OF ALL THINGS
WE did the best we could in the matter, and World had to run a five-column headline on the gen- with the support of all concerned. The tlemen who thought the world was going to come to first advice received, as earnest a bit as ever an end.
was offered by an Advisory Editor, was "we ought to have a rule against using the names usually seen in Also there didn't seem to be much indication of printed gossip." A Mr. Adams, our Special Emergency purpose and we felt sort of naked in our apparent Technical Verse Editor, said the same thing. An- aimlessness, about, we should say, as the Democratic other fellow said it made him sick and Adams said convention did after nominating John W. Davis and we would be suckers to do it as a lot of people would the other fellow. get sore, what with everybody having so many ene- mies these days. Those, practically, were his words. So we made a rule against mentioning any of the cur- We are going to have purposes, however, several rent butterflies of the printed column. But it didn't of them, and we shall start as soon as the mechanical do any good.
details get less pressing. Collier's was twenty years working up to that big national campaign about all the children in the public schools having their cars washed, or whatever it was. We won't have a cause like that The trouble is you can't do anything about it, Some things are inevitable. Mention to a contributor, because we are not a National magazine. The New somewhere in a snappy, fifteen-hundred word exposi- YORKER isn't going to be any more National than the National Arts Club. But we'll find big, vital issues. tion of the aims and purposes of THE New YORKER that you expect to use some satirical stuff and he comes back with a piece, which you can lay twenty Not that we don't admire some of the National to one on this and never work any more) is about either Woollcott, Broun or Otto Kahn. 'Do what magazines, especially the American Mercury and the you will about these fellows, the publicity rolls up. Saturday Evening Post. With a beautiful gesture we recommend both of these publications heartily. The You might explain it by saying it is the peculiar way most expressive writers in America write for the Post they dress, but this would apply to only two of them. and they do it in their most expensive manner. More- over, the magazine is utterly incorruptible. We think that even Ralph Easley will back us up in declaring A recent statistic is interesting in this connection. that the Saturday Evening Post has never once been Of the forty persons who apply daily for jobs in the bribed by Russian gold. editorial department of the Times, a majority want to work in the dramatic department. Twenty-five years ago they all wanted to be war correspondents. Fif- The American Mercury, while it has no such cir- teen years ago they wanted to write "Sun style" and culation as the Post, is by all odds the most purely sec- be Frank O'Malleys. Now they want to be dramatic tarian magazine there is. You may not enjoy it un- critics. The dramatic critics are the Richard Harding less you belong to Mencken's church, but if you do Davises and Frederick Palmers of this day. Anyone belong you will find each issue a great comfort. can easily figure out what the race is coming to. But still we long to be something else. We won't write expensively all the time. We will spill the We had intended to say earlier that you could have beans once in awhile, and we will say what is on our slapped us in the face with a wet blanket, or what- mind, if any, no matter what the subject happens to ever the saying is, when we saw the first issue. We be. On days that we haven't any ideas we won't were as astonished and alarmed as anybody else at the pretend that we have. At such times we will want tone of levity and farce that seemed to pervade it and to appear as inconsequential as we are. we hadn't intended to look so much like Judge and Life (to name those papers out of their regular se- quence for once).
Above all we don't want to be taken as a humorous magazine. Being funny when you don't feel like it is like editing the Nation when you are feeling good. We certainly weren't as serious as we had prom- ised or as momentous as we had thought we would be. We had intended to print a great deal of news stuff, for instance, and have been roundly condemned for not doing it. All we can say is that we had some of the best reporters in the city looking for news and they reported that there wasn't any. That was the week of the great drought, you remember, when the
And we won't aim to please. If we happen to please we shall not apologize, but we are not in that vast army of bores struggling frantically to give the people what they want. There may be money in such a struggle, but we are not even sure of that. It is our suspicion that the New York public is gen-
