Like all the other publishing ventures started in the 1920s, the New Yorker did not prosper at first. Initially, sales of around 70,000 copies were anticipated, so when the first issue, appearing in February 1925, sold only 15,000, and the second dropped to 8,000, the future did not look good. Success only came, according to another legend, when a curious package arrived in the office, unsolicited. This was a series of articles, written by hand but extravagantly and expensively bound in leather. The author, it turned out, was a debutante, Ellin Mackay, who belonged to one of New York’s society families. Making the most of this, Ross published one of the articles with the headline, ‘Why We Go to Cabarets.’ The thrust of the article, which was wittily written, was that New York nightlife was very different, and much more fun, than the stiff society affairs organised for her by Miss Mackay’s parents. The knowing tone was exactly what Ross had in mind, and appealed to other writers: E. B. White joined the New Yorker in 1926, James Thurber a year later, followed by John O’Hara, Ogden Nash, and S. J. Perelman.45
But a dry wit and a knowing sophistication were not the only qualities of the New Yorker; there was a serious side, too, as reflected in particular in its profiles. Time sought to tell the news through people, successful people. The New Yorker, on the other hand, elevated the profile to, if not an art form, a high form of craft. In the subsequent years, a New Yorker reporter might spend five months on a single article: three months collecting information, a month writing and a month revising (ad this before the fact checkers were called in). ‘Everything from bank references to urinalysis was called for and the articles would run for pages.’46 The New Yorker developed a devoted following, its high point being reached immediately after World War II, when it sold nearly 400,000 copies weekly. In the early 1940s, no fewer than four comedies based on New Yorker articles were playing on Broadway: Mr and Mrs North, Pal Joey, Life with Father and My Sister Eileen.47
The way radio developed in Britain reflected a real fear that it might have a bad influence on levels of information and taste, and there was a strong feeling, in the ‘establishment,’ that central guidance was needed. ‘Chaos in the ether’ was to be avoided at all costs.48 To begin with, a few large companies were granted licences to broadcast experimentally. After that, a syndicate of firms which manufactured radio sets was founded, financed by the Post Office, which levied a 10-shilling (50 pence) fee payable by those who bought the sets. Adverts were dispensed with as ‘vulgar and intrusive.’49 This, the British Broadcasting Company, lasted for four years. After that, the Corporation came into being, granted a royal charter to protect it from political interference.
In the early days the notion of the BBC as a public service was very uncertain. Ad manner of forces were against it. For a start, the country’s mood was volatile. Britain was still in financial straits, recovering from the war, and 1.5 million were unemployed. Lloyd George’s coalition government was far from popular, and these overall conditions led to the general strike of 1926, which itself imperilled the BBC. A second factor was the press, which viewed the BBC as a threat, to such an extent that no news bulletins were allowed before 7:00 P.M. Third, no one had any idea what sort of material should be broadcast – audience research didn’t begin until 1936, and ‘listening in,’ as it was called, was believed by many to be a fad that would soon pass.50 Then there was the character of the Corporation’s first director, a thirty-three-year-old Scottish engineer named John Reith. Reith, a high-minded Scottish Presbyterian, never doubted for a moment that radio should be far more than entertainment, that it should also educate and inform. As a result, the BBC gave its audience what Reith believed was needed rather than what the people wanted. Despite this high-handed and high-minded approach, the BBC proved popular. From a staff of 4 in the first year, it grew to employ 177 twelve months after that. In fact, the growth of radio actually outstripped that of television a generation or so later, as these figures show:51
To be set against this crude measure of popularity, there was a crop of worries about the intellectual damage radio might do. ‘Instead of solitary thought,’ said the headmaster of Rugby School, ‘people would listen in to what was said to millions of people, which could not be the best of things.’52 Another worry was that radio would make people ‘more passive,’ producing ‘all-alike girls.’ Still others feared radio would keep husbands at home, adversely affecting pub attendance. In 1925 Punch magazine, referring to the new culture established by the BBC, labelled it as ‘middlebrow.’53
Editorially speaking, the BBC’s first test arrived in 1926 with the onset of the General Strike. Most newspapers were included in the strike, so for a time the BBC was virtually the only source of news. Reith responded by ordering five bulletins a day instead of the usual one. The accepted view now is that Reith complied more or less with what the government asked, in particular putting an optimistic gloss on government policy and actions. In his official history of the BBC, Professor Asa Briggs gives this example of an item broadcast during the strike: ‘Anyone who is suffering from “strike depression” can do no better than to pay a visit to “RSVP” [a show] at the New Vaudeville Theatre.’ Not everyone thought that Reith was a stool pigeon, however. Winston Churchill, then chancellor of the exchequer, actually thought the BBC should be taken over. He saw it as a rival to his own British Gazette, edited from his official address at 11 Downing Street.54 Churchill failed, but people had seen the danger, and it was partly as a result of this tussle that the ‘C’ in BBC was changed in 1927 from Company to Corporation, protected by royal charter. The General Strike was therefore a watershed for the BBC in the realm of politics. Before the strike, politics (and other ‘controversial’ subjects) were avoided entirely, but the strike changed all that, and in 1929 The Week in Parliament was launched. Three years later, the corporation began its own news-gathering organisation.55
The historian J. H. Plumb has said that one of the great unsung achievements of the twentieth century has been the education of vast numbers of people. Government-funded schools and universities led the way here, but the various forms of new media, many of which started in the 1920s, have also played their part. The term middlebrow may be intended as an insult by some, but for millions, like the readers of Time or those listening in to the BBC, it was more a question of wising up than dumbing down.
* The history of Harlem was not fully recovered until the 1980s, by such scholars as David Levering Lewis and George Hutchinson. My account is based chiefly on their work.
13
HEROES’ TWILIGHT
In February 1920 a horror film was released in Berlin that was, in the words of one critic, ‘uncanny, demonic, cruel, “Gothic”,’ a Frankenstein-type story filled with bizarre lighting and dark, distorted sets.1 Considered by many to be the first ‘art film,’ The Cabinet of Dr Caligari was a huge success, so popular in Paris that it played in the same theatre every day between 1920 and 1927.2 But the film was more than a record breaker. As the historian of interwar Germany Peter Gay writes, ‘With its nightmarish plot, its Expressionist sets, its murky atmosphere, Caligari continues to embody the Weimar spirit to posterity as palpably as Gropius’s buddings, Kandinsky’s abstractions, Grosz’s cartoons, and Marlene Dietrich’s legs … But Caligari, decisive for the history of film, is also instructive for the history of Weimar…. There was more at stake here than a strange script or novelties of lighting.’3