When editors were gods

Why editors are sometimes slow to read their mail

"It would surprize most people to learn how many of the letters that come to every editor's desk threaten and badger us. The average man who writes to a paper seems to think he is privileged to abuse editors in terms he would never think of using to anyone else." — Hamilton Holt, editor of the Independent, writing in that magazine in 1921. ("Surprize" is his spelling.)

Perhaps not surprizingly, Holt soon left magazine editing. In 1924, he became president of Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, a position he held for the next 25 years.

Rule #1 for writers

“The first obligation of one who lives by writing is to write what editors will buy.” — Christopher Morley, in his essay “A Japanese Bachelor,” part of his 1919 collection, “Mince Pie: Adventures on the Sunny Side of Grub Street.” 

A popular author in the early to mid-20^thcentury, Morley was also one of the founding editors of the Saturday Review of Literature in 1924.

Amelia Earhart found! At a magazine!

On this day (August 27) in 1928 the Associated Press reported that Amelia Earhart would be joining Cosmopolitan magazine as an associate editor. Her job, it said, would be to “conduct a monthly department dealing with current developments in aviation, both as a sport and a career.”

The aviatrix made her own announcement on September 1, speaking to reporters in Rye, N.Y., where she was testing a small Avro Avian biplane she would soon use to become the first woman pilot to make a solo roundtrip across the U.S. (The publicity-adept Hearst organization seems to have announced Earhart’s appointment all over again in October, when her first contribution appeared.) 

Earhart, who had recently made headlines as the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, was apparently weighing a number of career options at the time. “Ray Long, the guiding spirit of Cosmopolitan Magazine, asked me to join its staff as Aviation Editor. With ‘Cosmo’s’ enormous circulation I welcomed the opportunity to reach a great audience with my favorite subject.  And in deciding to accept Mr. Long’s offer, I knew that I was casting my lot permanently with aviation,” she wrote in her 1932 book, “The Fun of It.”

Author Lori Van Pelt offers a somewhat more complicated version of events in her 2005 biography, “Amelia Earhart: The Sky’s No Limit.” In that telling, Earhart originally planned to accept a similar position with McCall’s magazine but the offer was withdrawn by editor Otis Wiese, who was miffed that Earhart had recently starred in advertisements for Lucky Strike cigarettes. She and George P. Putnam, her supposed Svengali and future husband, appear to have accepted Long’s offer on the rebound.

Even so, Earhart seems to have taken her magazine work, which included answering readers’ many questions about aviation, quite seriously and devotes the better part of a chapter to it in “The Fun of It.” 

Al Smith: Presidential candidate turns magazine editor, happily

On this day (August 23) in 1932, former Democratic presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith reported for duty as editor of the Outlook, an influential magazine of the day. Its earlier editors had included Henry Ward Beecher and Teddy Roosevelt. 

A souvenir of Smith's 1928 run

Nicknamed the “Happy Warrior,” Smith, who had lost his presidential bid to incumbent Herbert Hoover in 1928, seemed characteristically upbeat about the career change. “Years ago,” he told newspaper reporters, “I had to get over my ideas by word of mouth. Now all I have to do is talk to a stenographer, she types it, I revise it, and it gets the effect. Of course, I still like the radio.”

Smith left his editing post in 1934 and may be best remembered today as the namesake of the annual Al Smith Dinner.

 

A Life editor on the editor's object in life

“An Editor is a mean, vindictive creature whose main object in life is to prevent anything intelligent from getting into his paper. To accomplish this he surrounds himself with a few well-known authors long past their usefulness, printing their manuscripts for the sake of their names, while unknown geniuses who send in masterpieces are wholly ignored.” — Thomas L. Masson, writing facetiously (I hope), in his 1921 collection, “Well, Why Not?” Masson was an editor with Life, during its humor magazine incarnation, from 1895 to 1922.

The case of the fatal editor’s letter

It was on this day (August 15) in 1921 that Mrs. Mary De Brito, once named “the most beautiful Irish girl” in Chicago, was found dead in her bathtub with a hose from an open gas jet in her mouth.

The catalyst for De Brito’s apparent suicide was said to be a letter she had received from Wallace Campbell, the managing editor of Jim Jam Jems, a highly opinioned magazine published out of Bismarck, North Dakota. 

De Brito had read an article in the magazine that praised the tar and feathering of a Texas physician, most likely for performing abortions. She had then written the North Dakota governor, complaining that the magazine encouraged mob behavior “by gloating over a most disgraceful and regrettable incident…. When we reach the state where cowardly, contemptible, riotous mobs can, with impunity, render their own decisions and persecutions we have reached a critical state, indeed, for our country’s welfare.”

The governor’s office turned her letter over to the magazine.

The Chicago Tribune obtained Campbell’s letter—an attack on both the city of Chicago and De Brito herself—and quoted it at length.

“This magazine is on its tenth year of unparalleled success,” Campbell wrote. “It numbers over 200,000 monthly readers, declines subscriptions and advertisements which other magazines beseech and does more good than you and your like will do to the crack of doom.”

And he concluded on this ominous note:

“… the very few misguided hands who have grabbed at Jim Jam Jems found they had grabbed live wire, which burned to the bone, ere they could drop it. We didn’t start your intrusion into our affairs, but will guarantee to finish it good and plenty.”

Soon after she’d received the letter, the Tribune reported, a “badly dressed and domineering man” showed up at the home of De Brito’s parents, looking for her. Told that she was at work, he asked for the address, which, for some reason, they gave him.

That night, the parents reported, she came home “a nervous wreck” and told them, “O, they’ll print such awful things—what shall I do?”

The deputy coroner in charge of the inquest “declared his belief that she committed suicide while mentally unbalanced from humiliation at the editor’s keen sarcasm,” the Tribune reported.

Meanwhile, Campbell, seemingly unfazed by the tragic turn of events, doubled down, telling the Bismarck Tribune, “Mrs. De Brito was greatly aroused because we excoriated a Beaumont, Texas, abortioning physician who had received a deserved coat of tar and feathers. For some reason Mrs. De Brito seemed to particularly favor such gentry.… We judge that the poor woman feared some disclosure in her past life. We know nothing about her beyond the fact mentioned.”

At her death, Mary De Brito was 28 years old.  

The not-totally-surprising secret of America’s best-paid editor

"First of all, read. First, second, and last, read. Read all the time. Read anything, everything." — Ray Long, editor of Cosmopolitan, offering advice to would-be editors in an essay titled "A Letter to a Young Man With an Urge to Edit a Popular Magazine" (1927). 

Reportedly the best-paid editor of his day, Long estimated that he read, on average, more than 500,000 words a week in selecting material for Cosmopolitan, then a general-interest magazine.

In a typical weekend, the Los Angeles Times reported, Long plowed through "approximately 33 stories, three novels, and four or five magazines and trade papers."

And what did the editor do for leisure? “Today, when I tire of reading manuscripts,” he wrote in his introduction to “As I Look at Life,” a 1925 anthology, “I rest by taking down a book and reading it.”

What it was like to be edited by the New Yorker's Harold Ross

“’It gets sort of foggy in here,’ he will say, indicating the last sixteen pages of an eighteen-page manuscript. He is then likely to add, ‘And it’s slow in getting started.’” — Eric Hodgins, describing the working methods of legendary New Yorker editor Harold Ross, in the 1946 book “While You Were Gone."

Hodgins goes on to write that, “Mr. Ross has the knack of feeling the way his readers would feel if he didn’t feel that way first.”

A magazine man himself, Hodgins served as both managing editor and publisher of Fortune, among other posts. But he is probably best known as the author of “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House,” a novel also published in 1946 that became a popular movie.

Hodgins’s 1973 autobiography, “Trolley to the Moon,” though unfinished at the time of his death, is one of the best by any magazine editor.

The magazine editor of the future, 1915

“Above all things he must be an indefatigable student of humanity. With one hand firmly on the past, one hand searchingly upon the present, his eyes bent forward upon the future, eagerly examining, comparing, seeking always the signs, he must follow the trail of human progress with the untiring relentlessness of the bloodhound.” — Robert Sterling Yard, describing the magazine editor of the future in 1915.

Yard was editor of the Century magazine and a well-known environmentalist. 

How to make a helpful magazine

“The first quality required to make a helpful magazine is a balanced judgment, an intellectual inability to be drawn off into the advocacy of any fad or cure-all, or to allow one’s personal tastes and particular enthusiasms to dominate the whole periodical—in a word, the refusal to become sensational.” — Walter Hines Page, in his 1905 book, “A Publisher’s Confession.” 

Page edited, in succession, the Forum, the Atlantic Monthly, and the World’s Work. He later served as U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, appointed by his pal Woodrow Wilson.