Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976 Read Online Free PDF

pleases. As far as we have been able to discover, the keepers of this house have two aims: the first is to make money, the second is to make sense. We have watched for other motives, but we have never turned up any. That makes for good working conditions, and we write this as a sort of small, delayed tribute to our house. Anytime Mr. Seldes wants to see writers writing as they please, he can just step off the elevator and take a gander at us. By us, of course, we mean ourself. Emerson’s the name. Call us Ralph.
    RAINBOW WORKERS
    11/1/47
    THIS MAGAZINE TRAFFICS with all sorts of questionable characters, some of them, no doubt, infiltrating. Our procedure so far has been to examine the manuscript, not the writer; the picture, not the artist. We have not required a statement of political belief or a blood count. This still seems like a sensible approach to the publishing problem, although falling short of Representative J. Parnell Thomas’s * standard. One thing we have always enjoyed about our organization is the splashy, rainbow effect of the workers: Red blending into Orange, Orange blending into Yellow, and so on, right across the spectrum to Violet. (Hi, Violet!) We sit among as quietly seething a mass of reactionaries, revolutionaries, worn-out robber barons, tawny pipits, liberals, Marxists in funny hats, and Taftists in pin stripes as ever gathered under one roof in a common enterprise. The group seems healthy enough, in a messy sort of way, and every-body finally meets everybody else at the water cooler, like beasts at the water hole in the jungle. There is one man here who believes that the solution to everything is proper mulching—the deep mulch. Russia to him is just another mulch problem. We have them all. Our creative activity, whether un- or non-un-American, is properly not on a loyalty basis but merely on a literacy basis—a dreamy concept. If this should change, and we should go over to loyalty, the meaning of “un-American activity” would change, too, since the America designated in the phrase would not be the same country we have long lived in and admired.
    We ran smack into the loyalty question the other day when we got a phone call from another magazine, asking us what we knew about a man they had just hired. He was a man whose pieces we had published, from time to time, and they wanted to know about him. “What’s his political slant?” our inquisitor asked. We replied that we didn’t have any idea, and that the matter had never come up. This surprised our questioner greatly, but not as much as his phone call surprised us. When he hung up, we dialled Weather and listened to the rising wind.
    EXPEDIENCY
    1/31/48
    WE HAVE OFTEN WONDERED how journalism schools go about preparing young men and women for newspaperdom and magazineland. An answer came just the other day, in a surprising form. It came from California, via Editor Publisher. We quote:
    Â 
    San Francisco—Public opinion polls are scientific tools which should be used by newspapers to prevent editorial errors of judgment, Dr. Chilton Bush, head of the Division of Journalism at Stanford University, believes.
    â€œA publisher is smart to take a poll before he gets his neck out too far,” he said. “Polls provide a better idea of acceptance of newspaper policies.”
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    We have read this statement half a dozen times, probably in the faint hope that Editor & Publisher might be misquoting Dr. Bush or that we had failed to understand him. But there it stands—a clear guide to the life of expediency, a simple formula for journalism by acceptance, a short essay on how to run a newspaper by saying only the words the public wants to hear said. It seems to us that Dr. Bush hands his students not a sword but a weather vane. Under such conditions, the fourth estate becomes a mere parody of the human intelligence, and had best be turned over to bright birds with split tongues or to monkeys who can