Politics and Economics:
The Emergence of a The New Yorker Tone

In 1925, when The New Yorker made its first appearance, the Jazz Age was at its peak. John Held, Jr.’s flappers were dancing and smoking through the pages of College Humor; Gloria Swanson and Babe Ruth were being ballyhooed in the tabloids; and the cocktail party crowd, between snorts from their hip flasks, were chattering about Freud and Picasso. High Culture was big business, as Vanity Fair was demonstrating, and so too was the iconoclasm of H. L. Mencken in the pages of the American Mercury. The consumerist society, replete with cars, appliances, fads and fashions, and easy credit, was in full swing.

True, Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy were both published in 1925, similar in their insistence that America was a land of false illusions and broken promises. But after all, the Great War had faded into history, Europe’s problems were far away, and Calvin Coolidge ("the business of America is business") had just polled almost 72 percent of the electoral votes. For America’s reading public, it was party time and, wow, look at those stock prices soar!

At its inception, accurately reflecting its era, The New Yorker was a mélange of sophistication and crude effects. Founder Harold Ross had worked on the venerable humor magazine Judge and other publications, and had also come to know and admire many of the writers and illustrators associated with the cosmopolitan "new humor": Alexander Woollcott, Franklin P. Adams, Robert Henchley, Gluyas Williams and George S. Kaufman, among others. Early issues of the magazine unevenly blended the talents of these artists with the more raucous laugh-that-off! gag styles of Judge and Life (both of which dated back to the 1880s); the suave manner of Vanity Fair; and the sharp satire of the old British humor magazine Punch. Constant infusions of capital and continual replacements of editors and contributors marked the magazine’s first few years.

In the late 1920s a group of young writers and cartoonists joined that staff: Ogden Nash, James Thurber, Wolcott Gibbs, E. B. White, Peter Arno and Helen Hokinson—all of whom remained solidly identified with the magazine for the next several decades. They gradually created for The New Yorker a distinctive stamp, one marked by an articulate and sharp humorous perspective. Where Vanity Fair often seemed like a buffet table of cultural curiosities, The New Yorker began to acquire a uniform tone. It minimized the helter-skelter effects borrowed from the humor magazines. And it slid away from the iconoclastic manner of the American Mercury.

To some extent, Mencken’s justified irritation at the complacencies

of Coolidge-Hoover prosperity was also present in The New Yorker, but Ross and his staff were less interested in a fervent assault on what Mencken called the "booboisie" than in a skeptical, quietly amused scrutiny of day-to-day events.

The magazine did not completely eschew consideration of political and economic matters. After all, it was directed at a reasonably educated urban readership. Rather, it channeled these two topics in two unique ways. For one thing, it inserted political and economic comments right into the mainstream of all the other exciting events of the time, suggesting an equivalence of significance. Additionally, it consistently converted large issues into small-scale, even miniature perceptions. Capitalistic excess would not be excoriated loudly or at length; instead it might be compressed into a Peter Arno cartoon parody of a fat and foolish capitalist.

Almost from the beginning, two ambivalences were present. The New Yorker poked fun at conspicuous consumption, even while it paraded numerous examples of it, in columns and advertisements, in every issue. And while the magazine’s humorists bemoaned the demise of "enlightened individualism" in the city and nation, its own efforts often were largely the product of group process and editorial conference. A caption worked over by two writers might be attached to sample illustrations drawn by two or three cartoonists. In short, The New Yorker was hostage to the consumer society and the group ethic right from the outset.

A simple contrast might demonstrate The New Yorker’s usual perspective. When Tudor City, an expensive residential complex was erected on New York’s east side in 1929, a New Masses writer pointed to the irony of sumptuous dwellings rising within whispering distance of dreadful slums. But a New Yorker cartoonist drew hundreds of faces peering, astonished, from Tudor City windows at the one resident who had the effrontery to ride to work. The issue was not economic discrepancy, but the impact of a single deviant on an otherwise uniform mentality. No polemic, just poking fun.

Political humor in the late 1920s in The New Yorker often was confined to cynical flippancies in such columns as Howard Brubaker’s "Of All Things." "After painstaking research," Brubaker once wrote blithely, "we have at last discovered what the Mexican revolution is about. It is about over." Another columnist wrote, ". . . our sympathy goes out to Mussolini. It must be pretty discouraging to find that he has not scared anybody after all." Of course, this was better than College Humor, in which Ezra Pound could be found extolling the virtues of Fascist Italy. And The New Yorker was also warning, if rather gently, against Father Coughlin in 1931, three years before the formation of the Fascist-minded Christian Front. Periodically too, Adolf Dehn’s sinister little cartoons on German decadence appeared in its pages.

But in most important matters in politics and economics, The New

Yorker’s tone reduced them to frivolity. Small farmers had been in crisis for several years, but they made their only appearance in the magazine as bumpkins in cartoons. Even during such a violent and prolonged labor struggle as the Gastonia, N.C. textile strike, The New Yorker’s focus on idiosyncratic elements in the news led to its treatment of widespread symptoms of labor unrest in much the same way that it summarized April Fool’s Day pranks.¹

Statistics (as Compiled from the Current Press)
that Would Seem to Indicate an Epidemic.

So problems of magnitude could be neatly reduce to whimsy. Peter Arno’s absurdly pompous walrus-moustached roué’s were properly punctured, but they remained charming—and the corporate practices that they embodied were simply ignored. Ignored, too, were the business manipulations that helped to create the dramatic imbalances in the economy.

Late in October 1929 the stock market suffered two successive disasters. On Oct. 24, "Black Thursday," almost 13,000,000 shares of stock changed hands, in what the New York Times called "the most disastrous decline in the biggest and broadest stock market of history." On Oct. 29, "Tragic Tuesday," an estimated eight to nine billion dollars were lost, as over 16,000,000 shares were traded. The next day, Variety magazine set the tone for the initial response of American humor. What was to emerge as the worst peacetime economic collapse in modern history was shrunken to a Show Biz cliché: WALL STREET LAYS AN EGG.

The New Yorker added its voice to the wisecrack mood. "The collapse of the market . . . couldn’t help but be amusing," remarked a columnist. "It is amusing to see a fat land quivering in paunchy fright." The metaphor suggested that only Peter Arno’s fat capitalists were in danger.

The following week, the same blasé, cocktail-party chitchat tone was extended, to suggest that at least this fresh topic offered a welcome change from the Same Old Thing: "There was one feature of the stock market unpleasantness of last week which was not entirely without charm. It gave the newspapers something to print besides the political candidates were saying."

Surely, the "Great Flurry," as The New Yorker liked to refer to the incipient Depression, was a temporary phenomenon. Just a few days after the crash and a few days before the song "Happy Days are Here Again" was published, the magazine noted: "What finally stemmed the tide and averted an actual panic in Wall Street was not the intervention of the bankers but the arrival in town of the Rodeo."

Another early reaction was to needle political leaders. The New Yorker, always keeping one eye cocked for the marginalia on the inside pages, noted that ex-President Calvin Coolidge had just purchased a large estate in Northampton. This prompted an ironic jab demonstrating that "business has turned the corner and is definitely on the upgrade":²

Probably few people realize how bad for a nation’s morale it was to have an ex-president . . . living in half of a two-family house and paying thirty-two dollars a month rent. It hardly spoke well for the condition of business, and it tended to make everybody hold back . . . . Now, with the Coolidges in a Sixteen-room house, everything will open up. Mills and factories will soon be running again at full blast, oil wells will be drilled, stocks will show a decided strong tendency, and grain elevators of the West will be full to the brim, and the Sun will shine on a happy and prosperous people.

It didn’t happen of course, and soon the irony began to harden. "Depression has a strange effect on America," a late 1930 column began:³

We observed . . . the changed look on the faces of the dummies in the department-store windows. These silent ladies, fashionable poised, used to exemplify—in prosperous times—beauty, sophistication, worldly wisdom, the charm of decadence. The ones you see now are quite the opposite type. . . . Seemingly America has developed a new feminine ideal, in keeping with the slump. No longer can the Ultimate Consumer afford a worldly-wise woman who requires a sable collar to hide her lifted chin in; what he wants is a helpmeet with a schoolgirl complexion, who wants to make ends meet, and who has only a rather sketchy idea of how complicated life can really get.

A brief flurry of guarded optimism developed after the turn of the year.

The New Yorker found new "symptoms of recovery" where it could, although it could hardly keep pace with the fountain of good cheer emanating from politicians and economists. By 1931, there had been such a plethora of optimistic, usually platitudinous, predictions, that an entire book of them was published, with the appropriate cynical title, Oh Yeah? The New Yorker, for its part, devoted two full pages in one issue to "An Anthology of Hope, Compiled by Those Incorrigible Optimists, the Editors of the New Yorker, Who for Two Years Have Felt the Almost Daily Inspiration of the Country’s Leaders of Thought." Centered in the spread

was a cartoon by Otto Soglow, featuring his well-known man-in-a-manhole. For the depths of the sewer, he could be heard proclaiming, "I am convinced, Joe, that the country is fundamentally sound." Veteran satirists Reginald Marsh and Al Frueh, who had been drawing theatrical scenes for the magazine, now turned up with satires on industrialists. On at least one occasion, The New Yorker’s cover, which usually was filled with romping roués, giddy club ladies or colorful yachting pageants, came close to being a paean to the proletariat; it depicted, non-humorously, a group of industrial workers. New Masses could have used it.

Even the farmer, usually an object of rustic stereotypes in The New Yorker, came in for sympathy. On the occasion of the Administration’s crop-destruction proposal, the editors turned bitter:⁴

We have read, every month or so for years, an article predicting that man would eventually be destroyed by insects. . . . Now it appears that the bugs will be too late: long before they overrun the earth, we will have been destroyed by simple economic disintegration, leaving, for the insects, the vast hoppers full of wheat that we were unable to distribute equitably among ourselves.

Such dry irony was becoming commonplace in The New Yorker. By the end of 1931, the tendency in the magazine was to categorize almost every event or official pronouncement as a symptom—of official avarice, indifference, or simply bunk. And yet the magazine was usually incapable of dealing directly with explosive issues: old habits die hard. When, in the spring of 1932, the bonus army, consisting largely of unemployed veterans, descended on Washington, and some thousands of them encamped after the Senate voted down the bonus bill, The New Yorker commented: "If Henry Ford wants to do his government a good turn, he will go to Washington and get the bonus expeditionary force out of the trenches."

And when General MacArthur, on orders from President Hoover, brutally dispersed the bonus army, declaring that it was "a mob . . . animated by the essence of revolution," The New Yorker cavalierly commented:⁵

[The bonus army] attracted largely an assemblage of economists, men who turned to the study of economics, because it supplies a substitute for job-hunting and loafing. Ostensibly they made a demonstration to compel Congress to give them a hand-out, but unquestionably they liked the life or they wouldn’t have gone to Washington—that is, they preferred it to any other life they could have worked out for themselves at the moment. The Bonus-Army veterans are students of a sort; and we will wager that most of them could talk your ear off on almost any subject you might bring up, and would rather talk than eat.

The next item was on society notes.

With no lightening of the economic situation, the magazine staff seemed to become bored with the topic. Sometimes they viewed the Depression philosophically, as just one in a group of continually recurring events

in the topsy-turvy, but withal charming history of mankind— along with saloons, traffic laws, the five-day week, shorthand, pyorrhea, short skirts and bobbed hair. By late 1932, a New Yorker writer was asking: "What Depression?" Staff regulars Thurber, Benchley and Adams offered humorous tidbits about the depression, but they seemed to be mining, almost mechanically, the old humorous veins: Business was flat on its back, Over-Confidence was a Bad Thing, and the Horatio Alger myth was not true.

In the Presidential campaign of 1932, which the New Republic called an "obscene spectacle" because major-party candidates seemed to equivocate on every issue, the New Yorker confined itself to sniping. The magazine had been sarcastic about Hoover’s round-the-corner prosperity for some time; it was not equally unenthusiastic about FDR, who "could even straddle the bundling issue." In October, a columnist wrote, "It is hard for us to make up our mind whom to vote for, darn it."

Toward third parties, the New Yorker was contemptuous: "The Communists have been at us," wrote an editor, "to join up with them, flattering us with sly references to our ‘intellectual’ side and classifying us a ‘professional worker.’" (Such intellectuals as Clifton Fadiman, Edmund Wilson, Upton Sinclair and Sherwood Anderson had made positive comments on various Communist positions.) But for the New Yorker the Communists, like all radicals, were immature in their boisterous enthusiasms and denunciations, and in their idealism. In a typical cartoon, "Evolution of a Socialist," militant, revolutionary youth "progressed" to cynical, reactionary, chauffeur-driven capitalists. "A successful revolution," a communist wrote, "will require the finest sort of organization, whereas the typical Red cannot make his right foot cooperate with his left." Alexander Woollcott wrote from Moscow that everything connected with the Five Year Plan was far less significant industrially than the production of photographs of Stalin.

After the election, the New Yorker remarked that it preferred the election of the Lord Mayor of London, because at least that had "style." But the excitement engendered by the flurry of early New Deal legislation, which gradually lifted the spirit of Depression America, was not lost on the New Yorker’s acute observers. It had consistently parodied collectivism and bureaucracy, but by the end of 1933, a columnist could write ". . . the long, long dreams of a planned society are coming true, the way things look now. . . . Industry is learning its lesson."

When the NRA made its appearance, the New Yorker sported its own little NRA eagle, and when it reported "symptoms of recovery," it now did so without sarcasm. Its tendency, still, was to convert issues—in this case, the complex new program—into recognizable, humanized dimensions. In one cartoon, a man relaxes with his feet up on a table, while his wife complains to a friend: "It’s Johnson this an’ Johnson that ever since he won his blue iggle." And a new awareness of the significance

of economic security was sometimes being manifested, as in one cartoon where a rich roué is shown propositioning a young lady: ". . . and when you’re 63 you’ll have a hundred a month the rest of your life."

A basically positive attitude about the nation’s health began to be built into the magazine now, despite the vicissitudes of the long Depression years that still lay ahead. "The figures on reemployment look hopeful," wrote Howard Brubaker. "In a couple of years there will be useful work for everybody—except John Garner."

The rise in national optimism was accompanied by an upturn in advertising volume, and the New Yorker was an obvious beneficiary. As the 1930s moved along, the magazine grew fatter and more confident, even as the magazines that anachronistically embodied the Jazz Age spirit declined and died.

The New Yorker’s success in wooing advertisers was achieved despite its steady sniping at huckersterism, a pattern inherited from the joke-a-second flamboyance of the 1920s, and intensified after the stock market crash. The New Yorker gently satirized the irresistible onrush of advertising—in public conveyances, over the airwaves, in the streets. In 1932, poet Ogden Nash offered a definitive statement on the trend: "I think that I shall never see / A billboard lovely as a tree; / Perhaps, unless the billboards fall , / I’ll never see a tree at all."

The New Yorker continued to run its "There’ll Always Be an Adman" department, mocking fatuous or snobbish ads (as it has to this day), despite the presence of similarly absurd marketing appeals that filled its own advertising columns. Editor and author Alexander King noted that the New Yorker always knew precisely what it was doing: "It deals with personalities irreverently yet preserves enough tact to maintain the good will of its advertisers." King, who had edited the bitterly satirical Americana magazine early in the Depression, found out where his own bread was buttered. When Americana folded, he moved to an editorial desk at Time magazine.

Although Harold Ross, according to biographer Dale Kramer, was the first editor of a major modern magazine to achieve complete independence from the business side of the publication, it is obvious that Ross’s editorial "formula" included shrewd techniques for attracting "class" advertising. The magazine’s earliest and heaviest backer was Raoul Fleischmann, a yeast manufacturer.

Coolidge and Hoover were gone and business leaders had taken their lumps, but to read through the New Yorker in the 1930s was to feel that day-to-day life was mostly a matter of buying and selling. As usual, the New Yorker cartoons took an intimate perspective: generally, a one-on-one relationship between an aggressive, sometimes charmingly silly, salesman and his victim. To a slightly suspicious customer, a friendly neighborhood storekeeper says in one cartoon: "Fish is an old story with

us, Mrs. Burbank, but when this cod was unpacked we all pricked up our ears."

Occasionally, New Yorker writers manifested exasperation, especially when the English language was abused. Alexander Woollcott once railed:  "I find my own mind giving way under this persistent spectacle of the American business man sitting with his finger in his mouth and lapsing into a vintage coquetry that was already losing its charm when David Copperfield’s child-wife practiced it a hundred years ago."⁶ As for what one critic of advertising called its worst sin, the "systematic manipulation of anxieties," the New Yorker managed to hit at such trauma even while cushioning its barb with cuteness: one cartoon presented a grinning door-to-door salesman saying, "Good morning, sir. Have you given thought to the possibility of complete paralysis?"

The New Yorker’s middle-of-the-road adaptability in this area, as in so many others, proved successful. Step by step it had shed most of the superficial resemblances to the older humor magazines on the one hand, and to the chic-Culture publications on the other. Quietly but effectively, the New Yorker had been pioneering a different manner, one emphasizing moderation, in an almost eighteenth-century spirit, in all things. It stressed nuances rather than sharp contrasts, turning its well-tailored back on sweeping indictments. Satirical magazines that arose during the early Depression, such as Ballyhoo and Americana were either too rambunctious or too vitriolic to outlive the decade. Unlike both of them, The New Yorker never quite confronted the worst implications of the Depression at all.

The New Yorker’s moderation and detachment also led to a disappearance of overt "villains" in its humor. Such traditional enemies in magazine humor as the brutal police officer and the corrupt clergyman made fitful appearances in cartoons in the late 1920s; by the 1930s they underwent a humanizing process, even as the capitalist had become a comic, rather than a vicious, figure. All of these figures were portrayed as rather ordinary folks, foibles and all, caught up in a genial society that defied ready-made distinctions between good and evil.

An important result of this rounding-out of character and the resultant softening of moral overtones was that distinctions of a moral sort became increasingly difficult to recognize, not unlike the marginal differences between competing name brands on virtually identical products. Infinite nuances of judgment created a blurring effect: if there was less of the old-fashioned good-vs.-evil tension, there was also a less clear value structure. What was important and what wasn’t?

"Notes and Comment" moved freely, abruptly, from short jottings about international crises to Lily Dache hat designs. As the choice between different styles of lapels received equal attention with the choice between conflicting armies, there often was, in philosopher Suzanne Langer’s phrase, "a general trivialization of the human battle." It might be said

that the New Yorker built on the tabloids’ crazyquilt approach to the human panorama, and it also anticipated the "mosaic" miscellany that Marshall McLuhan later found intrinsic to television presentations.

The genuine achievement of the New Yorker’s humor, perceptive and civilized, need not be detailed here. But it is also true that in some ways this same humor represented a narrowed purview. "Hamlet lost a kingdom," someone said, and "Benchley lost a tooth." What often was lost in this new individualized humor was a sense of scale and the possibility of really trenchant satire. Radical views of individuals and events, like radical solutions to social problems were not, in general, subjects for serious consideration.

And always, of course, the advertiser and the world of goods supplied a special context, providing motive and means for the full efflorescence of the consumerist, self-oriented society. A triumphant new magazine founded in 1934 was Esquire. It incorporated many of the features that had made the New Yorker successful: articulate contributors, cartoons scattered throughout its pages, strong appeals to fashion and luxury consumption, and even a cute little capitalist, "Esky," walrus-moustache and all.

Notes

    ¹W. E. Farbstein, "Strikes and Strikers," the New Yorker, March 9, 1929, p. 26. Cf. "April Foot," The New Yorker, March 30, 1929, p. 85.
    ²"The Talk of the Town," The New Yorker, Apr. 12, 1930, p. 17.
    ³"The Talk of the Town," The New Yorker, Nov. 15, 1930. p. 17.
    ⁴ "Notes and Comment," The New Yorker, Sept. 25, 1931, p. 9.
    ⁵"Notes and Comment," The New Yorker, Aug. 13, 1932, p. 5.
    ⁶ "Shouts and Murmurs," The New Yorker, Oct. 21, 1933, p. 36.

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