THE PHELPS PUBLISHING CO* Sormwlield. Mass,
York
Cidem#®
GOOD HOUSEKEEPING IN OCTOBER 1908
By this time the cover of the magazine featured bright colors and pictures of children and lovely young women.
128
FEBRUARY 1<M»? SOc
Git Should birth control be available to the unmarried?
How faith helped Senator Charles Percy’s family face tragedy.
ill of woman does a man really want?
The year’s first great romantic suspense novel • by Susan Morrow.
GOOD HOUSEKEEPING IN FEBRUARY 1967
The Seal of Approval, visible here just above the title, does not appear on every cover. Photograph on this cover was taken by Jerome Ducrot.
ter word, for its contributors during its first five or ten years were generally writers without brilliance or originality. Nevertheless it was not an unattractive magazine, comparing favorably enough with other family journals of its times. Usually it gave its first page to a single poem, hand-lettered and decorated; its leading articles were introduced by an illustrative type of factotum initial; and other small woodcuts came to be used in connection with its discussions of fashions, embroidery, and the like. The poems and short stories, though they gave the little magazine much of its special character, were subordinate to the articles of advice on household affairs, cookery, dressmaking, house-designing and furnishings, and such miscellany as puzzles, quiz games (with small prizes for the best answers), query departments, and so on. The general effect was scrapbookish, lower middle class, and “homey.”
Good Housekeeping adopted at the very first a policy that was to characterize it throughout its long life: it kept very close to its readers. It invited contributions from them and set up modest contests in which they were invited to participate. One of the earliest of these offered $250 for the best series of six articles, of 2,000 words each, on “How to Eat, Drink and Sleep as Christians Should.” This was won by Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Daniel Lothrop), author of the best-selling Five Little Peppers stories for juveniles. A contest for articles on the making and eating of bread was won by Helen Campbell, later well known as a writer on the socio-economic position of women and for a time editor of Good Housekeeping’s own department entitled “Woman’s Work and Wages.” In the issue of April 28, 1888, appeared an offer of $25 each for “the best Buffalo Bug Extinguisher, the best Bed Bug Finisher, the best Moth Eradicator, and the best Fly and Flea Exterminator.”
As a result of this reliance on reader-written articles, few distinguished names appeared in the magazine, though the editor took pride in paying, however meagerly, for all contributions. Of course, Margaret Sidney’s name was well known; and so was that of “Marion Harland,” who had been an indefatigable writer for nearly all the home journals for a generation, but who appears to have been abducted from what Bryan
liked to call “the Good Housekeeping family” by the Ladies’ Home Journal after a few years. Rose Terry Cooke was a writer of some reputation when she contributed “Tom and Sally: How They Loved and Lived Life Worth Living” as Good Housekeeping’s first serial in 1886. Maria Parloa, of cooking-school and cookbook fame, edited a department entitled “Gustatory Thought and Suggestions.” Catherine Owen, whose serial of 1885-1886 in narrative form headed “Keeping House Well on $10 a Week” introduced such factual material as cooking recipes, was later added to Houghton Mifflin’s list of authors. E. C. Gardner, editor of the Philadelphia Builder, wrote on “Model Houses for Model Housekeeping” in early numbers of the magazine.
Clark W. Bryan and Company moved its operations back to Springfield in 1887. There it continued to publish Good Housekeeping and the Paper World, and a few years later began Amateur Gardener, a weekly designed to supplement the older monthly, and also two local periodicals. 4
In 1891 Good Housekeeping was changed from fortnightly to monthly publication, at two dollars a year. It now offered about fifty pages of somewhat smaller size and seemed moderately prosperous. It carried a few pages of advertising, most of it consisting of small “mail-order ads”—not a high-class lot, but the kind that supported most home magazines of the period. Circulation was probably less than 25,000. 5
The change to monthly publication had little effect on the character of the magazine. Halftone illustrations began to appear in the mid-nineties. An “Eclectic Department” emphasized the growing tendency to use selections from books, magazines, and newspapers. The many departments, ranging from the older “Cozy Corner” and “Fugitive Verse” to the newer “Domestic Economy” and “Sunday Song and Sermon,” occupied the latter half of the magazine.
From the first, Bryan had written much for his own magazine. He was a prolific poet, and during his thirteen-year term
4 Progressive Springfield, sponsored by the local Chamber of Commerce, and a Bulletin for the City Library, both monthlies.
5 The report given to N. W. Ayer and Co. for their 1891 directory set the figure at 28,500; ten years later it was quoted at 25,000. These were not sworn statements.
as editor he printed hundreds of his own poems. Occasional contributions to other publications were strays to be gathered immediately into his own pages. In the last six months of his editorship of Good Housekeeping, Bryan used no less than thirty-four of his own poems, all signed by his name. In an early issue of 1898, eight of his poems appeared, including “A Family Picture Gallery,” which was given fancy display on the first page, and another set full-width in pica type to occupy five pages, entitled “Nothing New in the Paper.” 6 Bryan sometimes attempted, with rather lamentable effect, the higher flights of poesy; he was at his best in homely verse about homely matters.
Three months after this outburst of song in March 1898, Clark Bryan, plagued by illness and financial worries, took his own life. Though his other publishing ventures were promptly discontinued, a purchaser was found for Good Housekeeping —one John Pettigrew, who soon turned it over to his printer, George D. Chamberlain, who in turn conducted it for less than two years before disposing of it to the Phelps Publishing Company. This firm was headed by E. H. Phelps, a former associate of Bryan’s in the Springfield Republican organization, and had offices in both Springfield and New York; it published four agricultural papers designed to serve the interests of farmers in different regions of the country. 7
James Eaton Tower, who had been editor of one of these papers, was drafted to edit Good Housekeeping under the new management. For a few years he followed much the same lines as those to which readers had become accustomed. But the appearance of the magazine improved, with illustrations in two colors and more of them. Maud Tousey’s drawings were especially attractive. Soon covers were printed in full color. The price per copy was reduced to ten cents, but raised again to fifteen cents in 1905.
By 1908 Good Housekeeping had a sworn circulation of over two hundred thousand and between twenty and thirty pages of advertising of good quality. The rise in circulation
was due to four factors—general prosperity, more aggressive and informed management, the improved appearance of the magazine, and a greater emphasis (beginning about 1904) on fiction by well-known writers.
This was a literary period characterized by great popular interest in fiction; nearly all the best sellers were novels, many of which dealt with domestic and community life. 8 Tower brought to the pages of Good Housekeeping such notable writers of the time as Thomas Nelson Page, Margaret Deland, Mary Stewart Cutting, Joseph C. Lincoln, Mary Heaton Vorse, and Selma Lagerlof. Humor lightened many issues (especially the August “Fun Number”); Ellis Parker Butler, Tom Masson, Marietta Holley, and Wallace Irwin were prominent contributors. Among the poets were Richard Le Gal- lienne and Edwin Markham.
The magazine was by no means all fiction, however. Under the Tower editorship it placed much emphasis on household management, and especially on domestic economies. In the December 1907 number, for example, appeared articles entitled “Living on a Little,” “Inexpensive Christmas Gifts,” and “Not Much, But Something.” Standards of excellence in foods were first given systematic attention in 1905. Domestic service and women’s work outside the home were much discussed.
By 1911 Good Housekeeping was a handsome magazine of 125 pages with a circulation of over 300,000 at $1.25 a year and good advertising patronage. In that year it was purchased by the Hearst interests and added to their group of magazines. Two years later Tower resigned his editorship; his successor was William Frederick Bigelow, who came over from Hearst’s Cosmopolitan and served Good Housekeeping for almost thirty years.
Now a period of major development began. Bigelow followed Tower’s editorial pattern but expanded it in all departments. Good Housekeeping became popular as a fiction magazine; eventually each number contained installments of two or three serials and four or five short stories. Most of the fiction
8 See F.L. Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York, 1947), chap, xxxii and pp. 312-13.
was by “name authors/’ and some by the first-class writers of the time. Somerset Maugham, William J. Locke, James Hilton, and I. R. Wylie were among English authors occasionally represented. Galsworthy’s “The Apple Tree” was a serial of 1917. But the popular American writers were prominent, too. Mary Roberts Rinehart’s “The Confession,” illustrated by James Montgomery Flagg, ran in 1917, and Kathleen Norris serials appeared in 1917-19. In 1923 Gene Stratton-Porter (sic), Coningsby Dawson, and James Oliver Curwood had serials appearing at the same time. All of this fiction was illustrated by the best magazine artists.
The short stories were as notable as the serials. Ellen Glasgow’s remarkable “The Past” appeared in the number for October 1920. Wilbur Daniel Steele and Irvin S. Cobb contributed some of their best work to Good Housekeeping during the Bigelow editorship. But much of the short fiction was lighter in tone—Booth Tarkington’s “Penrod” pieces, George Ade’s “Fables in Slang,” Wallace Irwin’s amusing “Togo” sketches, George Randolph Chester’s “Get Rich Quick Wallingford” stories, and those matchless Ring Lardner tales of the times.
The nonfiction interest also grew in importance. Frances Parkinson Keyes, a talented writer and the wife of Senator Henry W. Keyes, of New Hampshire, wrote a monthly article from Washington headed “Letters from a Senator’s Wife,” later gathered into a popular book. They were chatty epistles dealing much with leading personalities in the capital (and their wives and families), but also occasionally touching upon real issues of government. In 1923 Mrs. Keyes covered the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance meeting in Rome for Good Housekeeping. “The Real Calvin Coolidge,” by his widow “and others” was a serial of 1935. Among the writers of scientific articles were Hugo Miinsterberg, Woods Hutchinson, and Harvey W. Wiley. Dr. Wiley’s contributions were a part of the editorial content that grew out of the magazine’s “Institute”; it became an important feature of the magazine in the 1920’s. “Discoveries” had long been a popular department of household hints. Good Housekeeping’s poets included
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tiny mm of the following smart spring colors may be chosen e, i‘h the assurance that the garment should not. become faded and shabby from run and weather'. Mark, dust, parchment, reindeer. and doc are among 1 lip .coot brown topes which wilt be particularly smart this spring— these arc the tan. -fartrk-- byi'afarf tsifetes Henna, row, tend Titian are ameng the wunti browns. !’•• ..■ reft, daitddisin yolfasy, stud
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Nut imli Uie dye maU-rs, bid tin peal woollen, silk, and cotton JnaniifUptnrct's haw played a very splendid pari, in rafaUng a. trying fatuities!, ami in pimhfaf; America, offward to seek a work! market far its products. .Mr. fhoney. a iwugm/.r-d leader of tin- silk industry, oh.) operates great, mills, states
Progress of American Dye Manufacturing '■liv.os.tr opinion the progress made by the Aitierii-.fin dye industry is in many ways n- ntarlalile, both far the rapidity of its development and far bfatsinujutd at products produced. We arc u.mc.r American dyes to the lWfc*l e«- tenf. posidble. and as .a genend tiling bud them very scUMfacfcry, In many -..apes they arc better than ths- oh I (faWitf d)'it of the same types. Of course there are many dyes which have not yet been produced in this ostuitry. but .fifav that fhc war is-uver, and the dye man - ubtrimera haw the uRfustrieteiJ, opjiortunity of supplying themselves wit it ran materials and mterpietliaws. <u- fed coftCihnt ilml in Ihcraa s. stably near future pnnt.ii. ally all up - trf dyes iVi!!..be satfaacionly produced in this counfy. This is provided w have the sense and faHsigrri: to sgg that this fado-m has ad"
■ ihaie •protei-tinn. which is impiiRUh v not only as a peace.measure but also.as a war ragastiti:, because tin- dye industry and lbs explosive
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It is only fair te> octr even new iuduA!ri< rsgjige that tied; ti ire uvere-faty lor any non (aclurer or retailer to try to evade, the 'respire Idlin' of mereimwiiik: by apologfejng for An i ■•an dvrs Siidi upologies as one finds in u little tags bearfa;,: rite natenient, "f lu acera. of the dye sifvraStes we can Titif pn,uv.e colors 'in fafaritt «t l.c absolute!-, b.st,'' use ■- i epassfetffi. ptopagiinila, lor 'kfapfag orien • market, far (Sennas. dyes to Anu-rfa.. for itf tire- war trade.. Let.twi'h tags 'Jfaippeat.
Other able myrgbaiite whb hsvi don, m to erathe the ifye and textile industries Haas Jirotbers. Mr. Henjrere:, Him etsLbufiia3!i!".il!y of jte.t* spirit which the .war. tigs brought '.the cotiHlry fared, V know' each otlieT beiti.T and Can bfager Ik: crenfadered pro 0’fa did..'' be "l.birisig the past sis ijjonths Amiricre y have Iteen efafabSed m (Afferent mirt- it: world to. an extent never ifafare aUnira The-. splendid" {€V»fa*t«d -"c
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SPRING FASHIONS FOR MILADY, 1919
A page from the March 1919 issue of Good Housekeeping. Three fashion “tendencies” are noted, “cool brown tones” are designated as “particularly smart,” and dyes made in America are praised. The signature is that of Helen Koues.
136 GOOD HOUSEKEEPING
Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Alfred Noyes, Ogden Nash, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
In 1916 Good Housekeeping’s page size was increased to quarto, about that with which it had begun. By the end of Bigelow’s editorship in the mid-thirties, 250-page numbers were common, glowing with color, distinguished by the drawings of such artists as Charles Dana Gibson and Jessie Willcox Smith, and presenting a great variety of attractive and helpful articles and service features, fiction, verse, and entertainment for children (such as Rose O’Neill’s “Kewpies”). Circulation had passed the million mark in the mid-twenties and doubled in the next dozen years in spite of the Great Depression. Its success was no less than phenomenal. For 1938, the magazine showed an operating profit of $2,583,202—more than three times the profit of Hearst’s other eight magazines combined. 9 This was a recession year, in which magazine advertising as a whole dropped off 22 percent from the 1937 figure, and many small periodicals died. 10 At that time Good Housekeeping was probably the most profitable monthly published. Four years later Bigelow retired from the editorship after a long and successful career with the Hearst magazines.
Herbert R. Mayes came to Good Housekeeping from Pictorial Review, which the Hearst organization was about to discontinue. He was well aware of the declining interest in magazine fiction, and he soon began to reduce Good Housekeeping’s traditionally generous offerings in that field. In the early 1940’s two-part stories began to replace long serials; novelettes and condensed novels complete in one issue came along in the next decade; and eventually the fictional fare in each issue commonly consisted of one such longer story plus three short ones. Among contributors about mid-century were Sinclair Lewis, Christopher Morley, William March, Evelyn Waugh, Daphne du Maurier (her terrifying story, “The Birds,” appeared October, 1952), and John P. Marquand.
A tremendous variety continued to characterize the magazine. Hollywood, building and furnishing, babies, books, food, hairdos, fashions; the table of contents in these years ran a
9 Printers’ Ink, v. 186, March 16, 1939, p. 16.
10 1939 Britannica Book of the Year, p. 17.
wide gamut. But with all its diversity, Good Housekeeping remained definitely a home magazine; world affairs, politics, economics, and social problems were generally put aside except as they directly affected the home. Nor were gardening topics, horticulture, landscaping, and the like given much attention.
Although the extraordinary offering of popular fiction during Bigelow’s editorship had been one of the reasons for the ascending spiral of Good Housekeeping’s prosperity, that factor had been supplemented not only by the home service feature articles in the magazine but by the Good Housekeeping Institute and Bureau of Foods, with their Seal of Approval. This operation was integrated with both the editorial and advertising departments of the magazine.
Early in its second year, Good Housekeeping entered the fight against misrepresentation of products with an editorial entitled “Guard Against Adulteration.” 11 This was twenty years before the enactment of the National Food and Drug Act of 1906. The magazine continued its testimony against abuses in the sale of foods, but throughout Bryan’s ownership its own advertising pages were by no means free from fault, especially in the fields of proprietary medicines and cosmetics. When Phelps took over, however, a new era began.
In 1900 Good Housekeeping set up its own Experiment Station to test various methods and practices to be recommended to housewives in the magazine. This was only a beginning, for it soon became apparent that reliable materials and equipment were necessary to good practice; and in 1902 the Station began testing such products, accepting advertising only for those that won its approval, and printing in each issue “An Inflexible Contract Between the Publisher and Each Subscriber” that included a money-back “guarantee” of the reliability of every advertisement printed in Good Housekeeping} 2
The Experiment Station was conducted for several years by the editorial staff; but in 1909 Richard H. Waldo, then
11 Good, Housekeeping, v. 3, Sept. 18, 1886, p. 250.
12 The early development of the Station and the Institute is described in Good Housekeeping’s 50th anniversary number, v. 100, May 1935, p. 8.
publisher of the magazine, set up the Good Housekeeping Institute on a laboratory basis under the direction of Helen Louise Johnson. Three years later the Institute gained prestige by adding to its staff Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, who, as chief chemist of the United States Department of Agriculture for thirty years, had become famous as a leader of the crusade against food adulteration that had resulted in the Food and Drug Act of 1906. In the Institute, Wiley conducted his own Bureau of Foods, Sanitation and Health, as well as serving as a contributing editor of the magazine. His “Question Box” was a popular department for many years. He died in 1930 and was succeeded in the bureau by Dr. Walter H. Eddy. For a time in the 1940’s the Bureau was represented in the magazine only by a “Question Box”; but Albert A. Schaal made it more prominent during the years 1947-1963, and by the time of his retirement it had a staff of nine workers. 13
Beginning with a “Beauty Clinic” in 1932, other departments were added to the Institute from year to year—a “Needlework Room,” a “Baby’s Center,” and departments of “Engineering,” “Foods and Cookery,” “Appliances and Home Care,” and “Special Projects.” Such older departments of the magazine as those devoted to fashions, patterns, and “The Decorating Studio and Building Forum” were also related to Good Housekeeping Institute. Some of these divisions— notably the Bureau—functioned as testing laboratories for advertised products; others, though experimental in spirit, were designed mainly to produce editorial copy. But all had the double purpose of testing products and processes and filling the magazine with helpful information for the consumer.
From the testing by the Experiment Station, “Our Roll of Honor for Pure Food Products” developed naturally in 1905, and products listed therein were distinguished in the advertising pages by a five-pointed star carrying the words, “Pure Food Assurance —Good Housekeeping ” It was in 1909, when
13 See “Who, What, Why, and Wonderful: The Good Housekeeping Institute,” in the magazine’s 75th anniversary number, v. 150, May 1960, pp. 116— 24.
the Institute was set up, that the first seal, designating “examined apparatus and readily available products,” was inaugurated; it was designed as an ellipse enclosing the words, “Tested and Approved by the Good Housekeeping Institute Conducted by Good Housekeeping Magazine.”
This Seal of Approval eventually became the object of an acrimonious controversy having two more or less related motivations. When Rexford G. Tugwell became Assistant Secretary of Agriculture in 1933, he brought to his new job a strong conviction against what he considered the social and economic abuses of advertising. 14 Hoping to capitalize upon a popular sentiment already initiated by attacks on this industry in current books and periodicals, 15 and by such governmental agencies as the Consumer Services division of the Office of Price Administration (itself a bureau of the National Industrial Recovery Administration), Tugwell set out to push through Congress a new food and drug law that was to embody the principle of grade labeling. When the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act of 1938 was at last made law, it did not include the grade-labeling provision, which many considered as opening the door to arbitrary decisions by government agencies and invading the consumer’s right to free choice.
The Hearst Corporation fought arbitrary grade labeling with energy and even virulence. It was, of course, well aware that the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval would be superseded by government grading. But its fight against the New Deal consumer agencies did not end with the passage of the act in 1938. Indeed, it published an eight-page tabloid monthly called Consumers Injormation Service (1936-1942), “Sponsored by the Good Housekeeping Club Service,” as a propaganda organ attacking those agencies. “The slow strangulation of American industry with regulations and limitations,”
14 See Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming of the New Deal, v. 2 of The Age of Roosevelt (Boston, 1959), pp. 354-61, for a sympathetic account of Tugwell’s crusade against current advertising practices.
15 Stuart Chase and F. J. Schlink, Your Money’s Worth (New York, 1927); F. J. Schlink and Arthur Kallet, 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs (New York, 1923); Consumers’ Research Bulletin (“confidential” 1929-32; N.S. 1934-current) ; Consumers’ Union Reports (1936-current; title since 1943, Consumer Reports).
this periodical averred, “is not the system of free enterprise known to this country/’ 16
This feud probably furnished an important motivation for the action of the Federal Trade Commission against Good Housekeeping and its Seal of Approval. The FTC had been given certain powers to control advertising that appeared to violate the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act of 1938 by the Wheeler-Lea Act of the same year; and in 1939 it filed a complaint charging Good Housekeeping with “misleading and deceptive acts and practices in the issuance of guarantys, seals of approval, and the publication in its advertising pages of grossly exaggerated and false claims.” General Manager Berlin countered with a flat refusal to sign the cease-and-desist stipulation submitted by the FTC, declaring that “In no single case . . . was the Commission able to show that Good Housekeeping had failed to carry out its guaranty, which has been in existence for over 30 years. . . .” 17
Hearings on this complaint continued over nearly two years, in New York, Chicago, and Washington. Suspicion that envy of competitors directed against the home magazine that had surpassed all others in prosperity during the depression was a second motivation for the FTC complaint was aroused by the fact that among the leading witnesses to testify that the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval constituted unfair competition were Publisher Waiter D. Fuller, of the Ladies’ Home Journal and Editor Otis Wiese, of McCall’s.
After the long series of hearings, which occasionally developed displays of ill temper on both sides, the commission issued an order on May 23, 1941, directing Good Housekeeping to cease and desist from the use of seals declaring that its advertised products had been “tested and approved.” It declared that “while tests were made by . . . Good Housekeeping magazine, such tests were generally not sufficient to assure the fulfillment of the claims made for such products.” It also found that the magazine was publishing advertising containing deceptive statements about “the therapeutic value of medicinal preparations” as well as “the effectiveness of cosmetic
16 Consumers Information Service, v. 4, Dec. 1941, p. 2.
17 Time, v. 34, Aug. 28, 1939, p. 44.
preparations” and the qualities of wearing apparel, food, and commercial services. Specific advertised products were named. 18
The business of Good Housekeeping appears to have been little affected by these hearings. Circulation continued its steady advance, reaching 2,500,000 in 1943 and passing 3,500,- 000 in the mid-fifties. In the first half of 1955 the magazine’s gross advertising passed all its previous records at $8,000,000. Four years later a similar period showed over $11,000,000. 19
But the seal was changed following the commission’s order; the words “tested and approved” were deleted, and the guarantee read: “Replacement or Refund of Money Guaranteed by Good Housekeeping if Not as Advertised Therein.” Unquestionably the popular image of the Seal of Approval remained the same, however. In 1962 its guarantee was further altered: “If Product or Performance Defective, Good Housekeeping Guarantees Replacement or Refund to Consumer.” It will be noted that this last guarantee makes no reference to advertising claims.
The relation of the seal to Good Housekeeping advertising has varied somewhat throughout its history. Immediately after the FTC order, the magazine made the editorial statement: “As a matter of fact of all the products that have received the Seal of Approval less than 30 percent have ever been advertised in Good Housekeeping ” 20 Thereafter, however, the terms for use of the seal came to require some advertising in the magazine. Eventually the formal contract authorizing a distributor to use the seal granted such license only in connection with submission of advertising copy for the magazine and after u Good Housekeeping . . . has examined the product (s) and/or service(s) listed . . . and has examined the copy submitted for publication in the Magazine, and has satisfied itself that the product is a good product and that the advertising copy is acceptable. . . .” This contract covered a
18 Editor & Publisher, v. 72, Nov. 18, 1939, p. 7. Curiously enough, these products were also being advertised in the Ladies’ Home Journal and McCall’s at the same time.
19 Magazine Industry Newsletter, April 30, 1955 and May 23, 1959.
20 Good Housekeeping, v. 113, July 1941, p. 6.
period of one year only, provided for re-examination in case of changes in the product, and authorized inspection of factory or product at any time during the term of the license. 21
Once licensed, the advertiser might use the seal by affixing it to the product, or in any of its other advertising, including that appearing on the television screen or on billboards. Good Housekeeping outranked all other magazines in “advertiser tie- in linage”—that is, the amount of advertising in other media making some reference to the advertising of the product in a magazine. 22 The seal was not intended, however, to supplant the reputation and prestige of the product itself, its name, its label, or its own symbols. Indeed, by the early 1960’s less than a third of the advertisements appearing in Good Housekeeping displayed the magazine’s seal, 23 and it rarely appeared in the larger “ads” of the better known products. Why should it? On page six of every issue appeared a statement of approval covering all the advertising in the magazine, with specific exception of those for insurance, real estate, automobiles and the kind of promotion described as “institutional.” “We satisfy ourselves,” runs this statement, “that products and services advertised in Good Housekeeping are good ones, and that the advertising claims made for them in our magazine are truthful.” Certain “points” are then specifically noted in the practical application of the Good Housekeeping guarantee, such as the impossibility of measuring taste, the necessity of proper installation of equipment, and so on.
Other magazines have followed Good Housekeeping’s lead in the matter of emblems of approval; by the 1960’s Parents’ Magazine, McCall’s, and Better Homes and Gardens had joined the parade of seals.
Meantime Good Housekeeping continued to prosper, al-
21 “Agreement Governing the Use of the Good Housekeeping Consumers’ Guaranty by the Advertiser” (available on application). The author is indebted to Miss Susan Crumbaker for access to her collection of materials related to the backgrounds and present operation of Good Housekeeping, made in connection with a study performed at Syracuse University.
22 Standard Rate and Data Service, Consumer Magazine Section, March 27, 1963, p. 339.
23 Specifically, in the issue for Nov. 1963, 61 of the 209 advertisements displayed the seal, or 29 percent. The Parents’ Magazine seal was displayed, along with that of Good Housekeeping, in 11.
though editors changed. Wade H. Nichols, Jr., coming from the editorship of Redbook, succeeded Mayes in 1959. Good Housekeeping passed the five million mark in circulation in 1962. It was then carrying about 125 pages of advertising in each issue, at approximately $20,000 for a black-and-white page and $25,000 for one in full color. It provided split-run printings covering eight regions for its advertisers.
Editorially, the magazine, having swung away from its former heavy emphasis on fiction, had become mainly a household service journal. Leading topics were family life and children, medical matters, cookery and foods, fashions and beauty hints, house building and landscaping, furnishings and decorations, appliances, budgeting, diet. Many of the articles came directly from the Good Housekeeping Institute. In its eightieth year, it was an attractive, colorful magazine of three hundred pages or more, full of interest and practical help for the moderate-income family.*
* This historical sketch was written in the early 1960’s. Good Housekeeping’s circulation was over 5,500,000 in 1966.
“RISKY” COVER OF BROADWAY MAGAZINE, 1899
The bathing girls illustrate this magazine’s “shock-’em-and-sell-’em” technique. Theodore Dreiser became editor seven years later.
144
11
HAMPTON’S BROADWAY MAGAZINE 1
T WO young New Yorkers, George A. Sherin and Roland Burke Hennessy, founded the Broadway Magazine in April 1898. Sherin put up most of the money required and became general manager. Hennessy put up his experience on the Standard, a Saturday weekly devoted chiefly to the theater, and on the Metropolitan Magazine in its initial experiments with sex sensationalism. He became editor of the new magazine.
The Broadway began as a ten-cent offering of text and illustration of the kind then called by its devotees “risky.” Pictures of burlesque queens in tights and decolletage, art reproductions emphasizing the nude female figure, peeks at bathing girls in bloomers, and representations of “living picture” posing were prominent in the copious illustration. For text, the “Red Soubrette” told “saucy truths in a saucy way”; and other gossip departments combined to make the Broadway “absolutely the most unique, beautiful and satisfying monthly,” according to one of its blatant and badly worded boasts.
1 Titles: (1) Broadway Magazine, April 1898—Nov. 1907; (2) The New Broadway Magazine, Dec. 1907—Sept. 1908; (3) Hampton’s Broadway Magazine, Oct. 1908—Jan. 1909; (4) Hampton’s Magazine: The New Broadway, Feb.-April 1909; (5) Hampton’s Magazine, May 1909—Sept. 1911; (6) Hamp- ton-Columbian Magazine, Oct. 1911—Jan. 1912; (7) The Hampton Magazine, Feb.-May 1912.
First issue: April 1898. Last issue: May 1912.
Periodicity: Monthly. Vols. 1-19, semiannual vols., April 1898—March 1908; 20, April-June 1908; 20-26, regular semiannual vols., July 1908—June 1911; 27, July 1911—Jan. 1912; 28, nos. 1-4, Feb.-May 1912
Publishers: Broadway Publishing Company (George A. Sherin, general manager) 1898-1903; Broadway Magazine Company (C. H. Young, publisher) 1904-5; Broadway Magazine, Inc. (Benjamin Bowles Hampton, owner, 1906- 11) 1905-11; Columbian-Sterling Magazine Company (Frank Orff, pres.) 1911— 12. All New York.
Editors: Roland Burke Hennessy, 1898-1903; Courtland H. Young, 1904; Charles Edward Barns, 1904; Theodore Dreiser, 1906-7; B. B. Hampton, 1907- 11; W. W. Young, 1911-12.
Indexes: Bulletin of Bibliography Subject-Index, 1906-7; Readers’ Guide, 1910-12.
Broadway doubtless shocked many who found it on the newsstands in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Today, however, the abundantly clothed bathing beauties and the gals in tights seem funny rather than shocking; and the first few volumes of the Broadway Magazine, with their shock- ’em-and-sell-’em technique, are amusing in a somewhat tawdry fashion.
By 1902 there were more articles, mostly about the stage and New York life. For a while Sherin published also the Broadway Weekly and a Broadway Quarterly, both containing pictures of stage beauties and notes on the New York theater, and thriftily using over and over some of the Broadway Publishing Company’s plates.
In 1904, Courtland H. Young, who had been publishing Young’s Magazine, which exploited “snappy stories,” gained control of Broadway. He changed the policy of the magazine somewhat. Though it still emphasized the stage and the nude in art, and though it printed much about New York society, it now abandoned burlesque queens and “smart” gossip in favor of feature articles and what it called “storiettes”—short short stories. But the magazine, which had for a few years enjoyed a circulation of about one hundred thousand, went down rather than up, and its advertising was not impressive in either quantity or quality. Young sold the Broadway in 1905 to a company headed by Thomas H. McKee. It was early the next year that Theodore Dreiser wrote to the Broadway, offering to take over as editor at forty dollars a week and suggesting a nine-point editorial program embodying much of the former pattern, but with careful supervision of the art work “as to merit and purity”, and addition of such features as “What Americans Are Thinking,” occasional interviews with the famous, articles on the “Big Questions”—socialism, morality, spiritualism—and so on. His offer was accepted immediately. 2 Dreiser had been working at editorial jobs in the magazine field for a decade, and came to the Broadway from Smith’s,
2 Dreiser correspondence, University of Pennsylvania Library. Letter of application dated April 10, 1906. Letter from C. L. Litchfield, business manager, offering the job, dated April 18, 1906. Dreiser was warned that the job might not last long on account of the uncertainty caused by a probable sale of the magazine.
another specialist in female pulchritude. He was not yet famous as a novelist, though Sister Carrie had been published (if publication it could be called) six years earlier.
Dreiser’s position was uncertain from the first, since the sale of the magazine was again being considered. The purchaser, later that year, was Benjamin B. Hampton, an advertising man. Hampton had been an Illinois newspaper publisher before he had come to New York at twenty-five to make his fortune in the advertising agency business. In six years he had accumulated some $200,000. 3 He bought the Broadway in 1906 at a low price as an investment, intending to dispose of it within a year; but he soon fell in love with the whole business of magazine editing and publishing and decided to put his entire fortune into promoting this venture. 4 Hampton was by nature a plunger, intolerant of advice, versatile, brilliant. 5
He kept Dreiser on as editor. “The minute I set eyes on him,” said Hampton many years later, “I figured the man was a genius. I said to myself, ‘Jesus, here’s a wow!’” 6 Dreiser was given the commission to do much more than he had been doing on Smith’s and more than anyone had hitherto done on the Broadway. Dreiser later wrote that he took “an anemic ‘white-light’ monthly” and attempted “to recast it into a national or international metropolitan picture.” 7 The price was raised to fifteen cents; and the literary content, the editing, the illustration and layout, and the printing were all improved.
The roll of the new magazine’s authors now became impressive. Carl Van Vechten, Edgar Saltus, James L. Ford, Eugene Wood, and Harris Merton Lyon were constant contributors,
and members of a small group which Dreiser rallied about the magazine. In the narrative which Dreiser later wrote about Lyon under the title u De Maupassant, Jr.” in his Twelve Men, he told with gusto of bringing this group together. But he wrote also about his resentment against the interference of the owner in editorial matters. Hampton seemed to him “a small, energetic, vibrant and colorful soul, all egotism and middle- class conviction as to the need of ‘push,’ ambition, ‘closeness to life,’ ‘punch,’ and what not else . . . Hampton was accustomed to enter and force a conversation here and there, anxious of course to gather the full import of all these various energies and enthusiasms. One of the things which Lyon most resented in him at the time was his air of supreme material well-being, his obvious attempt and wish not to convey it, his carefully cut clothes, his car, his numerous assistants and secretaries following him here and there. . . .” 8 Dreiser and Hampton were incompatible, 9 and it is remarkable that they managed to work together for more than a year.
In 1907 Hampton took over the editorship himself, and soon changed the name to Hampton’s Broadway Magazine. The table of contents now bristled with great names. There were such serials as Rex Beach’s The Silver Horde (1910) and Harold MacGrath’s Carpet from Bagdad, stories by Joseph Conrad, O. Henry, Jack London, F. Hopkinson Smith, Emerson Hough, Montague Glass, George Randolph Chester, and James Hopper; as well as the “Luther Trant” detective stories by Edwin Balmer and William B. MacHarg, and a department of “short shorts.” Edmond Rostand’s drama Chantecler, in Gertrude Hall’s translation, was printed serially in the summer of 1910. In nonfiction, the offerings were quite as distinguished. Admiral Robley D. Evans’ history of the American Navy (1908), Robert E. Peary’s story of his discovery of the North Pole for which the author was said to have received $50,000 (1910), 10 and “Dr. Cook’s Own Story” (1911) were
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outstanding. A theater department and another called “Personalities” lent attraction to the magazine.
But the most notable articles published by Hampton’s were certain series on public abuses which form a kind of postscript to the muckraking movement. Herbert N. Casson, writing on the railroads in the summer of 1908, was sympathetic with their problems; it was not until November that he adopted the tone of the muckraker in “The Wall Street Nuisance.” John L. Mathews discussed the “power trust” and water resources in three articles in the summer of 1909, and later he contributed other articles on the preservation of natural resources for the public benefit. Judson C. Welliver wrote on the sugar trust in 1910. Eugene P. Lyle, Jr., discussed “The Guggenheims and the Smelter Trust” in the same year. Hampton himself wrote about Alaskan resources and the attempt to “steal” them. There were many other articles attacking “entrenched wealth” and “reactionary” statesmen.
Rheta Childe Dorr had a field all her own; she wrote about suffrage, the wrecking of the home by the employment of wives and mothers, “The Prodigal Daughter,” public health and education, protective legislation for working girls. Though these articles fitted well with the expose tone of the magazine, they were not precisely muckraking forays, but challenging discussions of important social problems, bolstered with facts.
Chief of the magazine’s band of writers on economic questions was Charles Edward Russell, who attacked millionaires and capitalists right and left, wielding his muckrake like a claymore. An early piece was the bitingly satirical “Rational Plan for an American Peerage” (July 1908), in which Russell proposed his scheme to put American millionaires in a good trading position when they tried to marry their daughters to foreign noblemen. Some of his studies of socialistic movements abroad were published in Hampton’s. But perhaps the strongest of his contributions were the series attacking the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1910, and the one which later arraigned the New Haven Railway.
Newspaper critics of Hampton’s pointed out that it was now the only muckraking magazine left in the field. To which Hampton replied:
Make no mistake. “Muck-raking” has not gone out of date. It really is just beginning to find itself, to make itself efficient ... we know a great deal more about the temper of the American people than the politicians do. . . . For a while the “muck-raking” was sensational without accomplishing much good. . . . Nowadays, w'e know how to get results. 11
The “efficiency” of Hampton’s in obtaining reforms may be questioned, but it probably had a part in driving Secretary of Interior Ballinger out of office, and perhaps it helped to loose the hold of the Southern Pacific on California government and to promote other reformatory movements. 12 Many of its exposure articles were very much in the public interest.
But Ben Hampton had trouble financing the expansion of his magazine. He had owned it only a few months when he initiated a campaign to raise funds by selling stock to its readers, beginning with an issue of $100,000. In this he followed the pattern of Everybody’s development, just as he had followed that magazine’s formula of building circulation by sensational muckraking, and indeed its general policy as to content. In the spring of 1908, Hampton’s was advertising that (( Everybody’s, the Ladies’ Home Journal, and others represent wonderful money-making investments. Our offer of Broadway Magazine stock represents the same opportunity to you. ... If you have fifty dollars, a hundred, or a thousand that you would like to invest where it will be safe, and earn unusually large dividends, you ought to send for the booklet immediately.”
The first $100,000 came easily; but it also went easily, and Hampton thereupon sold additional stock until a total of about $700,000 worth was disposed of and Hampton’s had some 4,500 reader-stockholders. 13
With money to spend in newspaper advertising, with an increase to 140 pages in size, with a marked advance in quality of content, and with a series of sensational exposes of big business and corrupt politics, Hampton’s Magazine was able to increase rapidly in circulation. In 1908 it reached 125,000,
11 Hampton’s, v. 24, June 1910, p. 876.
12 C. C. Regier, The Era of the Muckrakers (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1932), pp. 203-4; also “Editorial Notes” in Hampton’s, passim.
13 French, “Damnation of Magazines,” p. 8.
the next year it doubled that, and by 1910 it touched its highest point at about 450,000. Suddenly it had plenty of advertising, and was publishing fat, prosperous-looking numbers each month.
But it was never stabilized. Hampton’s shares fared badly on the stock exchange, thus stopping further sales of stock, and when the magazine “needed a few thousand dollars of capital to carry us through the summer,” it could not raise the money either through stock sales or from banks. Hampton himself said the banks would lend nothing because “Hampton’s fearless, aggressive editorial policy had offended the powers of Wall Street. . . 14 Editorial policy may have
had something to do with it; undoubtedly the financial policy of Ben Hampton was scarcely reassuring. At any rate, when he found himself unable to borrow, at the end of his string in the stockselling game, facing a breakdown in health, Hampton was forced to give up. He took a much needed rest, and commissioned his brother, Jesse D. Hampton, to sell the magazine.
This was not easy to do, but a buyer was found in June 1911. He was Frank Orff, a St. Louis publisher who was at the time conducting four periodicals. 15 Orff announced that
14 Hampton’s, v. 27, Aug. 1911, p. 258.
15 French, “Damnation of Magazines,” p. 9. But before the sale to Orff, Hampton had made some kind of deal with the International Correspondence School, of Scranton, Pa., to save himself from bankruptcy. Later this deal got into the courts, but Hampton never recovered anything. As he later wrote, “Of course, the property in the meantime had been ruined.” See interesting and picturesque (but often vague) statement made by Hampton about the latter months of his ownership in Upton Sinclair’s The Brass Check, rev. ed. (New York, 1936), pp. 230-33. In Sinclair’s ranting, The Pro jits of Religion (Pasadena, Calif., 1918), pp. 181-83, the author alleges that the New Haven Railroad wrecked the magazine in retaliation for the articles about it by Russell. Says Sinclair (p. 181): “. . . the story of its [ Hampton's ] wrecking by the New Haven criminals will some day serve in school text-books as the classic illustration of that financial piracy which brought on the American social revolution.” See also, Russell’s “The Magazine Soft Pedal,” Pearson’s, v. 31, Feb. 1914, pp. 179-89.
Orff’s other periodicals were the American Woman’s Review, formerly Chaperone (see F. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, v. 4 [Cambridge, Mass., 1957], p. 361), the Home, Orff’s Farm Review (1900-12), the Sterling Magazine (1909-11), and the Columbian Magazine (1909-11). They were all published in St. Louis except the last named, which was a New York general literary magazine edited by the Englishman Henry Mann.
Hampton would remain as “consulting editor” of all his publications; but this did not work out, and William W. Young was soon installed as editor of Hampton’s. Mayor Tom L. Johnson’s My Nine Years’ War With Privilege was a 1911 serial. Russell, who had been Socialist candidate for governor of New York in 1910, was still a valued contributor, and his article on “Socialism: Just Where It Stands Today” (January 1912) was a significant document. Robert W. Chambers had some short stories, and Mrs. Dorr continued her excellent studies. Interest was continued in two fields much cultivated by Hampton’s —psychic research and the progress of aviation.
Orff combined Hampton’s and his other New York magazine, the Columbian , in October 1911, under the name of Hampton-Columbian Magazine. He had purchased the Win- throp Press, a New York printing plant, from which the merged magazine was issued; and he had made other combinations and expansions in connection with his St. Louis ventures. 16 Orff’s operating capital had come from the sale of stock to readers on the Everybody’s-Hampton’s plan, and his company had 24,000 stockholders when it bought Hampton’s . 17 But over-expansion brought increasing need for capital; and the stockholders, hungry for dividends, received only appeals for more activity in selling subscriptions and more and bigger investment of savings. The collapse came at the end of 1911. The Hampton Magazine , as it was now renamed, was then sold to a committee of preferred stockholders for about $10,000. 18 Orff and some other officers of his company were later indicted for using the mails to defraud, by misrepresenting the financial condition of the Columbia-Stirling Company and the circulation of the magazines in selling stock. After a trial in June 1913, they were acquitted. 19
The Hampton Magazine was an attractive quarto of eighty pages, of which less than twenty were filled with advertising. It lasted only four months. Its editorials were progressive, but
16 Hampton-Columbian, v. 27, Oct. 1911, pp. 557-64.
17 Hampton’s, v. 27, Aug. 1911, p. 268.
18 French, “Damnation of Magazines,” p. 9.
19 New York Times, June 7, 1913,-p. 6, col. 2; June 10, 1913, p. 7, col. 4; June 29, 1913, sec. 2, p. 6, col. 1; July 1, 1913, p. 7, col. 7.
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there was no more muckraking. Such leftist observers as Sinclair and Russell agreed that the magazine was forced by “Wall Street” to use the “soft pedal” at the time Ben Hampton was squeezed out. As has been noted, however, Russell’s impassioned defense of Socialism appeared as late as January 1912. At this distance it would seem that neither Hampton nor Orff was a convinced Socialist or even a sincere economic reformer. They seem to have been unsuccessful entrepreneurs who skated frantically over thin ice toward their private visions of wealth and power.