{"id":38740,"date":"2025-02-11T13:55:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-11T13:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=38740"},"modified":"2025-02-12T05:56:06","modified_gmt":"2025-02-12T05:56:06","slug":"the-new-yorker-turns-100-%e2%88%92-how-a-poker-game-pipe-dream-became-a-publishing-powerhouse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/the-new-yorker-turns-100-%e2%88%92-how-a-poker-game-pipe-dream-became-a-publishing-powerhouse\/","title":{"rendered":"The New Yorker turns 100 \u2212 how a poker game pipe dream became a publishing powerhouse"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Christopher B. Daly<\/a>, Boston University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Literate in tone, far-reaching in scope, and witty to its bones, The New Yorker brought a new \u2013 and much-needed \u2013 sophistication to American journalism when it launched 100 years ago this month<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I researched the history of U.S. journalism for my book \u201cCovering America<\/a>,\u201d I became fascinated by the magazine\u2019s origin story and the story of its founder, Harold Ross<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a business full of characters, Ross fit right in. He never graduated from high school. With a gap-toothed smile and bristle-brush hair, he was frequently divorced and plagued by ulcers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ross devoted his adult life to one cause: The New Yorker magazine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the literati, by the literati<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Born in 1892 in Aspen, Colorado, Ross worked out west as a reporter while still a teenager. When the U.S. entered World War I, Ross enlisted. He was sent to southern France, where he quickly deserted from his Army regiment and made his way to Paris, carrying his portable Corona typewriter. He joined up with the brand-new newspaper for soldiers, Stars and Stripes<\/a>, which was so desperate for anybody with training that Ross was taken on with no questions asked, even though the paper was an official Army operation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Harold Ross and Jane Grant in 1926. University of Oregon Libraries<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In Paris, Ross met a number of writers, including Jane Grant<\/a>, who had been the first woman to work as a news reporter at The New York Times. She eventually became the first of Ross\u2019 three wives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the armistice<\/a>, Ross headed to New York City and never really left. There, he started meeting other writers, and he soon joined a clique of critics, dramatists and wits who gathered at the Round Table<\/a> in the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street in Manhattan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over long and liquid lunches, Ross rubbed shoulders and wisecracked<\/a> with some of the brightest lights in New York\u2019s literary chandelier. The Round Table also spawned a floating poker game that involved Ross and his eventual financial backer, Raoul Fleischmann<\/a>, of the famous yeast-making family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the mid-1920s, Ross decided to launch a weekly metropolitan magazine. He could see that the magazine business was booming, but he had no intention of copying anything that already existed. He wanted to publish a magazine that spoke directly to him and his friends \u2013 young city dwellers who\u2019d spent time in Europe and were bored by the platitudes and predictable features found in most American periodicals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, though, Ross had to come up with a business plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The kind of smart-set readers Ross wanted were also desirable to Manhattan\u2019s high-end retailers, so they got on board and expressed interest in buying ads. On that basis, Ross\u2019 poker partner Fleischmann was willing to stake him US$25,000 to start<\/a> \u2013 roughly $450,000 in today\u2019s dollars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ross goes all in<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In the fall of 1924, using an office owned by Fleischmann\u2019s family at 25 West 45th St., Ross got to work on the prospectus for his magazine<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe New Yorker will be a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human. Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit and satire, but it will be more than a jester. It will not be what is commonly called radical or highbrow. It will be what is commonly called sophisticated, in that it will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of its readers. It will hate bunk.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The magazine, he famously added, \u201cis not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, The New Yorker was not going to respond to the news cycle, and it was not going to pander to middle America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ross\u2019 only criterion would be whether a story was interesting \u2013 with Ross the arbiter of what counted as interesting. He was putting all his chips on the long-shot idea that there were enough people who shared his interests \u2013 or could discover that they did \u2013 to support a glossy, cheeky, witty weekly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ross almost failed. The cover of the first issue<\/a> of The New Yorker, dated Feb. 21, 1925, carried no portraits of potentates or tycoons, no headlines, no come-ons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, it featured a watercolor by Ross\u2019 artist friend Rea Irvin of a dandified figure staring intently through a monocle at \u2013 of all things! \u2013 a butterfly. That image, nicknamed Eustace Tilly<\/a>, became the magazine\u2019s unoffical emblem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A magazine finds its footing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Inside that first edition<\/a>, a reader would find a buffet of jokes and short poems. There was a profile, reviews of plays and books, lots of gossip, and a few ads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was not terribly impressive, feeling quite patched together, and at first the magazine struggled. When The New Yorker was just a few months old, Ross almost even lost it entirely one night in a drunken poker game at the home of Pulitzer Prize winner and Round Table regular Herbert Bayard Swope<\/a>. Ross didn\u2019t make it home until noon the next day, and when he woke, his wife found IOUs in his pockets amounting to nearly $30,000<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fleischmann, who had been at the card game but left at a decent hour, was furious. Somehow, Ross persuaded Fleischmann to pay off some of his debt and let Ross work off the rest. Just in time, The New Yorker began gaining readers, and more advertisers soon followed. Ross eventually settled up with his financial angel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A big part of the magazine\u2019s success was Ross\u2019 genius for spotting talent and encouraging them to develop their own voices. One of the founding editor\u2019s key early finds was Katharine S. Angell<\/a>, who became the magazine\u2019s first fiction editor and a reliable reservoir of good sense. In 1926, Ross brought James Thurber<\/a> and E.B. White<\/a> aboard, and they performed a variety of chores: writing \u201ccasuals,\u201d which were short satirical essays, cartooning, creating captions for others\u2019 drawings, reporting Talk of the Town<\/a> pieces and offering commentary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Middle-aged
E.B. White in his office at The New Yorker. Bettmann\/Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As The New Yorker found its footing, the writers and editors began perfecting some of its trademark features: the deep profile, ideally written about someone who was not strictly in the news but who deserved to be better known; long, deeply reported, nonfiction narratives; short stories and poetry; and, of course, the single-panel cartoons and the humor sketches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Intensely curious and obsessively correct in matters grammatical, Ross would go to any length to ensure accuracy. Writers got their drafts back from Ross covered in penciled queries demanding dates, sources and endless fact-checking. One trademark Ross query<\/a> was \u201cWho he?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the 1930s, while the country was suffering through a relentless economic depression, The New Yorker was sometimes faulted for blithely ignoring the seriousness of the nation\u2019s problems. In the pages of The New Yorker, life was almost always amusing, attractive and fun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The New Yorker really came into its own, both financially and editorially, during World War II. It finally found its voice, one that was curious, international, searching and, ultimately, quite serious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ross also discovered still more writers, such as A.J. Liebling<\/a>, Mollie Panter-Downes<\/a> and John Hersey<\/a>, who was raided from Henry Luce\u2019s Time magazine. Together, they produced some of the best writing of the war, most notably Hersey\u2019s landmark reporting on the use of the first atomic bomb in warfare<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A crown jewel of journalism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Over the past century, The New Yorker had a profound impact on American journalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For one thing, Ross created conditions for distinctive voices to be heard. For another, The New Yorker provided encouragement and an outlet for nonacademic authority to flourish; it was a place where all those serious amateurs could write about the Dead Sea Scrolls or geology or medicine or nuclear war with no credentials other than their own ability to observe closely, think clearly and put together a good sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, Ross must be credited with expanding the scope of journalism far beyond standard categories of crime and courts, politics and sports. In the pages of The New Yorker, readers almost never found the same content that they\u2019d come across in other newspapers and magazines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, readers of The New Yorker might find just about anything else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Christopher B. Daly<\/a>, Professor Emeritus of Journalism, Boston University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christopher B. Daly, Boston University Literate in tone, far-reaching in scope, and witty to its bones, The New Yorker brought a new \u2013 and much-needed \u2013 sophistication to American journalism when it launched 100 years ago this month. As I researched the history of U.S. journalism for my book \u201cCovering America,\u201d I became fascinated by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":38741,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15534,5,7,276,10,25,296,15533,38],"tags":[16036,785,885,891,886,860,16032,535,5799,308,1747,16034,16035,16033],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38740"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38740"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38742,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38740\/revisions\/38742"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}