William Carlos Williams
Flying, by R* M. MeAlmon
543 Cass Street. Chicago
s 2 .oo per Year Single Numbers 20 *
CONTROVERSIAL POETRY WITHIN A DIGNIFIED COVER
Harriet Monroe, always interested in new movements, did not hesitate to publish Ezra Pound’s poetry—for example, in this issue of March 1919. Thirty years later, in 1949, Poetry was embroiled in a hot dispute over the award to Pound of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry.
232
DENISE LEVERTOV A Vision JOHN LOGAN Carmel : Point Lobos TOM CLARK Three Poems
■
JOHN WOODS Trying To Keep Out of Trouble THOMAS McGRATH All the Dead Soldiers EDWARD DORN The Sundering U.P. Tracks
BARRY SPACKS . ETTA BLUM . JAMES L. WEIL JOHN INGWERSEN . LOUISE GLUCK • FRANK SAMPERI
LAURENCE LIEBERMAN Poetry Chronicle HAYDEN CARRUTH Booth and Wagoner DONALD W. BAKER Five Poets ROBERT SWARD Landscape and Language PHILIP LEGLER Three Poets
MODERN VERSION OF PEGASUS
Pegasus, the winged horse of the Muses, has always been a distinctive symbol on the cover of Poetry. It has appeared in several forms, none handsomer than this one in March 1967, outlined in white on a bright blue cover.
can only hope that the Bollingen Prize, with its official connotation, will not have an even slightly chastening effect. An uncan- tankerous Pound is unthinkable.” 17
In the June 1949 issue of Poetry —in which he was first named as editor—Hayden Carruth published a signed editorial offering a reasoned and reasonable defense of the award, in which he summarized the opposing views and distinguished between “the poem as object” and “the poem as communication.” He wrote: “I think that the judges were honoring the whole work of the poet whom nearly all of us would have to nominate as the single living person who has done the most to explore and develop the technical capacities of poetry in English.” He held, however, that “the terms of the award must be made more definite.” 18
In the same month, the Saturday Review of Literature, in the issue for June 11, published a six-column editorial signed by Norman Cousins, editor, and Harrison Smith, president, vigorously denouncing the award to Pound and taking full responsibility for two articles on the matter by Robert Hillyer, president of the Poetry Society of America. 19 The first of these articles appeared in the same number, under the title: “Treason’s Strange Fruit: The Case of Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Award.” 20 It is a violent attack on Pound, the Fellows of the Library of Congress who made the award, and the “new poetry” in general. In his second article, titled “Poetry’s New Priesthood,” Hillyer extended his attack to Poetry specifically:
“Poetry: A Magazine of Verse” seems to be falling into the hands of the new aesthetes. In their April number the editors comment on what a hard time poor Ezra Pound must have had from lack of appreciation and add that “nothing is more understandable than that he should have adopted a rather cross attitude towards America.” Some day someone is going to adopt a rather cross attitude towards the editors of Poetry. Maybe America. I will ask the reader to consider the childish frivolousness of such comment on the Bollingen Award at a time when the clouds of the New Fascism and the new aestheticism have perceptibly met in that award . 21
17 Poetry, v. 74, April 1949, p. 59.
18 Ibid., June 1949, pp. 154-56.
19 Saturday Review of Literature, v. 32, June 11, 1949, pp. 20-21.
20 Ibid., pp. 9-11.
21 Ibid., June 18, 1949, p. 8.
Poetry’s rebuttal appeared first in a brief letter in the Saturday Review of Literature, almost lost among the seven columns of “Letters to the Editor” commenting on Hillyer’s first article:
Sir: “Treason’s Strange Fruit” is undoubtedly a violence to good manners; it is also, I believe, an evil and dangerous corruption to the critical office. As an essay in unreason, it is a disservice to American letters and a demagogic threat to a number of innocent people.
Hayden Carruth Editor, Poetry 22
Then in his August number of Poetry, Carruth published “An Editorial: The Anti-Poet All Told,” beginning:
The two recent essays concerning the award of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry to Ezra Pound, written by Robert Hillyer and published in The Saturday Review of Literature, contain so many errors, so many grievous misjudgments that I cannot unriddle them all in an editorial as condensed as this must be.”
And he ended:
Whatever is the outcome of the Ezra Pound case, and certainly it is difficult to defend him on any but the narrow grounds of service to his craft, the enemies of poetry must not be allowed to damage the process of our art through untoward wrath . 23
To the editorial Carruth appended “A Few Notes on the Recent Essays of Mr. Robert Hillyer,” 24 devoted to identification and correction of some of the “errors” and “blurring of judgment” he had mentioned, including three mistakes in a two-line quotation from Pound.
Echoes of this controversy—perhaps the most colorful in Poetry’s generally rather stormy history—continued to appear.]*
22 Ibid., July 2, 1949, p. 25.
23 Poetry, v. 74, Aug. 1949, pp. 274, 280.
24 Ibid., v. 74, Aug. 1949, pp. 283-85. In November 1949, Carruth published a separate pamphlet of eighty pages containing “A Statement of the Committee of the Fellows of the Library of Congress,” reprinting his article “The Anti- Poet All Told” and articles from the New Republic, New York Times, and the Hudson Review, and adding previously unpublished letters from prominent writers.
* Here ends the insertion by John T. Frederick.
A later editor, Karl Shapiro, an ardent admirer of the Cantos, contended in 1952 that Pound’s poetry was inseparable from the crimes of which he was accused: “Whether Pound committed treason and advocated racism will remain a question vital to his poetry.” 25 For good or ill, the Pound record, with all its complexities, remains an important part of Poetry’s early history.
With its vers libre, imagism, and primitive singing, Poetry in its first few years made itself vulnerable to the attacks of all the conservatives. Chief among these was the Dial , 26 Chicago’s own semimonthly literary review. “One must regret,” wrote Wallace Rice in that periodical, “that Poetry is being turned into a thing for laughter”; and he claimed that “the practical identification of Poetry and Mr. Pound . . . involves not only a lowering of standards, but a defense of the thesis . . . that poor prose must be good poetry.” 27 Poetry made reply, and the running controversy enlivened the pages of both magazines for a time.
It was Sandburg’s group of Chicago poems, the first one beginning, “Hog butcher for the world,” that really set the Dial spinning on its ear. Poetry was now described as “a futile little periodical,” and the poems as “nothing less than an impudent affront to the poetry-loving public.” The critic goes on: “The typographical arrangement of this jargon creates a suspicipn that it is intended to be taken as some form of poetry. ... It is not even doggerel.” 28 Other critics contributed to the merry war.
But the innovators did not have it all their own way in Poetry . On two successive pages in the issue for August 1913 appeared two of the most anthologized poems that the magazine ever printed—Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” and Helen Hoyt’s “Ellis Park.” And such poets as Margaret Widdemer, Babette Deutsch, Grace Hazard Conkling, Clement Wood, William Rose Benet, Elinor Wylie, and Louise Bogan were often in its
25 Poetry, v. 80, June 1952, p. 183.
26 See F. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, v. 3 (Cambridge, Mass., 1938), pp. 539-43.
27 Dial, v. 54, May 1, 1913, p. 370.
28 Ibid., v. 56, March 16, 1914, pp. 231-32.
POETRY 237
pages. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Figs From Thistles” appeared in June 1918.
How many of the poets represented in the half-century of this magazine’s publication should be mentioned in a brief history such as this? It seems a pity to neglect any of them, but most poets’ tapers are blown out early, of course. Anyone running down the average table of contents, even if he is fairly well read in the books and magazines of the times, will recognize little more than half the names.
Wallace Stevens’ stage-poem “Carlos Among the Candles” was printed in December 1917, following by a few months “Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise” (July 1916). Partly because of his preoccupation with the nature of art, Stevens exerted for many years a strong influence on other contributors to Poetry. Hart Crane’s poems appeared until his career was cut short by his death in 1932. Robinson Jeffers long continued to be a valued but sombre contributor. Countee Cullen’s lyric gift and Langston Hughes’ more original and playful muse were well represented in the twenties. In that decade poems by Archibald MacLeish, Lew Sarett, and Marya Zaturenska also appeared. William Carlos Williams was an important contributor from the first, turning from imagism to a warm interest in common life. Dr. Williams and Marianne Moore, another important contributor, were sometimes styled “objectivists.”
Poetry’s scope was international. A long list of English poets could be compiled from its tables of contents; an “English Number” edited by W. H. Auden and Michael Roberts was published in January 1937. Twice Poetry has devoted entire issues to young French poets (October 1945, September 1952). Tagore has been mentioned. There was a special Chinese number in April 1935. “Of course Poetry from its beginning has emphasized the oriental influence, . . .” wrote the editor in 1918. 29 Pound, Ficke, Miss Tietjens, and Arthur Waley were among imitators and translators of Chinese verse. The Japanese Yone Noguchi was a contributor of hokku in November 1919. Special Canadian and Spanish-American numbers were issued in April 1941 and June 1925 respectively.
The scope of Miss Monroe’s interest in literary movements,
29 Poetry, v. 11, Feb. 1918, p. 271.
the catholicity of her taste, and the breadth of her sympathy with poetic endeavor are among the chief characteristics of her editorship. “Eclecticism was the very life of her magazine/’ 30 wrote Horace Gregory after Miss Monroe’s death. This meant, of course, printing many poems that did not look as well in print as they had in manuscript. It meant the acceptance of the work of unknowns, some of whom were to remain unknowns. “Fears have been expressed by a number of friendly critics,” Miss Monroe once wrote, “that Poetry might become a house of refuge for minor poets.” But she protested that the word “minor” was “presumptuous, since no contemporary can utter the final verdict.” A sophistical defense, no doubt; but one can only applaud the principle which the editor stated with firm resolution: “The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine—may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius!” 31
Moreover, Miss Monroe’s freshness of interest in new movements and new talent was maintained to the day of her death. “She alone,” wrote Allen Tate in 1932, “has come from the beginning of the late renascence to the present, with all the vigor of a new start.” 32 The motto of the magazine was a line from Whitman: “To have great poets we must have great audiences too.” Writing a profile of Miss Monroe, Harry Hansen paraphrased this: “To have great poets there must be great editors too.” 33 Harriet Monroe was indeed such an editor.
In the fall of 1936, Miss Monroe, now seventy-five years old, made a trip through South America. While crossing the Andes, she had a cerebral hemorrhage, and died in the mountain village of Arequipa, Peru. In a memorial number (December 1936) Poetry published six of her lyrics, the first of which began:
If all the tents are falling,
Arise, my soul!
Under these you were crawling Blind as a mole.
Seek out a new appalling Unmerciful goal . 34
30 American Scholar, v. 6, Spring 1937, p. 199.
31 Poetry, v. 1, Nov. 1912, pp. 62-64; quotation on p. 64.
32 Ibid., v. 40, May 1932, p. 94. '
33 Harry Hansen, Midwest Portraits (New York, 1923), p. 253.
34 Poetry, v. 49, Dec. 1936, p. 131.
Alice Corbin Henderson had been the first associate editor of Poetry. When ill health forced her retirement, she was followed by a procession of poets who kept that position for short terms —Eunice Tietjens, Helen Hoyt, Emanuel Carnevali, Marion Strobel, George Dillon, Peter De Vries, Jessica Nelson North, and Morton Dauwen Zabel. Longest in the associate editorship was Zabel, who had served seven years at the time of Miss Monroe’s death and who succeeded her as editor. Four others among the associate editors named served later as editors-in- chief; Dillon succeeded Zabel and served two terms totaling over ten years, and he, and Miss Strobel, Peter De Vries, and Mrs. North, alone or in various associations, performed the editorial duties in the forties.
The financial history of Poetry under Miss Monroe was full of dangers and near-disasters; but always when bankruptcy threatened, money came from somewhere to keep the little magazine alive. After the first five-year guarantee ran out, it was possible to renew the subscriptions for another lustrum, and so on in 1922 and 1927; though the list of guarantors slowly diminished in these years, the magazine subscription list increased despite a rise in price to $3.00 a year. The budget in 1932, when a crisis was brought on by the widespread depression, was $12,000 a year. 35 Miss Monroe had at the first received no compensation, and had paid her associate editor only forty dollars a month; later salaries were a little better, and before her death the editor was receiving $100 a month. 36 But the editing of Poetry was a labor of love, after all, and the salaries it paid were never expected to be sufficient for anyone’s sole support.
Long before Miss Monroe’s death, imagism had waned, and other forms and schools had developed. The Dial, which had undergone a sea-and-land change in its removal to New York, was now criticizing Poetry for its emphasis on esthetic rather than social criticism, and Miss Monroe replied: “An artist may find his special beauty in the social movements of our time—in strikes, or war, or pacifism, or settlements, or the Bolsheviki; but has the critic any right to complain if he finds it, like Whistler, in the fall of a rocket or the turn of a girl’s figure, or, like
35 Ibid., v. 40, April 1932, p. 31.
36 Monroe, Poet’s Life, pp. 284, 363.
Inness, in a sunset drift of autumnahcolors?” 37
The first notable reaction to the imagists was the work of a group that Miss Monroe called the “intellectualists” or the “aristocrats,” rejecting the profanum vulgus for expression “unintelligible to all but specialists,” essentially esoteric, and indulging sometimes in “typographical gymnastics.” “Poetry has printed many of these poets, but not with the wide-open hospitality which complete sympathy might have demanded,” wrote the editor in 1928, and added: “And even if now and then we miss a trick—as when we could not see Mr. E. E. Cummings for his i’s that shone out of his page like an undimmed automobile headlight—I still feel that progress in the art lies along the good curve of the solid earth rather than along the euphuistic tangent, and that Poetry has followed this grander curve throughout its sixteen years.” 38
These words of Miss Monroe’s constitute a kind of credo for the magazine that has been followed throughout its career. And yet, the things that attract the eye and catch the attention in its successive numbers are, perhaps, the more tangential poems. For example, this second stanza of “Calligrammes,” by Philip Blair Rice, then a professor of philosophy at Kenyon College: •
t-
he
he-g-
oat’s horn is a perfect logarithmic spiral with sine and cosine bearing the e- ternal relationship decreed for inanimate matter for immaterial essences in the mind of god the he-goat’s horns have a magical mathematical aphrodisiacal lure for the nanny and furthermore arch in an exquisite sweep envied by artists 39
37 Poetry, v. 13, Oct. 1918, p. 40. See also the article by Randolph Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks in Dial, v. 64, April 25, 1918, pp. 410-11.
38 Poetry, v. 33, Oct. 1928, p. 36.
39 Ibid., v. 65, Oct. 1944, p. 7. Reprinted with permission of Poetry and Mrs. Philip Blair Rice.
And so Poetry adhered to its policy of eclecticism. Another magazine, the experimentally minded Little Review, accused Miss Monroe’s magazine in 1929 of being “Sound, sane, safe, and subsidized.” 40 But as a matter of fact it continued year after year to print about the same proportions of the conservative and the unconventional styles of verse.
Poetry’s “grander curve,” though little affected by eccentricities of typography, has been determined to a considerable extent by the poets Miss Monroe called “intellectualists” and “aristocrats”—Tate, Crane, Williams, MacLeish, Laura Riding, Yvor Winters, Malcolm Cowley. Always critical, Poetry’s reviewers were sometimes severe on these writers. “Allen Tate’s poetry,” wrote one of these commentators in 1929, “shares many of the perversities and stylistic mannerisms of what was called, a few years ago, the cerebral school.” 41 After Miss Monroe’s death, her successors were wise enough to know that they could not continue the magazine always along the old lines. They knew that the founder would have changed policy with changing times. In 1937 Editor Zabel wrote: “. . . Poetry’s task today is far different from that of twenty-five years ago. . . . The impulse of that hour was still one of discovery. . . . Today the temper of literature, no less than of politics and society, is more critical, more hardened in skepticism and doubt. . . .” And Jessica Nelson North added: “Meanwhile the newest poets move about with assurance in their rare medium of symbolism, surrealism, and associational technique. . . . They may have first felt the inclination to write when they read Joyce, Wallace Stevens, or Eliot. . . . They embarked lightheartedly on a sea of that sort of poetry whose very cloudiness of import seems its chief charm. And where did these experimentalists first find attention and publication?” 42 The answer was, in many cases, “In Poetry”; just as that magazine had probably brought to the attention of these young poets the older “masters” mentioned. The Pound-Eliot-Tate succession of influence seems clear.
Without attempting to fit them into any schools or movements, it may be said that among poets yet unmentioned in this
40 Little Review, v. 12, May 1929, p. 60.
41 Ibid., v. 33, Feb. 1929, p. 281.
42 Ibid., v. 51, Oct. 1937, pp. 32, 36.
brief history, the following were prominent in the 1930’s: Conrad Aiken, Robert P. T. Coffin, Robert Penn Warren, Paul Engle, and Stephen Spender.
Poetry made its own distinctive contribution to the literature of two world wars. Its War Number of November 1914 attracted much attention, as it deserved to do. Louise Driscoll’s “The Metal Checks” won the prize offered for the best poem on war or peace. Rupert Brooke’s “War Sonnets” were published in April 1915. In the Second World War, a special number (August 1943) was devoted to the work of men serving in the armed forces.
About a third of each issue of Poetry has been, from the first, devoted to prose—editorial comment, book reviews, and news. Horace Gregory once declared that in these prose pages of Poetry, “. . . some of the finest critical prose ever written in America” has appeared. 43 At any rate, the editorial articles and the reviews have displayed a critical acumen superior to that found in most contemporary writing of this kind. This criticism has usually been keen and surgical, but constructive; magisterial, it has been informed and thoughtful. The chief writers of prose for the early volumes were Harriet Monroe, Alice Corbin Henderson, Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. But there were many others; and to list the leading critics throughout the file of the magazine would be to repeat the names of the editors and many of the chief poets.
The finances of the magazine continued to be precarious throughout the thirties and the early forties. Three successive grants from the Carnegie Foundation kept it going through the worst years of the depression. 44 But in 1942, with the guarantees of the fifth lustrum running out, prospects were dark again; in both May and June of that summer, Poetry spoke gloomily of the probability of the next number being its last. But groups rallied in California (where Poetry stock was always high), in Chicago and Washington and other centers; and with the help of many small gifts and a few large ones, the crisis was passed. 45
43 American Scholar, v. 6, Spring 1937, p. 200.
44 Monroe, Poet’s Life, p. 443. v
45 Poetry, v. 60, May 1942, p. Ill; June 1942, p. 173; and July 1942, p. 231.
In these war years, and in those immediately following, the magazine was edited by George Dillon, Miss Strobel, Mrs. North, Peter De Vries, John Frederick Nims, and Margedant Peters, in various combinations of two or three. The circulation increased in the 1940’s from two thousand to double that figure. 46 For a few years in the middle of the decade the magazine inserted portraits of some of its contributors in its pages. For a decade, its typography was modernized, with blackface headings; but it later returned to a page of more classic style.
It seems apparent that after the Second World War, the magazine Poetry was inclined to follow American poetry itself into the cloisters of those devotees who were themselves poets, critics, or connoisseurs of the arts, thus separating itself more than ever from the more popular literary forms. Prominent in the magazine in the forties were Gertrude Stein, Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell, Karl Shapiro, Muriel Rukeyser, John Ciardi, David Cornel Dejong and James Merrill.
Following a short but distinguished term of editorship by the young poet, Hayden Carruth, Karl Shapiro took over the management of the magazine in 1950. The verse that grew out of Shapiro’s war experience, and his critical perceptions in the field of poetry, made him a good editor. Among outstanding contributors of the fifties, not mentioned earlier, were Juan Ramon Jimenez, Stanley Kunitz, Delmore Schwartz, and Thom Gunn.
Henry Rago followed Shapiro as editor in 1955. While still a boy, the new editor had been encouraged in poetical effort by Miss Monroe, and he was only fifteen when his first work was accepted by Poetry. Since then he had appeared there occasionally, in other magazines, and in published volumes. He holds a doctorate in philosophy and taught at the University of Chicago for seven years.
Under Rago’s editorship were organized Chicago’s famous “Poetry Days,” which have done so much for the magazine. These grew out of the ideas of J. Patrick Lannan, Chicago industrialist and promoter; but they represent an extraordinary group effort. These Days, proclaimed by the mayor as dedicated to poetry and welcomed by hundreds on various levels of
46 Ibid v. 75, Oct. 1949, p. 58; Time, v. 50, Oct. 27, 1947, pp. 74-75.
education, have resulted in untold good for the magazine and for poetry in general. Publishers, dealers, and other donors turn over rare editions, manuscripts, and association items to be offered by sale at a big auction—proceeds to go, of course, to Poetry. Then there is a big subscription dinner, after which a famous poet speaks; Frost and Sandburg were the first, in 1955 and 1956 respectively. 47 Tied in with this dinner is an expansion of the plan of diversified gifts begun in the forties. That is, all donors become members of the Modern Poetry Association. These are divided into six classifications, ranging from the “subscribing member” at $7.50 to the “benefactor” at $500 a year.* All members receive the magazine without further cost. The association is the owner and publisher, and in the late fifties there were more than five hundred members.
This new financing was a life-saver, for in spite of an increase to a record-breaking 5,500 circulation in the late fifties, costs had also increased greatly. It would be interesting to know how many of the magazine’s subscribers are hopeful of being also contributors to its pages—how many even submit an occasional poem. It is said that Poetry receives fifty thousand manuscripts a year, of which it publishes about three hundred. 48
Under the Rago suzerainty the magazine has continued to be alert and perceptive. Notable numbers were the one devoted to Dylan Thomas (November 1956) and the Japanese issue of May 1956. Attention has been given certain of the Lallans poets, such as Tom Scott and Sydney Goodsir Smith; to selections from the late Paul Claudel and current work of Rene Char; and to such newcomers as Charles Tomlinson, Ted Hughes, Kenneth Koch, Marie Ponsot, Jay Macpherson, Ned O’Gorman, and Robert Duncan.
The history and the file of Poetry is well worth study for three reasons. First, the magazine exemplifies and illustrates the course of American poetry over a long period, having “discovered” many of our leading modern poets and published virtually all of them at one time or another. Second, though the
47 Poetry, v. 87, March 1956, pp. 360-61; v. 89, March 1957, pp. 393-94.
* A year’s subscription in 1966 was $10.00.
48 Newsweek, v. 40, Oct. 13, 1952, p. 104.
organ of a high art, and unvaryingly true to its mission, it has been kept alive in an era of materialism and of mass culture suffused with kitsch. And third, it is simply and unarguably a great pleasure to read through a magazine file which, though it has its low and soggy places, generally has kept to the high and stimulating road.*
* This historical sketch was written in the late 1950’s. It may be noted that circulation has continued to increase and in 1966 was over 6,000.
17
THE SMART SET 1
I N 1900 the fabulous Colonel William D’Alton Mann was banking big profits from several operations. Among them were his weekly Town Topics, a periodical of society news, gossip, criticism of the arts, and literary miscellany; his quarterly Tales from Town Topics, later to be transformed into Transatlantic Tales; his Town Topics Financial Bureau, a tipster service; and the publication of books, chiefly
1 Titles: (1) The Smart Set, March 1900—March 1930; (2) The New Smart Set, April-July 1930. Subtitles: A Magazine of Cleverness, 1900-1913; The Aristocrat Among Magazines, 1914-24; True Stories From Real Life, 1924-28; The Young Woman’s Magazine, 1928-30; and various other subtitles and slogans on cover, contents page, or half-title.
First issue: March 1900. Last issue: July 1930.
Periodicity: Monthly. Vol. 1, March-June 1900; 2, July-Dee. 1900 (Oct- Nov. combined) ; 3-74, Jan. 1901—Aug. 1924, 4 nos. per vol. (56-57 have irregular numbering: Sept. 1918 called v. 56, no. 1; Oct.-Dec. called v. 57, nos. 2-4); 75-85, Sept. 1924—Feb. 1930, 6 nos. per vol.; 86, March-July 1930.
Publishers: Ess Ess Publishing Company (William D’Alton Mann, owner), 1900-1911; John Adams Thayer Corporation, 1911-14; Smart Set Company (Eugene F. Crowe, Eltinge Fowler Warner, George Jean Nathan, Henry Louis Mencken, owners), 1914-24; Magus Magazine Corporation (William Randolph Hearst, owner; George d’Utassy, pres.), 1924-25; Magus Magazine Corporation (W. R. Hearst, owner; Richard E. Berlin, pres.), 1925-28; Magus Magazine Corporation (James Robert Quirk, pres.), 1928-30.
Editors: Arthur Grissom, 1900-1901; Marvin Dana, 1902-4; Charles Hanson Towne, 1904-7; Fred C. Splint, 1907-8; Norman Boyer, 1909-11; Mark Lee Luther, 1911-12; Willard Huntington Wright, 1913-14; M. L. Luther, 1914; George Jean Nathan and Henry Louis Mencken, 1914-23; Morris Gilbert, 1924; F. Orlin Tremaine, 1924-25; William Charles Lengel, 1925-28; T. Howard Kelly, 1928-29; Margaret Elizabeth Sangster, 1929-30.
References: Carl Richard Dolmetsch, “A History of the Smart Set Magazine,” unpub. diss., University of Chicago, 1957; [See also Dolmetsch, The Smart Set (New York, 1966)]; Charles Hanson Towne, Adventures in Editing (New York, 1926), chap, ii; C. H. Towne, So Far So Good (New York, 1945), chaps, xiii-xiv (mainly a reprint of the Adventures) ; William Manchester, Disturber of the Peace: The Life of H.L. Mencken (New York, 1950), chaps, iii-v; Isaac Goldberg, The Man Mencken (New York, 1925), chap, vii; Burton Rascoe, “ ‘Smart Set’ History,” in The Smart Set Anthology (New York, 1934), ed. by Rascoe and Groff Conklin (reprinted separately in a limited edition) ; Charles Angoff, ed., The World of George Jean Nathan (New York, 1952); [Andy Logan, The Man Who Robbed the Robber Barons (New York, 1965), a life of Col. W. D’A. Mann; and William H. Nolte, H.L. Mencken, Literary Critic (Middletown, Conn., 1966)].
the annual Representative Americans, often accused of being a blackmailing operation. 2 A commentator with a flair for the picturesque wrote that Mann’s “offices were heavily carpeted in red; footfalls were to be deadened; the stealthy atmosphere was dense with cigarette smoke and in and out stole society reporters with shifty eyes, correct clothes, and heavy perfumes. In the innermost office sat a bulky old man with magnificent white hair and patriarchal beard, a pasha of the Gilded Age, who thunderously grudged the contributors to his periodicals their penny a word. 3
As a companion to his society weekly, Colonel Mann in March 1900 launched the Smart Set, a monthly magazine of general literature with much the same kind of “snob appeal” that characterized Town Topics. In an early number, the publisher declared: “The Smart Set’s writers are not only those famous in the literary field, but many are from the ranks of the best society in Europe and America.” 4 To prime the pump for contributions, Colonel Mann relaxed his cent-a-word rule to offer generous prizes for novels, novelettes, short stories, poems, sketches, and witticisms. 5
Accordingly, the first number of the new monthly led off with a thousand-dollar prize novelette of New York society entitled “The Idle Born,” an amusing, Wilde-like satire by H. C. Chatfield-Taylor and Reginald DeKoven. The former of the collaborators was a wealthy Chicago writer who had spent much of his life abroad, and the latter was famous as a composer and musical critic; both were themselves social lions. This ideal opener was followed by such pieces as a satirical “true story” of a scandal about a former Duke of Portland by Edgar Saltus, sophisticate, esthete, familar figure in both American and English fashionable coteries; a one-act play about lords and ladies by “Julian Gordon” (Mrs. S. Van Rensselaer Cruger); and a story of the English nobility by Carolyn K. Duer. The three Duers—Carolyn, her sister Alice Duer Miller, and her
2 See F. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, v. 4 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 459-60, 753-55.
3 Ludwig Lewisohn, Expression in America (New York, 1932), pp. 314-15.
4 Smart Set, v. 5, Nov. 1901; advertising section, p. 10.
5 Prizes seem to have been continued for over a year. See Smart Set, v. 3, Feb. 1901, verso of title page.
248 THE SMART SET
mother Elizabeth Drier—were to become frequent contributors.
In this first number, which may be said to have set the pattern for the early Smart Set, the only nonfiction prose was a travel article by Mrs. Burton Harrison. The wits were well represented by R. K. Munkittrick, Gelett Burgess, Sewell Ford, and Oliver Herford. Among the poets were the young Theodosia Garrison, the established Bliss Carman and Clinton Scollard, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, whose name still carried an aura of the shameless avowal that a former generation had found in her Poems of Passion.
There were 160 pages of text and 20 pages of advertising, the whole enclosed in a striking bluish-grey cover. The cover design by Kay Womrath depicted a dancing couple in evening dress controlled by strings held by a grinning Pan; the slashing S’s of the title were in vermilion. The price was twenty-five cents. Altogether, it was an exciting Volume I, Number 1, intended, as the New York Tribune rather stuffily observed, “to entertain and amuse rather than instruct or edify.” 6 Evidently many thousands of Americans were willing to forego instruction for amusement—100,000, indeed, if Mann’s claim of the sale of his first number is to be trusted. 7
The editor of the new magazine was a young poet qarned Arthur Grissom, a New York free-lance writer who had once collaborated with George Creel in publishing a weekly miscellany in Kansas City; 8 the business manager was Sam Ragland, Grissom’s cousin. Death took the young editor in December 1901, and Marvin Dana succeeded him. Dana was a poet and novelist, and had edited the gay Judy in London before coming to the Smart Set as an assistant editor. Associated with him as he took over the reins were Charles Hanson Towne and Henry Collins Walsh. Towne was a poet in his mid-twenties, and had come to the Smart Set from Cosmopolitan Magazine. Walsh was an older man, a traveler, newspaper correspondent, and magazine editor of experience. The three made a good team, but it was broken when Dana left in 1904; then Towne became editor, with Walsh and Norman Boyer as associates.
Throughout its first nine years, during which the Smart Set’s circulation appears to have increased consistently, though by no means sensationally, it kept to much the same content formula. It sometimes relaxed its accent on high society for variety’s sake; but the bon ton, the light satirical touch, social intrigue, love without benefit of clergy, and irony at the expense of conventions were of the essence of the magazine. Each number began with a novelette; continued with ten or a dozen stories, one of them in French; found a place two-thirds of the way through for an essay on literature, the stage, travel, or society; filled in odd pages or half pages with verse; and tucked in epigrams and jokes and little satires in chinks here and there.
Many well-known names are found in the by-lines of the fictional offerings—Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Herrick, Ludwig Lewisohn, James Branch Cabell, Theodore Dreiser, Barry Pain, Max Pemberton, Eden Phillpotts (“In the King’s Chamber,” May 1900), Mary Austin (“At Tio Juan,” June 1906), Kate Masterson, Justus Miles Forman, Henry Sydnor Harrison. Among the authors of the novelettes were the Baroness von Hutten, Ralph Henry Barbour, “Christian Reid,” and Cyrus Townsend Brady. Few serials were published; there was a short one by Gertrude Atherton in 1908 and one by E. Phillips Oppenheim in 1911. But by far the larger proportion of the Smart Set’s story writers were unpublished amateurs, anxious to break into print even at a cent a word.
One such was William Sydney Porter, besieging editors in the first years of the new century with stories signed “O. Henry.” The Smart Set was not the first magazine to publish “O. Henry,” 9 but as early as January 1902, it printed “The Lotos and the Bottle.” This was a 6,000-word manuscript, but Porter offered it at the bargain rate of fifty dollars quick cash; he wanted to raise money so he could leave his newspaper job in Pittsburgh and come to the great city that he was to celebrate as “Bagdad on the Subway.” Grissom sent him his full sixty dollars and suggested that he call when he arrived in New York—an invitation Porter apparently forgot in the rush of his new life. 10
9 Robert H. Davis and Arthur B. Maurice, The Caliph of Bagdad (New York, 1931), chap. xii.
10 Towne, Adventures, pp. 63-64, recounts a colorful tale of the excitement
Ainslee’s Magazine got more O. Henry stories than did the Smart Set. Ainslee’s, which had experienced many vicissitudes in its five years’ life/ 1 changed policy in 1902 and became an out-and-out imitator of the successful Smart Set. For more than a decade thereafter, it looked much like that magazine, followed the same policy, used almost the same subtitles, and attracted many of the same contributors; and, selling for only fifteen cents, it soon attained double its rival’s circulation. This competition brought about some increase in the rates paid by the Smart Set to its better known writers, although, as a compensatory measure, more material from obscure scribblers was used. 12
Short stories, poems, and one-act plays in the French language appeared in the Smart Set for many years—one piece in French in nearly every number for over two decades, 1901— 1923. The magazine had a contract with a literary agency in Paris, the Societe des Gens de Lettres, to furnish such pieces at the incredibly low price of twenty-five dollars a year. Most of these were by obscure penny-a-liners and had already been published; a few were by writers already dead and gone. 13 Eventually short plays in either French or English became a regular feature of the magazine.
Poetry was by no means unimportant in the Smart Set. The early editors were all poets themselves, and they published much verse that was charming and amusing, and some that was very good. The going rate to poets was twenty-five cents a line, which led to the epigram current in the office, “Poets are born, not paid.” 14 It seems doubtful if “Momus, Junior,” who contributed a Juvenalian satire running to twenty pages in the May 1900 number, received as much as
caused upon receiving a story called “By Proxy,” from “O. Henry.” However, the order of publication of O. Henry stories in the Smart Set does not bear out the order of events detailed. The story Towne called “By Proxy” was evidently the one published as “His Courier,” in May 1902, and later called “By Courier.”
11 Mott, American Magazines, v. 4, pp. 48-49.
12 Towne, Adventures, pp. 89-90.
13 Dolmetsch, “A History of the Smart Set Magazine,” pp. 12-13, based on statements of both Mencken and Nathan to the author. [Dolmetsch, The Smart Set, pp. 10-11.]
14 Towne, Adventures, p. 76.
the regular rate. Besides those named as contributors to the first number, the following poets, among others, apparently were satisfied with the modest payment rate of the Smart Set: Richard Le Gallienne, Arthur Stringer, Charles G. D. Roberts, John G. Neihardt, S. E. Benet and later William Rose Benet, and Zona Gale. Some of these contributed both verse and prose. Among the essayists were Arthur Symonds, James Huneker, Agnes Repplier, and William J. Lampton. The wits were numerous; to those already named may be added John Kendrick Bangs, Tom Masson, and Carolyn Wells.
The Smart Set had already established a reputation for “its sunny way of clever dialogue and incident in prose and out” 15 well before the coming of the pair of critics who were to stamp their names and personalities upon it in its second decade—Henry L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. It is an exaggeration to say, as did one of Mencken’s biographers in an oft-quoted phrase, that during Mann’s ownership the magazine had “come to be associated with a sort of perfumed pornography.” 16 Carl Van Doren observed more justly that it “was to the older magazines about what a circus is to a library”; and added that naturally the moralists objected to it, most of the love being “on the lawless side,” passionate or professional rather than sentimental. 17
In 1907 Fred Splint, who had been working under Dreiser on the Butterick publications, traded places with Towne and became editor of the Smart Set. Splint kept Boyer as associate editor. Boyer had been a Baltimore reporter and was much impressed with Mencken’s work on the papers of that city, and he persuaded Splint to propose to the young critic (he was twenty-seven) to contribute a book article for each number of the Smart Set. 18 Channing Pollock had left Ains-
15 Zona Gale in the Critic, v. 44, April 1904, p. 323.
16 Goldberg, Man Mencken, p. 193.
17 Nation, v. 139, Dec. 12, 1934, p. 680.
18 Goldberg printed a communication from Dreiser claiming that the latter suggested Mencken for this work {Man Mencken, pp. 380-81); but Mencken himself heatedly denied this. See William Manchester, “A Critical Study of the Work of H. L. Mencken as Literary Critic for the Smart Set Magazine, 1908- 14,” master’s thesis, University of Missouri, 1947. Manchester cites Mencken in both an interview and a letter to the effect that Boyer made the suggestion (pp. 11 - 12 ).
V°L- 25 NO. 3
PRICE 2,5cts
1928
W9HRATH
30 . ay
LONDON
NEW YORK
452 Fifth Ave.
PARIS
THE PRE-MENCKEN SMART SET
The date: July 1908. This cover by Kay Womrath, showing an elegant couple against a gray background, was used from 1900 to 1911 Then James Montgomery Flagg modernized the couple’s dress, and soon the
cover varied with each issue. The initial letters were always enlarged as here, and were in color.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN (TAKEN IN 1906)
In November 1908, two years after this portrait was taken, H. L. Mencken began his column of literary reviews in the Smart Set. From 1914 to 1923 he was co-editor with George Jean Nathan. Mencken then edited the American Mercury for nine years (see page 3 above). Photograph by Meredith Janvier.
Tee’s to begin a monthly theatrical review in the Smart Set a year earlier, and now Mencken followed Pollock in the back of the book, his first article appearing in the issue for November 1908. It was entitled “The Good, the Bad, and the Best Sellers”; in it he attacked Upton Sinclair for taking himself too seriously in The Moneychangers, praised Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Circular Staircase, and called Marie Corelli’s Holy Orders “a decidedly capable performance.” 19
Oracular, pungent, and racy, Mencken’s book articles excited attention immediately; they were to continue for fifteen years, and upon them and the series of selections drawn mainly from them and entitled Prejudices was founded the Mencken cult of the second and third decades of the century. Mencken once wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly in which he cited approvingly the advice tendered him when he entered upon the business of criticism by “an ancient” in the craft: “ ‘The main idea,’ he told me frankly, ‘is to be interesting, to write a good story. ... Of course, I am not against accuracy, fairness, information, learhing. . . . But unless you can make your people read your criticisms, you may as well shut up your shop.’ ” 20 Mencken was nearly always interesting. Often he was satirical or bitterly ironical. He sometimes clowned his way through a review; occasionally he made outlandish suggestions, as when he urged publishers of novels to perfume their books—the odor of new-mown hay for Gene Stratton Porter, that of frankincense for Hall Caine, and carnation for Richard Harding Davis. 21
Just a year after Mencken became a regular contributor to the Smart Set, George Jean Nathan began his monthly theatrical reviews for that magazine, Pollock having resigned to join the Green Book. Nathan had been dramatic critic for Outing and Harper’s Weekly. He matched Mencken in his defiance of conventional mores, his saucy style, his magisterial attitude. Together, these two critics were to bring the Smart Set increasingly to the attention of the intelligentsia and espe-
19 Smart Set, v. 26, Nov. 1908, pp. 155-59.
20 Atlantic Monthly, v. 113, March 1914, p. 289.
21 Smart Set, v. 42, Jan. 1914, p. 153.
THE SMART SET 255
dally to that of the younger groups that developed after the First World War.
*
Meanwhile, the magazine was not prospering. It had done well for its first few years, and a later owner dedared that Colonel Mann had made $100,000 a year out of it. 22 It had a London edition for a few years, beginning in May 1901. The drculation of the American edition reached 161,000 in 1908, but gradually declined thereafter. 23 Advertising, never plentiful, also declined; at its height it had consisted chiefly of announcements of the Town Topics enterprises, patent medicines, cosmetics, clothing, books, insurance companies, railroads, automobiles, breakfast foods, and liquors. A by-product of the Smart Set was the publication of novelettes from that magazine in paper covers.
In the spring of 1911 Mann sold the Smart Set to John Adams Thayer, a well-known advertising man who had recently made a resounding success as one of the publishers of Everybody’s Magazine . He immediately began to build up the advertising section, doubling or tripling the amount carried in the latter years of the Mann regime. The back cover sold for $500. 24 Thayer revived the London edition of the magazine, creating an independent English publishing company which was to continue operations long after Thayer had sold the American magazine. He also revived a department called “The Shops of the Smart Set,” designed to stimulate advertising, and instituted another entitled “Cafe Guide.” Following his custom on Everybody’s, he wrote a monthly publisher’s department that he called “Something Personal.”
Thayer hired James Montgomery Flagg to redraw the Smart Set’s cover design in a more modern style; soon the cover varied from month to month, but still a grinning Pan
22 John Adams Thayer in “Something Personal,” Ibid., v. 35, Nov. 1911, p. 168.
23 Figures for the Smart Set in N. W. Ayer & Son’s Directory are not sworn to in this period, but may be taken as approximately correct. The issue for 1909 quotes the Smart Set at 161,000 for the preceding year; for the next two years no figures are given for it, and for 1911 the questionable round sum of 100,000 is quoted. Subsequently there is a steady decline.
24 See Smart Set, v. 34, June 1911, advertising section; v. 37, June 1912, p. 160.
usually held the strings on a cavorting couple, now in modish costumes. For a couple of years Thayer used illustrations of scenes from classical literature as frontispieces in the magazine; they were by Garth Jones, Andre Castaigne, and others.
Splint had resigned to study medicine in 1909, and Boyer had succeeded him. Thayer, who considered himself editor-in- chief, kept Boyer on until that unfortunate took his own life; 25 thereupon he appointed Mark Lee Luther, a writer of mystery stories who had been one of Boyer’s two associate editors. The other associate was Louise Glosser Hale, actress and author, who conducted an essay department, entitled “The Trunk in the Attic,” for several months. A far more tart and spicy department was one which was begun in the spring of 1912, called “Pertinent and Impertinent.” This first brought into the Smart Set’s table of contents the by-line of “Owen Hat- teras,” later written “Major Owen Hatteras, D.S.O.” as a satire on war-time “brass.” The name stood for a collaboration of Mencken and Nathan (and W. H. Wright, 1912-14). This first Hatteras department consisted of pungent commentaries on this and that—frequently on contemporary American life and ideas. That Thayer did not always approve of the work of staff contributors Mencken and Nathan is indicated by a statement in his own department at the beginning of 1912 to the effect that those worthies had resolved “even on the cloudiest, rainiest days in their respective fields they will carry optimism instead of a sharp-pointed umbrella.” 26 But it was absurd to try to convert the critical team to sweetness and light; in the very next issue, Mencken opened his article with a tirade against the prohibitionists. 27
For thirteen years now the Smart Set had been edited by a succession of six young men, most of them poets and fiction- eers, and none of them lasting more than two or three years. Now came out of the West not a young Lochinvar, to be sure, but a youth of aggressive personality, to take over, for one
25 Albert Payson Terhune, To the Best of My Memory (New York, 1930), pp. 196-98.
26 Smart Set, v. 36, Jan. 1912, p. 167.
27 Ibid., v. 36, Feb. 1912, p. 151.
memorable year, the fortunes of the magazine. Save a ready typewriter he weapons had none; but he had a virile literary talent and ambitious ideas.
Willard Huntington Wright had been under twenty years of age when he had begun a three-year term as literary critic of the Los Angeles Times. From there he came to New York to become literary editor of Colonel Mann’s Town Topics. In those days he wore a fierce, Kaiser-like mustache that was probably intended to support the image of the domineering personality that he cultivated. Moreover, he was an ardent admirer of Mencken, if not actually a disciple. He became an associate editor of the Smart Set in 1912; and the next year he “buffaloed” Thayer into making him editor of the Smart Set for a twelve-month term at double the salary of his predecessor and with an increased editorial budget, together with an agreement that the publisher would not interfere with the editorial conduct of the magazine. 28 After a few weeks he wrote his friend Dreiser that the fight he was making with the magazine was a difficult one and that the outcome was largely speculative. 29
The new editor’s fight was directed mainly to obtaining first- rate contributions which would reflect modern life frankly and with some power and cleverness. For his writers, he turned to England and the Continent and to the new group of brilliant Americans who, in the pre-war years, were flouting middle- class prejudices with realistic pictures of city life or more romantic pieces with a strong sex emphasis.
28 The date of his promotion to the editorial chair is fixed by a letter from Wright to Dreiser, Jan. 18, 1913, in which he said he was now editor of the Smart Set; Dreiser MSS, University of Pennsylvania Library. The term “buffaloed” is that of Malcolm Cowley, New Republic, v. 81, Jan. 16, 1935, p. 281. Burton Rascoe says Wright “frightened” Thayer into the contract; Rascoe, “Smart Set History,” p. xix. On the agreement with Thayer regarding the editorial conduct of the magazine, see Manchester, Disturber of the Peace, p, 70; Dolmetsch, “A History of the Smart Set Magazine,” p. 26. [Dolmetsch, The Smart Set, p. 34.] Rascoe and the others following him say “an ample budget”; it probably allowed for authors’ rates two or three times those of the niggardly Mann regime; but Terhune testifies that though Wright thought highly of his “Raegan” stories he paid only $75 apiece for them; Terhune, Best of My Memory, pp. 196-98.
29 Letter dated March 14, 1913; Dreiser MSS, University of Pennsylvania Library.
" Prominent among Wright’s English-contributors were D. PL Lawrence, Frank Harris, George Moore, Leonard Merrick, and W. L. George—and the Irishman W. B. Yeats. One-act plays and occasional stories and poems in French were continued; the Societe des Gens de Lettres still collaborated with the Smart Set, and it may be presumed that the Continental tour made by Wright, Nathan, and Mencken in 1912 brought some results in the way of contributions. Such German writers as Schnitzler and Wedekind were prominent in the magazine in 1913, as was the Swedish playwright, August Strindberg. Among other European writers were D’Annunzio, “Maartens,” and Artzybashev. Foreign writers already mentioned as contributors to earlier numbers were retained. On the whole Wright’s period of editorship brought more contributions from abroad into the Smart Set than did any other single year.
American writers of distinction abounded. Theodore Dreiser, Floyd Dell, Ludwig Lewisohn, and Achmed Abdullah became familiar by-lines. Albert Payson Terhune, with his “Alo- ysius Raegan” stories of New York street life, and Barry Benefield, with realistic stories of the people of the cities, made distinguished contributions. Among the poets were Robinson Jeffers, Sara Teasdale, Richard Le Gallienne, John Hall Wheelock, and many other notables; in one number (January 1914) appeared George Sterling, Joyce Kilmer, Harriet Monroe, Witter Bynner, and Louis Untermeyer. Wrote William Stanley Braithwaite in the introduction to his first annual Anthology of Magazine Verse (1913, p. viii): “This year I have included the Smart Set, which under the new editorship of Mr. Willard Huntington Wright, himself a poet of considerable attainment, has been the means of offering the public a high and consistent standard of excellence in the verse it printed.” And in his next year’s volume Braithwaite credited the Smart Set with more “distinctive poems” than any other 1914 magazine.
The twelve numbers of the Smart Set edited by Wright (March 1913—February 1914) constitute a notable contribution to the magazine history of the times. One enthusiastic critic has written that the Smart Set under Wright was “the
most memorable, the most audacious, the best edited, and the best remembered of any magazine ever published on this continent.” 30 At any rate, it was exciting and, on the whole, well written.
But Thayer was by no means pleased with the image of the Smart Set that the general reader had formed, and his displeasure rose as the magazine’s circulation fell. About the time Wright first joined the staff, an anonymous author made the following sprightly observations: “I’m most tickled to death at times, when I take The Smart Set on the cars to read it, and watch the eyes and mouths of the suburban population making round O’s at it and me. I believe half of them regard it as a handbook to Hades, and the other half would like to read it in secret, and are disappointed and baffled when they discover that, in place of being suggestive, it is just plain clever and cultured and artistic.” 31
Thayer, however, was not “tickled,” and as soon as Wright’s year was over, let him go and made Luther managing editor again. In the number for March 1914 the publisher quoted a compliment from the Boston Transcript as follows: “During the past year The Smart Set has been gathering laurels unto itself as a unique magazine for those who desire to keep abreast and ahead of modern literary currents,” and followed the quotation with the realistic verdict: “To gather laurels is one thing; to publish a successful magazine is quite another thing.” 32 Thayer then recounted the Smart Set’s triumphs in publishing famous authors and quality material. “But ” he went on, “we have received stout protests . . . some of the stories . . . have struck them [the protesters] as too sombre; the frankness of certain others has displeased them.” He concluded his little lecture by promising thenceforth “a good round measure of romantic and humorous relief.” 33 In the next issue he was more specific. He declared
30 Rascoe, “Smart Set History,” pp. xxii-xxiii. Rascoe’s feud with Mencken leads him to eulogize Wright and underrate Mencken. He claims that neither Mencken nor Nathan “began to show the qualities as writers that later distinguished them” until Wright took editorial charge of the Smart Set: see “Smart Set History,” p. xxiv.
31 Smart Set, v. 36, Feb. 1912, p. 167.
32 W.S. Braithwaite in Boston Transcript, Jan. 17, 1914.
33 Smart Set, v. 42, March 1914, pp. 159-60.
that the current number (April 1914) was “designed primarily to amuse and entertain. ... In all of its pages will be found nothing that is depressing or sordid. ... The Smart Set has abandoned the sort of 'fiction which . . . many readers last year criticized as sordid and pessimistic and unnecessarily realistic and plain-spoken. . . . But we do not intend to be goody-goody. ... We shall publish stories that represent life in all its phases. . . . though we believe that there is more of joy than gloom in life after all, if people will only make it so.” 34
All this made Mencken unhappy, of course, and he wrote Dreiser that the old Smart Set had become “as righteous as a decrepit and converted madame.” 35 But he knew that he and Nathan would not have to put up with their boss much longer. Thayer had been hit by the stock market slump of 1914, his magazine’s circulation was down to 50,000 or less, and he was tired of trying to cope with its problems. That fall he turned the property over to his chief creditor, who agreed to assume all debts. 36 The number for September 1914 was Thayer’s last; and next month the cover bore the slogan: “One Civilized Reader Is Worth a Thousand Boneheads,” and an announcement in the advertising section exulted in the promise that from then on the Smart Set would be edited “without any other ‘policy’ in the world than to give its readers a moderately intelligent and awfully good time.”
The new owner was a paper manufacturer, Eugene F. Crowe, who had acquired other magazines in the same way and made a success of them. Crowe’s associate in the magazine part of his business was Eltinge F. Warner, who now appeared as publisher of the Smart Set. Warner happened to be a fellow passenger on the “Europa” with Nathan when both were returning from short trips abroad; they became acquainted when they mutually recognized that they were
34 Ibid., v. 42, April 1914, p. 160.
35 Letter dated March 18, 1914; Dreiser MSS, University of Pennsylvania Library, quoted with permission of the library. The letter is included in Letters of H.L. Mencken, ed. Guy J. Forgue (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), pp. 42-43, and quoted with permission of the publisher.
36 Dolmetsch, “A History of the Smart Set Magazine,” p. 33 ; based on an interview with E. F. Warner. [Dolmetsch, The Smart Set, p. 44.]
wearing topcoats of the same cut and fabric, and, comparing notes, found that they had patronized the same London tailor. This not very extraordinary circumstance served to initiate a ship-comradeship in the course of which Nathan learned that Warner was the new manager of the Smart Set and Warner learned that Nathan had written a department for it during the preceding five years. Before they landed Warner had offered his new acquaintance the editorship of the magazine; and Nathan had accepted, with the proviso that Mencken should be co-editor with him. 37
In the arrangement that ensued, Nathan and Mencken each took a one-sixth interest in the publishing company in lieu of salary, the owners took one-third, and the other third went to pay off debts. 38 Since there was a deficit of $24,000, increasing at the rate of $2,000 a month, the two editor-partners actually received no salary for several months. 39
Various means of getting the publishing company out of the red were tried. Cheaper paper was used, and the number of text pages was cut for a while from 160 to 144. Back issues were bound up two together and sold under the cover title Clever Stories at fifteen cents on trains and newsstands outside Smart Set’s metropolitan markets. This was a success, and it suggested other ventures. The war had stimulated interest in things French, and the Parisienne was begun in 1915 “in a satirical vein”; it was cheap in every sense, and was attacked in the courts, but it was soon making more money than the Smart Set itself. 40 The partners had been irked by Colonel Mann’s Snappy Stories, on the cover title of which the big S’s seemed to imitate those of the Smart Set; and early in 1916 they began a Saucy Stories of their own. This naughty magazine was also successful financially. The Smart Set Company was now making a profit; and that fall Nathan
37 This anecdote is retold by all writers on Smart Set history and by biographers of Mencken and Nathan. It is told by Nathan in his article, “The Happiest Days of H. L. Mencken,” Esquire, v. 48, Oct. 1957, p. 146—an article notable more for its nostalgic impressionism than for factual data.
38 Dolmetsch, “A History of the Smart Set Magazine,” p. 35; based on an interview with Warner. [Dolmetsch, The Smart Set, pp. 46-47.]
39 Letter of Mencken to Dreiser, April 20, 1915 (on microfilm, Princeton University Library).
40 Goldberg, Man Mencken, p. 197.
and Mencken sold their shares in the “louse magazines/’ as Mencken called them, to the Warner-Crowe concern. A few years later the partners started the Black Mask, a mystery magazine, also regarded as “boob bait”; it was an immediate money-maker, and again Mencken and Nathan sold out their shares very profitably after six months. 41
Whatever shame they may have felt for their anonymous part in such more or less disreputable undertakings, that was not the only reason they always sold out their shares in them so promptly. The “louse magazines” had put the company on its feet financially; they were now drawing modest editorial salaries, and they had realized handsomely on the sale of their shares to Warner-Crowe. Besides, they were very busy. Both were engaged in varied activities aside from their editorship of the Smart Set. Mencken was still on the staff of the Baltimore Sun and Nathan on that of Judge; both were turning out books. But both worked hard on “the old S.S.” Nathan was office editor in New York, while Mencken continued to live in Baltimore, coming up to “Sodom and Gomorrah” twice a month. Mencken was first reader of manuscripts. When he found one that was amusing and made “as few compromises to public taste as possible,” he sent it on to Nathan, who, if he agreed, sent a check at once, and if he disagreed, wrote a gracious rejection letter. Mencken carried on a voluminous correspondence with his authors and with would-be contributors. 42 The magazine’s limited editorial budget required such methods, but both editors got a lot of fun out of it. There was always a liberal measure of the play-spirit in Mencken and Nathan’s work on the Smart Set.
But it was hard at first, under the deficit-financing of the magazine. The two editors themselves wrote at least half of their first number. 43 The First World War added to the magazine’s difficulties. Germany had declared war on France and
41 Manchester, Disturber of the Peace, p. 108; Goldberg, Man Mencken, pp. 197-98.
42 See pamphlets: “Owen Hatteras,” “Pistols for Two” (New York, 1917); H. L. Mencken, “A Personal Word” (New York, 1922).
43 Dolmetsch, “A History of the Smart Set Magazine,” p. 45. [Dolmetsch, The Smart Set, p. 48.]
invaded Belgium the month that Thayer was going to press with his last issue. Mencken was pro-German and Nathan but little interested in the war during the two and a half years of their editorship that preceded America’s formal entrance into the conflict. Neither before nor after that event did any martial echoes resound through the pages of the Smart Set; this was not a popular policy, and circulation declined slowly but unmistakably. At times the profits were nil, and the editors had no salaries; but when the price was raised to thirty-five cents a copy late in 1918, modest editorial stipends were restored. Modest, indeed; it is said that neither Mencken nor Nathan ever received more than fifty dollars a week from the Smart Set for editorial work. They did continue to get their hundred dollars apiece for their critical articles each month, and for a time they wrote many of the short stories themselves (sometimes half the magazine) under pen-names. Mencken’s favorite pseudonym was “Duchess de Boileau.” 44
“Its tone is that of enlightened skepticism,” declared a manifesto in the advertising pages of the Smart Set for October 1921. Its aims were to “discover new American authors as they emerge, and to give them their first chance to reach an intelligent and sophisticated audience. ... To present the point of view of the civilized minority. ... To introduce the best foreign authors to America. ... To leaven American literature with wit and humor. ... To encourage sound poetry.” This discovery of new writers was a specialty of the Smart Set, and well suited to its slender budget. Thyra Sam- ter Winslow’s first short story appeared in Mencken and Nathan’s first number; and, next to the editors themselves, she was the most frequent contributor during their control of the magazine. Ruth Suckow was another Mencken discovery, and many of her best stories were printed in the Smart Set. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babes in the Woods” (September 1919) was his first published story. Eugene O’Neill’s The Long Voyage Home (October 1917) was his first published play; later
44 Manchester, Disturber of the Peace, p. 76. For the statement “sometimes half the magazine,” see The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan (New York, 1932), p. 118.
came lie (May 1918) and The Moon of the Caribees (August 1918). Maxwell Anderson was another Smart Set discovery. There were many more. 45
But, of course, most of the * magazine’s newcomers never reached the heights. Few issues contained contributions signed by more than eight or nine writers well known to the ordinary reader, or even recognizable by him; and that included the editors. Since each issue contained some thirty-six pieces (about twenty short stories, ten poems, four articles, one novelette, and one play), fully three-fourths were by unknowns. 46 Most of these were newcomers who proved to be “duds”; many of them did not deserve publication in the first place, and the editors took their work because they could find nothing better that they could afford. Mencken once confessed, with characteristic candor, that sometimes “only a small proportion of the contents” of the magazine had been “really fit to set before the readers we have in mind.” 47
But the contributors to the Mencken-Nathan Smart Set who had established reputations or who were just beginning to be recognized make up an impressive catalog. Among short story writers not already named as frequently found in the earlier numbers of the magazine were the following, here listed with the title of a notable Smart Set story: Stephen Vincent Benet (“Summer Thunder,” September 1920), Willa Cather (“Coming, Eden Bower,” August 1920, later called “Coming, Aphrodite”), James Branch Cabell (“Some Ladies and Jurgen,” July 1918, embryo of the novel Jurgen ), Sinclair Lewis (“I’m a Stranger Here Myself,” August 1916), Howard Mumford Jones (“Mrs. Drainger’s Veil,” December 1918), Ben Hecht (“The Unlovely Sin,” July 1917), Reginald Wright Kauffman (“The Lonely House,” February 1917), and Charles Caldwell Dobie (“The Yellow Shawl,” June 1915). Somerset Maugham consigned a story of his entitled
45 Dolmetsch counted forty-two writers whom he believes to have been first “introduced to the American reading public” by the Smart Set and later to have “attained a large measure of distinction in the world of letters”; “A History of the Smart Set Magazine,” p. 133.
46 Dolmetsch counted 1,337 different contributors to the 110 numbers of the magazine edited by Mencken and Nathan; ibid.
47 Mencken, “A Personal Word,” p. 3.
“Miss Thompson'’ to his American agent, who sent it to most of the leading magazines without success; finally it came to Nathan marked down to $200. This was more than the Smart Set had ever paid for a story, but only a fraction of Maugham’s going rate. Warner authorized the extravagance, and the issue in which it was published (April 1921) was one of the few numbers of the Smart Set ever to sell out on the newsstands. “Miss Thompson” was later famous in a dramatic version with the title “Rain.” 48
Other story writers who brightened the pages of the Smart Set in the early twenties, when it probably shone most brilliantly in that department, were Hugh Walpole, Sara Haardt, Jeannette Marks, L. M. Hussey, Nancy Hoyt, and Leonard Cline. Edward J. O’Brien, who set himself up as a kind of arbiter of the American short story beginning with those of 1915, placed the Smart Set first among the magazines in the number of “distinctive” short stories published in 1920, and again in 1922 and 1923. 49
Much of the nonfiction during the first years of the Menck- en-Nathan regime was sensational hackwork. Series such as “The Sins of the Four Hundred” (1917-1918) and “Enchantresses of Men” (1918-1919) were anonymous or signed by pen-names; Nathan may have been responsible. But some of the nonfiction was more important; for example, articles on great cities appeared occasionally. The forerunner of such severe critical appraisals, and perhaps the best of them, was one published early in Wright’s editorship and written by Wright himself—“Los Angeles, the Chemically Pure” (March 1913). In the same tone were John Macy’s “Blue Boston,” the anon-
48 Dolmetsch, “A History of the Smart Set Magazine,” p. IS; based on an interview with Warner. [Dolmetsch, The Smart Set, pp. 80-81.] Rascoe says Nathan showed him the manuscript and told him the story of its acquisition; “Smart Set History,” pp. xi-xli.
49 See the series entitled The Best Short Stories . . . and the Yearbook of the American Short Story, edited by O’Brien. Of course, the Smart Set published many more stories than Harper’s, Scribner’s, and the Atlantic. In 1920, when it was placed first in number of “distinctive” stories, only 40 percent of its total of published stories were said to be “distinctive.” Before 1920 it was always credited with 20 percent or less; in 1921, 25 percent; in 1922, 35 percent; in 1923, 45 percent. In 1924 it was very properly dropped from consideration. One has the feeling that O’Brien did not discover the Smart Set until 1920.
ymous “Morals of Pittsburgh/’ and' Lewis Sherwin’s “The Morals of the Mormons/’ all published in 1917. American universities were taken apart in 1921; Hendrik Van Loon wrote on Cornell, John Peale Bishop on Princeton, and so on. These articles were not muckraking in the sense of exposes based on research, such as McClure’s Magazine had once practiced; they were impressionistic and literary. And then there were some important articles of literary and dramatic criticism in addition to the regular contributions of the editors; for example, Thomas Beer’s “Mauve Decade” (February 1922) was the germ of his later book of that title, and James Huneker made notable contributions.
Though the editors were against the “extravagances of the free verse movement,” they published about a thousand poems in their nine years. In their galaxy of poets appeared, besides some already mentioned as Smart Set contributors, John McClure, Margaret Widdemer, Glenn Ward Dresbach, Harry Kemp, David Morton, Muna Lee, Orrick Johns, Zoe Akins, Leonora Speyer, Lizette Woodworth Reese, and Maxwell Bodenheim.
Notable among playwrights who contributed the short pieces that were a unique feature of each number were Eugene O’Neill, Lord Dunsany, Djuna Barnes, and George M. Cohan. Cohan’s farces (for example “The Farrell Case,” October 1920) were very amusing.
Dunsany was only one of a considerable list of foreign contributors. In this category, the Mencken-Nathan Smart Set lagged somewhat behind that of Wright, especially in its latter years; but in 1914-1920 there were often three or four pieces by writers frdm overseas. For a time Ezra Pound, Ernest Boyd, and Frank Harris acted as scouts for the magazine in England. 50 James Joyce was virtually unknown in England when the Smart Set published two stories from his pen in May 1915. The magazine continued its relations with the French syndicate until 1922, using material that was mostly second-rate—some detective stories, some scandalous bits, some short stories of character and setting. From Russia came stories by Leonid Andreyev and Count Alexey Tolstoy.
50 Dolmetsch, “A History of the Smart Set Magazine,” p. 109.
Mencken and Nathan discontinued the magazine’s “Per- tinent and Impertinent” department when they took over the editorship, consigning items such as it had formerly thrived upon to use as fillers. In 1919 they began the “Repetition Generate,” a satirical review of the contemporary human comedy. One of its chief features was the award of a custard pie to some public figure for the most asinine utterance or action of the month. In it appeared in 1923 the announcement of Mencken and Nathan as candidates for the respective (if not respected) offices of President and Vice-President of the United States. In a burlesque platform they promised, if elected, to suppress the Y.M.C.A., to keep plenty of liquor in the White House, to write public papers “in language that their constituents can understand,” to turn the Philippines over to Japan, and so on. 51 “The Nietzschean Follies” series lasted only ten months in 1922; it ted off with an article by Thomas Beer attacking the prevalent idea of rural virtue. In July of that year a series of cartoons began, starting with William Gropper’s “Portraits of American Ecclesiastics”; it lasted well into the next year. In May 1923 began the department entitled “Americana,” under the Hatteras pen-name. Here were gathered together bits of news from all over the Union, demonstrating in what variety Americans were making fools of themselves; this department eventually became a leading feature of the American Mercury.
But of course, of all the contents of the Smart Set, year in and year out, the monthly critical articles of the two editors were paramount. They never failed to be readable, lively, challenging. Mencken and Nathan were a well-matched team; they drew well together in editorial harness, and they agreed generally in their critical principles.
Nathan, carrying on the sensitive esthetic tradition of Hun- eker, and employing also his friend’s tools of learning and sharp attack, never failed in his opposition to sentimentality and to the worship of bourgeois morals. His wit, his love of shocking his readers out of their old ruts of judgment and thinking, and his amazing erudition in things theatrical were applied to the consideration of play after play and to trends as
51 Smart Set, v. 71, June 1923, pp. 31-33; July 1923, pp. 41-44.
268 THE SMART SET
they appeared to develop. Though sometimes reckless and immoderate, he probably exerted a strong influence on the American theater. His Smart Set work, of course, extended much beyond dramatic criticisms. 52
To Mencken, even more than to Nathan, criticism was a battle; and above the noise of clashing critical lances echoed ever and sometimes even anon his raucous and derisive laughter. His love of unusual words—occasionally invented, often rude, sometimes effective by mere piling on of insulting terms—was characteristic; it resulted in what came to be known as “Menckenese.” Not a philosopher in any strict sense, he fought for certain basic ideas, chief of w r hich was freedom of expression on the part of imaginative writers. He was a hater of cant, hypocrisy, and pretentiousness. An enemy of the romance of his period, he stood for the realism which meant honest facing of life. In the criticism of poetry, his attitudes seem, on the whole, undiscriminating and sometimes contradictory: here, he was far weaker than in prose. Over all, he was a dogmatist, never trying to understand “the other side.” His leadership among critics of the twenties was founded mainly upon his championship of the advancing realism of the times and his ability as a striking and original writer. 53
In the twenties the Smart Set stepped up its attack on the “booboisie,” on the stupidity of the popular mores, on racism, patriotism, and reformers. It still held hard to the antimonogamy line, especially in its fiction; it fell in with the current assault on the small town; it multiplied its quips against Rotary Clubs and such organizations; it turned more and more to digs at politicians and political movements.
Of course, all this invited retaliation. Stuart P. Sherman began his famous crusade against Mencken as early as 1917, stressing what he conceived to be the latter’s lack of loyalty to his country. 54
Percy H. Boynton wrote his “American Literature and the
52 See Charles Angoff, ed., The World of George Jean Nathan (New York, 1952).
53 See William Manchester, “A Critical Study,” passim.
54 The first blast was a review of A Book of Prefaces in the Nation, v. 105, Nov. 29, 1917, pp. 593-94.
Tart Set” for the Freeman , 55 Time, in its second number, predicted: “If Mr. Mencken carries on his abuse against Rotary much longer, Public Opinion may proclaim him a bully —or, to use his language—a cad, a double-barreled ass, a poltroon.” In later numbers Time continued its attack. 56 Berton Braley wrote his parody on Eugene Field’s “Wynken, Blyn- ken, and Nod,” which appeared in The Sun Dial column of the New York Sun:
There were three that sailed away one night Far from the madding throng;
And two of the three were always right And everyone else was wrong.
But they took another along, these two,
To bear them company,
For he was the only One ever knew Why the other two should Be.
And so they sailed away, these three—
Mencken,
Nathan,
And God.
And the two they talked of the aims of Art, Which they alone understood;
And they quite agreed from the very start That nothing was any good Except some novels that Dreiser wrote And some plays from Germany.
When God objected—they rocked the boat And dropped him into the sea,
“For you have no critical facultee,”
Said Mencken And Nathan To God.
The two came cheerfully sailing home Over the surging tide And trod once more their native loam Wholly self-satisfied.
55 Freeman, v. 1, April 7, 1920, pp. 88-89.
56 Time, v. 1, March 10, 1923, p. 22; and, for example, July 30, 1923, p. 23 Aug. 27, 1923, p. 21.
And the little group that calls them great Welcomed them fawningly,
Though why the rest of us tolerate This precious pair must be Something nobody else can see But Mencken,»
Nathan,
And God ! 57
Doubtless Mencken and Nathan chuckled over this effusion: how the third of the trio took it, only He knows—doubtless with divine tolerance.
By 1923 Mencken and Nathan had decided they deserved a more dignified forum than was afforded by a magazine handicapped by a rather silly title and overloaded with cheap stories. The Smart Set had brightened its covers by color in 1915 and used pretty girl pictures by John Held and Archie Gunn the next year; it screamed from its covers, “Startling! Daring! Unmasking!”; it increased its number of pages again. But it was playing the schizophrene in order to pursue two audiences, the intelligentsia and the low-IQ “smuthound” —and capturing neither of them. By 1923 it had dropped below the 25,000 mark in circulation. 58 Mencken and Warner quarreled over the publication of a proposed piece on the death of President Harding in the fall of 1923; as a result, the magazine was offered for sale to Alfred A. Knopf, with whom the editors had already been discussing the founding of a new monthly review. Knopf would not pay as much as Warner wanted. His mind was fixed on a brand new magazine anyway. 59
Mencken and Nathan resigned with the number for December 1923. In his farewell, Mencken wrote, with a certain compunction that stopped well short of remorse: “. . . I have composed and printed no less than 182 book articles—in all, more than 900,000 words of criticism. An appalling dose, certainly! How many books have I reviewed, noticed, praised,
57 Berton Braley, “Three—Minus One,” in New York Sun, Dec. 6, 1920, p. 16, col. 4. Reprinted with permission of Ian Braley.
58 Sworn statement in 1924 edition of Ayer was 22,127. Circulations given in later paragraphs are also based on sworn statements in Ayer.
59 Dolmetsch, “A History of the Smart Set Magazine,” pp. 72-73 ; based on an interview with Warner. [Dolmetsch, The Smart Set, pp. 86-87.]
mocked, dismissed with lofty sneers? I don’t know precisely, but probably fully 2,0002’ Then he went on to express his belief that the situation of the imaginative writer in America had improved greatly in his decade and a half of reviewing, especially in the matter of freedom. The gist of his valedictory seemed to be that he felt he had won his battle. 60
And so Mencken and Nathan went on to found the American Mercury, and the Smart Set became a twenty-cent allfiction monthly. Morris Gilbert, who had been a contributor, now became editor. He announced that he would fill the magazine with “fiction of a much wider appeal than that which it has offered in the last decade.” 61 But after a few months it was sold to the Hearst interests for $60,000. 62
In October 1924, the Smart Set was made a quarto with a flashy cover and the subtitle, “True Stories from Real Life.” It now consisted largely of pictures, printed by offset; sex and sensation fiction, mainly of the “true story” type; sentiment by Edgar Guest and Dr. Frank Crane; and a little cheap advertising. “Look at the trollop! Why couldn’t she have died before she lost her good name?” exclaimed a former reader as he passed a newsstand. 63
But circulation, at a cover price of twenty-five cents, jumped to over 250,000 in 1925, and in the next few years to about 385,000. F. Orlin Tremaine was editor for a year or so, to be succeeded by William Charles Lengel. In 1928 James R. Quirk bought from Hearst both the Smart Set and the New McClure’s Magazine, both of them now wallowing in a vulgarity unworthy of past achievements, and put T. Howard Kelly, a fellow newspaper man, to editing them. But the next
60 Smart Set, v. 72, Dec. 1923, p. 138. This claim that the fight to free American literature had been won was also expressed in a broadside issued when the resignation was announced; Oct. 10, 1923.
61 Ibid., v. 72, Dec. 1923, pp. 11-12.
62 Dolmetsch, “A History of the Smart Set Magazine,” p. 145; based on an interview with Warner. [Dolmetsch, The Smart Set, p. 89.] According to Edgar Kemler in The Irreverent Mr. Mencken (Boston, 1950), p. 165, Mencken and Nathan each received from Hearst one-fourth of $60,000, the sale price of Smart Set, in addition to $40 per share for their stock.
63 Exclamation of Terry Ramsaye, quoted by Randolph Bartlett in his review of The Smart Set Anthology, in Saturday Review of Literature, v. 11, Dec. 1, 1934, pp. 320, 326.
jyear a marked decline in circulation was noted, and advertising was still sickly. A change was determined upon.
It was a radical change indeed. The Smart Set and New McClure’s were merged in May 1929, under the name of the former, and a new magazine, with the subtitle “The Young Woman’s Magazine,” was the result. Margaret E. Sangster, former contributing editor to the Christian Herald and author of novels and poems of pious and motherly kind, became editor. There were some good writers in this novel Smart Set, but the name and history of the magazine were handicaps to a journal for nice young ladies, and the number for July 1930 was the last. The title was taken over to appear as the heading for a column of society gossip in the Hearst papers signed by “Cholly Knickerbocker.”
18 '
THE SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY 1
I N launching the South Atlantic Quarterly in January 1902, Editor John Spencer Bassett wrote a little salutatory in which he asserted his belief in “liberty to think. 5 ’ He expected to present “the problems of today on all of their sides.” He closed this initial statement by declaring that the editor’s “ambition is that men shall say that he has sought truth without prejudice and with no more than a modest confidence in his own conclusions. To find truth absolutely might be a good thing, but it does not seem likely to be done. The next best thing is to have many people seeking it in the spirit of honest tolerance. It is this search which develops mind and brings culture; and it is with a reverent hope of attaining it among a large number of Southern men that the present enterprise is placed before the public.” 2 Did Professor Bassett, as he put these words on paper, have any presentiment of the crisis that would soon be precipitated by the on-all-sides freedom of discussion he invited?
The South Atlantic was at first sponsored at Trinity Col-
1 Title: The South Atlantic Quarterly.
First issue: Jan. 1902. Current.
Periodicity: Quarterly. Regular annual volume.
Publishers: 9019 Scholarship Society, 1902-7; South Atlantic Publishing Company, 1907-24; Duke University Press, 1925-current. All at Durham, N.C.
Editors: John Spencer Bassett, 1902-5; Edwin Mims and William Henry Glasson, 1905-9; William Preston Few and W. H. Glasson, 1909-19; William Kenneth Boyd and William Hane Wannamaker, 1919-30; Henry Rudolph Dwire (managing editor), 1930-44; William T. Laprade, 1944-57; William Baskerville Hamilton (associate managing editor), 1956-57; (managing editor), 1958-current. Joseph Francis Bivins, assistant editor, 1902-4. Oliver W. Ferguson, (associate editor), 1961-current. Editorial Board: W. H. Wannamaker, 1930-56; W. T. Laprade, 1930-44; Newman Ivey White, 1930-42; Calvin Bryce Hoover, 1930-57; Harvey Branscomb, 1944-47; R. Taylor Cole, 1944-59; Charles Sackett Sydnor, 1947-54; W. B. Hamilton, 1954-56; Lionel Stevenson, 1956- current; Herman Salinger, 1956-current; Arlin Turner, 1956-current; B. U. Ratchford, 1958-60; Ralph Braibanti, 1959-60; J. Harris Proctor, 1961-current; Robert F. Durden, 1961-65; Robert S. Smith, 1961-current; I. B. Holley, Jr., 1966-current; Aubrey W. Naylor, 1967-current.
Indexes: Poole’s Index, Readers’ Guide Supplement, International.
2 South Atlantic Quarterly, v. 1, Jan. 1902, p. 3.
273
274 SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY
lege, Durham, North Carolina, by a student organization known as “The 9019.” This was a scholastic society founded by Bassett when he had first come to Trinity as an instructor; its cabalistic figures denoted that it was born in the ninetieth year of the nineteenth century. 3 Honorary members of the society from the faculty were soon meeting the deficits, however; and in its second year the journal had the somewhat more assured support of the South Atlantic Publishing Company, composed of members of the faculties of Trinity College and Trinity Park School. 4 Stock certificates, valueless except as badges of honor, were issued to contributors. In 1907 the company was officially chartered, and some business and professional men of Durham joined the devoted band; in all, twenty stockholders put in $1,225 and received the decorative certificates as mementoes. 5 It appears that after this money was spent (and most of it probably went to pay debts to printers) the college and its supporters made fairly regular subventions to the journal. The college and the town could be proud of their modest Quarterly, which was a presentable publication of about one hundred pages, including a little section of advertising, all bound in a neat olive-green cover.
It was a Negro question that furnished the major test of Bassett’s doctrine of freedom of utterance for all sides. The first number of his magazine opened with “An Inquiry Regarding Lynching,” by President John Carlisle Kilgo, of Trinity, in which the author blamed the frequent recurrence of this crime in the South upon “sensitiveness in social dispositions,” and pleaded for an emphasis in southern education upon calmer, saner attitudes and abandonment of appeals to passion. This seems to have won a degree of acceptance, for Volume I, Number I of the journal was well received.
In the third number, Robert Watson Winston, president of the Durham Chamber of Commerce, was given a few pages for the presentation of “An Unconsidered Aspect of the Negro Question,” which turned out to be an attack on the Negro
SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY 275
worker, who “thinks idleness, vice, and impudence stand for manhood and freedom.” Winston predicted: “Unless a marked change for the better soon occurs, not only will there be increased violence towards the average negro, but upon hatred of him will grow up a political party that will sweep away his schools, his orphan homes and his hospitals, and will expatriate him or make a chattel of him.” 6 On the other hand, an editorial article appeared in the fourth number in which Bassett asserted that the Democratic party, then in the midst of a state campaign, had continuously used an appeal to passion against the Negro in order to gain votes: “Consciously or unconsciously it has bred race hatred and then fattened on it.” 7
This was provocative enough, but in the eighth number Bassett published an article entitled “Stirring Up the Fires of Race Antipathy” that certainly stirred up a tremendous flame of wrath throughout the South against the author, his journal, and his college. In this editorial, Bassett elaborated upon his theme of the political abuse of the Negro question, and then went on to make a startling prediction: “The only solution reserved for us is the adoption of these children of Africa into our American life. In spite of our race feeling, of which the writer has his share, they will win equality at some time.” But perhaps even more incendiary was an obiter dictum that Booker T. Washington was “the greatest man, save General Lee, born in the South in a hundred years.” 8
As soon as this article came to the attention of Josephus Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, he reprinted it in full in the editorial section of his Sunday edition, together with a three-column piece of his own in reply to it. 9 He used screamer headlines —“says negro will win equality,” “southern leaders slandered”— over the Bassett article; and in his own editorial he called “bASSett” a freak and suggested that he always prayed with his face turned to-
6 South Atlantic Quarterly, v. 1, July 1902, p. 267.
7 Ibid., v. 1, Oct. 1902, p. 307.
8 Ibid., v. 2, Oct. 1903, pp. 304, 299.
9 Raleigh News and Observer, Nov. 1, 1903, p. 9. Daniels’ own account of the entire episode is found in his Editor in Politics (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1941), “I Am Hung in Effigy,” pp. 42 7-38.
276 SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY
ward Tuskegee. Thereafter, day after day, this newspaper reprinted editorials from its contemporaries replying indignantly to the Bassett article; there were floods of them, and the reaction seemed unanimous.
\
The involvement of the News and Observer in this matter must be made clear. 10 Daniels, later Secretary of the Navy and ambassador to Mexico, had made his paper a leader in southern journalism. For several years he had been engaged in a crusade against the Tobacco Trust, which he regarded as the oppressor of the planter, as well as a strong supporter of the Republican party in the South, which was the most heinous offense of all. When the Dukes, chief operators of the Trust, began to give liberal donations to Trinity College, the News and Observer included that institution within the circle of its criticism and objurgation and represented President Kilgo as the spokesman of the Trust and of the opposition party. And so, when the South Atlantic Quarterly was founded (including a full-page announcement of the virtues of Duke’s Mixture in its very slender advertising section), the News and Observer looked upon it, not as an organ of the Trust, perhaps, but as belonging to the evil pattern. Still another reason for Daniels’ anti-Trinity position was President Kilgo’s bitter fight against state-supported higher education, which the editor, loyal to his alma mater, the University of North Carolina, strongly resented. 11
Within ten days after the appearance of Bassett’s article, such a fire of abusive and scurrilous criticism had been directed against the author that he wrote a statement for the local Durham newspaper in which he attempted to soften the terms of the original article. “I had no thought of social equality in my mind,” he wrote; and he gave also a special definition of “greatness” to apply to Booker Washington. 12 This did nothing to put out the fire. Newspapers, church bodies (Trinity was a Methodist college), and educational and polit-
10 Daniels, Editor in Politics; also his Tar Heel Editor (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1939) —both passim.
11 See Paul N. Garber, John Carlisle Kilgo (Durham, N.C., 1937), chap ii, for this campaign of Kilgo’s. Note also the account therein of the episode of the Bassett editorial, and particularly of the board of trustees meeting.
12 Durham Herald, Nov. 10, 1903.
SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY 277
ical leaders were almost unanimous in adding their particular torches to the conflagration that foiled upon the review and its editor, and the college and its president.
Another ten days, and Bassett resigned his professorship. It was obviously done to save the college, but the entire faculty stood by Bassett by placing in the hands of President Kilgo sealed envelopes containing their own resignations, to be opened if Bassett’s resignation was accepted. This action, though supposed to be secret, was undoubtedly a powerful club held over the board of trustees when it met in special conclave to consider the Bassett resignation; indeed, both faculty and students, though they disagreed more or less with some of the things their colleague and teacher had said, supported him faithfully on the ground of his right to say them. It is interesting to note that Walter Hines Page, then a kind of unofficial national spokesman for the South, wrote to Benjamin N. Duke repeatedly suggesting that he bring his influence to bear on the board to retain Bassett. 13
The board meeting began the evening of December 1, 1903, and lasted into the early hours of the next day. Weary students kept their watch at the door of the board room; and when, at nearly three o’clock in the morning, the news came out that the trustees had voted 18 to 7 to reject Bassett’s resignation, the college bell was rung, and immediately the campus was crowded with cheering students. A huge bonfire was kindled to enliven the celebration, and in its lurid light was seen an effigy of Josephus Daniels hanging from a persimmon tree, and even a second one on a telegraph pole. The student monthly was very apologetic, when it told about the hanging in its next issue; 14 but the reader seems to detect a certain satisfaction in this reply to the varied and long continued attacks of the News and Observer on their college.
And so Trinity and the South Atlantic Quarterly went on, and the fire of criticism died down. Bassett resigned his editorship about eighteen months later. He may have been influ-
13 Cline, “Thirty-Eight Years,” pp. 93-97. Later Page wrote an article about the whole episode for World’s Work, v. 7, Jan. 1904, pp. 4284-87.
14 Trinity Archive, Dec. 1903; reprinted in South Atlantic Quarterly, v. 3, Jan. 1904, pp. 68-72; and William Baskerville Hamilton, ed., Fifty Years of the South Atlantic Quarterly (Durham, N.C., 1952), pp. 68-72.
278 SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY
enced by the loss of his assistant editor, Joseph Bivins, who was killed in a railway accident in the fall of 1904. In 1906 Bassett left Trinity for Smith College, where he continued a long career as teacher and author. The incident of his “Race Antipathy” article remains an almost classic case of freedom of the press, since the real test in such an issue is not whether those in control believe in the statements that have been made, but whether they believe in the right of a responsible and sincere author to make them. 15
Bassett was succeeded in his editorship of the South Atlantic by William H. Glasson and Edwin Mims, who shared the work for four years. Glasson was an economist and Mims a professor of English who had just published a distinguished life of Sidney Lanier. When Mims went to the University of North Carolina, William P. Few took his place as joint editor of the Quarterly; but Few became president of Trinity the next year, and Glasson was the journal’s mainstay until 1919.
Contents for the first decade of the South Atlantic were nearly all southern, either by authorship or topic. “The fact that every article in the present number is by a native Southerner is a matter of gratification to the editor,” wrote Bassett of one of his issues. 16 The magazine was saved from monotony by the fact that southern writers frequently held forth on topics—literary, historical, or philosophical—which were by no means regional; and there were, as time went on, articles by non-southern writers on wholly non-southern topics.
The perennial debate over Negro rights and Negro character continued. A symposium on lynching was printed in the number for October 1906; and an article on that subject by Robert Russa Moton, who had succeeded Washington as principal of Tuskegee Institute, appeared in July 1919. James W. Garner, Mississippi born but now a professor of political science at Illinois, wrote about the savage Negrophobia of Gov-
15 A short account of the episode is found in William B. Hamilton’s “Fifty Years of Liberalism and Learning,” South Atlantic Quarterly, v. 51, Jan. 1952, pp. 7-32; reprinted as the first article in Hamilton, ed., Fifty Years, an anthology which contains also Kilgo’s article on lynching, Bassett’s famous editorial, and the statement embodying the decision of the trustees. The fullest account is in Cline, “Thirty-Eight Years,” chap. ii.
16 South Atlantic Quarterly, v. 4, Ian. 1905, p. 91.
Volume IV. Number 2.
The