Chicago, the city marvelous, has enlisted in its newspaper field some of the strongest intellects in the nation—men of broad mental grasp, cosmopolitan ideas and notable business sagacity. Conspicuous among those who have given the city prestige in this direction must be placed Melville E. Stone. His identification with “the art preservative of all arts’’ has been one of distinctive predilection, and. though he has intermittently turned his attention to enterprises of different nature, still, true to the instinct said to characterize every newspaper man, he has invariably returned to the work, strengthened and reinforced by the experiences which have been his.

Mr. Stone was born in the village of Hudson, McLean County, Ill., on the 22d of August, 1848, being the son of the Rev. Elijah Stone, a member of the Rock River Methodist Episcopal Conference, and afterward pastor of what is now the Centenary Church, Chicago.

He obtained his first newspaper experience on the old Chicago Republican, and when that paper was merged with the Inter-Ocean he became the city editor.

CONSOLIDATED THE POST AND MAIL.

About eighteen months later he aided in bringing about the consolidation of the Post and Mail, and became managing editor of the new paper, in whose interest he repaired to Washington as correspondent some months later.

While in the Federal Capital he became a member of the Congressional staff of the New York Herald.

He returned to Chicago and resumed his former position as managing editor, but he soon tendered his resignation for the purpose of concentrating on a new journalistic venture. The nucleus of the great enterprise which brought to Mr. Stone both success and renown was shown forth on Christmas day, 1875, when the first issue of the Chicago Daily News, the original one- cent paper of the city, made its appearance.

The inception of this enterprise, whose success is now a part of the history of Chicago journalism, was of most modest order, Mr. Stone’s associates having been William E. Dougherty and Percy Neggy. In 1883 a stock company was formed, all the stock being retained by Mr. Stone and Mr. Lawson.

HIS TEMPORARY RETIREMENT.

Mr. Stone remained in the business until 1888, when, having accumulated a fortune, he temporarily retired from journalism. He passed two years abroad In company with his family. On his return home in 1890 he became the prime factor in bringing about the organization of the Globe National Bank, which was recognized as one of the solid financial institutions of the city. In 1893 Mr. Stone became general manager of the Associated Press, In which capacity his talents

FOURTH ISSUE OF THE EDITOR AND PUBLISHER

The date: July 20, 1901. Until 1915, the first page of the paper characteristically featured a portrait of someone prominent in journalism or advertising—in this case Melville E. Stone, general manager of the Associated Press.

APRIL IS, 1967 Twenty cents

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OUT nrW5PAPEF»S, ADVEOTlSCPb AMD /iCiEHCIES

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newspapers in Rockford

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The great snow of ’67 was one of the biggest stories ever to hit—and bury—Chicago.

To capture aiS the drama, desolation and occasional humor of the storm and its aftermath, the Tribune gave its readers something memorable. While Chicago was stilt digging out, the Tribune delivered a two-color, 32-page rotogravure magazine in every copy of its Sunday edition on February 19.

Reader response broke ali records. Despite a greatly increased press run, the Sunday Tribune was completely sold out by early morning. To meet the demand, more than 100,000 extra copies of the "Big Snow" magazine were reprinted and sold.

The Tribune serves Chicago in many ways. Covering big stories in a memorable way is one of them,

Chicago Tribune

Mm or Mo for It group ownership?

Knight papers' hip executives move up

Readers stormed the newsstands for the Chicago Tribune’s 32-page “Big Snow” magazine.

MODERN APPEARANCE OF EDITOR & PUBLISHER

The date: April 15, 1967. An advertisement now is typically printed on the cover, often an ad for one of the Chicago papers. The ampersand in the periodical’s title has been a sort of trademark since 1915. “The” was dropped in 1918.

three other papers serving the same industry which were in course of publication in the same city at that time 3 would have been a deterrent to this undertaking; but the newspaper business was booming, and Colonel Shale looked covetously upon the advertising columns of the Fourth Estate, Newspaperdom, and the Journalist. He promised in his first issue that: “As an advertising medium, the paper will be the best in its special field, because it will reach weekly the men with whom the manufacturers of printing inks and presses, the paper makers, the stereotype and linotype metal producers, dealers in oils, desire to do business. It will be of special value [as an advertising medium] to the publisher because it will be placed in the hands of a selected list of general advertisers and the agents who handle large contracts.” 4

Shale sometimes listed himself as “editor” of his journal, but was interested in the business side chiefly, and left the editorial work to others. Frank LeRoy Blanchard, who had worked for four or five New York newspapers and had also held for some years a staff position on the Fourth Estate, was Shale’s “managing editor” during part of his ownership, as were Paul Lodge, Philip R. Dillon, and W. D. Showalter.

The first Editor and Publisher was an eight-page paper without cover. It was attractive in appearance, well printed on good paper, and illustrated by excellent portraits of men prominent in journalism and advertising. The picture of a boyish-looking William R. Hearst was prominent on page one of the first issue, which was dated June 29, 1901.

The paper supplied a good quota of news from its chosen field, with sketches of journalistic personalities. It had a widespread interest geographically; notable, for example, were its reports from “Breezy Chicago.” Also, it was surprisingly good at reporting the leading events related to magazine publishing.

From the very first, Editor and Publisher was a practical journal. One sentence from its salutatory is worth quoting because it announced a policy that the journal has followed throughout its long career:

Note 1

Note 2

It will be our purpose from time to time to present papers of a practical nature by experienced men on circulation schemes, the preparation and display of advertisements, the production and printing of half-tones, the cost of running daily newspapers in large and small cities and kindred topics. 5

The “topics” have changed somewhat in the last sixty-odd years, as the newspaper picture has changed, but the journal’s general policy has remained the same.

On the whole, Shale and Blanchard conducted a good newspaperman’s newspaper. It did not dodge disputes, but it tried “to give both sides of every controversy, and to maintain equipoise and good nature in all circumstances.” 6 In 1907 it absorbed the Journalist , 7 whose owner was by that time ready to give up because of ill health and ill success; and two years later it enlarged its size to sixteen pages. But circulation and advertising responses were both discouraging. The paper was never fat with “ads,” even for the numbers reporting the great newspapermen’s conventions; and though it claimed two thousand circulation by 1911, it probably had less than half that much—■ at a dollar a year, along with a yearly advertising revenue of about $16,000. 8 So when Colonel Shale, who had become involved in mining projects in the West, found a buyer for his paper, he was glad to get out of the publishing business for good. The buyer was “Jim” Brown, who enlisted seven minor stockholders to help him make the purchase, while retaining the controlling interest himself.

James Wright Brown had begun his newspaper career when, a boy of eighteen, he had found a job as reporter on the Tribune in his home city of Detroit. In the latter 1890’s he worked on Chicago newspapers in various capacities; from there he went to Louisville, Kentucky, to serve as general manager of the Herald from 1903 to 1911. He was thirty-eight years old and in his prime when he accepted an offer to move on to New York, the nation’s newspaper capital, and take over the management of the Fourth Estate , a weekly published for news-

5 Editor and Publisher, v. 1, June 29, 1901, p. 4.

6 Seventh birthday number of Editor and Publisher, v. 8, July 4, 1908, p. 4.

7 Mott, American Magazines, v. 4, p. 243.

8 Marlen Pew, “Story of the Rise of Editor & Publisher,” Editor & Publisher, v. 67, July 21, 1934, p. 34.

papermen. Then the very next year he had the opportunity to buy a majority interest in a competing journal and find out what he could do on his own. The first number of Editor and Publisher under his ownership was issued April 6, 1912.

Brown was a man of unusual capacities and character. He possessed business sense in a high degree, but he also had high ideals and a sense of public responsibility. Distinguished in appearance, he commanded respect wherever he went. He made acquaintances easily, and for many years he was the center of an increasingly large circle of friends who held him in affectionate regard. His influence was not limited to his own country; he was a participant in many international organizations, a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor of France, and an honorary member of the Company of Newspaper Makers of London and of the International Circulation Managers’ Association. He joined with Walter Williams, of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, in the organization of the first Press Congresses of the World.

In his introductory editorial statement, Brown declared his intention a to maintain the best traditions of American journalism,” and he promised to “fight the evils within and without the trade.” 9 He crusaded from the first against bad advertising, press agentry abuses, attempts to undermine the freedom of the press, and frauds in the news. But Brown was not conducting a paper devoted mainly to crusading or muckraking. He retained Blanchard as editor for the first four years of his ownership, continuing good coverage of the newspaper field. In fact, such reporting could now be more thorough with the added space available in issues of twenty pages a week. A country-wide staff of regional and metropolitan correspondents furnishing occasional stories was set up and has been continued ever since. A striking increase in advertising and in size was notable as soon as Brown assumed management of the paper. Before nine months were up, he gave it a firmer financial foundation by doubling the subscription price; thus he met the two- dollar rate of the Fourth Estate —with a better paper.

Editor and Publisher had from the first issued special numbers when the country’s newspapermen gathered in New York

9 Editor and Publisher, v. 11, April 6, 1912, p. 8.

JAMES WRIGHT BROWN, 1873-1959

Brown purchased Editor & Publisher in 1912 and made it indispensable to editors, publishers, and advertisers. His sons now carry on the tradition. Photograph by Jean Raeburn.

to attend the annual conventions of the American Newspaper Publishers’ Association and the Associated Press. But the first such number planned under Brown’s ownership was amazing, running to 126 pages, and overflowing with interesting contents. Among other things, it contained what was called “A General History of American Journalism,” printed and illustrated in de luxe style to occupy thirty-nine pages. 10 This was followed by histories of the Associated Press and the United Press by Melville E. Stone and Roy W. Howard respectively, and then sixteen pages devoted to sketches of “A Few Newspapers of Today.” In succeeding years the journal’s large special numbers for the May conventions in New York became an important part of its service to its readers. After 1922, when the American Society of Newspaper Editors was founded, its Washington meetings received attention in special editions; and coverage of the conventions of advertising and circulation organizations and other groups was also important.

In 1915 the founding date of the merged Journalist was adopted as Editor and Publisher’s own, and in its issue for March 15 it jumped its volume numbering from 14 to 47. Two months later the “and” in its title was changed to an ampersand, which has become a kind of trademark of Editor & Publisher. The journal was flourishing, with consistent increases in advertising, circulation, and number of pages. In 1925 it absorbed Newspaperdom, then being issued semimonthly. 11 Two years later it took over its lagging rival, the Fourth Estate. Circulation had now reached nine thousand.

James Wright Brown had a native gift for surrounding himself with a cooperative and able staff. In 1922 he recruited

10 April 26, 1913. The first sixteen pages dealt with ancient hieroglyphics and the like, Greek and Latin writing, and early German and English news-sheets and newsbooks. Unfortunately, the whole performance contained many errors of fact, implication, and conclusion. The representation of the front page of Publick Occurrences was faked. Editor Blanchard’s note under the portrait of the author contained a fairy story about extensive travels in Europe undertaken to produce the first sixteen pages, but it is obvious that the compiler need have traveled no farther than to the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street.

11 Newspaperdom had been started as a monthly, had at times been a weekly, and had experienced various changes in ownership. When Brown bought it, he issued it for six months under the title Advertising, before merging it with Editor & Publisher. See Mott, American Magazines, v. 4, p. 244.

Marlen Edwin Pew, then serving as general manager of the International Press Service, and two years later made him editor of Editor & Publisher —a position he held until his death in 1936. Pew was an excellent man for the post. Experienced in all departments of newspaper work, high-minded, enterprising, forthright in comment, he gave the journal to which he had been called both the tone and the extension in service that Brown desired. Pew began his “Shop Talk at Thirty” in October 1926; this was and has remained an informal commentary department relegated to the last page of the magazine, but often read first by its subscribers. Originally designed as a supplementary editorial page, the pungency and force of Pew’s writing soon made it a leading feature.

Another department initiated by Pew soon after he became editor was “Our Own World of Letters,” a book review section by James Melvin Lee, head of the journalism department at New York University. Lee’s work under this heading constitutes the most consistently excellent reviewing of books related to journalism that has appeared in any periodical. Upon his death in 1929, reviews for the department were written by various staff members for a few years. In 1946 Professor Roscoe Ellard of Columbia University began contributing book reviews, at first weekly and then less frequently. Since Ellard’s death in 1960, Ray Erwin, staff feature writer, has provided notices about books in the journalism field.

Another distinguished contribution by Lee was a series of six articles on “The Growth and Development of American Journalism,” published every other week beginning November 10, 1917, which formed the basis for Lee’s History of American Journalism, first of the “modern” works in this field. Brown’s travels abroad opened sources of information about the foreign press, and in the twenties and thirties Editor & Publisher was especially rich in such materials. The first of its International Numbers appeared May 22, 1919; it ran to 172 pages and was truly worldwide in scope. The number for June 19, 1926, included two handsome supplements with special covers, one entitled “Greater France” and the other “Britain and Progress.” Both were well patronized by foreign advertisers.

Many columns, departments, and series have appeared as

68 EDITOR & PUBLISHER

features of Editor & Publisher for longer or shorter periods. “Hunches” and “Dollar Pullers” were back-of-the-book departments of practical hints in the 1920’s. “Romances of American Journalism” was the overall title of a series of attractive stories about leading newspaper figures by different writers; it appeared irregularly for two or three decades, beginning in the early 1920’s. Much more recent have been “Ray Erwin’s Column” of amusing and curious miscellany and Roy H. Cop- perud’s “Editorial Workshop,” dealing with the proper use of words and phrases. The quadrennial polls of newspaper preferences for presidential candidates have been a feature since the 1936 campaign. 12

One of the great Editor & Publisher services initiated by James Wright Brown and consistently expanded by those who have followed him in the conduct of the paper has been the collection and presentation of statistics and other data of the newspaper industry. Such compilations have supplemented the regular editorial matter in such a way and to such an extent as to make this journal not only unrivaled but indispensable in its field.

From its beginning Editor & Publisher was a strong advocate of honest circulation statements. 13 In 1908 it was printing weekly a “Roll of Honor” listing the names of newspapers allowing the Association of American Advertisers to make circulation audits of their books. Only twenty-four papers were listed at the beginning, but the number grew steadily. The organization of the Audit Bureau of Circulations in 1914 and its gradual acceptance led to the substitution of a list of ABC members for the “Roll of Honor,” and then to a semiannual listing of circulations and advertising rates of newspapers, be-

12 It should be noted that in figuring percentages of support for each candidate, Editor & Publisher used as the base, not the total number making a partisan declaration of alignment, nor the total number of papers published, but the number of dailies responding in its polls (including the “independents”). It is not improbable that most of those that did not respond should be added to the “independents.” See F. L. Mott, American Journalism, 1690-1960 (New York, 1962), p. 719, nn. 2, 3; p. 858, n. 1.

13 It is sad to state, however, that as long as Shale owned Editor and

Publisher, he never furnished a sworn statement of his own circulation for the Ayer directory. v

ginning in the number for June 1, 1918. On the following January 11 , Editor & Publisher was able to present what it declared was “the first complete list of advertising rates [of American newspapers] ever compiled/’ including over two thousand English-language papers. Such lists were continued at the midyear for some time even after the big annual directories were begun.

The first of these directories appeared as a supplement to the number for January 28, 1922. It was called the “Seventh Semi- Annual Listing/’ but it was much more comprehensive than its predecessors, containing not only circulations and rates, but a directory of advertising agencies, one of syndicates, and lists of British, Cuban, Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese papers. Next year the data were even more extensive, and the compilation was called International Year Book. It was issued as a separate section to regular subscribers and was offered in hard binding for an extra payment. This was only a beginning; successive Year Books gave more personnel information, lists of papers in more foreign countries, more data about associations, the faculties of schools of journalism, bibliographies of books in the field, and so on and on. In 1945 the International Year Book became a separate annual publication included in the regular subscription price, a “53rd issue.” Finally it was completely divorced from the weekly in 1959, carrying its own price tag.

Somewhat the same course was followed by Editor & Publisher’s Market Guide, which was designed to furnish advertisers data for their study of potential markets. It had its beginning in analyses of markets in various states and the larger cities presented in special numbers through 1918-1923, and the first comprehensive report appeared in the issue of December 3, 1924. It was furnished as an annual supplement, until it achieved separate publication in 1942. The “Annual Syndicate Directory” also began in 1924, to continue as the “Second Section” of a summer or fall number. For many years extensive tables of page and paper sizes of newspapers were printed semiannually. The first linage report covered the advertising of five hundred papers for the first six months of 1922; these tabulations became a semiannual feature. By 1930 Editor & Publisher

was buying such data from Media Records, Inc., and eventually published them more frequently. And finally, a monthly “Equipment Review” section began in 1933.

In the meantime, the journal maintained its policy of excellent news coverage of its field. It gave increased attention in the 1940’s and 1950’s to developments in the advertising world, and by the 1960’s the line under its cover nameplate read: “Spot News and Features About Newspapers, Advertisers and Agencies.” In 1956 it recognized the increasing use of color in newspapers by bringing out a “Spring Color Issue,” which has become an annual feature. It contains a compilation of color linage data, color advertisers, and has general articles on colorprinting in newspapers.

Marlen Pew died in 1936, to be succeeded by Arthur T. Robb, who had been managing editor since 1924. Charles T. Stuart came to Editor & Publisher from a varied career in promotion and finance to become its advertising director in 1931; ten years later he became general manager, and for a full decade before his death in 1959 his title was “publisher.” James Wright Brown, Jr., who had studied at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, joined the staff in 1925, serving as circulation manager, as business manager, and then president and publisher. In 1948 he withdrew from the organization, but returned a few years later as vice-president and general manager. His brother, Robert U. Brown, a Dartmouth graduate, joined Editor & Publisher in 1936, holding various editorial positions until 1944 when he followed Robb as editor. In 1953 he became president of the publishing company as well. Their father, “full of honor and years,” died in 1959. Bob Brown’s aggressive policy of continuing and increasing service to newspaper publishing and his ability in organization sustained the position and prestige of Editor & Publisher. He has been national president of Sigma Delta Chi, the great association of city press clubs and school of journalism societies, and has held other positions of honor and responsibility.

By mid-century Editor & Publisher had become more definitely a “special pleader” for the newspaper industry than in its early years. It strongly resented criticisms of the newspapers and of advertising practices; it was deeply antagonistic to radio

and television (the latter it always called “tv” in lower-case even in headlines); and the Republican party leanings of a large majority of metropolitan publishers may be assumed to have prompted its frequent attacks on Democratic policies and activities. Editor & Publisher’s founder had been a friend of both Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover and had kept his paper nonpartisan; the breakdown of the tradition seems to have come with Roosevelt and his NRA, when newspapers fought hard and with some success to get out from under the wings of the Blue Eagle.

In 1944 Editor & Publisher page and type sizes were slightly decreased, but the number of pages continued to grow. It stated in its 75th edition, 1959, that its gross annual revenue even then exceeded $1,250,000. 14 The subscription rate was raised to $5.00 in 1947, to $6.50 in 1954, and as of 1964 was unchanged. The Market Guide price had risen, by this time, to $10.00 a copy and that of the International Year Book to $8.00. By 1964 Editor & Publisher had a circulation of over twenty thousand and a remarkably steady renewal rate.

In its early years the journal’s offices were in the Pulitzer Building on Park Row, the great newspaper street of New York City; then for many years it occupied the seventeenth floor of the Times Tower at 42nd Street and Broadway, where it was a mecca for visiting journalists. In 1961 its business offices were moved to 850 Third Avenue.

Few large industries have been so faithfully served by a single journal as newspaper publishing has long been by Editor & Publisher .*

14 Editor & Publisher, “75th Anniversary Edition,” June 27, 1959, sec. 2, p. 114.

* This historical sketch was written in 1961, and updated somewhat in 1964.

6

EVERYBODY’S MAGAZINE 1

J OHN WAN A MAKE R, the famous Philadelphia merchant, had been Postmaster General under President Harrison and was interested in many public and philanthropic activities. In 1896 he purchased the great A. T. Stewart department store in New York, and three years later this New York branch of Wanamaker’s founded Everybody’s Magazine.

John Wanamaker himself seems to have had little or nothing to do with the magazine, leaving it to Robert C. Ogden, his New York partner. More than half of the contents of Everybody’s in its first year was purchased directly from the Pearson Publishing Company, of London, and consisted of serials, short stories, articles, and poems, with illustrations, which had already appeared in the Royal Magazine of that city. Most of the writers were little known in the United States, though some of them—like Rafael Sabatini and Ethel M. Dell—were later to win American popularity. The Baroness Emmusca Orczy was the leading serialist the first year or two. Among contributions from this side of the Atlantic were potboilers by Theodore Dreiser and Rupert Hughes. There were series on new technological developments and great American industries by George

1 Titles: (1) Everybody’s Magazine, 1899-1923; (2) Everybody’s, 1923-29. (The word “Magazine” was dropped in the half-title and captions in 1921, but retained on the cover until 1923.)

First issue: September 1899. Last issue: March 1929.

Periodicity: Monthly. Vol. 1, Sept.-Dee. 1899; 2-59, regular semiannual volumes, 1900-1928; 60, three numbers, Jan.-March 1929. Merged into

Romance.

Publishers: John Wanamaker, Sept. 1899—May 1903 (under name North American Company, Sept. 1899—Nov. 1900) ; Ridgway-Thayer Company (Erman Jesse Ridgway, John Adams Thayer and George W. Wilder), June 1903—Sept. 1906; Ridgway Company (E. J. Ridgway, pres. 1906-16; James H. Gannon, 1916-26; Joseph A. Moore, 1926-29), Oct. 1906—March 1929.

Editors: Chauncey Montgomery M’Govern, 1899-1900; John O’Hara Cosgrave, 1900-1903, 1906-11; E. J. Ridgway, 1903-6; Trumbull White, 1911-14; William Hard, 1915; Howard Wheeler, 1916-18; S. V. Roderick, 1919-21; Sewell Haggard, 1921-25; Frank Quinn, 1925-26; Oscar Graeve, 1927; William Corcoran, 1928-29.

Indexes: Poole’s Index, Annual Library Index.

H. Perry and others, and much emphasis on camera pictures illustrating American scenes and situations of current interest. Printing and illustration were attractive, and the magazine sold for ten cents a monthly number, or a dollar a year.

The editor for the first year was Chauncey Montgomery M’Govern. Then, with the intention of reducing the amount of English material, the editorial management was turned over to the new firm of Doubleday and Page, who were beginning periodicals of their own, but who capitalized on Walter H. Page’s skill and prestige in the field by undertaking advisement and consultation with other magazines. 2 Page first suggested Joel Chandler Harris for the editorship of Everybody’s Magazine , 3 and when he refused, named John O’Hara Cosgrave. The new editor had been born in Australia, educated in New Zealand, and trained as a journalist in San Francisco. Better known names now began appearing in the by-lines of Everybody’s stories and articles—Rudyard Kipling and S. R. Crockett from overseas; Frank Norris, O. Henry, Charles Major, Owen Wis- ter, Justus Miles Forman, Mary E. Wilkins, and James Whitcomb Riley from the United States.

More attention was now paid to news events and to current political and economic problems. The capture of the Filipino chieftain, Aguinaldo, was featured through his own story (August 1901) and the narrative of General Funston, his captor (September 1901). Pointing a prophetic finger toward the magazine’s future muckraking was a series by David Graham Phillips beginning with an article on David B. Hill (November 1902).

Some departments and series were designed to appeal to women readers. The earliest was entitled “How to Make Money,” and consisted of practical suggestions for pin-money projects. Bessie Van Vorst began a series on “The Woman That Toils” in October 1902, and this was followed the next

Note 3

Note 4

year by Lillian PettingilFs articles on domestic servants titled “Toilers of the Home.” Meantime Mary Manners was writing on “The Unemployed Rich.” “Little Stories of Real Life,” a department of short short stories, for years one of the magazine’s most popular features, began in October 1902 with two stories by Sidney Porter (O. Henry).

By 1903 Everybody’s Magazine had achieved 150,000 circulation, largely by dint of low clubbing rates and direct mail advertising; but it needed more intimate management and better promotion. The public was too prone to regard it as merely “one of the departments of the big department store of John Wanamaker” 4 —which is what it was, of course. When the magazine was sold in May 1903, devoted management and bold promotion were precisely what it got. The selling price was $75,000.

Head of the new firm was Erman Jesse Ridgway, who had learned magazine publishing in the Munsey organization, where he had served for nearly nine years. His active partner was John Adams Thayer, primarily an advertising man, who had won his spurs on the Ladies’ Home Journal. Third man in the organization was George Warren Wilder, president of the Butterick Publishing Company, which published the Delineator 5 and other periodicals. Wilder was, in the main, a silent partner, though he occasionally made helpful suggestions to Ridgway and Thayer; 6 his chief function was to furnish the capital necessary for purchase and promotion. Though Ridgway was editorial director, Cosgrave, who now had a financial interest in the magazine, was retained as managing editor. In fact, Cosgrave held the job which Thayer designated as “acting editor” 7 for more than ten years—much the longest of Everybody’s editorships. He was managing editor for three years under Page and for an equal term under Ridgway; then after Ridgway had started his Weekly and was giving it his full attention, Cosgrave was called editor-in-chief.

Note 5

Note 6

Note 7

Note 8

The new management increased the number of pages in the magazine by a third, and made it very attractive with copious and varied illustration. About a third of the content was fiction (by O. Henry, Holman F. Day, Juliet Wilbor Tompkins, Will Irwin, and others); and there were timely articles on politics, history, and national affairs (by Alfred Henry Lewis and Bailey Millard), descriptive pieces about places at home and abroad, a monthly stage section, a department called “With the Procession,” which took the liberal side in politics and also commented on art and literature, and a back-of-the-book section, “With Everybody's Publishers,” in which Thayer and Ridgway boasted about the magazine’s progress.

They had something to boast about, for November 1903 showed not only a substantial circulation increase, but 160 pages of advertising, and a small net profit. 8 But it was Thomas William Lawson, the Boston stockmarket speculator, who really put the magazine on what appeared to be Easy Street: later it was found that the street sign had been misread—it was Uneasy Street. At any rate, Wilder, hearing that Lawson had resolved to turn informer and acquaint the American people with the wiles and manipulations and skulduggery of Standard Oil, Amalgamated Copper, et al., suggested to Ridgway and Thayer that this might be the sensational series for which they had been praying. After a campaign of persuasion, Lawson was induced to use Everybody's Magazine as his medium of exposure. He agreed to contribute the articles without remuneration, but he required Ridgway-Thayer to agree to spend $50,000 in advertising them. 9

“Frenzied Finance” was one of the four or five most famous contributions to the journalistic genre later known as “muckraking.” It ran for twenty months, beginning in July 1904, and was followed by supplementary chapters, including some fiction, through 1906 and 1907. These chapters and articles dealt with many financial operations, gave details of many “deals,” and brought the reader behind the scenes to meet famous and infamous financial and industrial leaders. Their aim appeared

8 Everybody’s, v. 9, Dec. 1903, p. 850.

9 Thayer, Astir, chap, xiii, “The Discovery of Tom Lawson.” At first Lawson demanded that this money should be offered as a prize for an essay on the series, but he was later dissuaded.

76 EVERYBODY’S MAGAZINE

to be to expose the “system” by which the people were robbed to swell the fortunes of the rich. In the penultimate chapter of “Frenzied Finance,” Lawson expresses this aim in a kind of vision:

Then the scene changed to the great banquet-hall at Sherry’s, with Jimmy Hyde in his white satin breeches, his violets, and his foreign decorations, the center of a gay throng of bediamonded women in silks and tulles and men in strange apparel. And as I remembered that this sumptuous scene, this matchless luxury, were paid for out of dollars, blood- and tear-soaked, wrung cent by cent from the honest toilers of the land—that these dollars meant sacrifice and abstinence, chilled bodies and scant food, fireless hearths and dreary days—all that there might be [of] a widow’s mite or an orphan’s livelihood—a fierce rage rose within me . 10

But more genuine was the author’s fierce rage against his opponents in some of his own financial contests, and his wish to pay off old scores. Sincere also was the desire of the publishers to build up the circulation of their magazine.

Tom Lawson’s style was melodramatic, highly colored, spectacular, feverish. If the finance he was describing was “frenzied,” so was the manner of the author. He wrote on the run, without the restraints of literary discipline, factual exactitude, or space limitation. His verbosity habitually led him to overrun the space allotted; and since he always furnished copy at the last possible minute, his contributions frequently had to be continued into the advertising section. Cosgrave practically lived in Boston, acting as monitor, editor, and chore-boy for the great man, during the entire period of Lawson’s contributorship. In choosing a passage to stand as an example of Lawsonism, we take, more or less at random, the introduction to Part III of “Frenzied Finance.” It begins with one of those little romantic anecdotes of which the author was fond: an African explorer who, having escaped many perils of attack by the savages and wild animals and all the dangers of the forest, was finally engulfed and swallowed up in a soft and insidious quicksand. The application:

Among men, it is as in the wilds. Silent craft is as dangerous as brute strength. More to be dreaded in the world of finance than the

10 Everybody’s, v. 14, Feb. 1906, advertising p. 67.

HUNTING THE TIGER WITH EVERYBODY’S

This cover appeared on Everybody’s Magazine for October 1904 while Thomas William Lawson’s muckraking series, “Frenzied Finance,” was scorching the pages of the magazine.

78

EVERYBODY’S MAGAZINE

daring plunger is the “unco quid” [sic] banker, whose gold bricks are served out to unwary investors from under a cloak of sanctity. In the course of this incidentful story my readers have been shown many strange men in dark places. With the pirates of finance and their ways there has been opportunity to establish an intimate acquaintance. It is now the turn of another and more subtle contingent, the disguised buccaneers, a group of whom at this juncture come into my chronicle. I refer to the “smug men of frenzied finance,” those “O-Lord,-we-are-all-that-we-should-be,-thanks-to- Thy-having-created-things-for-our-special-benefit” creatures of the dollar world.

When these white-wax-plated warriors of the golden highway are marshaled for the easel, the inkpot must be discarded and the quill reversed lest their immaculately glazed hides should be stained or punctured. So with the feather end of my weapon, I shall run over their enameled-for-inspection surface and lay-in their outlines in a solution of smudge juice and pansy extract . 11

The reaction to the Lawson romance was mixed. Readers apparently welcomed it, though $300,000 (Lawson is said to have added over $250,000 to Ridgway-Thayer’s $50,000 to promote “Frenzied Finance”) 12 would have made any w T ell- selected feature a big circulation builder. It may have exerted a reformatory effect in various directions, as its author and publishers frequently claimed but never proved. There is no doubt that many of the crooks attacked deserved all the excoriation Lawson administered, and for a time the lash in his hand made him a great man. Ridgway was an awed admirer of his leading contributor. At a public dinner in Lawson’s honor, Ridgway, as a climax to his eulogy, uttered the following orotund sentence: “When God needed a father of his country, He raised a Washington; when He needed an emancipator for the country, He raised a Lincoln; when He needed a savior of the country, He raised a Lawson.” William Travers Jerome, who followed Ridgway, rather spoiled the effect by remarking that in his opinion, when God created Lawson He needed someone to raise hell. 13

“Frenzied Finance” certainly got a “play” in the press, espe-

11 Ibid., v. 14, Jan. 1906, p. 73.

12 Ibid., v. 18, March 1908, p. 433.

13 Thayer, Astir, pp. 284-85.

dally through the personal attacks involved. A western mining operator named Greene stated in page advertisements in his home paper that he was going east to “settle with” his maligner, Lawson, but the Boston crowds who assembled to witness Colonel Greene’s arrival were disappointed that he did not emerge from his Pullman shooting. The expected duel proved to be a verbal one. Various lawsuits were brought against Law- son, including a criminal libel action by C. W. Barron, the financial journalist; but he emerged unscathed from these ordeals in the courts. Another financial editor, Denis Donohoe, wrote a series of articles entitled “The Truth about Frenzied Finance” for Public Opinion, exposing or purporting to expose the Lawson operations. 14 Norman Hapgood, editor of the liberal Collier's, carried on a controversy with Lawson in May and June 1905. “We have shown entire disbelief in Mr. Lawson’s honesty,” wrote Hapgood. 15 In a little history of Everybody's which the advertising man George French wrote some time later, there is an acute comment: “People never found out what ‘Frenzied Finance’ was all about, or what it was for. Lawson promised to tell, but never did. But it was great fun to read the excoriating stuff Lawson furnished.” 16

Finally Lawson tired of the game. On December 7, 1907, Ridgway was shocked when he read in the papers a statement by Lawson which ended with the following paragraph:

I have devoted three and a half years of my time and some millions of my fortune to reform work in the interests of the public. Beginning January 1st, I shall allow the public to do their own reforming, and I shall devote my time and capital exclusively to my own business of stock “gambling” in Wall and State Streets— particularly Wall Street—for the purpose of recouping the millions I have donated to my public work. P.S.—One of the oldest of human laws and as immutable is “the devil take the hindmost.” 17

A few days later, Ridgway wrote Lawson a long, sad letter. “I can’t help feeling, Mr. Lawson,” he said, “that this is an awful thing you have done.” Lawson retorted: “You talk of

14 Public Opinion, v. 38, Jan. 19-Feb. 18, 1905.

15 Collier’s v. 35, May 13, 1905, p. 8.

16 Twentieth Century, v. 6, July 1912, p. 49.

17 Everybody’s, v. 18, Feb. 1908, p. 287. Ridgway’s reply and Lawson’s rejoinder are on the following pages.

what I owe the people. What do I owe to the gelatine-spined shrimps? What have the saffron-blooded apes done for me or mine that I should halt any decisions to match their lightning- change ten-above-ten-below-zero chameleon-hued loyalty?”

In the course of Ridgway’s protest, he said: “While I cannot but regret the damage your announcement must inevitably do to the prestige of Everybody’s Magazine, you gave it its prestige, and if anyone has a right to take it away, you have.” This was a very handsome acknowledgment, but it ignores the fact that while Tom Lawson’s opus was running in the magazine, its general content had been brought to a level comparing favorably with that of any current fifteen-cent magazine.

Thayer tells with some amusement, in his autobiography, of Hall Caine’s remark when he heard of Everybody’s big gain in circulation in 1904-1905: “Yes, I expected it. That is the American magazine which is publishing my new story.” 18 But it is by no means impossible, or even improbable, that Hall Caine, long a best seller in America, did make an important contribution to the magazine’s growing prosperity. The publishers surely expected this, for they paid $10,000 for the serial: it was The Prodigal Son} 3 Other popular serials followed— Rex Beach’s The Spoilers, Jack London’s Bejore Adam, Booth Tarkington’s The Quest of Quesnay, and so on. Dorothy Can- field, Stewart Edward White, Charles G. D. Roberts, Joseph C. Lincoln, and Zona Gale contributed short fiction, and there were still O. Henry stories. A rather good department of anecdotes called “Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree” began in 1905 and ran for many years. The “Little Stories of Real Life” continued to be excellent.

General nonfiction was interesting and well illustrated— articles on the San Francisco disaster by James Hopper and Will Irwin, features from Europe by Vance Thompson, Leroy Scott’s sketches of the Russian revolution, nostalgic home-town recollections of Eugene Wood and Hugh Pendexter (the former a long time contributor to Everybody’s) , Hamlin Garland’s psychic observations entitled The Shadow World, and so on. President Theodore Roosevelt opened an exciting literary

18 Thayer, Astir, p. 257.

19 Everybody’s, v. 11, July 1904, p. 144.

and scientific controversy when he went after the “nature fakirs” in an interview given to Edward B. Clark and published in the number for June 1907. Carrying a strong chorus to Tom Lawson were Charles Edward Russell, Will Payne, Upton Sinclair, William Hard, Edwin Lefevre, and others. Russell especially, with his series on the beef trust and a later one on social conditions abroad entitled “Soldiers of the Common Good,” and still another called “Where Did You Get It, Gentlemen?” wrote literature of exposure on a comparatively high level.

Circulation, kicked high by the boot of the newspaper advertising of “Frenzied Finance,” soared in late 1904 to something less than a million, more than half of it from newsstand sales. During most of the run of “Frenzied Finance” the magazine printed about 750,000 copies. The issue for May 1905 had 120 pages of advertising at the ruinously low price of $350 a page, 20 but soon rates caught up with a somewhat more stable circulation; and by 1907 the magazine, with a little over half a million circulation at fifteen cents a copy, was carrying liberal advertising—sometimes as much as 180 pages in an issue—at $500 a page. Thayer had excluded, from the time of his first connection with Everybody’s , all patent medicine advertising. In 1913 the magazine published a list of its heaviest advertisers during the decade just closed: Postum Cereals (Post Toasties, Grape Nuts, Postum) was first, with about $111,500; Victor Talking Machine second, with $86,300; and Eastman Kodak third, with $72,400. 21

At the height of the monthly’s success, Ridgway conceived a grandiose plan for a national weekly; Wilder agreed with the proposal, but Thayer opposed it. Finally, in 1906, Thayer sold out to his partners rather than join in the risks of the new periodical. It was rumored that Thayer received “several hundred thousand dollars” when he left the company; 22 at any rate, he was well paid for his three years’ work, and was probably the luckiest of all the men who put effort and money into Everybody’s.

Ridgway’s Weekly lasted only a few months, but the monthly

20 Ibid., v. 12, June 1905, p. 857.

21 Ibid., v. 29, July 1913, p. 144.

22 Critic, v. 49, Sept. 1906, p. 198.

continued to prosper, in spite of the panic of 1907. In that year it cleared over $200,000. 23 In that year also, it offered to the public bonds amounting to $200,000 of a new half-million issue; it gave as its reason for the new financing its plan to erect a new plant—a project never carried out. In 1908 it offered $150,000 more of its stock, since “one of our largest stockholders was caught in the panic.” 24 The next year the Ridgway Publishing Company was purchased by the Butterick Publishing Company. Wilder had major holdings in both. Butterick was capitalized at $12,000,000 and Ridgway at $1,000,000; Butterick issued $3,000,000 of new stock and exchanged it for Ridgway stock three for one. Tom Lawson was not the only one who could play at stock deals.

Lawson’s defection had by no means ruined the magazine; indeed, during the four years following that event it was probably a better moneymaker than at any other time during its existence. In that quadrennium, 1908-1911, with a circulation over half a million, Everybody’s led the field of American general monthlies in its volume of advertising. In 1909 it averaged over 150 pages of paid matter per month. Thayer had been a genius as an advertising manager; but Robert Frothingham, who followed him, was even more successful. Another factor in the magazine’s prosperity during these years was its secession from the American News Company, which for many years had exercised a dictatorship over the distribution of magazines to newsstands the country over. Circulation Manager John F. Bresnahan devised in 1906 a system of distributing Everybody’s and Ridgway’s through newspaper wholesalers who were independent of the American News Company. Six years later, Bresnahan consolidated his successes by organizing Ridgway’s, Butterick’s, and other periodicals into the Publishers News Company. 25

Fiction writers in these years, besides such familiar contribu-

23 Everybody’s, v. 18, June 1908, advertising section insert between pp. 24 and 25.

24 Ibid., v. 25, Aug. 1911, p. 287. This was Charles W. Morse, a banker, who was sentenced to a term in a federal prison. See Twentieth Century, v. 6, July 1912, p. 51.

25 Roy Quinlan, “The Story of Magazine Distribution,” Magazine Week, v. 1, Oct. 19, 1953, pp. 4-5.

tors as Beach, Tarkington, and Zona Gale, were William J. Locke, Leonard Merrick, E. W. Hornung, Lloyd Osbourne, Eleanor Hallowed Abbott, Harvey J. O’Higgins, Arthur Train, Kathleen Norris, and Dorothy Canfield. In 1912 the magazine offered $10,000 in prizes for the best solutions to Mary Roberts Rinehart’s mystery, “The Case of Jennie Brice.” But despite changing trends, Everybody’s still emphasized nonfiction, and still stuck to muckraking. Judge Lindsey’s autobiography, The Beast and the Jungle, was a feature of 1909 which the magazine advertised to the tune of $50,000. 26 Richard Washburn Child contributed two series in 1910—one on the railways, and another on the tariff on wool. In the same year, Lincoln Steffens wrote a series called It on the political power of organized business, and in the closing months of 1911 he engaged in a remarkable debate on free speech versus censorship with Publisher Ridgway. Ex-Senator Frank J. Cannon had a notable series in 1911 called Under the Prophet in Utah. C. P. Connolly wrote on Big Business and the Bench in 1912.

Then, in 1912-1913, Tom Lawson reappeared with The Remedy, a disquisition which he had promised his readers seven years before, but for which he had later claimed the people were not yet ready. Now, presumably, they were ready; but the great solution turned out to be only “a crusade to rout the sinister forces of the underworld of Wall Street”—in short, the abolition of stock exchange gambling. There was as much frenzied prose as ever, and more frenzied blackface capitals, but readers did not rally ’round as they once had. A big advertising campaign brought an average increase of less than a hundred thousand in the circulation of the Lawson numbers, which ended in July 1913. Some months later, Ridgway wrote frankly that muckraking was no longer a paying business. He thought government had reformed, anyway, and said Everybody’s would thenceforth be “constructive.” He added, however, that since circulation responded to fighting and attack, the magazine would now take up arms against the Demon Rum. 27 This it did through prize letters on the subject, but there is no evidence that Ridgway received the help he hoped for by this campaign.

26 Everybody's, v. 21, Dec. 1909, p. 863.

27 Ibid., v. 30, April 1914, p. 505.

And he was beginning to need help. Circulation, which had taken a small spurt in 1911, bringing it over six hundred thousand, dropped off slowly but steadily thereafter. An advertising decline began in 1911. 28

In that year Trumbull White, an experienced magazine man, came from Adventure to take Cosgrave’s place on Everybody’s, with the valuable assistance of Gilman Hall, who had come from Ainslee’s. The magazine was as attractive as ever—more attractive, indeed, with color and the illustrations of such artists as Jay Hambidge, S. J. Woolf, N. C. Wyeth, May Wilson Preston, Oliver Herford, James Montgomery Flagg, and others. Departments included Franklin P. Adams’ “Everybody’s Almanac,” John Parr’s financial section (begun 1913), Clayton Hamilton’s “The Players,” the perennial “Little Stories of Real Life,” Coningsby Dawson’s (it had been J. B. Kerfoot’s) “A Row of Books,” and “Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree.” But in May 1915 all departments except the “Chestnut Tree” were abandoned in favor of one devoted to editorial comment on current events called “Keep Posted,” which ran for almost two years.

A feature of 1913 was a series of excerpts from Captain Robert F. Scott’s diary, entitled The Uttermost South, and one of the next year was the debate on socialism by Morris Hillquit and Father Ryan. In 1914 also came William Hard’s “constructive” series Better Business.

By 1914 Everybody’s was keeping close to war developments. Frederick Palmer wrote a series on the occupation of the city of Vera Cruz by United States naval forces, and later was Everybody’s correspondent on the European front. A prize contest for letters on the question, “What Is a Christian?” in 1914-1915 resulted from what was conceived to be a popular interest in the morality of war. But soon theorizing gave place to a more martial spirit. Theodore Roosevelt’s “America—On Guard!” in January 1915 was a clarion call to military preparedness. The magazine favored compulsory military training. In January 1916 appeared a notable symposium entitled, “America’s Neutrality as England Sees It,” to which Lord Bryce, H. G. Wells, G. B. Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, and other

28 Ibid., v. 30, June 1914, p. 865.

famous Britons contributed. By 1917 all the leading articles pertained to the war, as did much of the fiction. “The Poetry of the War” was an interesting department. Lincoln Steffens and William G. Shepherd wrote on the Russian revolution, and Samuel Hopkins Adams had a series on German propaganda and American disloyalty. The great feature of 1918 was Brand Whitlock’s Belgium. In 1919-1920 the magazine published two notable biographical serials—Irving Bacheller’s life of Lincoln called A Man for the Ages and Vernon Kellogg’s The Story of Hoover.

Fiction offerings in these years continued to be attractive; and there was a good deal about the theater, including articles by Alexander Woollcott. In late 1914, Shaw’s Pygmalion was published in the pages of Everybody’s, and Great Catherine in early 1915. Honore Willsie’s Still Jim and Owen Johnson’s Making Money in 1915 were popular continued stories, Ernest Poole’s His Family in the next year, and Joseph Hergesheim- er’s Linda Condon in 1919. Other fictioneers in the magazine were George Randolph Chester, Talbot Mundy, Henry Kitchell Webster, Edgar Wallace, and Ben Ames Williams.

Popular fiction was a fighting question with Everybody’s in these years. In 1914, when Ridgway had to acknowledge at last that muckraking was played out, he apparently took a good long look at his chief competitor, Cosmopolitan, which was just then soaring toward a million circulation on the wings of Robert W. Chambers’ sex-in-society serials. Ridgway claimed that Everybody’s had lost circulation by refusing to use “tainted fiction.” 29 In 1914 it conducted something of a crusade against such fiction and “the indecent stage.”

Nevertheless, Everybody’s kept to its half-million figure pretty steadily for a few years. Trumbull White gave up his editorial chair to William Hard in 1915, and Hard resigned it to Howard Wheeler in 1916. Wheeler developed an interesting page layout which emphasized margins by line illustrations and subheads. In November 1917, Everybody’s —hitherto royal octavo in size—followed other magazines in adopting the quarto form. Ridgway withdrew from the publishing company, which continued to bear his name, in 1916.

29 Everybody’s, v. 30, June 1914, p. 865.

These changes indicated that all was not well with the magazine. Its content seemed well balanced and attractive during the First World War, but circulation declined to less than three hundred thousand. During S. V. Roderick’s editorship, 1919— 1921, there was a slight recovery, but in 1921 Sewell Haggard, whose creed was stated in the dictum, “Sheer entertainment is the ingredient essential to success,” 30 became editor, and Everybody’s became an all-fiction magazine, with the motto, “If it’s in Everybody’s it’s a good story.” Page size came back to the old royal octavo, but with an increase in number of pages to 180, and the price was raised to twenty-five cents.

There were some distinguished contributors to the all-fiction Everybody’s. A. S. M. Hutchinson’s best-selling If Winter Comes was the leading serial in 1921. Hugh Walpole, Rafael Sabatini, Michael Arlen, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Achmed Abdullah, Mrs. Wilson Woodrow, and Samuel Merwin may be named as leading writers for the magazine in the twenties. Beginning in 1925 under Frank Quinn (there was a new editor nearly every year now) two “old” short stories were reprinted each month. Woodpulp paper for part of the magazine came in about that time; by 1927 it was all woodpulp.

In the mid-twenties some miscellaneous articles were used, especially sports stories; but from December 1926 contents were strictly limited to fiction, and even the old “Chestnut Tree” was chopped down. During the next three years each number carried two novelettes, two serial installments, and seven short stories. Circulation steadily declined to about fifty thousand. The last number was issued for March 1929, after which the magazine was merged into another Ridgway fiction periodical called Romance, under the title Everybody’s Combined with Romance; 31 and thus it did its last ten-months’ stretch ingloriously as a species of confession magazine.

Everybody’s reminds one of the lady with a record, whose career was rather checkered. It would be pleasant to think that its reformatory zeal during the decade beginning in 1903 was

30 Doris Ulmann, A Portrait Gallery of American Editors (New York, 1925),

p. 68.

31 The first number after the merger was called Romance Combined with Everybody’s.

entirely sincere, but certain utterances of Ridgway, Thayer and Lawson convince us that it was not. However, Everybody’s did publish a spate of readable material in its thirty years—some of it literature, and a lot of it good entertainment and information.

7

THE FREEMAN 1

F RANCIS NEILSON was born in Birkenhead, England, with the surname of Butters, but later he took his mother’s maiden name. 2 Both his father and mother were professional cooks. “Butters” might be all right for a cook, but the son was aiming for a stage career; and “Neilson” was obviously better for the theater. While playing in New York in the nineties, Neilson became much interested in Henry George’s economic and political theories. When he returned to England, he went into politics himself and was elected to Parliament 1910-1915.

In 1915 Albert Jay Nock was in England, occupying himself, among other things, with making unofficial contacts that might be useful to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. 3 4 Nock was the son of a clergyman, and himself served in an Episcopal pastorate for several years; but for the five years preceding this visit to England, he had been a kind of associate member of that famous group of muckrakers that had just given up control of the American MagazineA Brand Whitlock, United States Minister to Belgium, had given Nock a note of introduction to Neilson, and the two found they had many ideas and enthusiasms in common. Neilson had a book manuscript, anti-state in character, for which he had not been able to find a publisher. Nock convinced him that he could get it printed in the United

Note 9

Note 10

Note 11

Note 12

Note 13

Note 14

Note 15

Note 16

States, and that he could find a literary career more easily in the newer land. So in that same year Neilson moved to New York, bringing his wife and two daughters.

His book, How Diplomats Make War, was published by young B. W. Huebsch anonymously, (“By a British Statesman”), with a signed introduction by Nock; and during the next winter Neilson lectured in a number of cities on “imperialist causes’’ of the war. In Chicago he encountered again Mrs. Helen Swift Morris, whom he had previously met in England. The year after, 1917, he was divorced, and Mrs. Morris proposed marriage to him. 5 Helen Swift had been a packing-house heiress, and she had married Edward Morris, who represented another meat-packing fortune; she was now a very wealthy widow with four grown children. She and Neilson were married that same year. One of the things made possible by Neilson’s new affluence was his placing Nock on the staff of the Nation in 1918-1919 by paying his salary. In fact, Mrs. Neilson tried to buy the Nation for her husband and Nock to conduct, but Villard would not sell. She then decided to found a new weekly for them.

This was the Freeman, and the Neilsons and Nock agreed to disregard Chicago’s literary pretensions and take it to New York. Perhaps the meat-packing capital’s literary boom was waning by that time; at any rate, the founders of the new magazine set up headquarters at New York’s Ritz-Carlton and began to organize staff, enlist contributors and make publishing arrangements. 6

A notable staff was brought together. At the head of it were the two editors, Neilson and Nock. Neilson, fifty-three years old, with all his stage background, was a student by nature and largely self-educated. However, he lacked intellectual subtlety and charm of style. As the chief student of the Freeman history and file has observed, Neilson was “a simple man and something of a dupe.” 7 Eventually, the rigors of editorship weighed

5 Neilson, My Life in Two Worlds, p. 23.

6 Neilson, Story of ‘The Freeman,’ p. 20.

7 Susan Jane Turner, “A Short History of The Freeman, a Magazine of the Early Twenties, with Particular Attention to the Literary Criticism,” unpub. diss. Columbia University, 1956. [See also, Turner, A History of The Freeman, Literary Landmark of the Early Twenties (New York, 1963).]

too heavily in the scale against the pleasures of travel, fishing, and golf. In a singularly revelatory sentence, Neilson later wrote of himself as “a man who at first agreed to send in [to the Freeman ] only a few ideas because he wanted time to enjoy a life of leisure with his wife.” 8 After the first year and a half of the Freeman’s life, he did not do even that much. In contrast, Nock, forty-seven years old, was devoted to his job. To Neil- son’s growing resentment., 9 Nock came to be considered by many as the head and front of the weekly—which he was. His stylistic skills, which included happy phrasing, verbal ingenuity, clarity, and wit, had much to do with making the Freeman what it was. At the same time, Nock’s highly cultivated selfesteem and glibness were offensive to some. His account of the Freeman in his autobiography is mostly arrogant nonsense. 10

The literary editor was Van Wyck Brooks, who came to the Freeman from the short-lived but brilliant Seven Arts. He was a leader of the literary radicals, often called “the young intellectuals,” and he now became the chief guide of the new weekly in its extensive literary criticism. He remained in that position throughout the Freeman’s four years, except for six months in 1923, when Nock relieved him so he could work on his study of Henry James. Chief lieutenants of Brooks among the magazine’s contributors were Lewis Mumford and Harold Stearns.

Suzanne La Follette, who had been secretary for her famous relative, Senator Robert M. La Follette, and had later performed the same services for her father, Congressman William L. La Follette, of Washington, came to the magazine with an intense interest in the Russian experiment and in reform in general. Hard-working and intelligent, she made a good assistant for Nock. From the Dial staff was recruited young Geroid Tanquary Robinson, who was later to become professor of history at Columbia and a specialist in Slavic affairs. Walter

Note 17

Note 18

Note 19

G. Fuller was an Englishman with a special talent for paragraphing, “rewrite/’ and general office editorship. B.W. Huebsch, the publisher, was occasionally a contributor. For more clerical work, the staff enjoyed the services of Lucy Taussig and Emilie McMillan, who came to the magazine from Wellesley and Smith respectively.

The first number of the Freeman, issued March 17, 1920, met a friendly reception from all except those who found it rather too “radical.” One of the most enthusiastic welcomers was the New Republic, which waxed poetic in comparing the new weekly to Shelley’s west wind, “tameless and swift and proud.” 11 True, there was some criticism of the anglicism of the new paper, which used such spellings as “labour” and which looked like the Spectator of London. In a letter to the editor published in the second number, Lewis Mumford alleged that Number One was “not American” but “a bland mixture of the best elements in each” of the six English weekly journals of opinion. 12

The Freeman was not immediately recognized by all as a single-tax, no-state paper; but these were its two great causes throughout its life. It was devoted to “the simple expedient of confiscating rent,” as it stated in an early number; and on this principle it took its stand in discussing all economic issues. This made it, the editors claimed, a genuinely radical journal (in the etymological sense of the word), and it often twitted the New Republic and Nation with being, not “radical,” but merely “liberal.” George Santayana took them to task for this position:

The editors of the Freeman say they are radical because at the root of things is the fact that man is a land animal and has a natural right to the source of his subsistence. This is not radical at all: the notion of “right” is as derivative, complicated and conventional as that of “duty.” Man has no more right to possess land than mosquitos have to possess the air. Nothing has a right to exist. . . . Not only is the logic of the word “right” sophistical, but the temper of it is wrong. We exist on sufferance. Wisdom is to enjoy life, not to claim it.

11 New Republic, v. 22, March 24, 1920, p. 105.

12 Freeman, v. 1, March 24, 1920, p. 34.

To which Nock replied:

Mr. Santayana is, on one point, quite right. Man has no natural right to possess land. We have never said that he had. We said that he had a natural right to use land,'and we still maintain that he has. There is a school of philosophers to which Matthew Arnold belonged, which denies that man has any natural rights of any kind. Perhaps Mr. Santayana belongs to this school. If so, he is in excellent company, and for all except philosophical reasons we are sorry we can not join him. 13

The reply is amusing, but not quite satisfying, and a little too glib. It illustrates Nock’s qualities as a writer.

The Freeman’s advocacy of philosophic anarchism fell in with an international movement of the twentieth century to explore the origin and nature of sovereignty, and owed much to writings on the state by Franz Oppenheimer, Harold J. Laski, and others. Perhaps it reached its climax so far as the Freeman was concerned in Nock’s series entitled “The State,” published in June and July 1923 and revised and extended later in his book, Our Enemy the State.

But the Freeman never advocated violent overthrow of the government; revolution, to be sure, but a revolution in which reason will conquer injustice and the common sense of mankind consign to the limbo of useless, worn-out things the machinery of political government. “A peaceful revolution is still possible and practicable,” wrote Suzanne La Follette in the first number of the Freeman, “and such is the eager hope of enlightened minds.” 14

Not only was this journal opposed to violent revolution, it rejected direct political action as well. This gave its commentary on all political matters a negativist cast; it was a mildly cynical spectator of the political scene. After April Fool’s Day of 1920, it could remark that “The first prize in the great All- Fools’ Day free-for-all was this year awarded” to the New York Assembly for disfranchising and unseating the Socialist party in that state, with a second prize “to President Wilson for his inimitable animadversion upon the relations between the

13 Freeman, v. 3, March 30, 1921, p. 65. But Mumford’s review of Santayana’s The Life of Reason calls the author “a star of the first magnitude” in the “firmament of philosophy”; Freeman, v. 7, May 23, 1923, p. 260.

14 Freeman, v. 1, March 17, 1920, p. 1.

Soviet Government of Russia and the ‘civilized world’ ” contained in a note to the Allied Powers. 15 This superior attitude the Freeman rarely abandoned, though it was often submerged in the charm or force of essays on various subjects.

Some of its friends found an inconsistency in the journal’s opposition to direct political action (including socialism as a party movement) and its open-mindedness to labor unionism and all forms of industrial organization that might circumvent state controls—syndicalism, strikes, guild socialism, even the Soviets. One good example of the general strike in Britain, Italy, or the United States, it once asserted, “would be enough to win economic freedom for labor.” 16 Norman Thomas was among those who objected to the Freeman’s “blessings for the economic action of the class-conscious labour organizations, and cursings for the class-struggle theory on which these organizations operate.” 17

Many political, economic and social topics engaged the attention of the Freeman; its variety of interests was remarkable. Charles and Mary Beard remarked approvingly that its mission seemed to be “to scatter acid on many a sacred convention.” 18 It was against all parties, all corporations, all newspapers, all politicians. In the earlier part of the file, political criticism seemed dominant; later the paper was more literary, Nock’s adherence to Henry George’s single-tax views seemed more stylized and mechanical, and even his anti-statism was less aggressive. He did not trouble to keep the paper consistent, but sometimes admitted articles that ran counter to the single-tax and anarchistic beliefs of himself and Neilson. Brooks, the literary editor, not only was a Socialist but was not a Georgist.

In the journal’s first year and a half, Brooks, with Mumford and Stearns, made the Freeman the organ of the Young Intellectuals in current American literature. They adopted the Whitman idea of the artist as leader and prophet, and looked to the new writers for social interpretation and criticism. This position pitted the Freeman against the chief organ of the esthetic experimentalist, the Dial, which spoke so often and shrilly for

15 Ibid., v. 1, April 14, 1920, p. 97.

Ibid., v. 2, Oct. 27, 1920, p. 150.

17 Ibid., v. 1, Sept. 1, 1920, pp. 590-91; quotation on p. 591.

18 Charles A. and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York, 1930), v. 2, p. 765. Quoted in Nock, Superfluous Man, p. 171.

Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce. Nock, taking the place which he loved as critic of the critics, scolded the young intellectuals for their complaints about the victimization of the artist by American society—“the wholly imaginary predicament so vividly conjured up by Mr. Mumford”—and urged them to deal less with such childishness and more with the problems of a work of art. 19 Thus the editor sided with the enemy. But Stearns was especially concerned with the barrenness of America so far as art and the appreciation of art were concerned. “Limbo, the place of lost souls; the world of the magazines, of this accepted American literature of ours, is nothing or less,” he wrote. 20 Later he had much about the expatriates, climaxed by his famous advice to the American artist: “Get Out!” 21 This negativistic criticism tended to increase in the Freeman’s pages; and as Brooks’s own attitude became less aggressive in 1922, turning more to general evaluations and historical reviews, the journal seemed to fail a little in its original critical vigor.

If the Freeman lost some sharpness of point in its political- economic and literary-critical attacks in its last year or two, it gained in variety and urbanity. Originally it had only a few departments of editorial comment and criticism; by 1923 it had developed ten such sections. These may be reviewed here, in order to give a picture of the journal’s variety.

Each number throughout the file opened with about three pages of short, unheaded editorials grouped under the title of “Current Comment.” These dealt with all facets of the contemporary scene, were contributed by various staff members, and were always lively and well written. “In our humble opinion, if there is one thing more obscene than printed indecency, it is the uproar of the professional moralists,” wrote Harold Kellock, and went on to prophesy the “bootlegging” of literature, and packaging such as would make it suitable to be carried on the hip, like illicit liquor. 22

“Topics of the Times” contained editorials of somewhat

19 Freeman, v. 3, March 16, 1921, p. 11.

20 Ibid., v. 1, July 28, 1920, p. 463.

21 Ibid., v. 1, Aug. 4, 1920, p. 491. These articles reappeared in Harold Stearns’ America and the Young Intellectual (New York, 1921).

22 Freeman, v. 7, March 21, 1923, p. 27.

greater length and occupied three or four pages. They dealt chiefly with politics and economics in the first half of the file, and more with art and literature, education, religion, and so on, in the latter half.

“Miscellany” carried further editorial commentary—much like “Current Comment,” but dealing more with music, the theater, and variegated social phenomena. “Charles Beard, the historian, has mentioned to me the humorous idea of potting a lot of obituary-notices from the daily press and working them up into a kind of anthology of vacuity and blather,” wrote Nock, and then went on with curious talk about obituaries. 23

Then came the section called by the staff “the middle articles”—headed and signed pieces of great variety, many of them written by contributors rather than staff. 24 Nock’s several serial disquisitions appeared in this department. A serial in April-May 1922 was signed “Somnia Vana” and was entitled “College Education: An Inquest”; it took American higher education apart. Here also appeared some of the most important articles by Brooks, Mumford, and Stearns; Daniel Gregory Mason’s musical criticism, Walter Pach’s studies of contemporary art, and Alexander Harvey’s rather heavy series on classical literature (1920) and another on theological history (1922). Here were the various critiques of the small town, including Thorstein Veblen’s series “The Country Town” (July 1923)—all supplemented by reviews in the later book section discussing the work of Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Floyd Dell, and Waldo Frank. Nock took occasion to compare the work of this school to Gogol’s Dead Souls (January 26, 1921).

Also among the “middle articles” were short fiction, sketches, light essays, and verse, which the Freeman published sparely at first, but later somewhat more plentifully. This work definitely was not of the experimental schools. Some of it consisted of translations from the German and Russian. Gerhart

23 Ibid., v. 8, Feb. 27, 1924, p. 584.

24 The publisher kept a file in which each piece, however small, bore the annotated name of the author; and in The Freeman Book (New York, 1924), Huebsch and Miss McMillan gathered together what they called “typical editorials, essays, critiques, and other selections from the eight volumes of The Freeman,” noting the author of each.

Hauptmann’s “Phantom” (September-December 1922) was the journal’s only fiction serial. There were two short stories and a few other pieces by the owner, Mrs. Neilson; the stories were character take-offs of the “natives” who lived near the Neilson summer home in northern Michigan (September 1923). There were one-act plays by Laurence Housman, short stories by J. D. Beresford, “Vignettes of City Life” by Walter Prichard Eaton. And there was also some poetry; James Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation” was first printed in the Freeman (December 1, 1920), and Carl Sandburg, Leonora Speyer, Witter Bynner, Alfred Noyes, Jeannette Marks, and Howard Mumford Jones were occasional contributors of verse.

Eaton was not only a contributor of sketches from city streets, but he was also the journal’s chief critic of the New York theater. Current plays and published drama came in for treatment also at the hands of the editors and the various book reviewers. Reviews of the current theater commonly occupied only one page. “Letters to the Editor” was also a one-page department—often a very spicy single page.

“Books,” consisting of five or six pages of reviews, was one of the best of the magazine’s sections. Some of the best bookreviewing done in any American journal in the twenties appeared in the Freeman. Charles A. Beard, Newton Arvin, Mary M. Colum, John Gould Fletcher, and Edwin Muir were only a few of the many brilliant writers of book reviews who, drawn from many fields, supplemented the work of the regular editors. In conformity with the general policy of the journal, the work of the experimental-esthetic school of the decade did not fare so well at the hands of the Freeman’s reviewers as that of the writers who bore the social, economic, and political burdens of the day. But on the whole, this group of critics seems to have been singularly competent and enlightened.

“Literary Notes,” later called “Ex Libris,” was for a long time written by John Macy; when he went to the Nation as its literary editor, this commentary about writers and publishing projects was furnished by Percy Boynton and others. “A Reviewer’s Notebook” appeared irregularly and contained evaluations of writers old and new; Brooks did most of these articles.

Both Neilson and Nock were well acquainted with England

and the European countries. The English influence on the very spelling and format of the Freeman has been noted, and several English contributors have been mentioned. The names of G. D. H. Cole, Llewellyn Powys, and Henry W. Nevinson may be added as frequent contributors. Neilson himself wrote on English politics with all the background of a former Member of Parliament. He opposed British policy in Ireland and India; he was anti-Churchill and pro-Labour.

There were three roving correspondents who wrote series for the journal: Gilbert Cannan’s “Letters from a Distance” were mostly about England and often dull; Charles R. Hargrove’s “Letters from Abroad” were more varied and interesting; and Harry W. Frantz’s “University of the World” began his long- popular “vagabonding” writings.

Translations from the German have been mentioned. Nock’s sympathy with Germany is evident in his editorials and in his serial “The Myth of a Guilty Nation” (1921), later published in book form.

But it was the Freeman’s sympathy with the Russian Soviets that formed the most conspicuous element of its foreign policy. Its very first number carried a sympathetic discussion of Soviet government, in which Cole considered it (1) as political expediency and (2) as political theory. A month later the journal carried the first of Robinson’s sympathetic but critical essays on the Soviet experiment. And another month later William Leavitt Stoddard noted happily the increasing influence of the Soviet idea on American labor. Hiram K. Moderwell wrote of the growing power of the Soviets in Italy (October 1920). And so the Freeman went on with the U.S.S.R. polemic. In an editorial on “Lenin’s Purge,” Nock wrote editorially: “Lenin is forging—or rather, the Third Internationale is forging—a compact, revolutionary minority, sure of its end, seeking and giving no quarter, and ready to fight with weapons of the flesh as well as of the spirit the revolutionary fight for the power and dictatorship of the proletariat.” 25 A notable series on Russia was the one by William Henry Chamberlin in 1923. On the literary side were two important serials—Maxim Gorky’s fragmentary “Reminiscences of Tolstoy” (July-August 1920) and

25 Freeman, v. 2, Nov. 3, 1920, p. 175.

Alexander Kuprin’s “To Chekhofs Memory” (August 1921).

In a brief survey of the content of such a varied journal as the Freeman, it is inevitable that important items and writers should be neglected. It would be a pity not to mention the posthumous anti-state articles of Randolph S. Bourne; or the literary criticism of Ernest Boyd, Louis Untermeyer, Howard Mumford Jones, John Gould Fletcher, and Gorham B. Munson. Among the “discoveries” of the Freeman were John Dos Passos and Constance Rourke. Amos Pinchot, William S. Bullitt, Arthur Gleason, and Robert H. Lowie were brilliant writers in varied fields.

The Freeman was throughout its history a twenty-four-page, self-covered, small quarto with double columns, typographically chaste, and well printed. It sold for six dollars a year, or fifteen cents a number. It never passed seven thousand circulation. It carried no advertising except its own announcement on page 24. Its deficits cost Mrs. Neilson in the neighborhood of $7,000 a year, 26 about a dollar a year per subscription.

In his autobiography, Nock made the manifestly absurd statement that the Freeman’s “character and quality were maintained at an exact level throughout the four years of its existence.” 27 As a matter of fact it began to lose some of its aggressive attack and probably some of its influence after its first eighteen or twenty months; it seemed less affirmative and more negative than ever. Neilson, as has been pointed out, lost most of his interest in the conduct of the journal after the first year and a half. In the fourth year, Nock himself took an extended holiday in Europe, leaving the editorship in the hands of Miss La Follette. Brooks, the literary editor, had lost some of the critical drive that distinguished the early Freeman. Editors wrote less of the journal, and contributors more. It was still admirably written, and to some, pleasanter reading than in its earlier phases. But as a radical journal, it was running down, and its editors and its owner were losing interest. Moreover, much ill feeling had developed between Neilson and Nock. 28

Mrs. Neilson had originally agreed to support the paper for

26 Turner, “Short History,” p. 38.

27 Nock, Superfluous Man, p. 168.

28 Neilson, Story of ‘The Freeman / pp. 32-53.

three years; but when that time was exhausted she added another year, and then quit. In announcing the end of the Freeman, it was said editorially: “The paper was a gift to the American people, a gift as real as hospitals, laboratories, colleges, and other public services supported by wealthy citizens, and more valuable from the point of view of civilization than many of these.” 29

“We produced what was quite generally acknowledged to be the best paper published in our language,” declared Nock with characteristic braggadocio several years later. 30 The Nation’s epitaph was also one of eulogy, but more measured: “The best written and most brilliantly edited of the weeklies of protest.” 31 Nock once modestly suggested that Socrates would have liked the Freeman? 2 and in another place he exclaimed: “How the millennium would be hastened if 100,000 new readers were added to our list in 1921!” 33 But quips and exaggerations aside, it may be said that the pages of the weekly Freeman were filled for four years with well-written commentary and disquisition, thought provoking, and charged with wit and argument about important matters.

Six years after the discontinuance of the Freeman, a New Freeman was founded, also in New York, with Suzanne La Follette as editor. 34 Nock was a “contributing editor,” and Boyd was literary editor. The new journal attracted many of the same contributors who had given character to the original Freeman, which it resembled. Its extreme pro-Russian attitude was less acceptable in 1930 than it would have been earlier, and it perished after fourteen months of publication.

29 Freeman, v. 8, Feb. 6, 1924, p. 508.

39 Nock, Superfluous Man, p. 168.

31 Nation, v. 118, Feb. 6, 1924, p. 131.

32 Freeman, v. 8, Jan. 30, 1924, advertisement, p. 504.

33 Ibid., v. 2, Jan. 5, 1921, advertisement, p. 408.

34 It began at $4.00 a year but was soon raised to $5.00. Peter Fireman was president of the publishing company. Clifton Fadiman and George Jean Nathan were among the new contributors. The fortnightly Freeman begun in 1950 by John Chamberlain, Henry Hazlitt, and Suzanne La Follette was in most respects a very different periodical.

8

THE FUGITIVE 1

I N 1914 a group of men in Nashville, Tennessee, most of them connected with Vanderbilt University, were drawn together by a common interest in philosophical and literary subjects and began a series of informal evening meetings that led, several years later, to the publication of a magazine of poetry called the Fugitive.

At the center of this group was Sidney Mttron 2 Hirsch, who belonged to a cultivated Jewish family in Nashville. Hirsch had traveled widely in Europe and the Orient, had been a model in Paris and a playwright in New York, had formed acquaintances in eastern literary and artistic circles, and was now fre-

1 Title: The Fugitive .

First issue: April 1922. Last issue: Dec. 1925.

Periodicity: Quarterly 1922, 1925; bimonthly 1923-24. Vol. 1, April, June, Oct., Dec. 1922; 2, Feb.-March, April-May, June-July, Aug.-Sept., Oct., Dec. 1923; 3, Feb., April, June, Aug., Dec. (double number), 1924; 4, March, June, Sept., Dec. 1925. In vols. 1-2 issue number and paging are continuous.

Editors and publishers: Walter Clyde Curry, Donald Grady Davidson, James Marshall Frank, Sidney D. Mttron Hirsch, Stanley Phillips Johnson, John Crowe Ransom, Alec Brock Stevenson, John Orley Allen Tate (withdrew Feb. 1925). Added June 1922, Merrill Moore; Dec. 1922, William Yandell Elliott and William Frierson “in absentia”; and Ridley Wills and Jesse Ely Wills. Added Feb. 1924, Robert Penn Warren; March 1925, Laura Riding Gottschalk; Sept. 1925, Alfred Starr. (Managing editors: Davidson, 1923-24; Ransom and Warren, 1925. Associate editors: Tate, 1923—April 1924; Jesse Wills, June 1924—Dec. 1924. Business Manager: Jacques Back, Oct. 1923—Dec. 1924.) Index: Contents for all issues are given in Cowan (see below), pp. 258-67. References: Louise Cowan, The Fugitive Group: A Literary History (Baton Rouge, La., 1959); John M. Bradbury, The Fugitives: A Critical Account (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1958); Merrill Moore, ed., The Fugitive: Clippings and Comment (Boston, 1939) ; Allen Tate, “ The Fugitive, 1922-25,” Princeton University Literary Chronicle, v. 3, April 1942, pp. 75-84; Donald Davidson, “The Thankless Muse and her Fugitive Poets,” Sewanee Review, v. 66, Spring 1958, pp. 201-28; Rob Roy Purdy, ed., Fugitives’ Reunion: Conversations at Vanderbilt, May 3-5, 1956 (Nashville, 1959) ; Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen and Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton, 1946), pp. 116-24, 265-66.

2 The name Mttron is said to be derived from the Kabbalah, in which the angel representing Deity is given that cognomen. It is pronounced Me-tat-tron. For interesting characterizations of Hirsch, see Purdy, Fugitives’ Reunion, pp. 124-29.

quently back in his native city making his home with his half- brother Nat. This home extended a warm welcome to a remarkable group of young men, who found Sidney Hirsch’s eclectic interests in philosophy, mysticism, and poetry, as well as his fancies in etymology and language in general, fascinating and stimulating.

John Crowe Ransom had been graduated from Vanderbilt, had spent three years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and was now invited by Edwin Mims, recently appointed head of Vanderbilt’s English Department, to become an instructor at his alma mater. In this same year of 1914, Donald Davidson returned to Vanderbilt to resume his work as an undergraduate and, incidentally, to take courses under Ransom. About the same time, Walter Clyde Curry, a South Carolinian who had just received his doctorate at Stanford and whose special interest lay in the field of literary esthetics, joined the Vanderbilt faculty.

Two other young men who were still undergraduates in 1914 but were eventually to become members of what was later to be called the Fugitive group were Stanley Johnson and Alec Stevenson. The former was a native of Nashville, majoring in philosophy and modern languages; the latter was the bookish son of Vanderbilt’s professor of Semitic languages.

These young men and some others frequented the Hirsch home, gathering informally for an afternoon or an evening of discussions dealing mainly with philosophical matters. Some met also in other groupings at other places, and eventually there came to be a strong feeling of kinship among them. “It was as if we had been cousins all the time,” wrote Davidson many years later. 3

The First World War broke up these associations. Hirsch and Curry remained in Nashville, but the others were soon drawn into the armed services. When Ransom and Davidson found each other at the Ft. Oglethorpe Officers’ Training Camp in 1917, their talk was more of poetry than war; and Ransom read to his friend some of the poems that were to be published later in his first volume of verse, Poems about God. By the fall of 1919, the war over, Ransom had returned to Vanderbilt; and

3 Davidson, “Thankless Muse,” p. 207.

in the following year the original group was completely reassembled in Nashville.

Its members now formed the custom of meeting every other Saturday evening at the home of James M. Frank, brother-in- law of Sidney Hirsch. Frank, a prosperous shirt manufacturer, a graduate of Peabody College, and a man of culture and learning, found pleasure in offering hospitality to the talented men who gathered at his house. Hirsch, now a semi-invalid as the result of an old injury received during his wanderings in the Far East—or perhaps a valetudinarian by inclination—was living in the Frank home. Allen Tate, the last man to join the group before the magazine was begun, was to write thus of Hirsch: “. . . a man of vast if somewhat perverse erudition . . . a mystic and I think a Rosicrucian, a great deal of whose doctrine skittered elusively among imaginary etymologies. . . . He was a large man, an invalid who never moved from his chaise longue, and he always presided at our meetings. . . . Shining pince-nez stood up on his handsome nose, and curled Assyrian hair topped a massive brow.” 4

Tate himself was a student in his senior year at Vanderbilt at this time. He was then strongly under the influence of Herbert Charles Sanborn, professor of philosophy, and the interest in esthetic criticism acquired in the classes of that able teacher was to mean much to him. He brought to the discussions that took place in the Frank home modern “abstractionist” views that eventually became rather unsettling to some of his elders.

As these discussions turned more and more to poetry, largely under the influence of Ransom and Davidson, it became the custom for members to bring poetical “offerings” to the meetings. Louise Cowan, in her admirable history of the Fugitive, tells what the meetings were like:

There, with the Franks’ comfortable living room and dining room thrown open and a log fire crackling, the poems were read without apology and were given honest, detailed criticism. Carbon copies of individual pieces were customarily furnished by the authors, so that the audience might mark special points during the reading. Usually, after all the poems were read, a more general topic of discussion emerged naturally from the specific criticisms; and this long debate

4 Tate, “Fugitive,” p. 76.

THE FUGITIVE

103

on an aesthetic question would last well into the next morning.

Mrs. Frank never joined in , the conversation; she was self- effacing, leaving the men to themselves except for talking with them affectionately before the meeting and putting out food for them— usually hot chocolate, cake, and fruit, but sometimes more elaborate concoctions, such as steaming hot dishes of creole eggs, cold meats, little sandwiches, butter cookies, and various relishes. 5

These activities led surely to the establishment of a “little magazine.” The 1920’s saw a remarkable flowering of small journals, many of them devoted chiefly to poetry; the South had two or three such periodicals before the Fugitive was begun. Generally these adventures in publication were edited and published either by one man or by a group of two or three; the Fugitive was written, edited and published at its beginning by a group of eight, and it continued throughout its four years to be produced under group management. In the past, associations of gentlemen had occasionally supported magazines at various times and places and under varying arrangements for management. 6 Indeed, the “steaming hot dishes of creole eggs” recall in fragrant memory the suppers of “widgeon and teal” with which the members of the Monthly Anthology Club regaled themselves in Boston in the early years of the nineteenth century. 7 But the Fugitives, as they came to call themselves, regarded their “cousinship” in poetry and criticism as something very special and precious, as indeed it was.

Apparently Hirsch and Frank were the first to suggest the publication of a magazine, though if they had not done so another of the group would soon have ventured the proposal. 8 Davidson and Tate differ as to who named it—Stevenson or Hirsch; 9 but certainly it was Hirsch, with his flair for walking over philology “on high stilts,” 10 who had fun explaining the meaning of the word settled upon as a title for the fledgling. “A

5 Cowan, Fugitive Group, p. 41.

6 See F. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, v. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), p. 194.

7 Ibid., p. 256.

8 “Fugitives Add to Literary Honors of Tennessee,” Nashville Tennesseean, May 27, 1923, reprinted in Moore, The Fugitive, p. 32.

9 Davidson, “Thankless Muse,” p. 217; Tate, “Fugitive,” p. 79. But see also Purdy, Fugitives’ Reunion, p. 125.

10 Davidson, “Thankless Muse,” p. 212.

Fugitive was quite simply a Poet: the Wanderer, or even the Wandering Jew, the Outcast, the man who carries the secret wisdom around the world.” 11 Less erudite and poetical scoffers, however, commonly thought that the title reflected a foreboding of the editors that their magazine was more or less ephemeral. Such a feeling was frankly stated, indeed, in the foreword to the first issue, in which three to five numbers were promised. Beyond that point, readers were told, “the editors, aware of the common mortality, do not venture to publish any hopes they may entertain for the infant as to a further tenure of this precarious existence.”

The first number of the Fugitive appeared in April 1922, with thirty-two well-printed small quarto pages enclosed in a blue cover. All eight editors were represented save Frank, who reserved his first contribution for the second number. Ransom wrote the foreword and four of the seventeen poems in Volume I, Number 1. Some whimsy led the contributors to sign their poems with pen-names; Ransom was “Roger Prim,” Davidson “Robin Galivant,” Tate “Feathertop,” and so on. This masquerade was abandoned after the second issue.

The decision to sign their own names to their work was forced upon them by the assumption of some critics (including H. L. Mencken) 12 that the entire magazine was written by one man. There is no doubt about the “cousinship” of the group, but only the most casual examination of the poems of those early issues would mistake the binding sympathy of the group for identity of ideas and style. This sympathy, which was to withstand bitter clashes of critical theory, was apparently based upon three principles, two of which were stated explicitly by Ransom in editorials appearing in the early numbers of the magazine: (1) “The group mind is evidently neither radical nor reactionary, but quite catholic, and perhaps excessively earnest, in literary dogma”; 13 and (2) “The Fugitive flees from nothing faster than from the high-caste Brahmins of the Old South.” 14 The third canon in the creed of the Fugitives

11 Tate. “Fugitive,” p. 79.

12 Moore, The Fugitive, p. 17.

13 Fugitive, v. 1, June 1922, p. 34.

14 Ibid., v. 1, April 1922, p. 1.

was based upon resentment of the growing industrialism about them—of the false gospel of the “New South” as preached by Henry W. Grady and others.

But disunity in critical theory was almost a rule of the group; they appear to have been in complete agreement on only one principle—that complete agreement was not only impossible but undesirable. Yet such were the bonds of tolerance and friendship among them that they published—in concert, as it were—nineteen numbers of a distinguished poetry magazine. Ransom’s initial poem in the first number, “Ego,” is as near to a literary manifesto as anything the Fugitive ever published. Its last lines run:

And if an alien, miserably at feud With those my generation, I have reason To think to salve the fester of my treason:

A seven of friends exceeds much multitude. 15

Whether the treason was toward the Old South, or the New South, or the traditional rationale of poesy is not clear—possibly toward all three.

The greatest editorial outburst against what was popularly regarded as the southern literary tradition to appear in the Fugitive came as a reply to “Aunt Harriet” Monroe’s advice to southern poets to interpret appropriately “a region so specialized in beauty, so rich in racial tang and prejudice, so jewel- weighted with a historic past.” The Fugitive greeted with “guffaws” the idea that “the southern writer of today must embalm and serve up an ancient dish.” 16 Nevertheless, the eight founders were all southern born except Stevenson, who was brought to Nashville as a child; all received their early education in the South; and one of the strongest bonds that united them was a deep-seated regional devotion. Even Tate, chief exemplar in the group of the “modern” cerebral, highly individualized verse, appeared to join with his fellows in a regional rebellion against incursions of the North into the industry, education, and cul-

15 Fugitive, v. 1, April 1922, p. 4. Reprinted with permission of the author.

16 Fugitive, v. 2, June-July 1923, p. 66. Miss Monroe’s statement appeared in a review of Carolina Chansons, by DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen, in Poetry, v. 22, May 1923, p. 91.

ture of the South. 17 The southern traditions the Fugitives really served were those that survived from an English culture imported in Colonial times. As Davidson later wrote:

Whatever the temporary concern of the poet, the main direction of the poetry follows the principle so casually uttered by Tate: that “the form requires the myth. 7 ’ Or, in other terms, that the images and symbols, in fact the total economy of the poem, require the support of a tradition based upon a generally diffused belief. . . . And since a tradition could not flourish without a society to support it, the natural step was to remember that after all we were Southerners and that the South still possessed at least the remnants, maybe more than the remnants, of a traditional believing society. 18

The “clashes of critical theory” referred to grew mainly out of differences among members of the group over degrees of adherence to the more traditional forms and ideas of English poetry and, on the other hand, of acceptance of the “modernistic” modes best represented, perhaps, by the work of T. S. Eliot.

Professor Mims, who felt some responsibility for the literary activities of members of his English department at Vanderbilt and of students working under them, made some attempt to dissuade the projectors of the magazine from the venture in early 1922; 19 it may be surmised that he had some fears of “modernistic” follies. But after two numbers of the magazine had appeared, Mims spoke before a Nashville literary club in praise of the work of the Fugitive poets. “They keep in line with tradition,” he was reported in the local newspaper to have said. “They are not writers of free verse. Their writings have a certain freshness and individuality, and yet maintain the traditions of English verse.” 20 Writing much later about those early attitudes of the Fugitives as a group, Davidson explained:

Except for Tate, we were not as yet admirers of Eliot. Yet we were perfectly ready to concede some merit to modern experimenta-

17 See Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York, 1942), p. 442; also Tate’s own statement, in “Fugitive,” p. 83.

18 Davidson, “Thankless Muse,” p. 228.

19 Tate, “Fugitive,” p. 79.

20 Nashville Tennesseean, Oct. 13, 1922, reprinted in Moore, The Fugitive,

p. 20.

tion—even to “free verse”—on two conditions: (1) the experiment must stand as severe a test as to form and technique as any other of the rhetorics of poetry; the mere novelty of experimentalism allowed no immunity from such criticism; (2) mastery of traditional forms was a prerequisite to valid experimentalism; to deviate from traditional forms without first practising them was to ignore the total resources of the art and engage in irresponsible dilettantism. 21

All of this sounds like good doctrine on a rather academic level. But as one number of the magazine succeeded another, as the group expanded, and as the critical debates at the Frank home went on late into many a night, a rift developed among the cousins. There was no unfriendliness, but differences in critical judgment became more marked. Tate’s influence grew. Davidson admired the work and valued the criticism of his younger associate. 22 And when Ridley Wills and Robert Penn Warren joined the group, they reinforced the modernists. Wills had distinguished himself by a revolt against authority in Vanderbilt’s student newspaper and later by writing a novel and finding a publisher for it. Warren was a young Kentuckian who had come to Vanderbilt to study chemistry but had found Ransom and Davidson such stimulating teachers of English that he was swept into the dominant literary current of the time and place. Tate tells of his first meeting with Warren:

He was tall and thin, and when he walked across the room he made a sliding shuffle, as if his bones didn’t belong to one another. He had a long quivering nose, large brown eyes, and a long chin— all topped by curly red hair. He spoke in a soft whisper, asking to see my poem; then he showed me one of his own—it was about Hell, and I remember this line: “Where lightly bloom the purple lilies . . .” He said that he was 16 years old and a sophomore. This remarkable young man was “Red,” Robert Penn Warren, the most gifted person I have ever known. 23

Tate, Warren, and Wills shared a room in a Vanderbilt dormitory intended for theological students and called Wesley Hall; they also shared critical discussions, horseplay, and

21 Davidson, “Thankless Muse,” p. 222.

22 Ibid., p. 220.

23 Tate, “Fugitive,” pp. 81-82.

poetical experimentation. Tate and Wills collaborated on a series of parodies dedicated to the Fugitive, in which Wills wrote eleven poems in conventional style, each of which was followed on the next page by one on the same subject by Tate using all the ‘modernistic’ techniques and devices. Both writers, of course, exaggerated their patterns, like good parodists; but the prank showed an awareness of the distinct cleavage that had grown up in the group.

The entire series was written in one evening, but when the two wits showed it to Merrill Moore the next day, he wanted to have a part in the travesty. When the little book was privately published a little later, 24 it carried an introduction by Moore, a short poem by him addressed to R.W., one to A.T., and a third “Panegyric to the Entity.”

Moore was a pre-medical student, the son of a Tennessee writer of some note; he later became a psychiatrist in Boston but never entirely abandoned the Muse. His form was the sonnet, and he was probably the most prolific sonneteer in the history of literature. It is said that he invented a shorthand of his own to get his lines on paper quickly between less poetic but more demanding employments. Moore himself stated eight years before his death that his three volumes (one of them entitled M to indicate the thousand sonnets it contained) and his several smaller collections published as brochures “don’t represent one percent of my output.” 25 If one may apply simple arithmetic to poetry, this surely means that he produced over one hundred thousand sonnets during his lifetime. Yet Moore was far from a freak. He had many admirers among perceptive critics; and his poems, though not often profound, showed a pleasant fancy, wit, and sharpness of perception.

Though Moore was not much inclined, apparently, to take sides in the controversies that came to divide the Fugitives, he was definitely a conservative himself. And so were William Yandell Elliott and William Frierson, each of whom won

24 [Ridley Wills and Allen Tate], The Golden Mean and Other Poems (Nashville, 1923). Privately printed.

25 Merrill Moore, M: One Thousand Autobiographical Sonnets (New York, 1938) ; New York Times Book Review, Jan. 23, 1949, p. 8.

Rhodes scholarships at Oxford and were listed as editors in absentia during most of the life of the magazine.

The conservative-modernistic differences make the successive numbers of the Fugitive a fascinating study. As early as December, 1922, Tate declared editorially, “Yes, we are experimentalists, but perhaps not too bold”; and he goes on to approve abstraction in modern art and the break with representation." 6 But in the same number, Frierson rails at the modern themes (rather than the forms) of recent Fugitive verse:

I am tired of being bitter.

I am weary of the disillusionists,

. . . the sinister sterility of irreverence . 27

And in the next number Stanley Johnson wrote editorially, rebuking the “modern poets,” who, he says, “have pointed out from time to time that there is no God, that pessimism is the end of knowledge . . . that garbage heaps and dunghills are subject matter of poetry. . . . [They] have prepared for themselves a freedom which looks tragically like slavery, a courage which smacks of cowardice, and in their creedless night have committed themselves to a creed of spiritual anarchy.” 28

But modernism in both form and idea (especially in idea) was not to be denied in the Fugitive. A year or two later Tate wrote in his “Credo: An Aesthetic”:

Good manners, madam, are had these days not For your asking nor mine, nor what-we-used-to-be’s.

The day is a loud grenade that bursts a smile Of comic weeds in my fragile lily plot;

Comic or not, heterogeneities

Divert my proud flesh to indecisive guile . 29

Even outside the Frank drawing-room and the Fugitive’s pages, the group carried on an earnest but friendly contro-

26 Fugitive, v. 1, Dec. 1922, p. 99.

27 “Reactions on the October Fugitive,” Fugitive, v. 1, Dec. 1922, p. 106. Reprinted with permission of Mrs. William C. Frierson.

28 Fugitive, v. 2, Feb.-March 1923, p. 2.

29 Ibid., v. 3, June 1924, p. 87. Reprinted with permission of the author.

versy. When Ransom attacked Tate’s article, “Waste Lands,” in the Literary Review, Tate wrote a reply, to which Ransom made a rejoinder. 30 Tate withdrew from the Fugitive’s editorial board early in 1925. He was then living in New York, though he continued to make occasional contributions to the magazine; indeed, he had a poem in its last issue.

About the time of Tate’s withdrawal, Davidson was writing to Laura Riding: “The Fugitives are not a unit in their literary beliefs and practice. I believe they represent all varieties of poetical creed and practice, from the wholly traditional to the more or less radical. Nevertheless we are prevailingly ‘modern’ in tone, I am sure, occupying perhaps a middle position between the extreme conservatives and the extreme radicals.” 31

Laura Riding Gottschalk, wife of a history professor at the University of Louisville (later at the University of Chicago), had won a prize in a poetry contest sponsored by the Fugitive and had later contributed some other poems. She was energetic in her promotion of the magazine and eventually came down to Nashville to meet with the group. But a woman could scarcely adapt herself to this unusual fellowship of gentlemen. Mrs. Gottschalk quarreled with Grand Master Hirsch; and though she was made a member of the board of editors, she was never a real Fugitive.

Another very late comer to the group was Alfred Starr, a mathematician who had been a student of Ransom’s and a classmate of Tate and Wills. But the Fugitives generally were living up to their name by 1925. Tate was deeply engaged in his New York activities. Ridley Wills was in newspaper work in that city; and though his cousin Jesse, who had also become a member of the magazine’s editorial staff, was still in Nashville, he was devoted more to his insurance business than to poetry. Warren was at the University of California as student and graduate assistant. Elliott had just left that institution to join the faculty of the department of government at Harvard.

30 Literary Review of the New York Evening Post, July 14, Aug. 4, Aug. 11, 1923, quoted in Cowan, Fugitive Group, pp. 123-25.

31 Cowan, Fugitive Group, p. 182. See also Purdy, Fugitives’ Reunion, pp. 120 - 21 .

Frierson was an English professor at the University of Alabama. Curry was busy finishing his authoritative study of Chaucer and science, 32 and Davidson was finding his spare time occupied by the editorship of a distinguished book page for the Nashville Tennesseean. Moore was in medical school, though never too busy to dash off a sonnet between laboratory and lecture room. Meetings were still held at the Frank home; but much of the magic of the early “cousinship” had vanished, and nobody seemed to want to perform the inevitable detailed labors of production.

In the third issue of the Fugitive an interesting note about the conduct of the quarterly had appeared. After expressing gratification over the success of the two numbers already published, the writer promised that “The magazine will run through another year at any rate, and indefinitely, so far as appears now, until the present group is no longer intact.” 33 Obviously, that time had now arrived.

In this same issue, a fantastic statement of the magazine’s production was presented: “The procedure of publication is simply to gather up the poems that rank the highest by general consent, and take them down to the publisher.” The publication of even a “little magazine” was of course more complicated than that: such chores as copyreading, page layout, and proofreading had to be performed by someone; and since the Fugitive’s editors were also its publishers, a business side demanded attention. The group might heave a communal sigh of relief because “Our books are not complicated by revenues from advertising matter nor payments to contributors”; 34 nevertheless, some of the group had to keep subscription records, look after a bank account, pay the printers, and attend to mailing out the successive issues.

Davidson and Stevenson were the chief chore-men during the magazine’s first year. 35 The former was named as “managing editor” in an official statement of ownership dated March 20, 1923, and he was listed on the contents page as

32 Walter Clyde Curry’s Study was Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences (New York and London, 1926).

33 Fugitive, v. 1, Oct. 1922, p. 66.

34 Ibid.

35 Cowan, Fugitive Group, p. 74.

editor throughout 1924. In 1925, the magazine’s final year, Ransom and Warren were so listed. Tate’s name was printed as “associate editor” in several issues of 1923-1924, to be followed by that of Jesse Wills when Tate left for New York. There were also “editorial committees” and editors of individual issues from time to time, though the “cousins” insisted loudly now and then and here and there that the editorship of the magazine was a total group activity—as, of course, in general it was.

Even poetry has usually required, alas, dollar support. The printer’s bill for a single number was only $100, to be sure; but when only twenty-seven renewals and eighteen new subscriptions had dribbled in by mid-January of the second year, 36 special efforts (chiefly by mail solicitation) were undertaken for both new subscribers and “patrons” who were willing to contribute five dollars or more to culture. More than a dozen such philanthropists were rounded up, some paying ten dollars a year. 37 At the same time the magazine raised its price to $1.50 and promised six numbers in 1923. Also the group members dug down into their pockets—a resource, said one of their circulars, “which we contemplate at all times with reasonable alarm.” 38

Thus the Fugitive got through its second year, after which a minor miracle happened. An “angel” appeared unto the brethren and said unto them: “I’ll take over the entire financial responsibility of this operation—receipts, expenditures, profits up to twenty-five percent, losses up to one hundred percent, printing, mailing, what not—and all you have to do is to write the poetry for it.” This dispensation lasted only for one year, at the end of which time an editorial writer referred to their rescuer as a “rare spirit” and recorded the injunction: “When the annals of The Fugitive are written, let the chronicler pause here, and write the name of Jacques Back into his record.” 39 Selah.

When Back, who ran a local advertising agency, took over, the group agreed to pro-rate the debt to the printers among its

36 Cowan, Fugitive Group, p. 95.

37 Davidson, “The Thankless Muse,” p. 204.

38 Moore, The Fugitive, p. 8.

39 Fugitive, v. 3, Dec. 1924, p. 131.

members; but at the beginning of 1925, some of that indebtedness was still outstanding. 40 During its last two years the magazine resumed quarterly publication at a dollar a year, with black covers imprinted with gilt. Its circulation probably never exceeded five hundred.

The inevitable announcement of discontinuance appeared in the number for December 1925, with the explanation:

This action is taken because there is no available Editor to take over the administrative duties incidental to the publication of a periodical of even such limited scope as the Fugitive. The Fugitives are busy people, for the most part enslaved by Mammon. . . . No financial exigency was the joint in our armor, the vulnerable heel in our anatomy. The Fugitive from the beginning has solved its financial problem without undue effort . 41

No joint in the armor or vulnerable heel perhaps; but, more prosaically, an occasional drain on pocketbooks, however “undue.”

Local commercial interests had not been unaware of the little magazine, however, and had rallied ’round in support of Nashville culture to a modest extent. The Retailers’ Association of the city offered prize money for poetry contests outside the group; this adventure, though obviously at variance with the original plan of limited authorship, had been welcomed by the Fugitives. It brought in a flood of entries, which were judged by Jessie B. Rittenhouse, William Alexander Percy, and Gorham B. Munson. Most of the prize-winning poems were rather below the Fugitive level of excellence; but the contests did bring in work by Robert Penn Warren and Laura Riding, who were to become members of the group, and a contribution from Hart Crane. They doubtless had some value as promotion among poetry lovers. Other “guest contributors” from time to time were Louis Untermeyer, Witter Byn- ner, W. A. Percy, David Morton, John Gould Fletcher, Joseph Auslander, and the Englishmen, Robert Graves and L. A. G. Strong.

What was the Fugitive “level of excellence,” all in all? The term is too mathematical, of course. But it may be noted that criticism has ranged from the “extremely mediocre” judgment

40 Cowan, Fugitive Group, pp. 118, 182.

41 Fugitive, v. 4, Dec. 1925, p. 125.

of the New York Times writer who discussed the poems of the magazine’s first number 42 to the prediction of a much later critic: “In the future history of American letters, the Fugitive group almost certainly will occupy a position analogous to that of the Transcendental Group of the mid-nineteenth century.” 43 Truth must lie between these extremes; but it is not likely to be denied by any unprejudiced reader who undertakes the pleasant task of reviewing the nineteen numbers of the Fugitive that here is, on the whole, good poetry, provocative in ideas and interesting in the many techniques displayed. It would be gratifying if one could point a finger at two or three poems in the file and say, “Here are great works, sure of permanent place in American literature.” But much as one may like certain poems, no great ones emerge.

Among the men of talent in the group, Ransom stands out as the leader in poetical achievement. 44 He had more maturity as an artist in 1922-1925 than had his “cousins,” and he apparently had more influence upon them than they or he realized. Poems such as “Necrological” (June 1922), “Judith of Bethulia” (October 1923), “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” (February 1924), and “Eclogue” (March 1925) are memorable partly because of their reappearance in anthologies. Ransom’s frequent use of the allegorical ballad and his occasional ironical thrust or wry observation are recognizable characteristics. Interested as he was in experimentalism, he never held with the abstractionists. In a two-page editorial on “The Future of Poetry” in the latter years of the Fugitive, he insisted on the duty of poets “to conduct a logical sequence with their meanings on the one hand,” and “to realize an objective pattern with their sounds on the other”—a lucid statement of a point of view that was generally, though not always, accepted by the Fugitives. 45

Pointing out individual poems of note would be of doubtful value if continued at length, but a few of special significance should be mentioned. Davidson, romanticist by nature and

42 Moore, The Fugitive, p. 16, reprints an article from “a Nashville paper of June 1922” which quotes the Times without date.

43 Bradbury, The Fugitives, p. vii. Bradbury’s observation was not limited to the work of the group that appeared in the Fugitive.

44 Cowan, Fugitive Group, p. 93; Purdy, Fugitives’ Reunion, pp. 86-94.

45 Fugitive, v. 3, Feb. 1924, pp. 2-4.

inclination, but sensitive to modernistic trends, is probably best remembered by Fugitive readers for a poem not quite characteristic—his satiric “Ecclesiasticus” (February-March 1923). Tate’s growing commitment to the abstract and cryptic tended to separate him somewhat from the fellowship before the end of the file; perhaps the best of his early Fugitive poems was his “Horation Epode to the Duchess of Malfi” (October 1922). Warren’s “To a Face in The Crowd” (June 1925) was probably his most distinguished contribution to the Fugitive. But perhaps the most frequently reprinted of all the poems that appeared in the magazine was Merrill Moore’s “The Noise That Time Makes,” which appeared in the last number. The critical reader, however, must choose the best poems himself, and the Fugitive anthology 46 published a few years after the magazine was suspended conveniently affords poems for such a diversion.

Varied though the offerings of the Fugitive were, a few characteristics of its verse were more or less general. Irony, used with greater or less delicacy, was common, whether applied, stiletto-like, to type characters, or used more philosophically. Vocabulary was a preoccupation of the Fugitives, from Hirsch to Tate; esoteric, invented, foreign-language terms tended to give an academic, and sometimes even an occult, tone to many of the poems. This is related to the quality of much of the verse in the Fugitive that often has been called “metaphysical.” Doubtless most of the Fugitives, students of the history of English literature as they were, did discover an agreeable fellowship with the seventeenth-century poets— Donne, Marvell, Carew, and others of that “metaphysical school”—with their metaphors extended to conceits and with their short, sometimes cryptic phrases memorable for remarkable content of wisdom. Such wits, such philosophers, were sure to appeal to the Fugitives and perhaps to influence their own work.

A pithy characterization of the Fugitive verse is that of the author of the short introduction to that curious farrago of recorded conversations between Fugitives who returned to

46 Fugitives: An Anthology of Verse (New York, 1928). Davidson wrote a foreword to this volume; he and Tate were its editors for the group then scattered.

Nashville in 1956 to hold one more (and doubtless the last) of their long series of conversations. Rubin writes: “During a time of considerable caprice and striking of attitudes in verse, the poetry of The Fugitive was characterized for the most part by a serious and hard-wrought dignity.” 47

Davidson, with his unmatched understanding of the whole Fugitive episode, has pointed out that a growing realization that the Fugitives were southerners, with responsibilities to southern society, had much to do with the ending of their magazine. He wrote: “The Dayton ‘anti-evolution trial’ of 1925, with its jeering accompaniment of large-scale mockery directed against Tennessee and the South, broke in upon our literary concerns like a midnight alarm. It was not the sole cause of change, but from that time Ransom, Tate, Warren, and I began to remember and haul up for consideration the assumptions that, as members of the Fugitive Group, we had not much bothered to examine. They were, as it turned out, of the greatest relevance to poetry itself, but discussion of them in the closed and intimate circle of the Fugitive Group was hardly appropriate. From that moment publication of The Fugitive ceased to be attractive, and in fact became a burden we did not wish to carry. The defense of poetry and with it the ‘New Criticism’ were in the making. The defense of the South, for which we were to seek new friends and allies, lay only a few years ahead.” 48

The “defense of the South” here referred to was undertaken by a group rather badly named “Agrarians.” Ransom, Davidson, Tate, and Warren were members. They attacked industrialism as a way of life and rejected the theory that the growth of commercial prosperity was ipso facto true progress. The essays of this group 49 may be considered in a sense a postscript to the critical views expressed and inherent in the Fugitive.

47 Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Introduction to Purdy, Fugitives’ Reunion, p. 15.

48 Davidson, “Thankless Muse,” p. 228.

49 Allen Tate, ed., I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners (New York, 1930). Other members of the Agrarians were Andrew Lytle, Stark Young, John Gould Fletcher, Frank Lawrence Owsley, Lyle Lanier, H. C. Nixon, John Donald Wade, Henry Blue Kline.

9

THE GOLDEN BOOK MAGAZINE 1 2

cc \ MONG the Christmas magazines at the news-stalls there lay a newcomer, a monthly fiction magazine, with JL A. a creamy cover, a big golden moon, a golden skirted lady and gold stars. You stared at this magazine because there, beside the lady’s skirt, in big red letters, the list of contributors looked so extraordinary. You had heard all the names before, but for a moment you could in no way connect them with a news-stall. It was like running across a bishop in a saloon or seeing your wife about to play quarterback for the Varsity. ‘Hullo, what are you doing here? 7 you said, as you read: ‘Heine, Dumas, Kipling, Gaboriau, Tolstoy, de Alargon, Anatole France, Robert Louis Stevenson. . . . 7 7 7 2

Thus Time, itself rather new, handsomely introduced to its readers the new Golden Book Magazine, published by the Review of Reviews Corporation. Volume I, Number 1 of the magazine, dated January 1925, reached the newsstands in time for the 1924 Christmas trade.

The title was a good one, though the magazine had but slight connection, connotative or otherwise, with the medieval Venetian caste-register known as Libro d’oro, which it fancied as a kind of godmother. The new magazine carried about 150 small quarto double-column pages (a little over six by nine

Note 20

Note 21

Note 22

Note 23

Note 24

Note 25

Note 26

118 GOLDEN BOOK

inches) and was well printed, without illustration but with attractive typography, on a good quality of rough-finish (wood- pulp) paper. It sold for twenty-five cents at the newsstands, or three dollars annually by subscription. Its content consisted of reprinted material, with emphasis on the short story.

Time’s little write-up gives only an inkling of the richness of content in that first Golden Book number. O. Henry was also represented, and so were Richard Harding Davis, Owen Wister, Bret Harte, H. C. Bunner, Sir Richard F. Burton, Sir Harry Johnston, and James Ohio Pattie. The poets included Sir Thomas Wyatt, Robert Burns, Frangois Villon, Emily Dickinson, Ben King, and Walter Malone. There was a page of “Sayings That Have Made Men Immortal,” another of “Sayings That Are Portraits,” two pages of bits by famous men about “Some Women I Have Met,” and three pages of extracts showing “How Men Make Love in Novels.” There was a little piece by Don Marquis on “Loneliness,” and a comic strip by A. B. Frost. Two pages were given to a musical composition by Brahms (an experiment never renewed), and three pages to a “Booklover’s Calendar,” with quotations for each day in the month (a feature that lasted throughout most of the magazine’s history).

Freighted with such treasures, the new Golden Book made a distinct hit, and the early numbers were completely sold out. Within two years it reached a circulation of 165,000—the highest it ever attained.

The true founder of the magazine was Henry Wysham Lanier, son of the poet. He had in previous years been employed in the publishing houses of Scribner and Doubleday, but for some time he had been freelancing. He had now persuaded his brother, Charles Day Lanier, 3 a New Yorker who had made a success in industrial and mining ventures, to put some money into a new monthly eclectic that should specialize in reprinting the best short stories of the past; and the two of them had induced Albert Shaw’s Review of Reviews Corporation to undertake the publication of the magazine. Henry W. Lanier, of course, became the editor. He set up an advisory board on which J. Cotton Dana and Charles Mills Gay-

3 Time, v. 26, Sept. 16, 1935, p. 33.

GOLDEN BOOK 119

ley served for four years, and William Lyon Phelps and Stuart P. Sherman for two.

Leaders among the older American writers drawn upon were Hawthorne, Harte, Bynner, and Bierce. From the end-of-the- century crop there were many stories by Stephen Crane, Richard Harding Davis, Chester Bailey Fernald, Jack London, O. Henry, Mark Twain, and Owen Wister. Among contemporary short story writers, Achmed Abdullah, Sherwood Anderson, Willa S. Cather, Irvin S. Cobb, Theodore Dreiser, and Stewart Edward White were most often seen in the pages of the Golden Book. The chief English short story writers were Stacy Aumonier, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, W. W. Jacobs, Katherine Mansfield, Leonard Merrick, “Saki,” Rafael Sabatini, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

One has only to glance at this catalog to realize what a variety of fare the magazine was providing for its readers. But this was by no means all. Translations from the Russian and French were also furnished plentifully—Averchenko, Chekhov, Turgeniev; Daudet, Balzac, Maupassant, Dumas, France, Merimee. And stories came from other European countries as well, though not in such quantities: contributors ranged from Boccaccio to Bojer, from Petronius to Pirandello.

The Golden Book liked two-part stories: Stevenson’s “Prince Otto” was reprinted in its first two numbers. But it also came to like, increasingly, serial stories running through three to six numbers. It printed twenty of these in its ten years of existence. Among its fiction serials were two each by Willa Cather and Joseph Conrad, Donn Byrne’s “Messer Marco Polo” (1932), and Owen Wister’s “The Virginian” (1927-1928). The magazine was publishing H. Rider Haggard’s “She” at the time of its demise; readers who wished to follow Ayesha to her doom had to do it elsewhere.

Somewhat more than a fourth of the Golden Book was usually given over to nonfiction miscellany, including poetry and plays. The poets down the ages were drawn upon, as well as contemporary writers of verse; thus we have them all the way from Sappho to Sarett, Horace to Hovey. There was much of the older English poets, but de la Mare and Masefield also ap-

,-VmeWai’s Lure

Volume V

Vine Renter Vignettes ' ' The Power of Beauty

May

25 Pents

"A;

f

I Thackeray S. F. Whitman Marjorie Pickthall de Maupassant James Stephens Myra Kelly Sudermann du M aurier

THE GOLDEN BOOK MAGAZINE, MAY 1927

The golden sun, the bluebirds, and the wind-blown maiden, perhaps symbolic of spring, form a characteristic romanticized cover picture. The golden disk was on every cover.

120

peared frequently. Frost and Lindsay, among current American poets, were occasionally represented; and there were

*

many of the older favorites. The playwrights, too, had a great range—from Euripides to O’Neill. The Irish dramatic school —Lady Gregory, Synge, Dunsany—were favorites; another group was composed of von Kotzebue, Sudermann, Schnitz- ler. One-act plays by such writers as Chekhov, Maurice Baring, and W. S. Gilbert were on the preferred list; full-length plays were less frequent.

There was a little nonfiction from the first—occasional bits of true adventure and travel and reminiscence. Several pieces by Henry Adams appeared in 1927-1928. John B. Watson wrote on “What Is Behaviorism?” in April 1928. The year 1930 saw more of such nonfiction ventures than any other twelve months in the file: there was a debate between Aldous Huxley and Robert E. Sherwood over the talking motion pictures in April, O. W. Holmes’s “Natural Law” in August, and Harry Emerson Fosdick’s “The Old Savage in the New Civilization” in November—as well as other less notable pieces dealing with contemporary thought.

Humor was a mainstay in the Golden Book. Besides the older, accepted humorists like Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and Bill Nye, there was a long list of contemporaries: George Ade, John Kendrick Bangs, Ellis Parker Butler, Stephen Leacock, Ring Lardner, and Dorothy Parker—to mention but a few. The magazine had a fashion of using collections of bits from writers like Lewis Carroll, Max Beerbohm, or G. K. Chesterton. This was by no means limited to the wits; Amiel received that kind of treatment as well as Thackeray.

Indeed, a kind of jackdaw-like picking out of shining bits of literature was a characteristic of the Golden Book. An episode might be excerpted from a novel, a scene taken from a play, or a memorable paragraph lifted from any book. This led to the magazine’s “hors d’oeuvres pages.” Taking the number for July 1930 from the middle of the file as a sample, we note thirteen pages of such material—the familiar “Booklover’s Calendar,” with its literary quotations (three pages); “So They Say,” an equally familiar collection of contemporary “quotes” from newspapers, magazines, and books (two

pages); “The Jolly Angler/’ bits about fishing from many books (four pages); “The Tenth Muse— Advertisia” another favorite of these collections, relating to advertising facts and foibles (one page); “Love, Life.and Laughter,” epigrams by Anatole France (one page); and “Hors d’Oeuvres from the Newest Books,” a usual Golden Book department, sometimes strung through the advertising pages. Such were the contents, in general and particular, of the Golden Book throughout its entire life. But there were changes.

At the end of 1928, Charles D. Lanier withdrew as the magazine’s “angel” and his brother resigned as editor. It had done well at the start, but 1927 and 1928 had shown successive declines in circulation; 4 and it now seemed clear that the magazine’s gold was to remain chiefly in its title and cover-page. The Shaws wished to make some changes, but the Laniers were doubtful and decided to quit.

The Golden Book of January 1929, edited by Edith O’Dell, was larger in page size, to conform to the new fashion dictated by the advertisers. But it was a handsome, readable page. There was more nonfiction: “Of Fiction and True Stories,” said the subtitle, but soon the thoughtful article made its appearance. However, the essential nature of the magazine was not changed much. The chief improvement was in a more open page and greater illustration.

At the start, the Golden Book had carried no illustration except some ornamental figures and an occasional page of comic drawings—plus the ever-present facsimile signatures of its authors. A break was made when “Trilby” was serialized with the original du Maurier pictures in 1926-1927. Then in September 1928 “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was reprinted with the great Dore illustrations. Of course the covers were pictorial and in color, usually a stylized romantic scene including a big golden moon. Amy Hogeboom did many of these covers. When the 1929 change in editors came, there were attractive line drawings; and when smooth-finish paper largely supplanted the accustomed woodpulp of the magazine, there were halftones. Color appeared in the advertising pages

4 Circulation recorded in N. W. Ayer & Son’s Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals.

GOLDEN BOOK 123

and on the covers by Artzybasheff, but none in the body of the book.

Advertising had followed the circulation curve, accumulating to seventy-five pages a month in 1926, but slowly declining thereafter. Books and travel were the chief topics of the advertising pages, but there was also a considerable offering of household “luxuries”—silver, pianos, fine furniture.

Again in 1930-1933 there was a board of advisory editors —Henry S. Canby, Hugh Walpole (who wrote a short-lived monthly letter from England), Albert Shaw (the chief owner), Edwin Mims, and Blanche Colton Williams. To the sympathetic reader of today, as to many readers of the thirties, it seems that such an attractive magazine, in which basic literary values were so well combined with the passing interests of intelligent persons, deserved to succeed. In fact, circulation did rise a little; but it never quite reached 140,000 during the publication of the full-quarto series, from January 1929 through July 1931. By that time the financial crash had ruined the magazine’s slender chances. The page size was reduced to an octavo, smaller than the one with which it had begun life, and smaller print in order to offer equivalent, or (as it claimed) a larger amount of material But the country was now fully in the grip of the Great Depression, and circulation went down rapidly.

Frederica Pisek Field, who had edited the magazine for four years after Miss O’Dells brief incumbency, gave way to Mary Letha Elting in 1933. There were now a few original stories—one a month for a while. Various straws were grasped at, giving the magazine’s editorial policy a curious inconsistency. In its last few months it even tried over-emphasis on sex: it carried what its table of contents called “a spicy yarn” from the Arabian Nights and the story of “The False Courtesan” from Balzac’s Droll Stories in the number for May 1935; and in the following issues offered “Don Juan’s Greatest Love” by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Nietzsche on “Chastity,” and an excerpt from Rousseau’s Confessions. Casanova, Rabelais, and the others were laid under tribute.

The magazine’s owners, in serious trouble with their chief property, the Review of Reviews, ever since the end of the

World War, 5 were forced to give up the fight for the Golden Book in the fall of 1935. Its early success had stimulated the establishment of a group of imitators—one of which, Famous Stories Magazine (1925-1927), it had absorbed—and now it was itself merged in a very new periodical of the same character. Fiction Parade had begun in May 1935; in October of that year, it became Fiction Parade and Golden Book. It lasted until February 1938.

Throughout its short life, the Golden Book was conducted with bookish fervor and literary enthusiasm, not only by Lanier but by the lady editors who followed him. It was a victim of the depression, but it was also the victim of lack of general public response to the spirit of literary eclecticism in which the magazine was from the first conducted.

5 See F. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, v. 4 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. 663.

10

GOOD HOUSEKEEPING 1

C LARK W. BRYAN, founder of Good Housekeeping, was a man of energy, versatility, and talent. He began his professional career as editor and publisher of the Berkshire Courier, of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. In addition to conducting his own paper, he acted as regional correspondent for the Springfield Republican. In those years, before the telegraph network covered such backwoods areas as western Massachusetts, gathering election returns in the Berkshire towns and getting them to the Republican promptly was a task requiring great effort and ingenuity. Bryan made a strong impression at the Republican office by his accomplishments in this field and also by his ability as a writer, as displayed in the Courier. He was surprised in late 1854 to receive an offer of a position on the editorial staff of the great Spring- field paper, and he accepted without hesitation.

On the Republican he found himself associated with two

1 titles: (1) Good Housekeeping, 1885-1909, 1916-current; (2) Good Housekeeping Magazine, 1909-16. Various subtitles, including Conducted in the Interests of the Higher Life of the Household, 1885-1911; The Magazine America Lives By, 1941-59.

First issue: M^ay 2, 1885. Current.

Periodicity: Biweekly, May 1885—Dec. 1890; monthly, Jan. 1891—current. Vols. 1-10, semiannual (May-Oct., Nov.-April), May 1885—April 1890; 11, May-Dec. 1890; 12-current, semiannual (Jan.-June, July-Dee.), Jan. 1891— current.

Owners: Clark W. Bryan & Co., Holyoke, Mass., 1885-86, Springfield, Mass., 1887-98; John Pettigrew, Springfield, Mass., 1898; George D. Chamberlain, Springfield, Mass., 1898-1900; Phelps Publishing Company, Springfield, Mass., 1900-1911; American Home Magazine Company (renamed International Magazine Company, 1914; Hearst Magazines, 1936; Hearst Corporation, 1952), 1911- current. New York.

Editors: Clark W. Bryan, 1885-98; James Eaton Tower, 1899-1913; William Frederick Bigelow, 1913-42; Herbert Raymond Mayes, 1942-58; Wade Hampton Nichols, Jr., 1959-current.

Indexes: Volume indexes, 1885-1922; Readers’ Guide, 1909-current.

References: W. F. Bigelow, “Now That We Are Forty,” Good Housekeeping, v. 80, April 1925, p. 4; 50th anniversary number, v. 100, May 1935, especially pp. 4, 80-83, 224-26; Amos Stote, “Good Housekeeping Lives Up to Its Name,” Magazine World, v. 3, Feb. 1947, pp. 10-12, 27.

126 GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

remarkable personalities—young Samuel Bowles, whose independent discussion of political questions had already made him an important editorial voice throughout the nation, and Dr. Josiah G. Holland, who was later to attain wide popularity as novelist, poet, and essayist. Partly because Bowles was at the time more or less incapacitated by eye trouble and partly because of his own terrific energy, Bryan nearly worked himself to death in his first year on the Republican.

When he returned to duty after his recovery from a physical collapse, Bryan was made a partner in the firm of Samuel Bowles and Company and placed in charge of business operations. Soon he set up an auxiliary job-printing shop, which prospered and later expanded into the book-publishing field. But in 1872 Bowles decided upon a separation of the Republican from the printing and publishing operation. Bryan thereupon retired from the newspaper firm and organized his own company to conduct the business he had built up. Shortly afterward Clark W. Bryan and Company purchased the Republican’s evening competitor, the Union, and brought over to its staff some of the Republican’s best men. This was easy to do at the moment because Bowles’s business had fallen off as a result of the offence he had given to many old-line Republicans by refusing to support Grant’s current candidacy for a second term. 2 But the Union’s popularity declined after the campaign was over, and Bryan soon disposed of the paper and moved his printing business to the nearby town of Holyoke. There he prospered moderately, especially after he established his lively trade journal, the Paper World?

Under the date of May 2, 1885, Bryan published, from Holyoke, the first number of Good Housekeeping: A Family Journal Conducted in the Interests of the Higher Life of the Household. It was a thirty-two-page quarto, with stout green cover, to be issued fortnightly at $2.50 a year.

The periodical clearly represented Bryan’s tastes and talents. It was literary in tone; perhaps “subliterary” is the bet-

2 For Bryan’s relations with Bowles and the Republican, see George S. Merriam, The Life and Times of Samuel Bowles (New York, 1885), v. 1, pp. 103-4; v. 2, pp. 201-9.

3 See F. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, v. 3 (Cambridge, Mass., 1938), p. 128.

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Chapter Notes

1. 3 F. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, v. 4 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 243-44.
2. 4 Editor and Publisher, v. 1, June 29, 1901, p. 4.
3. 2 World’s Work was the first of the Doubleday-Page periodicals; Country Life in America and Garden Magazine came a little later. Page was advising Frank Leslie’s Magazine. Also the firm had just taken in hand the American publication of the new Monthly Review, of London. See Publishers’ Weekly, v. 58, Nov. 3, 1900, p. 1234.
4. 3 Julia C. Harris, Life and Letters of Joel Chandler Harris (Boston, 1918), p. 433.
5. 4 Journalist, v. 33, May 23, 1903, p. 73.
6. 5 See F. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, v. 3 (Cambridge, Mass., 1938), pp. 481-90.
7. 6 Everybody’s v. 26, Jan. 1912, p. 56. See also John Adams Thayer, Astir (Boston, 1910), pp. 229-30, 250-51.'
8. 7 Thayer, Astir, p. 254.
9. 1 Title: The Freeman.
10. First issue: March 17, 1920. Last issue: March 5, 1924.
11. Periodicity: Weekly. Semiannual volumes.
12. Publisher: Freeman Corporation, New York, B. W. Huebsch, general manager.
13. Editors: Francis Neilson and Albert Jay Nock. Associate editors: Van Wyck Brooks (1921-24), (Clara) Suzanne La Follette (1921-24), Geroid Tanquary Robinson (1921-24), Walter G. Fuller (1921-22), Harold Kellock (1923-24). Index: Readers’ Guide.
14. 2 Francis Neilson, My Life in Two Worlds (2 vols.; Appleton, Wis., 1953). Parts of this work are valuable for Freeman backgrounds.
15. 3 Francis Neilson, The Story of ‘The Freeman,’ Supplement to the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, v. 6, Oct. 1946, p. 6. Issued separately.
16. 4 See F. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, v. 3 (Cambridge, Mass., 1938), pp. 513-14.
17. 8 Neilson, Story of ‘The Freeman / p. 42.
18. 9 Neilson’s Story of ‘The Freeman’ is mainly an arraignment of Nock, whom the author accuses of ignorance, of claiming credit due Neilson and others, and of exploitation of the Neilson wealth.
19. 10 Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (New York, 1943), Chap.
20. 1 Title: The Golden Book Magazine.
21. First issue: Jan. 1925. Last issue: Sept. 1935.
22. Periodicity: Monthly. Semiannual vols.: Jan.-June and July-Dee., except 13 (Jan.-July 1931), 14 (Aug.-Dee. 1931), and 22 (July-Sept. 1935).
23. Publisher: Review of Reviews Corporation, New York.
24. Editors: Henry Wysham Lanier, 1925-28; Edith O’Dell, 1929-30; Frederica Pisek Field (literary editor, 1929-30), 1930-33; Ralph Rockafellow, managing editor, 1930-31; Mary Letha Elting, managing editor, 1931-35. Editorial Board: William Lyons Phelps, 1925-26; Stuart P. Sherman, 1925-26; J. Cotton Dana, 1925-28; Charles Mills Gayley, 1925-28; Henry Seidel Canby, 1930-33; Hugh Walpole, 1930-33; Albert Shaw, 1930-33; Edwin Mims, 1930-33; Blanche Colton Williams, 1931-33.
25. Indexes: The Golden Book Magazine Author-Index, 1925-34, with Addenda 1935 (mimeographed), comp, by F.P.; Readers’ Guide.
26. 2 Time, v. 4, Dec. 29, 1924, p. 23.