January 2011

About the time we started putting this issue together, Vanessa Weiman, the most recent addition to our editorial staff, came up with an idea: Why not ask everyone on the magazine to bring in a snapshot of him- or herself as a child between the ages of one and three. The pictures would be displayed unidentified and we’d all try to guess which was who.

This got under way in a spirit of casual amusement—“A chance to see your colleagues in the nude!” said Peter Morance, the art director, on his poster announcing the contest—but once the thirty pictures were up they had the most profound and mysterious effect on us all. From time to time during the day a dozen staff members would be drawn to them as the moon draws the tides; and the mood they exerted on us would shift subtly with each viewing. Sometimes it was hilarious, sometimes oddly intimate, sometimes tremendously sad—a Housman poem illustrated by our own lives.

When a rocket lifts off, it lights up the launch area with a brilliant burst of flame and then trails a fiery streak across the sky as it soars toward orbit. But without careful guidance all the pyrotechnics will have been for naught. That is, in short, what happened to the National Aeronautics and Space Agency.

Like a rocket, NASA initially lit up the sky, with spectacular feats. But for lack of proper direction from policymakers, the agency failed to continue on a course that would clearly and consistently serve the national interest. Instead NASA steered by a false star.

The Challenge

John Adams said that Thomas Jefferson’s mind was “eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed, and ignorant.” Ulysses S. Grant said that James Garfield did not have “the backbone of an angleworm.” Theodore Roosevelt called Woodrow Wilson “a Byzantine logothete.” Wilson called Chester Arthur “a non-entity with side whiskers.” Harry Truman summed up Lyndon Johnson with a curt “No guts!”

It is hardly surprising that presidents would have strong opinions about their predecessors and successors. Not all of them have expressed their views in public. Some have concealed critical thoughts as a matter of policy: they felt presidents and former presidents should avoid public brawls. Others have been awesomely, even recklessly confrontational. But few presidents have gone quietly into the night without some interesting remarks on the record.

In 1935, Fortune magazine published a profile of the Hearst empire, which said that William Randolph Hearst’s assets—28 newspapers, 13 magazines, eight radio stations, two movie companies, inestimable art treasures, real estate, 14,000 shares of the Homestake Mine, and 2,000,000 acres of land were worth $220 million.

But Fortune also noted that, because of taxes and other debits in books that it was not permitted to see, the Hearst Corporation might soon be short of cash. The taxes, of course, were imposed by that hated man in the house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., for which Hearst would have gladly traded his California castle; his Bavarian Village in Wyntoon, California; his mistress Marion Davies’s beach “cottage” at Malibu; his castle at St. Donat in Wales; his Long Island estate; his New York apartment; his two cloisters from Spain; and his Brooklyn warehouse with all its treasures.

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.

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.”

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.

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.