Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976 (13 page)

10

Business

DOG EAT DOG

4/1/33

MOST IMPERATIVE OF RECENT MISSIVES
was a letter from
Forbes,
reminding us that we are not a bluebird. “You are not a bluebird,” the letter said, gruffly, and then added, “you are a business man.” There was a kind of finality about this news, and we read on. “Business is a hard, cold-blooded game today. Survival of the fittest. Dog eat dog. Produce or get out. A hundred men are after your job.” If
Forbes
only knew it, goading of this sort is the wrong treatment for us. We are not, as they say, a bluebird. Nobody who reads the
Nation
regularly, as we do, can retain his amateur bluebird standing. As for business, we agree that it is a hard, cold-blooded game. Survival of the fittest. Dog eat dog. The fact that about eighty-five per cent of the dogs have recently been eaten by the other dogs perhaps explains what long ago we noticed about business: that it had a strong smell of boloney. If dog continues to eat dog, there will be only one dog left, and he will be sick to his stomach.

STRIKES

8/6/27

AS WE RODE COMFORTABLY
in the subway on the day set for the transit strike, the thought came to us that strikes are not what they used to be. We mourn the old days when workers would quit their jobs in a spontaneous burst of rebelliousness and high blood-pressure. Lately, strikes have been produced in the calm manner of musical comedies, with advance announcements of the cast, date of opening, and photographs of the strike-breakers learning their duties from the smiling, expectant strikers. The police are notified in advance that riots will begin at 2:30, the same as any matinée. No wonder labor is disgruntled; it's as bad as community singing.

PREDATORY

3/19/27

AS PERNICIOUS A PIECE OF
chicanery as was ever perpetrated is the inspired work of one H. W. Miller, who gave up his seat on the Stock Exchange recently, and since then has been devoting his time to calling upon friends during office hours, seemingly for no particular reason. He shows up unannounced, relaxes in a chair, talks half an hour about curiously dull subjects, makes it clear that he is in no hurry, and finally makes a vague exit without giving any reason for having dropped in. This has left his friends weak, irritable, and bewildered.

It now turns out that the merry stock merchant, finding himself relieved of work, deliberately armed himself with a sheaf of inanities, stale jokes, and platitudes, and set forth to avenge himself heartily for all the time he had been unnecessarily interrupted during business for the past ten years.

“I am going to do this for two weeks,” he said when cornered, “and then I'm going to the country.”

 

This, in our judgment, has something of the fine deliberateness of the bored ex-aviator who bought a Ford when the war was over, installed an airplane engine and a very loud horn, took aboard some ballast, and went abroad in the land insultingly showing his dust to every Lincoln and Stutz from here to Yosemite. That is the actual case, although we don't know the man's name. We do know that he occupied himself pleasantly that way for more than a year, hiding down lanes and waiting for his prey.

WHAT EVERY ADULT SHOULD KNOW

12/31/27

INSURANCE SALESMEN HAVE ALWAYS BEEN
glamorous in our eyes, because they go to places we wouldn't dare go and face odds that would make us quail. While we were lunching with one of these dare-devils last week (he had been in our psychology class at college) he unexpectedly confessed all. He told us that the reason it is possible to make what seem to be impossible sales is that the average man secretly believes he can argue the hide off any salesman, and likes to hear himself try. Once he starts arguing, he hangs himself.

After listening to our friend's disclosures, we are in a position to reveal the cardinal principle for insulating oneself against insurance. It is: always make the wrong answer to the salesman's questions, which are all scientifically designed to bring forth the answer Yes. Your salvation lies in saying No. He will, of course, expect you to take the soundness and the general worthiness of the idea of insurance for granted. This never comes into question. Then he will start off very candidly with some such disarming question as this:

“Now, Mr. Fish, as you know I have come to see you about insurance. I assume, sir, that a man of your business integrity has already made provision against unforeseen circumstances,
haven't you?”
(You say Yes.) “Just as a matter of sound business sense you have created an estate for the protection of your wife,
haven't you?”
(You say Yes.) “Furthermore, I assume that you wish your son Roger to enjoy the educational advantages in life that he deserves,
don't you?”
(Another Yes.)

Well, if you say Yes to all these questions you are a goner because he has a whole string of others calling for affirmative answers which lead inevitably to the execution of a policy. The only safe answer, as we said, is No. If you say No he will still go on trying to sell you insurance but he will be too stunned and dazed to accomplish anything.

A good variation is to say, when the salesman refers to your wife: “I left my wife last week.” When he speaks of your son, who will soon be ready for college, bite your lips and say that unfortunately your marriage was childless.

Our friend also informs us that in this business they no longer use the term “to sign” a thing; they say: “to write your name.” The word “sign” has come to have a sinister tone. Don't let this trick fool you—writing your name is just as binding.

TADPOLES AND TELEPHONES

6/2/28

THERE WAS A LARGE BOWL
of tadpoles in the window of the Telephone Building as we came wandering along, lonely as a cloud. We stopped of course—we stop for anything in windows, particularly tadpoles. A sign said:
THE TADPOLE REMINDS US
. It told how the unfortunate creature, gloomily metamorphic, is forced to rise at intervals to the surface of the water in order to breathe; and it compared his fate to that of the unfortunate business man who has no telephone on his desk and has to rise and leave his work whenever there is a call. It was a fine and a beautiful little object lesson, and we stood enthralled for fifteen minutes, hoping to verify the truth of this neat biological phenomenon, brooding on its neat analogy. The tadpoles, how-ever, seemed not to rise: they rested lazily on the bottom. After ten minutes of waiting we began to shift uneasily from one foot to the other. Still no tadpoles rose to the surface. Could the Telephone Company be wrong? The truth finally seeped into our consciousness: the tadpoles had sensibly
given up
rising to the surface, wise little frogs! We departed, vowing never to answer the phone again.

TRUTH-IN-ADVERTISING

7/11/36

THE TRUTH-IN-ADVERTISING
movement has just celebrated its silver jubilee, and everybody laughed when it stepped up to the piano. Advertising is almost the only profession which has spent twenty-five years worrying about its own good character. Most types of enterprise never give truth a second thought, but advertising people are not like that: they keep truth in front of them all the time, brooding dreamily about it while writing the long, long drama of mouth hygiene. They worry so furiously about truth, one suspects they read each other's copy. All this is confusing to the consumer, who has a double responsibility toward advertising, being obliged to read it and keep up with it and buy products on the strength of it, and at the same time sympathize with the advertiser's devotion to truth.

 

In our opinion, nobody has done justice, artistically, to advertising. It is patently America's major contribution to present-day culture; yet the only books, analytical or critical, we have seen on the subject have been either textbooks, which are dull and special, or books debunking advertising, which are ill-tempered, humorless, and out-of-date before they get into print. The key to the advertising heart (and none of the writers on the subject seems to have grasped this) is this very search for elusive truth, the kind of search that took Byrd to the South Pole even though he knew there was nothing there, the kind of search which after twenty-five years still takes its pilgrims to Boston to a meeting of the Advertising Federation of America, there to rededicate themselves to the principles of the Baltimore convention of 1931. It is this feeling for truth which sets up a local irritation in the breasts of those who have given themselves to the fantasia of depilatories and emollients. They know that the hair must be removed from ladies' arms and men's jowls, yet in the pain of literary composition they find themselves kin to Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Guy Empey. They are obliged to express an idea on paper, and this takes them into the world of literary creation, artistic jealousy, and truth.

 

The consumer, if left to his own devices, would no more expect truth in advertising than he would expect honesty in parenthood; after all, it is reasonable to suppose that a manufacturer is biassed about his own product, in the same way that a parent is over-appreciative of his own child. “Advertising,” said Mrs. William Brown Meloney at the silver jubilee of truth, “must be the herald of the new and greater world into which we are entering.” And one suddenly gets a picture of the devotees exhausted by their zeal, entering into the new and greater world by getting a lift from a nationally advertised cigarette.

 

Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams—Joseph interpreting for Pharoah. Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept bright as a sword. We rise to eat a breakfast cereal which will give us strength for the tasks of the day; we vanquish the excesses of the night with an alkaline fizz; we cleanse our gums, stifle our bad odors, adorn our diseased bodies, and go forth to conquer—cheered on with a thousand slogans, devices, lucubrations. What folly for our leaders to meet in Boston in quest of an unwonted truth! We live by fiction. By fiction alone can Man get through the day.

RAVISHED LIPS

4/10/37

WE DO NOT PROFESS TO
understand the philosophy of merchandising, but we are willing to go on studying it, just as we have for many years. On the radio we heard a voice say that Angelus lipstick kept lips “ravishing yet virginal.” It seems to us highly important to examine this apparent contradiction and to find out where the manufacturer really stands on the question, what his desires and hopes are for the girls who use his product. Does he want them to be ravished, or does he want them to remain virgins? If his desire is that they look ravishing, yet remain untarnished, then what are his feelings, if any, toward the males for whose benefit the cosmetic is applied and whose lot it is to be attracted yet repelled? We think the public has a right to inquire into these things, and be instructed. It is possible that a manufacturer of lipstick has no genuine interest in the potentials of his product. It is also possible that we men, faced with women who are equipped to be both maid and wanton, are deliberately being taken for a sleigh ride.

 

Bourjois, the scent-maker, points out that romance doesn't just happen: it is won by wearing a perfume called Evening in Paris. And there is the daring new odeur, Gabilla's Sinful Soul, exotic and naughty. One would say that ladies are now enabled to ask, in the language of the odeur, for love licit or illicit, for enduring fidelity or for the wanton tweak. Let us hope that the ladies, with their fragrances, are not embarrassed by a too great confidence in the New York male's sense of smell, debauched as it is by blowing dust, burned motor fuels, and desiccating office heat. How can the ladies tell, anyway, what smells are associated with romance in a gentleman's subconscious? For one is the torpid, alkaline smell of the Interborough; for an-other, the pure prickle of new linen unfolded by hands suddenly adored; for another, the drying of wet wool before a great fire. Perhaps Elizabeth Arden is wisest—she wants the ladies to smell like a rolling Kentucky landscape, which really takes in quite a lot.

WHAT? THEY DON'T WORK?

7/3/43

THE PAPERS CARRIED
only the most modest account of the Federal Trade Commission's complaint against Carter's Little Liver Pills; to wit, that they had no therapeutic effect on the liver. We don't understand the complacency with which the nation received this news, threatening, as it does, to affect millions of Uves and organs. From the early days of medicine men and snake oil, the sluggish liver has been an inseparable part of the American dream—the sluggish liver, the healing pill. Our mountains and plains, our cities and villages, were conquered and built by men who had sluggish livers and the means of curing them. The famous little pills travelled the uncharted alimentary canal by the untold billions, and their fame shone forth from the sides of barns and warehouses from one end to the other of this vast and bilious empire. Suddenly we are informed, in one blinding sentence of our government's charge, that not one pill ever reached its destination, not one ever made contact with the human liver, and that the whole thing has been a magnificent delusion. It was as though we had heard one morning that Broadway had in reality never made contact with Forty-second Street, or that Niagara Falls had no actuality but was a mere fiction of lovers. We fail to see why the
Times
didn't give the story what it was worth—an eight-column head on the first page:
CHARGE CARTER'S PILLS MISSED VITAL ORGAN—130,000,000 PEOPLE REPORTED STILL SLUGGISH
.