Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (67 page)

For Cyrus Curtis, a breakthrough came when he learned that an offer to contribute to an author’s favorite charity often was enough to win an article for his wife’s magazine. Thus, Louisa May Alcott came to head the
Journal’s
“List of Famous Contributors,” which Curtis publicized. This, and an aggressive advertising campaign, capped by a contest with cash prizes, caused circulation in 1887 to shoot up to 400,000; correspondingly, the magazine’s size expanded to a handsome thirty-two pages per monthly issue.

In the 1890s, the magazine’s appeal to American women was due in part to its newfound tone of intimacy. Editor Edward Bok, a bachelor, had instituted a chatty, candid personal-advice column, “Side Talks with Girls,” which he himself initially wrote under the pseudonym Ruth Ashmore. Its phenomenal success—the first column drew seven hundred letters from women seeking counsel on matters from courtship to health—spawned “Side Talks with Boys” and “Heart to Heart Talks,” and established “advice” and “self-improvement” features as magazine staples. And while other magazines of the day featured identical cover illustrations issue after issue, the
Journal
daringly changed its cover images monthly, setting another modern trend.

Not all the magazine’s features were lighthearted and chatty. The
Journal
uncovered a major advertising hoax.

At the turn of the century, there was no national agency to screen the miracle claims made for scores of over-the-counter syrups and sarsaparillas. The federal government and the medical profession were continually battling companies nostrum by nostrum, claim by outrageous claim. Considerable controversy surrounded the top-selling Lydia E. Pinkham Vegetable Compound, a panacea for a spectrum of female woes. Advertisements for the product claimed that Miss Lydia herself was toiling away— “in her laboratory at Lynn, Massachusetts” —improving the compound. The
Ladies’ Home Journal
proved that Lydia was actually in Pine Grove Cemetery near Lynn, where she had been resting for twenty years. To prove it, the magazine published a picture of the dated tombstone. No Watergate coup, to be sure, but the article heightened public awareness of falsehood in advertising, and the following year, 1906, Congress passed the long-awaited Federal Food and Drug Act.

The
Ladies’ Home Journal
could rightfully boast that it became the first magazine in America to attain a circulation of one million readers.

Good Housekeeping
: 1885, Massachusetts

The hallmark of the 1880s
Good Housekeeping: A Family Journal Conducted in the Interests of the Higher Life of the Household
was that it invited readers’ contributions and sponsored contests. One of the earliest requests for contributions offered $250 for the best article on “How to Eat, Drink and Sleep as Christians Should.” And initial contests awarded cash prizes for the most effective “Bug Extinguisher,” the best “Bed Bug Finisher,” and the most potent “Moth Eradicator,” highlighting an entomological concern that apparently was of pressing significance to readers.

The thirty-two-page biweekly, which sold for $2.50 a year, was the brainchild of Massachusetts political writer and poet Clark Bryan. Scrapbookish in design, the magazine featured word puzzles and quizzes in addition to advice on home decorating, cooking, and dressmaking. Bryan’s reliance on reader-written articles precluded an elite roster of contributors, but it helped immensely to popularize the homey periodical, offering a subscriber the opportunity to see his or her name and views in print. Each issue led with one of Bryan’s own poems, but in 1898, after battling a serious illness, the magazine’s founder committed suicide.

The magazine survived and thrived. And it continued to feature poems—by such writers as Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Alfred Noyes, and Ogden Nash. By 1908,
Good Housekeeping
boasted a readership of 200,000 and was still printing articles like “Inexpensive Christmas Gifts,” the kind Bryan had favored.

Clark Bryan did not live to see the words “Good Housekeeping” adapted as the country’s first national badge of consumerism. Yet the Good Housekeeping
Seal of Approval
arose out of Bryan’s founding philosophy. To test the numerous recipes, spot-removing practices, salves, and labor-saving gadgets that subscribers recommended to other readers, the magazine set up its own Experimental Station in 1900. The station’s home economists and scientists also tested products of the magazine’s advertisers and published ads only for products that won approval. The concept was novel, innovative, much needed, and it rapidly gained the respect of readers. By 1909, the magazine had instituted its official Seal of Approval, an elliptical graphic enclosing the words “Tested and Approved by the Good Housekeeping Institute Conducted by
Good Housekeeping Magazine
.” A guarantee of a product’s quality and availability, the phrase passed into the American vernacular, where it was applied not only to consumer merchandise but colloquially to any person, place, or thing that met with approval.

Cosmopolitan
: 1886, New York

Bearing the motto “The world is my country and all mankind are my countrymen,”
Cosmopolitan
was born in Rochester, New York, in 1886, the idea of writer and publisher Paul J. Schlicht. The handsome magazine, with its high yearly subscription price of four dollars, was not at all successful. In accordance with its motto, the periodical featured articles on such disparate subjects as how ancient people lived, climbing Mount Vesuvius, the life of Mozart, plus European travel sketches and African wild animal adventures.

After a financial struggle, Schlicht sold the magazine to a former West Point cadet and diplomat to China, forty-year-old John Walker, a New Yorker. Although Walker was both praised and criticized for introducing “the newspaper ideas of timeliness and dignified sensationalism into periodical literature,” under his leadership
Cosmopolitan
prospered. He raised the prestige of the magazine in 1892 by hiring the respected literary figure
William Dean Howells as a coeditor. And the first issue under Howells’s stewardship was impressive: it carried a poem by James Russell Lowell; an article by Henry James; an essay by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily Dickinson’s mentor; and a feature by Theodore Roosevelt.

To further increase the magazine’s circulation, Walker undertook a railroad tour of New England cities. New subscribers received as gifts the memoirs of either Grant or Sherman, and successful student salesmen of
Cosmopolitan
subscriptions won college scholarships. By 1896, the magazine held a secure place among the country’s leading illustrated periodicals.

Walker’s “dignified sensationalism” was not quite dignified enough for the subtler literary tastes of coeditor Howells, who resigned. But Walker’s philosophy was appreciated by the public and by the Hearst Corporation, which acquired the magazine in 1905. Compared to its competitors,
Cosmopolitan
was expensive: thirty-five cents an issue during the ’20s. But people did not seem to mind spending the money for dignified sensationalism, as well as for features by Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane. President Coolidge remarked when he selected the magazine to publish his newly completed autobiography, “When you pay thirty-five cents for a magazine, that magazine takes on in your eyes the nature of a book and you treat it accordingly.”

Vogue
: 1892, New York

To the American woman in the 1890s,
Vogue
depicted a sophisticated new world. George Orwell, the British literary critic and satirist, wrote that few of the magazine’s pages were devoted to politics and literature, the bulk featured “pictures of ball dresses, mink coats, panties, brassieres, silk stockings, slippers, perfumes, lipsticks, nail polish—and, of course, of the women, unrelievedly beautiful, who wear them or make use of them.”

In fact, it was for those women who “make use of them” that the magazine was designed.

Vogue
began in 1892 as a society weekly for wealthy New Yorkers. The names of most of the two hundred fifty stockholders of its publishing company were in the Social Register, including a Vanderbilt, a Morgan, and a Whitney. According to its philosophy, the weekly was to be “a dignified, authentic journal of society, fashion, and the ceremonial side of life,” with its pages uncluttered by fiction, unsullied by news.

The first issues were largely social schedules on soirees and coming-out parties. For the cover price of ten cents, average folk could ogle the galas, betrothals, marriages, travel itineraries, and gossip of New York’s elite. The magazine mentioned Delmonico’s with respect, and reported from the theater, concert hall, and art gallery with approval or disdain. Its avid coverage of golf suggested the sport was already a national craze.

Vogue
was not for everyone. Its unique brand of humor—as when it printed: “Now that the masses take baths every week, how can one ever
distinguish the gentleman?” —often confounded or infuriated its more thoughtful readers. And the early magazine was edited by the brilliant but eccentric Josephine Redding, described as “a violent little woman, square and dark, who, in an era when everyone wore corsets, didn’t.” Renowned for her hats, which she was never seen to remove, she once, when confined to bed by illness, received her staff in a nightgown and a hat.

Vogue
scored a coup in 1895, publishing detailed drawings of the three-thousand-dollar trousseau of Consuelo Vanderbilt, whose impending marriage to the duke of Marlborough was the Charles-and-Diana event of the day. No lesser magazine of that era would ever have been given access to the material.

In 1909,
Vogue
was purchased by publisher Condé Nast. Under his leadership, the magazine became primarily a fashion journal, still for the elite. An editorial that year proclaimed as the purpose of the magazine to “hold the mirror up to the mode, but to hold it at such an angle that only people of distinction are reflected therein.” In the 1930s, Nast introduced
Mademoiselle
, geared for women aged seventeen to thirty, then
Glamour
, edited for the young career woman. But
Vogue
remained the company’s proud centerpiece, America’s preeminent chronicler of fashion and the fashionable, labeled by
Time
as “No. 1” in its field.

House Beautiful
: 1896, Illinois

Its name was taken from a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, “The House Beautiful,” and that was the exact title of the original 1896 magazine.
The
was dropped in 1925.

Begun as a journal of “Simplicity and Economy” by Eugene Klapp, a Chicago engineer who had a flair for architecture and literature, the magazine cost a then-reasonable ten cents. It contained short, readable articles on home building and decorating, and the magazine’s first page announced its philosophy: “A little money spent with careful thought by people of keen artistic perception will achieve a result which is astonishing.” In other words, beauty and elegance were affordable to the average home owner. When Eugene Klapp joined the military in 1899, the magazine came into the capable hands of Harvard-educated Herbert Stone.

Possessing an abhorrence of pretension, Stone was perfectly suited to the magazine’s homey philosophy. He oversaw a series of critical articles under the rubric “The Poor Taste of the Rich.” The intent of the series was to assure readers “That Wealth Is Not Essential to the Decoration of a House,” and to enlighten them to the fact “That the Homes of Many of Our Richest Citizens Are Furnished in Execrable Taste.” The critical articles came amply illustrated with photographs of the offending mansions, and the names of the affluent residents were not withheld. The series generated considerable publicity but, interestingly, no lawsuits.

In 1898,
House Beautiful
instituted an annual competition for the best
design of a three-thousand-dollar home, regularly upping the limit to keep pace with inflation and prosperity. And when apartment house living gained ascendancy in the 1910s, the magazine offered the first articles on the special requirements in furnishing and decorating this new type of space. In reflecting such trends, the magazine’s articles became a social barometer of middle-class American living; for example, the single title “Three-Bedroom House with Two-Car Garage for $8,650” (April 1947) could conjure up an era and its people’s expectations.

Herbert Stone served as editor for sixteen years, but in 1915, returning home from a European holiday on the
Lusitania
, he drowned when the ship was sunk by a German submarine.

National Geographic
: 1888, Washington, D.C.

With its yellow-boarded cover and timeless photographic essays,
The National Geographic Magazine
became an American institution soon after its introduction in October 1888. From the start, subscribers saved back issues, for quality nature photography (in black and white) was something of a new phenomenon, elevating the magazine to the nondisposable status of a book.

The landmark publication originated with the National Geographic Society as a means of disseminating “geographic knowledge.” From the premier issue, the magazine specialized in maps of exotic rivers, charts of rain forest precipitation, reports on volcanology and archaeology, and adventurous forays by eminent scientists and explorers into foreign lands. In the era before air travel,
National Geographic
transported thousands of readers to regions they would never visit and most likely had never imagined existed. The adventure was to be had for a five-dollar membership in the society, with a year’s subscription to the magazine.

An early president of the society was inventor Alexander Graham Bell. With the magazine’s membership static at about thirteen hundred in 1897, Bell undertook the challenge of creating a new audience. Solicitation now took the form of a personal invitation to membership in the National Geographic Society, beginning, “I have the honor to inform you that you have been recommended for membership.” A subscriber was assured that his or her money funded scientific exploration in new parts of the globe.