On November 2 the first issue of the Harper brothers’ new magazine Harper’s Bazar appeared, based on the sophisticated German publication Der Bazar and headed by the admired translator and historian of New York City Mary L. Booth. Fletcher Harper’s brothers had been reluctant at first to back the effort; the Bazar would be aimed chiefly at women, who were still only a vaguely felt force among readers. Nevertheless, Fletcher’s enthusiasm prevailed. Most of his fashion illustrations would come from the Berlin edition, giving the sixteen-page magazine an air of European newness, while its editor, Mary Booth, would refine the mix of stories, serial fiction, columns, and domestic tips.
That she did, bringing the Bazar’s readership up to eighty thousand within its first ten years. Booth had more than twenty volumes of translation to her name by the time she took the job with Harper’s, as well as an 850-page history of the City of New York, the first of its kind.
But she was also no stranger to deadlines; she had written for The New York Times and had translated Count Agenor de Gasparin’s fat work The Uprising of a Great People: The United States in 1861 in one virtually sleepless week. While her interests were often scholarly, Booth knew how to keep her readership entertained and uplifted for the twenty-one years she held the editor’s job, until her death in March of 1889.
1917Seventy-five Years Ago
Razors for the Front
If the magazines were to be believed, the big going-away gift for November was a safety razor. The Autostrop (“the only razor that sharpens its own blades”) was now offered in a “New Military Kit” of black leather, pigskin, or khaki and complete with a trench mirror. Twelve blades should guarantee “500 clean, comfortable shaves” to the average soldier. The Autostrop’s competitors also made sure to picture grinning doughboys in their advertisements; the Gem Damaskeene razor showed a soldier by a campfire remembering his genie-girl as he held his blade.
Statutes now outlawed so-called glare lights on automobiles in twenty-two states, and headlight beams no longer were to “reach the eye” or shine higher than forty-two inches above the ground. The makers of the Warner-Lenz held out hope to the driver: “When only city laws forbade glare, dimmers could comply.… But on dark roads these quelled lights will not do.… The Warner-Lenz sheds no direct beams,” and “its appeal is resistless. One ride behind the Warner-Lenz and you will never drive without them.” Your car could be fitted out with a pair of Lenzes for $3.50 to $5 and soon spread a “soft and mellow” light.
1942Fifty Years Ago
The Fire
A fire at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston killed 492 patrons and injured 166 others on the cool night of November 28. It apparently started with a single replacement light bulb and an imitation palm tree decoration. The club was packed with a Saturday night crowd celebrating a football victory when the fake palm caught and its flame spread to the ceiling of the basement Melody Lounge. The fire crossed the ceiling to the stairs and trapped the room in toxic smoke. Most people did not know of a second exit through the kitchen.
“It was incredible,” recalled a member of Boston’s Engine Company 35, whose way at first was blocked by the bodies. “I couldn’t even get in with the hose.” Once inside the club another fireman noticed a striking young woman still seated at a table in the Melody Lounge. “She was sitting with her eyes open and her hand on a cocktail glass, as if waiting for someone. As I first looked at her, I wondered why she was just sitting there, thinking she was okay. But, of course, she was dead.”
The disaster produced some unsatisfying villains—including a hapless fire inspector who claimed the club’s decorations had resisted his attempts to light them only the week before—but it also brought about many innovations in fire prevention and in the treatment of burns. Cocoanut Grove victims taken to Massachusetts General Hospital were among the first patients to receive a new drug called penicillin.
In the November third elections the Republicans failed to win control of the House despite a net gain of nine Senate and forty-two House seats, but they did add four governorships along the way.
Coffee rationing went into effect on November 28; the Selective Service Act was amended on November 18 to make men eligible for the draft at age eighteen.
Superman Goes to War
In November the writer Gilbert Seldes noted the profusion of “magazines in bright covers, all singularly alike, but each bearing a different name.” The comic book had taken off despite the paper shortages affecting more conventional publishing. “In many libraries,” Seldes noted, “the children’s room carries a message from Superman, recommending a good book.… It is hard for librarians to find themselves inferior to Superman, but they must learn to accept the common lot. All of us are inferior to him.” The rush to imitate Superman’s success with similarly caped adventurers had coincided with America’s entry into the World War.
The relatively new invention of the comic book provided light and inspiring reading for GIs at the front, and soon an army of superheroes of all shapes and abilities had joined them in their fight against the Axis Powers—from Captain Aero and the Fighting Yank (with his credo “No American can be forced into Evil”) to Bat Man, the Green Mantle, and Ajax, a visitor from the sun. They all followed, of course, in the trail of Superman, who had first appeared in 1938 and who, in addition to his radio show, starred in a film and a novel in 1942. The visitor from the planet Krypton had inspired at least a dozen second-tier adventurers by 1942, all fighting the good fight. When war came, Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, wasted little time having him choose sides on his adopted planet. The comic propaganda war would also involve the usually remote Tarzan, who, although born sometime in the late nineteenth century, found himself in the thick of present dangers when Nazis tried to set up camp in his jungle. There were those who predicted that adventure comics couldn’t outlive the crisis they had served so well, but after the war Superman returned to preventing drabber catastrophes, and new comics moved on to exploit peacetime concerns like nuclear mutation. One war product, Captain America, continued for decades to dress in skintight stars and stripes and to fight a red-skulled menace in a Nazi uniform who had somehow survived Hitler’s bunker.
No other nemeses would ever be as satisfying as Nazis. Joseph Goebbels himself reportedly envied the Americans’ propaganda invention enough to label Superman a Jew, which in a way he was—or at least he was the progeny of two Jewish newspapermen from Cleveland, one of whom had joked in his high school paper that he wanted to play pinochle with Hitler.
1967Twenty-five Years Ago
Cool It for Carl
On November 7 a quiet insurrection at the polls in Gary, Indiana, and Cleveland, Ohio, elected those cities’ first black mayors. Richard G. Hatcher took the fierce election in Gary by a mere thirteen hundred votes, a margin so close that his Republican opponent, a Gary furniture dealer named Joseph B. Radigan, refused to concede. In Cleveland Carl B. Stokes, an Ohio state representative and the grandson of a slave, became the country’s first black politician to lead a major American city when he beat Seth C. Taft, the grandson of an American President and the nephew of a U.S. senator. Stokes had barely lost in the 1965 election and benefited this time from a registration drive among the city’s black voters by Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference as well as from a vital endorsement in the primary from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which gave him moderate, crossover appeal in a divided town. The great fires that ravaged Newark, Detroit, New Haven, and so many other inner cities that summer never flared in Cleveland, although it had suffered from some of the highest unemployment in the nation. One street slogan advised, “Cool it for Carl.” In the end Stokes’s cool articulation as a peacemaker and his self-made status made the difference with many Clevelanders outside his loyal base of support. Stokes’s views on the Vietnam War and other issues weren’t all that far apart from those of his opponent. “They’re both liberals,” asserted Taft’s campaign manager. “Seth would play short left field, and so would Carl.” Taft, however, remained a suburbanite who had moved to the city for the mayoral election and was isolated by his sterling Republican name in a Democratic town. During the campaign Stokes’s newspaper ads claimed, “The man of drive, boldness, imagination, basic experience and raw courage is named Carl B. Stokes. And once you accept this, the rest is easy.” In the end Cleveland’s Democratic majority delivered its first black mayor by accepting this, if barely.
What We Have Here…
Cool Hand Luke made its debut on November 1, featuring Paul Newman in his strongest role to date as the rebellious hero of a Southern chain gang. George Kennedy won an Academy Award playing Dragline, Luke’s rival-turned-apostle in the camp. Director Stuart Rosenberg and cinematographer Conrad Hall made the dry outskirts of Stockton, California, look like a steamy Southern prison camp, and Strother Martin in the role of Luke’s icy tormentor introduced the understated phrase “What we have here … is a failure to communicate.” The saying accompanied Newman’s laughing face in newspaper ads for the film. “That traditional object of sorrow and compassion in American folk song and lore, the chain-gang prisoner,” wrote The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther, “is given as strong a presentation as ever he has had in ‘Cool Hand Luke.’” At least as important to audiences as the film’s message about power was Newman’s high-spiritedness in the lead role, which saved the picture from obviousness. His Luke is bragging and unmartyrly, especially after his transformation to “Cool Hand Luke” when he earns the awe of his fellow prisoners by eating fifty hard-boiled eggs on a bet. Beneath the film’s sweaty realism lay—for those who wanted it—the half-buried story of the last days of Christ, complete with a centurion in mirrored sunglasses at the film’s end. Although Life magazine’s Richard Schickel found the photography too beautiful for the darkness of Donn Pearce’s story, most reviews were favorable.
Newman had played—against type—the middleweight boxer Rocky Graziano (Somebody Up There Likes Me), a lowlife pool player who has his thumbs broken (The Hustler), a moody half-breed Apache (Hombre), and other roles that seemed self-consciously unpretty. But it was as the detective in Harper (1966) that he hit his stride, and in Cool Hand Luke the former pretty boy really made good, as if all his on-screen suffering had finally lent him weight.
