The American Magazine Grows Up

by FREDERICK LEWIS ALLEN

1

NINETY years ago — in the spring of 1857, when Buchanan had just entered the White House, and the Supreme Court had just handed down the Dred Scott decision, and the Panic of 1857 was brewing — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his diary: —

Dined in town at Parker’s, with Emerson, Lowell, Motley, Holmes, Cabot, Underwood, and the publisher, Phillips, to talk about the new magazine that the last wishes to establish. It will no doubt be done, though I am not so eager about it as the rest.

By modern standards it was a drab-looking little periodical, with 128 pages of unsigned contributions printed in painfully small type. Though it carried a little sober advertising, as an economic enterprise the Atlantic was modest indeed. Lowell, as editor, drew a salary of $2500 a year. It paid six dollars per magazine page for contributions — only five dollars for “tyros.” It showed none of the zeal for reportage, for immediacy, for human interest, that most up-and-coming magazines display today. To be sure, that first number contained some observations on the 1857 Panic, but these took the form of a leisurely and rather poetic moral essay. In essence the new Atlantic was designed to perform for literary America the function which a college literary magazine nowadays performs for the college to show the best current writing of the best writers.

But what writers! For the very first issue Emerson turned in four poems — for which he was paid a total of fifty dollars — including the memorable verses which begin, “Daughters of lime, the hypocritic Days.” Longfellow, the best-selling poet (whose Courtship of Miles Standish, the following year, sold 10,000 copies in London in a single day), contributed the poem “Santa Filomena,” which gave world-wide currency to the phrase he applied to Florence Nightingale, “a lady with a lamp.” Holmes, who twenty-five years earlier had written for another magazine some “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” papers, reinstated his Autocrat, beginning a new series of rambling discourses with the words, “I was just going to say, when I was interrupted. . . John Lothrop Motley was there, and Whittier, and Harriet Beecher Stowe (already famous for Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and of course Lowell himself. It was as if literary New England, at its most brilliant moment, were determined to put into the field an all-star team.

The competition that the young Atlantic faced was lively. A certain restlessness of the American temperament, an ambition to be up-to-date, and a zeal for self-improvement (preferably without undue effort) had made magazine publishing a lively, if always precarious, industry in the United States. In 1854 the New York Quarterly had referred to “that passion for periodical literature which characterizes the age.”There were already some six hundred magazines in the country. These included all sorts of religious and educational and trade publications, and also — in those days of difficult, transportation — clusters of local publications with only local readership; but many had a wider appeal.

The most popular were weekly miscellanies, mostly published on Saturday for Sunday reading (in the absence, of course, of Sunday newspapers). According to Frank Luther Mott, who knows more about American magazine history than any ten other men today, circulation figures were notoriously unreliable, but Robert Bonner’s New York Ledger was rumored to have 400,000 readers. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, which was printed in newspaper format and could be described as the Time of its day, gave in 1860 the explicit figure of 164,000. Harper’s Weekly was just entering the field. Some weeklies specialized in news and hints for farmers, the leader being Luther Tucker’s Country Gentleman, which in 1858 claimed 250,000 readers.

But there were monthly magazines for women, too, with a sharp eye out for fashions; the leader among these was Godey’s Lady’s Book, with a claim of 150,000. And there were also general monthlies, including the short-lived but sharp-witted Putnam’s and the emerging leader, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, founded in 1850 by the New York book firm of Harper & Brothers (which continues to publish it to this day). Harper’s made such a hit by serializing in turn Bleak House, The Newcomes, and Little Dorrit, and by running a serialized life of Napoleon, that its circulation during its first fifteen years averaged 150,000. It was the nearest approach yet made to a national family magazine.

In size of readership or in catholicity of appeal the newcomer in Boston was hardly in the running with these rivals. In 1863 James T. Fields, who had succeeded Lowell as editor, wrote in his diary that “purely literary as it is, it has a subscription list, daily increasing, of 32,000.” Small change, beside Harper’s 150,000! But the phrase “purely literary" was the Atlantic’s special glory. That, and the fact that it did not go a-whoring after British novelists, but proudly concentrated on producing American work. What if, during its first fifteen years, two thirds of its contributors — and probably an equal proportion of its readers — were New Englanders? The flowering of New England was then at its fullest bloom. There was nothing in the rest of the country remotely like the concentration, in the Boston area, of literary talent and intellectual excitement.

Founded by men of genius and aided by their high repute, the Atlantic had got off to a good start. It was amateurish by current standards, but it was native, venturesome, and intent upon holding literature “above all other human interests.” In a crude and sprawling America it stood for quality.

2

THIRTY-ODD years later — in the early eighteennineties — the periodical scene had changed, but it had not been utterly transformed. Although the country had become far more populous and had been linked together by railroads from end to end, so that a single magazine could now begin to reach a really national audience, none had yet attained a circulation of anything like a million copies.

During those thirty-odd years there had been a great increase in the number and variety of periodicals. There had been an epidemic of “mail-order” publications, devised to carry and sugar-coat the mail-order advertising of goods. There had been plenty of gutter journalism, its most famous exponent being the Police Gazette, which in 1874 dressed itself in pink, focused its attention on lurid sex, and each week displayed on its front page curvaceous females of formidable poundage. A sharpened interest in science had led to the establishment of Popular Science (in 1872) and other rivals to the older Scientific American.

Among what we would now call the news weeklies, Harper’s Weekly had become the recognized leader, with Leslie’s as its chief rival. Among the magazines of more ambitious literary quality, the Galaxy had shone brightly but briefly, and a second Putnam’s had followed the first into oblivion. The Nation, founded by E. L. Godkin at the end of the Civil War, lived on as a journal of opinion, with a negligible circulation but an impressive influence. Among humorous publications, the original Life rivaled the gifted H. C. Bunner’s satirical Puck. And so forth — one could go on at length listing the burgeoning varieties of periodicals. But by 1890, by all odds the most impressive thing about the scene was the way in which the field of general monthly publications was dominated by Harper’s and its two younger rivals, the Century and Scribner’s.

These three magazines — all finely illustrated with drawings reproduced by copper or wood engraving (there was then no half-tone), all distinguished in appearance, all intellectually respectable in content and sometimes brilliant — were, along with the staider Atlantic, almost undisputed contestants for the attention of educated Americans of substance. And they were likewise the most respected vehicles for the advertising of such noted products as Pearline, W. Baker & Co.’s Breakfast Cocoa, the W. L. Douglas $3 Shoe, Castoria, Mellin’s Food, Ferris’ Patent Good Sense Corset Waists, the Kodak Camera (“You press the button, we do the rest”), and Pears’ Soap (“Good morning, have you used Pears’ Soap?”). To have Harper’s or the Century on one’s parlor table, and to have a long row of bound volumes on one’s shelves, marked one clearly as a person of consequence.

Harper’s was under the almost perpetual editorship of Henry Mills Alden, the bearded gentleman with the noble eyes who had been on the job since 1869 and would continue there till 1919. The magazine commanded the work of the ablest writers both in England and at home, and was not only impeccably distinguished but a money-maker.

Its most impressive rival was t he Century, founded — confusingly for us — as Scribner’s Monthly in 1870 by the lively and able Dr. Josiah Gilbert Holland, with the financial aid of Charles Scribner. In 1881 Holland parted company with Scribner and his publication became the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine; during the next decade its remarkable series of articles on the Civil War, by men who had actually directed the battles, quickly lifted its circulation from 127,000 to 225,000; meanwhile its art editor, Alexander W. Drake, was bringing the reproduction of works of art by wood engravings (done by Timothy Cole and others) to a new pitch of perfection. No wonder Charles Scribner, watching the success of the enterprise that had once been his, decided that he must once again have a Scribners. So in 1887 he started one — which promptly became the third member of the great, triumvirate.

Meanwhile the Atlantic was not exactly flourishing. Its series of editors — Janies Russell Lowell, James T. Fields, William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and Horace E. Scudder — had not represented, let us say, a uniformly ascending scale of ability. Furthermore, the flowering of New England was over; and although the Atlantic s literary standards remained high, it had become, like literary Boston, less creative, less electric, and more academic. Its circulation, never large, was on a slow decline toward the pathetic figure of 7000, which it was to reach in 1897.

We can see clearly now that all these four fine magazines — and most especially the Atlantic were victims of the pervading malady of educated folk in late-nineteenth-century America — gentility. Seeing about them a community which by contrast with the Europe of their Baedekered visits was barbarian and uncouth, they turned their mental eyes away from the scene toward literature and the arts, travel, history, and English and Continental culture — forgetting that the test of a civilized mind is not in the subject-matter with which it deals but in the discrimination and sensitivity with which it deals with anything. They shrank away from the topic of American business to an extent which to us today is astonishing; the present-day historian, scanning their bound volumes for data on the economic and political state of the nation, finds them singularly barren of information and comment on such matters. They shrank away, too, from everyday human nature, trimming their fiction to meet a sense of propriety best illustrated, perhaps, by the testimony of a subscriber to Scribner’s, who wrote the editors that a “young female member” of his household, finding in the magazine an article on French art illustrated with reproductions of nudes, “uttered a low cry and fled from the room.”

Overwhelmingly these magazines centered their attention upon what was really cultural and academic shop-talk and upon the other blameless intellectual topics that they considered proper to nice people: “Rambles Through Old Brittany,” “Some Unpublished Letters of Dean Swift,” or “Sculptors of the Early Italian Renaissance.” Here, for example, are the titles of the first few articles in the Atlantic for November, 1890: “Along the Frontier of Proteus’s Realm,” “The Legend of William Tell,” “Robert Morris,” “A Successful Highwayman in the Middle Ages,” and “An American Highwayman” (date of incident discussed, 1808). Could departure from the main stream of American life have been more complete?

The leading American monthlies of the early nineties were splendid magazines. They broadened the interests and subdued the barbarism of a generation of educated Americans. But they had moved too far away from the everyday realities, and a revolution was coming that would presently end their undisputed reign.

3

THE revolution began in 1893, when Frank Munsey dropped the price of his magazine to ten cents, other magazines cut their prices, and it was discovered that what you lost in revenue by selling your magazine at much less than cost came back to you — and much more — through the increased advertising that a big circulation would command.

Presently S. S. McClure, one of the greatest of all American editors, sent the revolution into a second phase. He set McClure’s Magazine to reporting — with specific facts and also with discrimination — the truth about contemporary American life; presenting Ida M. Tarbell’s detailed history of the Standard Oil Corporation, examining the way other businesses won control of markets, and sending Lincoln Steffens to show how political machines actually worked in American cities. The dismay of McClure’s writers at the dreadful facts they unearthed led to the excesses of the “muckrakers”; but that men and women of conscience and sensibility should actually investigate what was going on around them was wonderful indeed — and how the public lapped it up!

The revolution went into its third phase after Cyrus H. K. Curtis of Maine bought the dying local weekly in Philadelphia called the Saturday Evening Post — paying only $1000 for it ($100 down) — and installed George Horace Lorimer as editor. As owner of the Post — and of the Ladies’ Home Journal, which he had bought in 1888, installing Edward Bok as editor in 1889 — Curtis pushed the Munsey principle to the limit. Lorimer, like McClure, believed that American business could be made interesting; unlike McClure, he presented it in a friendly way, appealing to the great mass of men (and women too) who want to improve themselves rather than improve the world. Bok had a shrewdness, sentiment, and idealism which enabled him to give American women the sort of practical hints and spiritual encouragement for which they yearned.

Both the Post and the Journal prospered uncannily. Again and again in the early years of this century the rising circulation of the Post would outrun its current advertising rates, the cash would he low in the till, and Curtis’s advisers would counsel caution — but he kept on promoting the sales, and then jacking up the advertising rate, until by about the time of the First World War the Saturday Evening Post’s circulation had reached the hitherto undreamed-of figure of two million. National advertising had definitely become the mighty mainstay of American periodical publishing; and the advertising agencies, with their new techniques of mass appeal, had become a power in the land.

The Post and Journal had numerous imitators and rivals, such as Collier s, McCall’s, the Woman’s Home Companion, the Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and the American Magazine (formerly Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly). One and all, they reached circulations which would have seemed fantastic in the nineties. The revolution led by Munsey, McClure, Curtis, Lorimer, and Bok had put magazine publishing into mass production.

For the great triumvirate of the nineties, for the professorial Atlantic and for the other magazines dedicated to quality, this turn of events was ominous. They had their loyal followers, but they lost advertising to the newcomers, they lost authors and artists who preferred a check for $1000 to one for $150, and they lost prestige. There began a slowmotion procession to limbo.

Despite frantic efforts to put these HumptyDumpties back on the wall, by the nineteen-twenties the Century was merged with the Forum, which was merged with Current History. Later Scribner’s was merged with a newcomer, the Commentator, which in World War II fell into strange hands — and died. The World’s Work was merged with the Review of Reviews, which in turn was merged with the Literary Digest, which died. Among the distinguished monthlies which had been famous in the nineties, and their younger associates in what was once called the “Quality Group,” only the Atlantic and Harper’s remain alive and recognizable today. (One might add, perhaps, the much younger American Mercury, which after a brief period of iconoclastic brilliance under Henry Mencken in the twenties, when it was the badge of intellectual nonconformity on the campuses, went into a decline, but now continues energetically in other hands.)

The Atlantic was saved by the extraordinary editorial acumen of Ellery Sedgwick, who bought it in 1908, when its circulation was only 15,000, became editor in 1909, and without vulgarizing it gave it something of the McClure immediacy and the Bok human interest. Sedgwick had a relish for respectable tradition and for fine English; but he also had a sharp eye for vital subjects, a wonderful capacity for wheedling essays out of men of ideas, a zest for discussion (he pictured the Atlantic as a sort of dinner party with fascinating guests), and an ardent — sometimes perhaps too ardent — enthusiasm for the personal stories of people who had been in odd human predicaments and had found spiritual gold in strange places. Under his guidance, the Atlantic piled up circulation till it was well over the 100,000 mark. Rejuvenated and energetic, it stood for quality as always, plus a new journalistic vitality.

Harper’s in its turn was saved when in 1925 Thomas Bucklin Wells cut out its illustrations, put a brick-orange cover on it, changed its whole tenor, and made it too a magazine chiefly of current events and current ideas; not wholly neglectful of literature, but primarily concerned with discussion, and successful once again because of its active influence.

The lesson was reasonably clear. What had caused the procession to the graveyard was not a vulgarizing of American taste or even the rise of the mass-production principle in journalism, so much as the editorial — and business — complacency of the onetime leaders of the American magazine world. Unable to find their way out of the ivory towers of learned gentility into the flesh-and-blood world of affairs, they had gradually lost touch with American leadership. Only those among them who were able to rediscover the stuff of life were able to carry on.

4

THERE were new and surprising changes still to come after World War I. Let me list a few of them briefly: —

1. The rise of the confession magazines. This was the cynical result of the discovery that you could fake stories of personal adventure, preferably with a high content of sexual excitement but ending with a lofty if bogus moral lesson, and thereby allure a big audience on the lowest levels of sophistication. Bernarr Macfaddcn’s True Story, a leader of this pack, was started in 1919 and had almost two million readers by 1926 — a fast climb. The confession magazines still continue, though somewhat tempered by a rising level of sophistication.

2. The success of the Reader’s Digest. When, early in the nineteen-twenties, a tall, mild Presbyterian-looking young man named DeWitt Wallace approached various editors in New York to ask permission to reprint their articles in his new digest, they foresaw for him no success at all. Who would want to read warmed-over material a month late? But these editors had forgotten that it isn’t the formula which makes or breaks a magazine, but the way in which the formula is carried out. Convinced — and rightly—that most articles were overwritten, Wallace learned the art of condensing five thousand words into two thousand without destroying much of anything but the author’s style. This art, and his unerring sense of what would interest ordinary men and women, began to have a startling effect on the Digest’s circulation by about 1930; it began a rapid climb to the highest figure on record.

A magazine which made such a fetish of brevity could almost never achieve subtlety or deal with complex material; Wallace showed as little interest in the riddle of the Depression as in literary art; but by gauging correctly the appetite of his countrymen for pellets of easy and varied information, optimistic success hints, and inspiration, he achieved the miracle of delighting millions with a magazine which contained almost no pictures, almost no fiction, no scandal, and no advertising.

CIRCULATIONS OVER ONE MILLION

3. The rise of the New Yorker. Beginning uncertainly in the middle twenties, this magazine developed, both in its text and in its pictures, a new school of American humor, far subtler and more deft in its social comment than anything previously seen on these shores. As time went on, it became also a vehicle for excellent short stories — mostly of a very restrained variety — and some of the shrewdest reporting in the United States; and incidentally it was edited with an errorless perfection which not only surprised those who had thought Harold Ross lacking in regard for polish of expression, but aroused the wonder and envy of his competitors.

4. The coming of the news weeklies and picture magazines. Since the demise of Harpers Weekly and the rise of the Sunday rotogravure sections it had been an axiom in publishing circles that there was no place in the United States for a weekly dispenser of news or for a magazine of pictures. But Henry Luce upset this axiom as neatly as DeWitt Wallace had upset the axiom that timeliness was everything. First with Time, which he started with Briton Hadden in 1923, and then with Life, which took off in November, 1936, with the aid of the camera craze which was then sweeping the country, Luce developed to an unprecedented degree the assemblyline technique of producing magazine copy, relying not upon outside contributors but upon salaried employees. The process — with its somewhat standardized style — was abhorrent to the literary temperament; but Luce proved that magazines could win millions of readers without resorting to sentimentality, fakery, or evasion — if they combined a conscientious coverage of the news of the day with enough sensation, horror, and cheesecake to satisfy those human impulses which the civilized share with the uncivilized.

5. The rise of the pulps and comics. At present the huge market for comics is chiefly juvenile; it remains to be seen how many of their fanciers will drop them on growing up. They appeal to tastes which, while not necessarily unintelligent, have no relation to literature, or even journalism.

After all these revolutions and innovations, what a contrast between the scene today and ninety years ago! There are now over six thousand magazines, as against SIX hundred then; but the most striking difference is in the size of magazine operations. Take a look at the following facts — remembering that in 1857 no periodical had as many as half a million readers, and that claims of a quarter of a million were somewhat dubious. At the beginning of 1947 there were no less than 32 magazines in the United States — under the narrowest interpretation of the term “magazine” — with circulations of over a million apiece. If to these we add four magazines which arc distributed with various Sunday newspapers, the total comes to 36. If we add two more which arc distributed through chain stores, it comes to 38. And if we include Mother’s of Winona, Minnesota, with an estimated, but not sworn, circulation of 1,200,000, it comes to 39!

The table on page 81 gives the list, in order of size of circulation, with all these doubtful eligibles included. (With the exception of the Reader s Digest and Coronet, the figures are from Ayer’s Directory for 1947.)

Nor is this all. For there are various comics, pulps, movie magazines, and confession magazines which are organized in groups and report their circulations only on a group basis; the total circulation for a group may reach two millions or more even if no member of it is in the million class. For instance, take the Fiction House Magazine Group, consisting of Action, All-American Football, Baseball, Detective Book, Flight, Football Action, Football Stories, Frontier, Jungle, Lariat, Northwest, Planet, and Wings; total circulation: 1,899,673. Such groups are at least active competitors for newsstand space and for the advertiser’s dollar.

Do you wonder that the editors of magazines whose individual circulations come to less than a sixth of a million feel, when they confront such figures, somewhat as if they were driving jeeps in a procession of supertanks, and have to remind themselves that a list which put the magazines in order of influence would be vastly different?

Glance, too, at the majestic proportions of some magazine enterprises. Take a single example, Time Incorporated. During the year 1946 it included four magazines (Time, Life, Fortune, and the Architectural Forum), a radio program, and a documentary movie; on these it spent, all told, ninety million dollars. Its editorial departments alone employ about a thousand people (by contrast, Harper’s Magazine has only ten full-time people in its editorial department).

Certainly the innumerable magazines which pile up on the newsstands today provide a range of entertainment, titillation, and specific information which makes the periodical array of 1857 — and even of 1900, for that matter — look meager. Certainly the standard of physical production — letterpress, reproduction of pictures, layout, design — is superior to that of former days; in some cases, as in the fashion magazines, it is strikingly superior. Almost as certainly the standard of editorial competence is far more professional; even within my own years of experience there has been a marked change — more careful editorial planning, much more careful and detailed work on factual reporting, processing of manuscripts, copy editing, and fact checking. It goes almost without saying, too, that there has been a similarly increased precision in the business operations of publishing—in advertising promotion, circulation promotion, and the diligent (and sometimes slavish) assessing of readers’ tastes. As an industry, magazine publishing has grown up with a vengeance. But what of quality in the higher sense, meaning interpretation of the world we live in, and service to our civilization?

I myself believe — though I have moments of doubt that even in this respect a better over-all job is being done today than in the nineteenth century. Let us grant at once that a vast amount of trash burdens the newsstands — silly stuff, faked stuff, venally distorted stuff designed to placate advertisers; and also that many of the successful magazines whose editors possess consciences — many of the big slicks and women’s magazines, for example — contain much machine-made and trivial fiction, deal timidly and superficially with public affairs, and seldom produce anything that could be considered a contribution to literature. But there is another side to the argument. In the first place, the secondand third-rate material produced today goes largely to people who in an earlier day would hardly have read at all. And in the second place, the best work produced today, whether creative or journalistic, is not concentrated in one or two magazines — where it would make the most impressive showing — but scattered through a great many, large and small. A thoroughly illuminating article on foreign policy may, for example, see the light in the Atlantic, or Harper’s, or Foreign Affairs, or the Nation, or Life, or the Saturday Evening Post although some of these magazines are so intent upon their “policy” (whether declared or undeclared) that they will reject work of high quality that deviates from it. In bulk the output of quality is impressive, even though it sometimes seems swamped in a flood of mediocrity.

What, then, is lacking or in short measure? Well, it seems to me that several trends of the day — the trend toward staff-writing, plus the trend toward editing to supply what is established by polls to be sure-fire entertainment, plus the trend toward more and more disproportionate rewards for those who can supply such entertainment, plus the trend toward slavery to editorial policy, plus the dominance of the market for advertising, as it is now organized, by the organs of huge circulation and such other organs as deliberately flatter advertisers’ opinions, if not their goods too — that all these trends limit in one way or another the chances for men and women with fresh and pioneering ideas, or with special and unorthodox literary talent, to find a hearing adequate to what they have to offer.

That is why I hope there will continue to be room on the highway, for a long time to come, for magazines which stand for thoroughness, distinction of thought and style, liberal hospitality to fresh ideas, and above all independence. For ninety years the Atlantic has held to such standards almost uninterruptedly, with ups and downs in effectiveness but always with a consciousness of the high tradition established for it by the brilliant men who launched it. Continued long life to it — and large influence!