When editors were gods

Bio: Orison Swett Marden

(1850 to 1924)

Claim to fame: Founder and editor of Success, a pioneering self-help magazine.

Quote: “Success is the child of drudgery and perseverance. It cannot be coaxed or bribed; pay the price and it is yours.”

Another one: “He can who thinks he can.”

Life in 400 words or less: In the long-ago era when male magazine readers were as eager to improve themselves as their female counterparts were, Success occupied a special place on the periodical racks. The magazine was the brainchild of Orison Swett Marden, a prolific self-help book author, whose own life story was perhaps his richest source of inspiration.

Orphaned at age 7, he put himself through Harvard Medical School and Boston University Law School, attending the two programs simultaneously and graduating from them a year apart (1881 and 1882). He was also a successful caterer and hotel manager, eventually drawing on all that experience when he became an author. Frank Munsey, a leading magazine entrepreneur and friend of Marden, supposedly lamented that, "If Doctor Marden had not written his first book he would have been a millionaire. He had a genius for hotel making."

Marden launched his first Success magazine in 1897 and built it into a substantial property, only to see it fail in 1912. In 1918, heeding his own advice to persevere, he gave it another shot, with New Success. That iteration, eventually just called Success again, would survive Marden himself. He died in 1924, and the magazine continued until 1927. (Several later Success magazines, including one I once worked for, have continued the name or some variation of it.)

A typical table of contents for Marden’s Success might include a serialized novel, an article or two on current affairs, some poetry and, of course, one or more uplifting pieces on topics such as “Minimizing Difficulties” and “Keeping Fit for Work.” Theodore Dreiser, then a young freelancer, was a frequent contributor, interviewing big shots like Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison.

While Marden had countless fans and his ideas are rebottled by self-help authors to this day, he also had his detractors. H.L. Mencken, perhaps not surprisingly, had little use for him. “It was the heyday of some of the most banal eminentissimos that even the United States… had ever known,” Mencken recalled in “My Life as Author and Editor” (Knopf, 1993), citing Marden and eight other contemporaries. “The spectacle they provided was a gaudy one, and I surely enjoyed it as much as most, but meanwhile my hand itched for a club to belabor them to the glory of God.”

For more: The standard biography, though a bit gushy by today’s standards, is “The Life Story of Orison Swett Marden, A Man Who Benefited Men,” by Margaret Connolly (Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1925). Marden himself wrote dozens of self-improvement books and pamphlets, including “How to Get What You Want,” “Making Friends With Your Nerves,” “Pushing to the Front,” and (worth seeking out for its title alone) “Self-Discovery: Why Remain a Dwarf?” — Greg Daugherty, 9/08

Bio: Edna Woolman Chase

(1877 to 1957)

 

Claim to fame: Turned Vogue, where she worked for more than 50 years, 38 of them as editor in chief, into the undisputed leader among fashion magazines.

 

Quote: “Fashion can be bought. Style one must possess.”

 

Life in 300 words or less: Edna Woolman Chase’s major accomplishments are more likely to be filed under Fashion than under Editing. During World War I, for example, when Parisian couturiers could no longer get their creations across the Atlantic, she organized America’s first fashion show, giving domestic designers some previously denied cachet. As Time magazine would later characterize her rise, Chase “began playing to the rising U.S. upper middle class” by publishing photos of smartly dressed high-society types and selling dress patterns “so that every U.S. woman could look as chic.”

 

As an editor, however, she did give young Dorothy Rothschild (later Parker) a start as a combination writer, fact-checker, and proofreader; it was for Chase’s Vogue that the future Mrs. Parker wrote her oft-quoted line “brevity is the soul of lingerie.” Chase also published Thomas Wolfe, sent reporters to cover World War II, and, perhaps most surprisingly for a fashion editor, ran photos of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

 

Though the woman who comes across in her memoirs seems reasonably down to earth, a more-imperious Chase appears in other works. Marion Meade, a biographer of Dorothy Parker, describes her as an “autocrat” who insisted her ill-paid junior staffers arrive each day in hats, white gloves, and black silk stockings. Another story, perhaps apocryphal, has her telling her staff that hurling oneself in front of a speeding subway train (as one apparently had) was too crass an exit for Vogue women and that a quiet overdose was preferable.

 

For more: Chase, and daughter Ilka, an author and actress, collaborated on her autobiography, “Always in Vogue,” published by Doubleday in 1954. Several of Chase’s successors at Vogue also followed her in publishing memoirs, including Grace Mirabella, later editor of Mirabella magazine, whose “In and Out of Vogue” (Doubleday, 1995) is a masterpiece of score settling. Liz Tilberis published her memoir, “No Time to Die” (Little, Brown), in 1998 before her death the following year. Chase’s flamboyant successor Diana Vreeland is the subject of several books, including her own “D.V.” (Knopf, 1984) and the more recent “Diana Vreeland,” by Eleanor Dwight (William Morrow, 2002). — Greg Daugherty, 9/08, 10/18

Bio: Edward Bok

(1863 to 1930)

Claim to fame: Built The Ladies’ Home Journal into one of the first, if not the very first, 1 million circ. magazines. Also founded the magazine that became Cosmopolitan. Was even a pioneering celebrity endorser (click on the circa 1902 typewriter ad at right).

Quote: "Make you the world a bit more beautiful and better because you have been in it" (quoting his grandmother).

On magazine editing: “A successful magazine is exactly like a successful store: It must keep its wares constantly fresh and varied to attract the eye and hold the patronage of its customers.”

Life in 500 words or less: Edward Bok’s story is the classic tale of a poor immigrant boy arriving on these shores (at age 6, from the Netherlands) and through pluck, luck, and marrying the boss’s daughter becoming one of the most influential men of his age.

Bok may have found his story somewhat unbelievable himself, because when it came time to write his autobiography he did so in the third person, as if describing somebody else. That book, "The Americanization of Edward Bok" (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), won a Pulitzer Prize and reads engagingly to this day, once you get used to the weird third-person thing.

As a magazine editor, Bok’s inventions were many. In his autobiography he takes credit for the idea of jumping features to the back of the magazine, today a frowned-upon practice but one that allowed him to create desirable ad positions throughout the book.

More to his credit, perhaps, he used his post to fight numerous worthy battles, even at the risk of alienating readers and losing circulation. Of course, it may have helped that the magazine’s owner, Cyrus H.K. Curtis, was also his father-in-law.

For example, Bok’s LHJ led a crusade against quack patent medicines and expelled their ads, then a lucrative source of revenue, from its pages. He was the first editor of a major magazine to address the subject of venereal disease. When the demand for feathers in women’s hats resulted in the slaughter of countless mother birds and the starvation of their babies, he pressed for, and helped win, a federal law to stop the practice. Less admirably, he opposed extending the right to vote to women, although he gave people on both sides of the issue a chance to make their case in his magazine.

H.L. Mencken, an unlikely Bok booster if there ever was one, credited him and his magazine with almost single-handedly changing Americans’ taste in architecture and home decoration from “ugliness into dignity, simplicity, something not far from beauty.”

As a pioneer of service journalism, Bok took the concept to a level it had never seen before and has seldom seen since. He encouraged readers to send their questions on “all conceivable problems” to the magazine and employed 35 editors to answer them, immediately. Before long the magazine was fielding close to 1 million letters a year.

Bok intended to retire at age 50 and devote the rest of his life to good deeds. World War I intervened, however, and his departure from the Journal was delayed until 1919. He died in 1930 and is buried at the base of the 205-foot carillon tower at what’s now Historic Bok Sanctuary in Lake Wales, Florida.

For more: In addition to his initial autobiography, Bok wrote a second, "Twice Thirty," a decade letter and this time in the first person. Among his other books is "A Man from Maine" (Scribner’s, 1923), a biography of his father-in-law, Cyrus H.K. Curtis, founder of the Curtis Publishing Company, owner of The Ladies’ Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, The Country Gentleman, and other magazines. — Greg Daugherty, 8/08

Bio: George Horace Lorimer

(1867 to 1937)

Claim to fame: Editor of The Saturday Evening Post during its glory days.

Quote: “Editors and crowned heads are the only people in the world…with the right to say we. Editors should be the only despots.”

Contradictory quote: “[T]he prime qualification of being an editor is being an ordinary man.”

Life in 500 words or less: Many magazine editors joke about our trade being like sausage making, but George Horace Lorimer would have known more than most of us about the aptness of the comparison. He spent the first eight years of his working life in the meat-packing business, before switching to journalism.

From there his rise was rapid, culminating in the editorship of The Saturday Evening Post, a post he held onto for the next 38 years. Though the Post claimed a connection to Benjamin Franklin, the publication that Lorimer took over was a distressed property with a circulation little over 10,000. In time he would build it into 3 million circ., middle-brow must-read.

On his death, The New York Times described him, with simultaneous admiration and derision, as “a sort of Henry Ford of American literature. Week after week there sprang from his editorial assembly line technically perfect stories and articles wedged in between costly advertising, and illustrated by the best artists in the country.” Among those writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, and a long list of forgotten but once-famous authors. Most illustrious of his illustrators, then and now, was Norman Rockwell.

The great editor’s work habits are exhausting even to think about. After a long day at his desk, producing a weekly magazine that often exceeded 250 pages, he went home with a stack of manuscripts, which he read at a rate of 100,000 words a night, half a million words a week. (Then he settled into bed for a couple hours of leisure reading.) One thing he didn’t read, however, was other magazines, saying he didn’t want to be influenced by the work of his peers.

Lorimer’s consumption of words seemed to have been matched only by that of chocolates and tobacco products, the latter of which may have contributed to his death, of throat cancer, at age 70. According to biographer John Tebbel, Lorimer once explained his editorial philosophy this way to the mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart: “A magazine like the Post has to be like a full meal, beginning with soup, going on to the most important course, which is roast beef, then maybe a salad, and it must have dessert.”

Whether he actually thought in those terms or was simply hungry at the time, is not known.

Lorimer was sometimes accused of being a mindless cheerleader for big business (at the same time that the muckraking magazines were exposing its excesses). He also vigorously opposed the policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

For more: Lorimer died before writing a planned autobiography. John Tebbel’s "George Horace Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post" (Doubleday, 1948) is the definitive biography, as far as I know. (Tebbel’s other magazine-related books are also worthwhile.) Otto Friedrich’s "Decline and Fall" (Harper & Row, 1970) only touches on Lorimer but describes in vivid detail the magazine’s later implosion. Among Lorimer’s own books, "Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son" (Small, Maynard & Co., 1902) is probably the most famous.

— Greg Daugherty, 8/08, 10/18 

 

Art: George Horace Lorimer, as sketched by James Montgomery Flagg