When editors were gods

Domineering, almost ruthless—and of course a great magazine editor

"Mr. Lorimer had a domineering, almost ruthless personality. Like all the great tycoons—Ford, Rockefeller. He created an institution in his own image, out of himself, and of course he was one of the great magazine editors of all time. He was, in a sense, the Post, all of it. It was his magazine from the front cover to the back. And he had to assert himself constantly in everything—rejecting three out of five of my sketches, for instance—because if he had relinquished one prerogative the whole complicated structure which he had built would have collapsed. (Not really, of course, but he must have felt that way subconsciously.)" — Norman Rockwell, reflecting on the legendary Saturday Evening Post editor George Horace Lorimer in his 1960 memoir, My Adventures as an Illustrator.

The children's magazine editor and the famous dike

The legend of the little Dutch boy who saves his town by plugging a leaking dike with his finger was apparently concocted by Mary Mapes Dodge for her 1865 children's book Hans Brinker; or, the Silver Skates. Dodge was also the founder and editor of the most famous children's magazine of her day (and long after), St. Nicholas.

Interestingly, according to this expert, the legend is virtually unknown among actual Dutch people.

 

 

 

A bound volume of St. Nicholas magazine
from 1916. (Author's Collection)

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Time capsule of magazine history

As of June 1, anyone can access the Time.com website, including 100 years of back issues, free of charge. Readers of this blog might want to check out the magazine's extensive (if often bite-size) coverage of its own industry over the decades. 

There is, for example, its 1977 portrait of Clay Felker, then riding high at New York magazine: "He is variously described by associates and acquaintances as autocratic, devious, dishonest, rapacious, egotistical, power mad, paranoid, a bully and a boor. Almost in the same breath, the same people call Felker a genius."

Or its 1929 account of a cloak-and-dagger operation by Cosmopolitan magazine and its "short, stocky, chesty Editor [Ray] Long" to publish a reminiscence by the departing president Calvin Coolidge without competitors finding out about it first. (Apparently getting anything out of Silent Cal was a very big deal at the time.)

Or a 1965 item announcing that one Helen Gurley Brown, 43, had been appointed editor of Cosmopolitan — a magazine she would soon make unrecognizable to readers of Ray Long's day. "The magazine is bubbling with enthusiasm over its new editor, even though she has had no editing experience," Time reported.

There's a lot more here, some of which we'll explore in future posts.

An editor answers a common beef of rejected writers

"An experienced editor knows that it is not necessary to eat an entire ox to test the quality of the beef. A single paragraph anywhere in a manuscript gives him a clue to the quality of the whole." — Orison Swett Marden, editor of Success magazine, in his 1914 book "Hints for Young Writers."

Similar sentiments have been attributed to a number of famous editors (Edward Bok, George Horace Lorimer, etc.) though the food in question varies (apples, eggs, cheeses, etc.). Personally, I  like the "entire ox" version.

 

R.I.P. Warren Boroson (1935-2023)

Warren Boroson, a veteran magazine editor and writer, died on March 12 at age 88.

A former colleague and longtime friend, Warren is the subject of a lengthy obituary in the March 23 New York Times, which condenses the bulk of his career into a single sentence, while devoting nearly half a page to a lone episode he seems fated to be remembered for. (Of course, without that episode he might not have gotten an obit in the Times at all, let alone a big free one written by Sam Roberts.)

The episode involved a famous 1964 poll of psychiatrists published in Fact magazine. The story based on the poll concluded that a majority of psychiatrists believed the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater to be mentally unstable and unfit for the presidency. Goldwater’s lawsuit against the magazine (and Boroson personally) went all the way to the Supreme Court and led to the creation of the American Psychiatric Association's Goldwater Rule, which says it is unethical for psychiatrists to pass judgment on people they have not personally examined.

The Goldwater Rule was back in the news in recent years, when a certain president’s behavior raised questions that members of the psychiatric profession appeared best equipped to address, if even they could.

I worked with Warren at Sylvia Porter’s Personal Finance magazine in the late ‘80s, where he was a senior editor. The Goldwater experience hadn’t totally spoiled the fun of polling for him, but his polls were now confined to mutual fund managers and other financial worthies, whose ethics rules seem to have been a bit looser.

The Sylvia Porter editorial crew in Central Park, 1988. That's Warren kneeling beside
the magazine's editor, Pat Estess.

 

Warren had more contact with Sylvia than most of us; as far as I know she never set foot in our offices. Regarding her unfortunate late-career habit of publishing PR handouts virtually verbatim, he famously observed that, “half of America read Sylvia’s columns, and the other half wrote them.”

At some point prior to SPPFM he had worked at Money magazine under, I believe, its founding editor, William S. Rukeyser. Warren once told me that he’d discovered the common denominator among personal finance writers and editors: “We were all English majors.”

Warren also mentioned that he had worked in some capacity at Pageant magazine, whose boy wonder editor, Harris Shevelson, he recalled, “Told entire staff, on Friday, to come in Monday with 100 story ideas!” (This must have been early in Warren’s career because Shevelson was killed in a famous East River plane crash in 1959, having already left Pageant.)

Another stop in his career was Next, an early 1980s magazine about the future that, unfortunately, didn’t have much of one.

In 2017 Warren sent around an email with the subject line “My Contribution to the Goldwater Rule” that to my knowledge was never published elsewhere.

In that email Warren explained how he came to work for the late Ralph Ginzburg, the founder and editor of Fact magazine: “I had been a college English major, and now at age 29 eager to become a famous writer. But I found myself working in the public relations department of Western Electric, then a part of AT&T. So I jumped at the chance to join Ginzburg’s staff, first at Eros magazine, a pretentious, hard-cover sex magazine (Time called it a four-letter word: b-o-r-e); then at Fact, an angry, muck-raking magazine. Fact published some trash, but also excellent articles, including an essay by Arnold Toynbee against the Vietnam war.”

Separately, Warren told me that he had taken a magazine writing class with Harold Hayes, editor of Esquire in its 1960s New Journalism glory days, and a fellow classmate, Frank Brady, had helped him get the job with Ginzburg.  (Coincidentally, Hayes and Ginzburg were contemporaries at Esquire, and Hayes had beaten out both him and Clay Felker for the top job there. Each went off to create their own magazines.)

As to the infamous Goldwater article, Warren explained that the poll was Ginzburg’s idea and that his own contribution was to have been “a psychological profile of Goldwater. I based my article mainly on a famous study of fascist sympathizers after World War II, a study called The Authoritarian Personality. And I spoke with a noted psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson, author of ‘Young Man Luther,’ who was encouraging. My article argued, among other things, that Goldwater was trying to prove his masculinity with his relentlessly tough stance against the Soviet Union.”

But, he said, Ginzburg had someone “whom I never met, rewrite my article. He did, taking out all mention of authoritarianism. I was so furious that I resigned from the magazine and insisted that my name not appear on the article.”

Ginzburg, he added, “was a clever, ambitious, contradictory person; a liberal in politics, but also somewhat unscrupulous. His main failing: oversimplifying things. He did know a good deal about mailing lists and promotion.” Warren said he considered the Goldwater poll “slapdash.”

The Goldwater article, to the extent that Warren was responsible for it, wasn’t his only controversial contribution to Fact. Another was a piece about Reader’s Digest titled “The Pleasantville Monster,” in which he characterized the magazine as a “cross between the John Birch Society Newsletter and a Sears Roebuck catalogue” and went on from there.

That article also proved memorable, at least in Pleasantville. He was still persona non grata at The Digest when I worked there 30 years later.

 

R.I.P. Victor Navasky

Victor S. Navasky, longtime editor of The Nation, died on Monday (January 23) at age 90.

Both during and after his run at The Nation, Navasky proved to be an astute and witty observer of the magazine scene. His books include the memoir "A Matter of Opinion" (2005), which recounts his experiences editing the influential but financially fragile liberal opinion magazine, and "The Art of Making Magazines" (2012), edited with Evan Cornog, in which an assortment of well-known magazine types share their wisdom.

In an unsigned editor's note in the 2007 edition of The New York Review of Magazines that is generally attributed to him, Navasky (we assume) wrote that, "The nice way to say it is that great magazines are the product of visionary editors. The other way to say it is that interesting magazines are spawned by self-centered megalomaniacs."

 

 

Happy centennial, Time magazine

This year (2023) marks the 100^th anniversary of Time magazine, as its cover has already started reminding us.

The first issue of Time, all 32 pages if it including covers, was dated March 3, 1923. A tiny masthead at the bottom of page 23 lists the soon-to-die-young Briton Hadden and the soon-to-be-really-rich Henry R. Luce as editors.

Before launching their magazine, Hadden and Luce had shown a prototype to H.L. Mencken, hoping for his approval. Mencken’s reported reaction: “It will never work.”

Time’s centennial follows by a year that of another hugely successful magazine of the 20^th century, Reader’s Digest. Though different in many respects, both magazines were created and edited to serve the same basic need, that of busy Americans who wanted to stay informed but didn’t have the time or desire to read everything.  

Setting a rather high bar for contributors, 1916

“Whatever appears in a magazine should manifest genius.

“A magazine editor should decline any contribution, even if the President wrote it, that is not obviously the work of a man of genius.”

—Alexander Harvey, in his weekly publication The Bang, April 17, 1916.

A biographical sketch written by H.L. Mencken notes that Harvey was at various times a newspaper reporter and editor, a novelist and short story writer, and the author of books on Robert Louis Stevenson, William Dean Howells, Percy Bysshe Shelley, socialism, and the “woman question.” He was also an editor of the magazine Current Opinion.

Editor accuses alleged kitten skinner, and the fur flies

On this day (January 6) in 1928, newspapers reported that Jesse Pomeroy, a longtime lifer in the Massachusetts State Prison, was suing Alice Stone Blackwell, noted suffragist and editor of The Woman's Journal, for $5,000. Blackwell had accused Pomeroy of skinning a live kitten in his jail cell, not in the pages of her magazine but in a 1925 letter to a Boston newspaper, opposing his possible parole. Pomeroy denied the accusation. Blackwell said her letter was fair comment. The jury sided with Pomeroy but awarded him just $1 in damages.

Is this what Isaac Asimov really thought of editors?

"Editors are fiends, one and all, and it is a worthy task to get even with them after being at odds with them. It would be a happier, a purer, a more fragrant world if every editor were buried under a huge heap of stinking maradram, though that, of course, would make the smell worse." — Azazel, a "two-centimeter extraterrestrial being" who appears in a number of Isaac Asimov's fictional works, speaking of the editors where he comes from. The story, which seems to have originally appeared in the magazine Analog Science Fiction & Fact, is included in the author's "Magic: The Final Fantasy Stories" (1996).

In addition to being an extraordinarily prolific writer, Asimov was at least nominally a magazine editor, of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. I worked for another magazine published by the same company, and while I don't know how hands-on he was as an editor, he did put in frequent appearances at his namesake's offices. One year, in fact, he dressed as Santa Claus and handed out the Secret Santa gifts at our company's holiday party. Unfortunately, he apparently overplayed his dirty old man persona, and he didn't reprise the role after that.

The editor and illustrator who fathered the famous New Year’s baby

The Saturday Evening Post didn’t invent the New Year’s baby, but it might as well have. While countless magazines have put babies on their covers to note the arrival of a new year — The New Yorker, Liberty, Collier’s, and Mad, to name a diverse few — the Post’s idealized infant, drawn for decades by J.C. Leyendecker, became the most familiar by far.

“If The Saturday Evening Post was known for one image, it was J.C. Leyendecker’s New Year’s Baby, which, since 1906, had been bouncing joyously onto the cover in top hats and various getups,” Deborah Solomon wrote in “American Mirror,” her 2013 biography of Leyendecker’s friend and fellow illustrator Norman Rockwell.

That would not have been possible but for the Post’s all-powerful editor, George Horace Lorimer.

John Tebbel, author of a 1948 Lorimer biography, noted that the New Year cover was “always a Leyendecker canvas and uniformly beloved by the Boss.”

But as much as the Boss revered Leyendecker’s work, “no illustrator, whatever his fame, had control over a cover of the Post. Like everything else in the magazine, the cover belonged to Lorimer. He would review a set of potential covers rapidly, dismissing most with a cursory glance and a terse ‘Out,’” Jan Cohn wrote in the 1995 book “Covers of The Saturday Evening Post.”

Leyendecker, a celebrated illustrator who created the iconic Arrow Collar Man for shirt ads and drew a record 322 Post covers, delivered his first New Year’s baby for the magazine’s December 29, 1906 issue, marking the coming of 1907. The baby, a girl with a bow in her hair and angel wings on her back, had a pinkish hue, made possible by the magazine’s two-color (black and red) printing process.

For 1908 the baby, possibly a boy, is accompanied by a stork. In 1910, he or she is joined by a Father Time-type codger symbolizing the old year. The baby appears to be attempting to sell the old man a copy of the Post. 

 

Leyendecker's 1908 New Year's baby and friend. Credit: Wikimedia Commmons

As the years went by, the baby changed with the times. In December 1911, a girl baby totes a sign promoting women’s suffrage. The December 30, 1916 cover shows a worried-looking baby surveying the world globe, the warring nations of Europe shaded in black. For December 29, 1917, six months after the U.S. entry into the war, a helmeted baby stands at attention and salutes, a sword conveniently covering his (or her) private parts.

The Post began printing covers in four colors in the 1920s. The baby was a little slow to adapt, but by the late 1920s and early 1930s, he or she was in full color as well.  The December 30, 1933 cover shows a top-hatted baby happily scanning a stock-market ticker tape, presumably hoping that the country’s fortunes would improve in 1934 and reflecting Lorimer’s upbeat, pro-business attitude.

When Europe went to war once more, Leyendecker’s tone became less optimistic. For the December 30, 1939 cover, the baby is wearing a gas mask. The following year, a crying baby dangles by its diaper from a sinister iron-gloved hand. For the January 3, 1942 cover, the baby is back in uniform — a military-style cap, at least — astride the globe and guarding the Western Hemisphere with a cocked pop gun. Given the magazine’s production lead times, it’s unlikely that it or Leyendecker had yet had time to react to the country’s entry into the war in December 1941. But in January 2, 1943, the baby is in full combat mode, helmeted, armed with a rifle, and jabbing a swastika with his bayonet. The magazine had rejected another Leyendecker concept for that year's cover, showing the baby hitchhiking to war, reportedly concerned that it hit a little too close to home for soldiers' families; the unpublished painting was auctioned off in 2020 for $275,000.

That cover would be the baby’s last. Lorimer had retired in 1936 and died in 1937. Under a new editorial regime, the magazine was now running more photographs on its cover. While Norman Rockwell and several other illustrators continued to produce covers, Leyendecker was out. He died in 1951 at age 77.

The magazine editor who ran for president (and was rejected)

Seventy-five years ago today (December 29, 1947) The New Republic announced that its editor, Henry A. Wallace, was resigning. The news came on the same day that Wallace delivered a radio address announcing his intention to run as an independent candidate in the 1948 presidential election. "When the old parties rot, the people have a right to be heard through a new party," he told listeners.

Neither announcement came as a total surprise. A week earlier The New Republic's publisher, Michael Straight, said publicly that Wallace would have to leave his post if he ran for office, adding that the magazine "will not be the organ of a third party."

Wallace had joined the magazine in December 1946 after serving one term (1941 to 1945) as vice president of the U.S., followed by a brief stint as secretary of commerce (1945 to 1946). Earlier in his career he had been the editor of a newspaper for farmers.

Ultimately, Wallace's Progressive Party ticket finished fourth in the election, trailing Harry Truman, who won in what was perceived as an upset; the Republican Thomas E. Dewey; and another independent candidate, the Southern segregationist Strom Thurmond. In total, Wallace received about 2.4% of the popular vote and exactly 0% of the electoral vote.