Nothing to Wear
newspaperman in a growing city of the Middle West, one had almost unequaled privileges as a spectator and participator of the notable event. Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that prairie fire suggests a feeble image of the swift spread of Mr. Butler’s poem under the eye of such a witness; and I begin to prefer a train of gunpowder.
“I do not know where the piece first appeared, but I remember that with the simple predacity of those days we instantly lifted the whole of it out of a New York paper, hot from the mail, and transferred it to our own columns about midnight, as if it were some precious piece of telegraphic intelligence. I am not sure but that it was for us something in the nature of a scoop or beat. At any rate, no other paper in town had it so early; and I think it appeared on our editorial page, and certainly with subheads supplied by our own eager invention, and with the prefatory and concurrent comment which it so little needed.”
What happened in that newspaper office, happened in scores of others. “Nothing to Wear” swept the country; Miss Flora McFlimsey became a type, and “nothing to wear” a phrase with satiric implications which it has never lost. Its permanence, indeed, is due in no small part to its universality, for its message is as intelligible and apropos to-day as the day it was written.
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