American Experiment (243 page)

More than ever this cost-price gap was being filled by advertising, which by the 1920s was generating two-thirds of the newspaper revenue and, in metropolitan newspapers, appropriating three columns for every two of reading matter. The cost of advertising in English language newspapers tripled between 1915 and 1929, amounting to $860 million in the latter year. Earlier, Ivory Soap had boasted, “It Floats”; now Maxwell was urging installment buyers of autos to “Pay As You Ride”; the railroads were
exhorting travelers to “See America First”; Listerine was warring on halitosis and Life Buoy Soap on “B.O.”

In the frenzied search for advertising and hence for circulation, the newspapers offered entertainment and diversion—scandal, crime, fashion notes, puzzles, society gossip, recipes, beauty hints, astrology, chess, whist, bridge, gardening, palmistry, advice to the lovelorn. “The newspaper offers a mart wherein the commodity factory may shriek its wares, and exploit its own workers, who spend more and more of their surplus on newly-created wants,” Silas Bent wrote during mid-decade. “The newspaper offers to the literate but uneducated workers an escape, an entertainment, a thrill, an opiate.”

Nothing combined all these qualities more graphically than the comics, which had originated earlier as day-to-day gags but came into their own as continuity strips at the start of the twenties. Millions followed the lives and times of Andy Gump, Toots and Casper, Skeezix, Winnie Winkle, Barney Google, Tillie the Toiler, Moon Mullins, and Blondie. Accident-prone, crisis-ridden, vociferous, funny, they let their eager public identify itself with their family squabbles and personal foibles. “If historians of the next century were to rely upon the comic strip,” Stephen Becker has observed, “they would conclude that we were a peaceful lot of ruminant burghers from 1920 to 1929, with only flashes of inspired insanity, and that our social conflicts and national crises were settled by family conferences at the dinner table.”

No ideological pattern emerged from the zany characters and their doings. Cartoonist Harold Gray’s conservatism, individualism, and philosophy that “only the good have rights” expressed itself in Little Orphan Annie’s millionaire protector Daddy Warbucks, but most of the comic characters of the 1920s are notable only for their human vanities and failings. The comics represented commercialism more than conservatism. Publishers knew that the comic strips were by far the most read of all their features, and their artists were among the best paid of all who worked for newspapers.

More than ever before, the big papers were big business, sharing the powers and vicissitudes of big business. Newspaper proprietors, it was said, had to be “reelected” every day, as customers casually chose among a dozen competing papers at a newsstand. One response to “destructive competition” was consolidation. Strong newspapers swallowed up weak ones; morning and evening papers combined, thus keeping a single plant running twenty-four hours; papers merged to keep or gain the precious Associated Press franchise. Consolidation intensified during the war years and continued into the twenties.

The monarch of mergers in the 1920s was surely Frank A. Munsey. A Horatio Alger figure who had started out at thirteen as a clerk, he rose to fame and riches by buying, selling, merging, or discontinuing a large number of newspapers. After buying the New York
Press
and merging it with the
Sun,
a penny paper, he poured $2 million in it by 1920 without much effect on circulation. He then bought the
Herald,
a venerable paper that with the
Sun
had set high standards in American journalism. After neither turned a profit, Munsey eyed the
Tribune,
another excellent and unprofitable organ. When the Reid family refused to sell this living legacy of their late father, Munsey abruptly sold them the
Herald.
The result was the
Herald Tribune.

Munsey did not sentimentalize over the seven New York dailies or the eleven magazines that he merged, sold, killed off, or renamed. “The same law of economics applies in the newspaper business that operates in all other important business to-day,” he said. “Small units in any line are no longer competitive factors.” The mergers that made newspapers scarcer made Munsey richer, to the tune of $20 million.

At the start of the twenties, Upton Sinclair threw down his gauntlet before the working press. “The Brass Check is found in your pay-envelope every week—you who write and print and distribute our newspapers and magazines. The Brass Check is the price of your shame—you who take the fair body of truth and sell it in the market place, who betray the virgin hopes of mankind into the loathsome brothel of Big Business.”

Strong words, but Walter Lippmann granted that Sinclair spoke for a large body of Americans. How answer such a charge? Lippmann could hardly defend the accuracy of the press, for he and a colleague were just completing a test of the
New York Times
’s coverage of the Russian Revolution and concluding that the “news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was” but rather what reporters and editors “wished to see.” But Lippmann would not blame the big publishers as big businessmen. The problem lay elsewhere—in the fact that news and truth were by no means the same thing. The press could report only palpable events, “like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision.” It could not report underlying, tangled, “social truth.” That could be done only through a system of intelligence, a machinery of knowledge.

Others traced the failure to economics and technology. “The industrialization of the news gathering process,” according to a recent study, “had inevitably required further and further division of labor. From a colonial
institution in which one man wrote, edited and printed the entire newspaper, the press had developed into a complex operation in which the facts in any one story were transmitted from one person to another in an expanding chain. An overseas story might go from reporter to rewrite man to editor of the originating paper in the United States and thence through wire or syndicate editors to hundreds of other papers for handling by still other rewrite men and editors. The process provided limitless possibilities for honing and focusing news, but it also made possible a good deal of misunderstanding and re-interpretation.”

Perhaps the critical change had taken place in the nature of public opinion itself. Trying to collect news from a chaos of sights and sounds, reporters lacked a shaping framework in which to conduct their work. In earlier days, at least in their political reporting, they had operated in a party environment and worked for partisan newspapers. Public opinion was largely party opinion. Parties were already declining in the 1920s under the impact of the anti-party reforms of earlier in the century, however, and the number of party-affiliated newspapers had dropped dramatically—from 801 Republican and 732 Democratic dailies in 1899 to 505 Republican and 434 Democratic dailies by 1929. More party independence did not free the press from political or economic controls, but simply made reporters dependent on other influences and moorings.

To some degree, publicity agents filled the party gap—a clear sign, Lippmann noted, that “the facts of modern life do hot spontaneously take a shape in which they can be known. They must be given a shape by somebody.” Also interpreting events were syndicated political columnists, who came into their own during the twenties. Arthur Brisbane’s column “Today” was syndicated by Hearst’s Washington
Times.
Mark Sullivan, Walter Winchell, and Will Rogers appeared in scores of papers; Heywood Broun’s “It Seems to Me” appeared in the New York
Tribune
and then in the New York
World
until he clashed with his employers and moved to the New York
Telegram.
And when the
World
disappeared into the
World-Telegram
in 1931, the dispossessed Walter Lippmann moved to the
Herald Tribune,
where for years he would help “shape the news.”

Henry Luce, recently of Yale, had his own ideas as to how to sculpture the news. With his friend Britton Hadden, he founded
Time
in 1923, with a prospectus claiming that Americans were on the whole poorly informed. Luce and Hadden proposed to offer a blend of fact and opinion, on the premise that anyone who thought he was objective was deceiving himself. Luce urged newspapers to drop their separate editorial page and feature “intelligent criticism, representation and evaluation” of leaders.
Time
itself
had no editorial page; critics held that all its pages were editorial. Luce believed in free enterprise, free speech, hard competition, and the “American Way.” Even more conservative, at least on economic issues, was the
Reader’s Digest,
which began in 1922 as a pocket-sized monthly composed of articles condensed from other publications. Both these journals ended the decade with sizable circulations; in 1930, Time Inc. spawned
Fortune,
a monthly for affluent businessmen.

To such publications there was, however, no counterpart on the left, no substantial adversary press. The Yiddish-language
Daily Forward
had a decent circulation, but most socialist and communist journals struggled through the gay twenties. The trade union press consisted mainly of provincial, craft-oriented papers. At the start of World War I, the United States could boast of more than 1,200 foreign-language newspapers, 500 of them printed in German; New York alone had ten German-language newspapers. But many German-language presses were stopped during the war, never to run again. Socialist papers such as the Milwaukee
Leader
and the New York
Call
were denied the use of the mails; the
Leader’s
editor, Victor Berger, was barred from his seat in Congress; the editors of Philadelphia’s
Tageblatt
went to jail for criticizing the war effort.

The native Indian newspapers, which under the leadership of the
Cherokee Advocate
had thrived during the previous century, entered a dark age. The
Advocate’s
Cherokee-language type was handed over to the Smithsonian, and its press sold as junk. Other journals such as the
American Indian Magazine
printed work by leading Indian writers but lasted only a few years. A number of black newspapers, on the other hand, flourished during the twenties; even the radical Chicago
Defender
had a circulation of 93,000, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s
Crisis,
the organ of the NAACP, enjoyed a marked influence. Northern black papers were said to have helped inspire the continuing Negro migration to Northern cities.

Nonetheless, all these minority or dissenting papers combined—and, in contrast to mainstream papers, they did not seek to combine—could in no way be considered to constitute a strong adversary or opposition press.

The major challenge to the established press lay outside the press, in an innocuous little box that was showing up in more and more American parlors. This was the radio, the “Furniture That Talks,” as comedian Fred Allen dubbed it.

“I have in mind,” twenty-five-year-old David Sarnoff had written in 1916, “a plan of development which would make radio a ‘household utility’ in the same sense as the piano or phonograph…. The receiver can be designed in the form of a simple ‘Radio Music Box’ and arranged for
several different wave lengths.” Five years later, after becoming general manager of the new Radio Corporation of America, Sarnoff persuaded RCA to enter radio broadcasting. Five years after that, he helped launch the National Broadcasting Company.

Everything turned on that box in the parlor. By 1922 sales of radio sets and parts had reached $60 million; within two more years sales were almost six times that figure. Stations quickly proliferated—28 were licensed in 1921; by July 1922 this number had swelled to 430. A whole new industry was getting under way. Radio magazines appeared with broadcasting schedules. Technology, programming, professionalism all improved. At first the stations tended to feature European classical music. Then they discovered the swinging music of New Orleans, called jazz or “race music.” Because the saxophone was considered an immoral instrument, this kind of music was not to be found on the airwaves until the mid-1920s—and by then the listener could hear little else.

Radio had a particular impact on the nation’s farmers, a million of whom were receiving programs from five hundred stations. Some large firms like the Gurney Seed and Nursery Company in South Dakota bought not only time but whole stations. Soon the little boxes were offering religion, politics, Fibber Magee and Molly on Chicago’s WMAQ, and Henry Ford’s old-time square-dance music on Detroit’s WBZ. It was estimated that 25 million people heard Calvin Coolidge’s Inaugural Address in 1925.

The Bill of Rights forbade regulation of the press, but what about radio, which used the nation’s airwaves? The federal government, through activist Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, began to regulate radio by assigning wavelengths. Some small stations refused to stick to their allotted place, wandering instead through the radio spectrum in search of clear air. When Hoover sealed the chronically offending station of Aimee Semple McPherson, she replied with a tart telegram:
“PLEASE ORDER YOUR MINIONS OF SATAN TO LEAVE MY STATION ALONE. YOU CANNOT EXPECT THE ALMIGHTY TO ABIDE BY YOUR WAVE LENGTH NONSENSE.”

Minor controversy broke out as to whether radio should be federally regulated at all, but only regulation of wavelengths could prevent chaos, and radio recognized no state boundaries. Virtually no one even raised the question of whether government should own the airwaves or control the contents of radio broadcasts, even though during the 1920s Britain under a Conservative government established the nationalized British Broadcasting Corporation. So radio was turned over to private enterprise, which inevitably competed to offer entertainment.

The movies had a history something like that of radio. In each “a crude toy became an industry; fierce patent struggles erupted; public acceptance skyrocketed; business combinations won domination; anonymous idols exploded into fame.” There was a difference in degree of spectatorship between radio and film, however, that amounted to a difference in kind. People could interact face-to-face with stump speakers; they could heckle, applaud, boo, and hiss, and speakers could respond to these cues. Audiences could interact with actors in the “legitimate theater,” registering their feelings and even eliciting subtle responses from the stage. Radio listeners could talk among themselves, or at least turn to another wave band. But moviegoers sat in relative isolation; they could not communicate with the silent actors on the silver screen; they could not easily talk among themselves or quit the theater. Spectatorship was complete.