One hundred years ago, 'The New Yorker' was born at a poker table
One hundred years ago, 'The New Yorker' was born at a poker table
Boston University
Boston, Literary in tone, mainstream in scope, and infused with biting humour, the New Yorker brought a new—and necessary—sophistication to American journalism when it was launched one hundred years ago.
While conducting my research on the history of American journalism for my book Covering America, I became fascinated by the story of the magazine's birth and that of its founder, Harold Ross.
Ross fit in easily with the media world, a world teeming with strong personalities. He had never finished high school. Divorced several times and plagued by ulcers, he always sported a gap-toothed 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 1892 in Aspen, Colorado, Ross worked as a reporter in the West while still a teenager. When the United States entered World War I, he enlisted. Sent to the south of France, he quickly deserted and made his way to Paris, taking his portable Corona typewriter with him. He then joined the newly established newspaper for soldiers, the Stars and Stripes, which was so desperately 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 really left again. There, he met other writers and quickly joined a circle of critics, playwrights, and brilliant minds who gathered around the Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street in Manhattan.
During endless, lavishly lavish lunches, Ross mingled and exchanged witty remarks with some of the brightest figures in New York's literary scene. These gatherings also gave rise to a long-running poker game involving Ross and Raoul Fleischmann, who would become his future financial backer and hail from the famous yeast-producing family.
In the mid-1920s, Ross decided to launch a weekly magazine devoted to metropolitan life. He was well aware that the magazine industry was experiencing considerable growth, but had no desire to imitate what already existed.
He wanted to publish a newspaper that would speak directly to him and his friends—young city dwellers who had spent time in Europe and were tired of the platitudes and predictable columns that filled most American periodicals.
But first and foremost, Ross needed to establish a business plan.
The type of cultured readers he was targeting also appealed to major New York department stores, who saw them as an ideal clientele and expressed their willingness to buy advertising space. Based on this, Ross's poker partner, Fleischmann, agreed to lend him USD 25,000 to get started — the equivalent of approximately USD 4,50,000 today.
Ross goes all in
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In the autumn of 1924, installed in an office belonging to the Fleischmann family at 25 West 45th Street, Ross began work on the presentation brochure for his magazine:
“The New Yorker will be a reflection, in words and pictures, of metropolitan life. It will be human. Its general tone will be one of gaiety, wit, and satire, but it will be more than a mere jester. It will not be what is commonly called radical or intellectual. It will be what is usually called sophisticated, in that it will assume in its readers a reasonable degree of open-mindedness. It will abhor nonsense.”
Ross added the now-famous phrase: “The magazine is not designed for the old lady in Dubuque.” In other words, The New Yorker would not seek to keep pace with current events or pander to middle America.
Ross’s sole criterion would be the interest of a story—and he alone would decide what was deemed interesting. He staked everything on the audacious and improbable idea that there were enough readers who shared his tastes—or were likely to discover them—to sustain a weekly magazine that was elegant, irreverent, and witty.
Ross nearly failed. The cover of the first issue of The New Yorker, dated February 21, 1925, featured no portraits of the powerful or the industrial magnates, no catchy headline, no bombastic promise.
Instead, it presented a watercolour by Rea Irvin, an artist friend of Ross, depicting a dandyish figure intently observing—what an idea!—a butterfly through his monocle. This image, nicknamed Eustace Tilly, became the magazine's unofficial emblem.
The magazine finds its balance
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Inside this first issue, the reader discovered an assortment of jokes and short poems. There was also a profile, reviews of plays and books, plenty of gossip, and a few advertisements.
The overall effect wasn't particularly impressive, giving more of a patchwork feel, and the magazine struggled to get off the ground. Just a few months after its launch, Ross nearly lost everything in a drunken poker game at the home of Herbert Bayard Swope, a Pulitzer Prize winner and Round Table regular.
He didn't return home until noon the following day, and when his wife searched his pockets, she found IOUs totaling nearly USD 30,000.
Fleischmann, who had also participated in the game but had left at a reasonable hour, flew into a rage. No one knows how, but Ross managed to convince him to settle part of his debt and let him pay off the rest through his work.
Just in time, the New Yorker began to gain readers, soon followed by new advertisers. Ross finally paid off his debt to his guardian angel.
Much of the magazine's success stemmed from Ross's knack for spotting talent and encouraging writers to develop their own voices. One of his first major discoveries was Katharine S Angell, who became the magazine's first fiction editor and a constant source of sound advice.
In 1926, Ross recruited James Thurber and EB White, who performed all sorts of tasks: writing "casuals" - short satirical essays -, drawing caricatures, writing captions for other people's drawings, 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 devoted to a person who was not in the news but deserved to be better known; long nonfiction stories fuelled by thorough investigations; short stories and poetry; and of course, one-panel cartoons and comic strips.
With an insatiable curiosity and a manic perfectionism when it came to grammar, Ross was prepared to do anything to ensure accuracy. Authors would receive their manuscripts covered in pencil annotations demanding dates, sources, and endless fact-checking. One of his most typical annotations was: "Who he?"
During the 1930s, as the country went through a relentless economic crisis, the New Yorker was sometimes criticized for its apparent indifference to the seriousness of national problems. In its pages, life almost always seemed light, seductive, and pleasant.
It was during the Second World War that the New Yorker truly found its place, both financially and editorially. It finally discovered its own voice: curious, open to the world, demanding and, ultimately, profoundly serious.
Ross also discovered new writers, including AJ Liebling, Mollie Panter-Downes, and John Hersey, whom he poached 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 the conditions that allowed singular voices to be heard. On the other hand, the magazine provided a space and encouragement for a form of non-academic authority: a place where informed amateurs could write articles on the Dead Sea Scrolls, geology, medicine, or nuclear war, with no other legitimacy than their ability to observe carefully, reason clearly, and construct a well-crafted sentence.
Finally, Ross deserves credit for broadening the scope of journalism far beyond the traditional categories of crime, justice, politics, and sports. Within the pages of this magazine, readers almost never found what they could read elsewhere. Instead, New Yorker readers could discover just about everything else. NPK NPK
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