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Bostonian, literary in tone, mainstream in scope, and full of biting humor, The New Yorker brought a new—and much-needed—sophistication to American journalism when it launched one hundred years ago.
While doing my research on the history of American journalism for my book Covering America, I became fascinated by the birth of the magazine and the story of its founder, Harold Ross.
Ross fit easily into the media world, a world full of strong personalities. He never completed high school. Despite being divorced several times and suffering from ulcers, he always wore a toothy smile and a distinctive crew cut. He devoted his entire adult life to a single enterprise: The New Yorker magazine.
For the educated, by the educated
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Born in Aspen, Colorado, in 1892, Ross worked as a reporter in the West as a teenager. When the United States entered World War I, he enlisted. Sent to the south of France, he left immediately and headed for Paris, taking his portable Corona typewriter with him. He then joined the newly established newspaper for soldiers, Stars and Stripes, which was so short of qualified staff that Ross was hired without question, even though the newspaper was an official Army publication.
In Paris, Ross met several writers, including Jane Grant, the first woman to work as a reporter for The New York Times. She later became the first of his three wives.
After the armistice, Ross left for New York and never visited again. There, he met other writers and soon joined the group of critics, playwrights, and brilliant minds who gathered around the Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street in Manhattan.
Over the course of endless, lavish lunches, Ross mingled with some of the brightest minds on New York’s literary scene and exchanged witty remarks. These gatherings also gave rise to a long-running poker game involving Ross and Raoul Fleischmann, who became his future financial backer and was from the famous yeast producing family.
In the mid-1920s, Ross decided to start a weekly magazine devoted to metropolitan life. He was well aware that the magazine industry was experiencing considerable growth, but he had no desire to copy what already existed.
He wanted to publish a newspaper that could speak directly to him and his friends – young city dwellers who had spent time in Europe and were tired of the meaningless and predictable columns that filled most American magazines.
But first and foremost, Ross needed to establish a business plan.
The type of cultured readership he was targeting also attracted the major department stores of New York, who saw him as an ideal customer and expressed a desire to purchase advertising space. Based on this, Ross’s poker partner, Fleishman, agreed to lend him US$25,000 to get started – the equivalent of approximately US$450,000 today.
Ross goes all the way in
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In the autumn of 1924, installed in an office belonging to the Fleischman family at 25 West 45th Street, Ross began work on the presentation brochure for his magazine:
“The New Yorker, in words and pictures, will be a reflection of metropolitan life. It will be humane. Its general tone will be one of gaiety, wit, and satire, but it will be more than a mere buffoon. It will not be what is usually called radical or intellectual. It will be what is usually called sophisticated, in that it will assume a fair degree of open-mindedness in its readers. It will abhor nonsense.”
Ross added the now famous phrase: “The magazine is not made for the old lady of Dubuque.” In other words, The New Yorker will not try to keep up with current events or pander to middle America.
Ross’s only criteria would be the interest of the story – and he alone would decide what would be considered interesting. He bet everything on the audacious and impossible idea that there were enough readers who shared his interests – or were likely to find them – to maintain a weekly magazine that was elegant, irreverent and funny.
Ross almost failed. The cover of the first issue of The New Yorker, dated February 21, 1925, had no portrait of the powerful or industrial giants, no catchy headline, no ostentatious promise.
Instead, it featured a watercolor by Ree Irwin, an artist friend of Ross’s, depicting an attractive figure gazing intently – what an idea! – A butterfly through your monocle. This image, nicknamed Eustace Tilly, became the magazine’s unofficial symbol.
The magazine finds its balance
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Inside this first issue, the reader found an assortment of jokes and short poems. There were also profiles, reviews of plays and books, lots of gossip, and some advertisements.
The overall effect was not particularly impressive, giving a patchwork feel and the magazine struggling to get off the ground. Just a few months after its launch, Ross lost almost everything in a drunken poker game at the home of Pulitzer Prize winner and Round Table regular Herbert Baird Swope.
He did not return home until noon the next day, and when his wife searched his pockets, she found IOUs totaling approximately US$30,000.
Fleischmann, who had also attended the game but had left at the appropriate time, became angry. No one knows how, but Ross managed to convince him to repay part of his debt and let him pay the rest through his work.
Within no time, the New Yorker began gaining readers and new advertisers soon followed. Ross has finally repaid his debt to his guardian angel.
Much of the magazine’s success was due to Ross’s ability to recognize talent and encourage writers to develop their voices. One of his first major discoveries was Katherine S. Engel, who became the magazine’s first fiction editor and a constant source of good advice.
In 1926, Ross recruited James Thurber and EB White, who did all kinds of work: writing “casuals” – short satirical essays –, drawing caricatures, writing captions for other people’s pictures, reporting for the Talk of the Town section and various commentaries.
As The New Yorker found its footing, editors and writers began to refine some of its trademarks: the in-depth profile, ideally dedicated to a person who was not in the news but deserved to be better known; Long non-fiction stories driven by deep investigation; Short stories and poetry; And of course, one-panel cartoons and comic strips.
With an insatiable curiosity and manic perfectionism when it came to grammar, Ross was willing to do anything to ensure accuracy. Authors would find their manuscripts covered in pencil annotations, demanding dates, sources, and endless fact-checking. One of his most characteristic comments was: “Who is that?”
During the 1930s, when the country was experiencing persistent economic crisis, The New Yorker was sometimes criticized for its apparent indifference to the seriousness of national problems. Life in its pages almost always seemed light, charming and pleasant.
It was during World War II that The New Yorker truly found its footing, both financially and editorially. It finally found its voice: curious, open to the world, demanding and, ultimately, deeply serious.
Ross also discovered new writers, including A. J. Liebling, Molly Panter-Downes, and John Hersey, whom he acquired from Henry Luce’s Time magazine. Together, they produced some of the greatest writing of the period, notably Hersey’s seminal report on the use of the first atomic bomb in a conflict.
A gem of journalism
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Over the past century, The New Yorker has profoundly influenced American journalism. On the one hand, Ross created conditions that allowed solo voices to be heard. On the other hand, the magazine provided a venue and incentive for a form of non-academic authority: a place where knowledgeable amateurs could write articles on the Dead Sea Scrolls, geology, medicine, or nuclear war, with no other validity than their ability to carefully observe, argue clearly, and produce a well-crafted sentence.
Ultimately, Ross deserves credit for expanding the scope of journalism far beyond the traditional categories of crime, justice, politics and sports. In the pages of this magazine readers almost never found what they could read elsewhere. Instead, New Yorker readers can search for almost everything. npk npk
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