46
PARTISAN REVIEW
if externals have changed little, editorial policies have been revolu-
tionized.
The
New Yorker
was established to exploit commercially two
groups of sophisticated readers: those who followed Mencken and
Nathan and those who looked to the Manhattan wits centering
around the Algonquin Hotel. Its keynote was: "Not edited for the
Old Lady from Dubuque." It had been appearing only a few months
when the Scopes evolution trial in Tennessee took place. Here was
the perfect, foolproof issue: the clash of cultures in its crudest form.
No literate reader but was with Darrow and Darwin against Bryan
and the Bible. Furthermore, Bryan was the personal symbol of all
that was most hateful and absurd to the East. The editors of the
New Yorker
sensed complete reader-support. Week after week they
printed cartoons lampooning Bryan, cartoons of a brutality unique in
its history. They ran editorials, articles, eyewitness accounts of the
trial. For a time it almost seemed that the
New Yorker
had been
founded specially to report on the Scopes affair. It was an extra-
ordinary but hardly an incomprehensihle outburst.
On its first birthday the
New Yorker
editorialized: ."We declared
a year ago that it was not the
New Yorker's
intention to tap the
North American steppe region by offering the natives mirrors and
colored beads in the form of the recognized brands of hokum:" 'The
North American steppe region,' 'the Old Lady from Dubuque,' 'the
Pickle Princes of Peoria' -such phrases are literary wild oats. The
present editors would deplore alike their sound and their sense. Their
sense because whereas at the end of its first year the
New Yorker
an-
nounced that its 40,000 circulation was "almost all of it in the city and
suburbs," today exactly half its 125,000 readers live outside New
York. And their sound, because exuberance is no longer the
New
Yorker's
"line." The brash Menckenians and the aggressively sophis-
ticated Algonquins have been superseded by the timorous and bewild-
ered Thurber. The
New Yorker
as well as the National City Bank
bears the marks of 1929.
The
New Yorker's
immediate reaction to the market crash was
to set a distance between itself and the business community. That
week it editorialized: "The collapse of the market, over and above
the pain, couldn't help but be amusing. It is amusing to see a fat land
quivering in panicky fright. The quake, furthermore, verified our
suspicions that our wise and talky friends hadn't known for months
what they were talking about when they were discussing stocks."
This detachment from "our wise and talky friends" was something
new. It grew with the depression..But such protestations should not
be taken too seriously. All that had really happened was that the
New Yorker's
honeymoon with the oligarchy was over and it had
