Edward Bok was a native of Holland whose impoverished family moved to Brooklyn in 1870 when he was seven years old. From this humble origin the extraordinarily enterprising young immigrant rose from selling ice water on trolley-cars, to lemonade, to contributing reports of birthday parties to newspapers, to doing stenography for Western Union and earning the attention and trust of legendary Wall Street tycoon Jay Gould (of whom Bok seems to been slightly wary, however, enough to turn him off pursuing a career on Wall Street, in which one must assume he would have made at least as great a success financially as he made in publishing), to founding his own newspaper, to inventing the modern theater program, and the newspaper syndicate, and coming up with the idea of printing biographical information on the back of collectible picture-cards found in cigarette packages, to a position in the advertising department at Scribner's to, at age 26, being named editor of The Ladies' Home Journal, in which position he would remain from 1889 to 1919, during much of which time the magazine seems to have had the largest circulation of any periodical in the country, featured the work of many famous and outstanding writers as well as contributions from numerous current and former presidents, most of whom were good friends with Bok, was at the forefront of journalistic innovation and the influence of mass taste (which I must say I often like in this time period). He had also played a prominent leadership role during the American participation in World War I, both through the magazine and by virtue of his involvement in various committees contributing to the direction of the war effort, especially the Y.M.C.A's National War Work Council. So at the time that his autobiography appeared he was a prominent figure in American society.
While never acclaimed as a literary masterpiece, even by me, this was a highly interesting and entertaining book, mainly for its anecdotes about the many famous people of the time whom Bok knew, most of whose names remain known to us but whose personalities have never been vivid, as well as its depiction of an older America that bears an almost unsettling resemblance to the present in many ways, with its teeming immigrant population, ferocious competition and hyper-capitalism at the top, Wall Street mega-tycoons, a rowdy and not always responsible media environment. On the other hand in contrast to our time the tone of the book is almost unfailingly enthusiastic and optimistic about America's political and cultural leadership, its unique qualities, and its prospects going forward (there is one 12 page chapter near the end titled "Where America Fell Short With Me"). It does not have very much in the way of satisfaction to offer current progressives, which is why it will probably remain a work relegated to those interested in the ethos of its particular time and place, though there are a couple of things I thought possibly redeeming in it that I will expand on below. Rather than spend a month or two to hammer this into a coherent essay, I am just going to make (hopefully) brief comments on certain topics in the book that I found of interest.
The Bok Family. The book has been sold and praised over the years primarily as being the true story of an impoverished clever immigrant boy who worked like a dog to become a big success in America (Bok died in 1930 with an estimated worth of over 14 million dollars). It is true that the family was very poor during Bok's childhood; his father had been ruined by bad investments in the Netherlands and was never able to attain even a middle class living after moving the family to America. However, his extended family in Holland was quite distinguished. One of his grandfathers had sat on the Dutch Supreme Court, and among his uncles there were numerous commissioners, civil servants, clergymen, and the like, nearly all of the men being university-educated. Bok was not exactly the scion of endless generations of peasants, as the general description of the book might sway one to believe. The family has continued to be prominent and successful in the United States down to our own time. Bok's grandson Derek Bok was the president of Harvard University from 1971-1991, and again briefly in 2006 on an interim basis (Bok himself had to leave school for good at age thirteen). Though I have been familiar with the names of both Edward and Derek Bok since the 1980s I had not made the connection of their being related until it was noted in my book. There is a another branch of the family based in Maine that includes a grandson (of Edward) who is a prominent folk singer, and a great grandson who is an artist of some renown. With the exception of Edward Bok's father, there are obviously very strong genes influencing general intellect and a propensity for accomplishment in worldly affairs running through this family. These are the people I see, or the influence of whose presence I detect anyway, on the increasingly rare occasions when I visit one of the really pleasant, long-established old places in New England, and wonder, why doesn't every dumpy old town, or more of them anyway, make itself like this? Why can't they? Why can't I?
Bok on Success. There are a number of damning observations about the laziness and lack of drive most people display, such that Bok never perceived there to be much competition for all of the achievements and honors he attained. This was to me the most pertinent:
"Eventually, then, Bok learned that the path that led to success was wide open: the competition was negligible. There was no jostling. In fact, travel on it was just a trifle lonely."
I have the sense that most people who have achieved success almost exclusively as a result of their relentless work ethic have a similar view of the world's affairs. It has been the interest of many successful societies to inculcate this virtue in all of their younger people, but even where this ethos permeates the air and dictates activity to a large degree there are clearly a small number of people whose hearts are in their working far more than they are in that of the rest of the group. It is not merely the exercising of a habit but the actualization of the will in such individuals, and has the effect almost of being a talent in itself.
"Smoking was not permitted in the Scribner offices, and, of course, Mark Twain was always smoking."
Among the things this book is known for is Bok's relentless name-dropping of famous people of the time, but I found his vignettes interesting, as I did not have much of a sense of what many of these people were like on a personal basis at all. We have a tendency in our age to be suspicious of anyone who was able to achieve popularity in such debased and wicked times as the past was, and to assume that they were openly morally repugnant at best and God only knows how evil secretly. Bok relates his youthful meetings and interactions with these old American celebrities as almost uniformly positive experiences, however. Ulysses S Grant and Rutherford B Hayes were almost unbelievably unburdened by other business and considerate in their meetings with the teenaged Bok. Oliver Wendell Holmes and especially Longfellow were equally accommodating towards the boy when he sought them out in Boston (It was a more relaxed age. Longfellow, probably the most famous poet in the country at the time, was able to respond to his daily haul of five fan letters while chatting with Bok over lunch. As an adult, Bok became, according to himself, close friends both of Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling (and by extension Kipling's father, who was an artist and an interesting man in his own right), all of these being depicted as lively and generous hearted people. The famous Americans in general were at that time more accessible and less haughty than their counterparts would be today. Bok had more trouble ingratiating his way into this level of company when he went to Europe. Attempting to coax Lewis Carroll to come out of retirement and write some stories for his magazine, Bok had a very pleasant tea and walking tour of Oxford with the Professor Charles Dodgson, who however, refused to acknowledge the existence of Lewis Carroll and affected not to recognize the game. Florence Nightingale would not see him at all, and his attempt to enlist some popular French authors to produce stories for The Ladies' Home Journal resulted in his getting screamed at by Jules Verne and the younger Alexandre Dumas, author of Camille, about American publishers' bad habit at that time of printing and selling their books without obtaining permission, paying royalties, and so on.
Another friend of Bok's was the poet Eugene Field ("Wee Willie Winkie"). Field was into unbelievably elaborate practical jokes. For example, asking Bok to travel to New Orleans to introduce him at a dinner where he was to receive some honor, only of course the dinner did not exist (Bok actually did his research on this one and did not fall for the joke). There was another episode where Bok was visiting Field at his house in Chicago on a Sunday and Field claimed he had nothing to eat in the house and that he had dismissed his servants for the evening, leaving Bok and another guest to go roaming all over Chicago for four hours or so in search of food. When they returned to Field's house, the poet and his other guests were in the middle of an elaborate multi-course field and having a good laugh at Bok's expense. I don't know if people could take quite this level of pranking anymore, in good humor.
New York Provincialism. When Bok took the Ladies' Home Journal job, he had to relocate from New York, where he had lived from age 7 to 26, to Philadelphia, which is where the Curtis publishing company, which owned the Journal as well as the Saturday Evening Post and some other magazines, was headquartered in those days. His friends and associates in New York were against the move: "...to cap the climax, they each argued in turn, he would be buried in Philadelphia, New York was the center, etc, etc...Bok now consulted his business associates, and, to a man, they discouraged the step, but almost invariably upon the argument that it was suicidal to leave New York. He had now a glimpse of the truth that there is no man so provincially narrow as the untravelled New Yorker who believes in his heart that the sun rises in the East River and sets in the North (Hudson) River." Bok continues: "He (speaking of himself; the book is written in the third person) had had experience enough to realize that a man could not be buried in any city, provided he had the ability to stand out from his fellow men. It all depended on whether the cream was there: it was up to the man."
Bok does not write a lot about his social life in Philadelphia, unfortunately, since there are not many well known books that get into this. The Curtis Building, which housed the corporation, built in 1910 when Bok was at the peak of his career, is still there, at the corner of sixth and Walnut Street. I must have walked by it dozens of times without realizing what it was. Indeed, I have almost certainly been there, as my grandparents took me to see an exhibit on Norman Rockwell around 1982 in what they called 'the old Saturday Evening Post building', which undoubtedly is this building where Bok worked. I remember going to the exhibit, but I recall nothing about the building from that day. The old Curtis estate on Church Road in Cheltenham Township, now a park, arboretum and so on, is literally down the road from where I grew up (the street I lived on connected with Church Road. I must have been there, though I don't have any memory of it, and I certainly never had any sense of who Curtis was (Cyrus H.K. Curtis, the publishing magnate). Bok lived in Merion, which is a suburb at the other end of the city. There was an Edward Bok High School (public) in South Philadelphia, which I see was closed after the 2013 school year. I don't think the school had an especially good reputation at any point in my lifetime, though pictures on the internet reveal it to have been a beautiful art deco (1938) building. The names of Bok and Curtis, which once thundered across the entire land, will thus continue to fade further in the memory of the Philadelphians who follow them, if they can be brought to feel any kinship of place with them at all.
Bok's House (unfortunately named Swastika, by his good pal Rudyard Kipling, with whom the symbol was also associated) in Merion.
One of Bok's many crusades during his years of editorship was the general improvement in the architecture of the average American house, which led to, among other things, the once-famous Ladies' Home Journal houses, which were built from plans developed by well-known architects and sold by the magazine. I have had on several occasions in my life had a house pointed out to me as being one of these catalog houses, though this did not make a great impression on me at these times. My point is, however, I have always liked houses and other buildings put up in this time period, so if Bok really had the influence in this area that he claims for himself (and the average pre-1890 American house as hideous as he claims it to have been), I have to give him some credit for good work there.
Bok and Modern Social Justice. I usually try to account for this with these old white guys now, especially if they have fallen somewhat into obscurity, lest I unwittingly appear in liking them too much to be condoning some especially atrocious attitude that even I would find unacceptable. Bok essentially ignores the question of race entirely, at least in this book, with the exception of one sentence recounting a discussion he had with Theodore Roosevelt in which he insinuated that he considered Roosevelt's arguments about the impending peril of (white) race-suicide to be important and merit thinking about. So he appears at the very least guilty of pro-white racialism and paranoia, as well as completely not seeing or acknowledging the existence of people of color in his work. He took up numerous crusades in his magazine over the years, against patent medicines, the aforementioned architecture, against French fashion, in favor of prophylactics, and many others, but things like lynching and other extreme racist practices seem not to have gripped his attention. He did not offer any unfortunate opinions or suffer any slips with regard to Jews as were not uncommon at this time either. A few persons with Jewish-sounding names, usually connected with the publishing industry, found their way into the narrative, though on the whole the modern reader is struck by how comparatively few Jews there were in the upper reaches of this world in the early 1900s, and what a different dynamic the American literary scene had as a result. The nature of that dynamic strikes me as something like this, that as the standards of literary importance, excellence, intellectualism, humor, taste/acceptability have increasingly been set and driven in this country over the last century by Jewish writers, critics and professors, something of the energy and originality which people like Mark Twain or Jack London or Ring Lardner or Theodore Roosevelt brought to the national culture in the first years of the 1900s appears, if not to have died, to have been somewhat stifled; the type of formally untutored, but in its own way still formidable spirit I am thinking of here being neither as prominent nor as seemingly widespread throughout the culture as it was formally, the development of this particular type of character not being well-served by the kinds of institutions and educational systems we have currently. Then of course the decline of the old brahmin wasp establishment is well-documented, and the Roman Catholic community and tradition as one of the major forces in American cultural life seems to have imploded entirely, certainly in the arts and universities. I would like to see some of that vitality re-emerge and re-assert itself, not at the expense of Jews or what might be called Jewish intellectual culture, but because I believe it contains qualities which, directed appropriately, will improve the life of the nation. It also might inspire a few more people to feel excitement about the possibilities of their own lives, to allow themselves to feel they can aspire to something higher than a bland, careful, inoffensive uselessness. Needless to say, this theory is in its infancy, but clearly the dynamic of the 1910s and 1920s in terms of individual personality and projection of force is noticeably different, particularly for gentile whites, than what it is now.
Bok had a lot more to say about women, some of it inevitably not up to our standards of respectfulness, but not completely reprehensible. He was in favor of women's suffrage for example, though he expressed reservations that in the mass they were not knowledgeable enough, presumably compared to men, to wield the vote with the sacred responsibility that the immigrant Bok considered as one's civic duty, and devoted much space in the magazine to addressing this problem. I was struck by the number of professional women who contributed to the magazine over the years, and Bok's attitude regarding them. The popular image that I have absorbed anyway is that women's voices were completely silenced and their talents completely suppressed until the tiny progressive steps that have occurred in our own time, but Bok at least employed, and sought out, many women writers whom he regarded as superior, as well as women doctors, fashion designers, leaders of the temperance and suffragette movements, and so on. There was even some controversy when he assumed the editorship of the magazine that a man should be editing the Ladies' Home Journal, which indicates that the idea that a woman was capable of being and even properly should be the editor of a major mass market publication was not something completely alien to a part of the American public even in 1889. I know there are other issues--I don't know what Bok paid his women writers for example compared to what he was paying Rudyard Kipling and his stable of ex-presidents, and the overwhelming majority of women obviously were expected to devote themselves to domestic duties--but on the whole the presence of and level of respect given to professional women was more than I would have anticipated in this time. I was also reading about the muckraker movement recently and was surprised at how prominent women were in that as well.
There are multiple chapters devoted to Theodore Roosevelt, with whom Bok was good friends (Bok also was on good personal terms at various times in his life with presidents or former presidents Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison & Cleveland). Among Roosevelt's influences recorded in these chapters Bok notes that one of the President's arguments which "made a deep impression on him was that no man had a right to devote his life to the making of money."
As noted earlier, when the United States entered World War I Bok was named to and interacted with a lot of committees. Something that interested me at least, he let drop that when he went to Washington in January of 1917, the authorities he consulted with informed him that the country entering the war had been a practical certainty for some time, and the Government was pretty much waiting for the most opportune moment to make it official. I should have known this was true, but I guess I had some idea that the American leadership at that time really wanted to avoid getting into the war if it had been possible, but either that was not the case or they determined that it was not really possible. Being a middle-aged man in a position of leadership, Bok's account of that dreadful, death-drenched period was a little more chipper and jingoistic than we are used to (His close friend and co-generationist Kipling endured a loss of prestige due to a similar apparent obtuseness of tone on the subject of the calamity that most men who fought in the war experienced it as). He was not all terrible. He appears to have been genuinely sobered by seeing first hand some of the obliterated cities and blasted landscapes, as well as abandoned trenches full of "German" bodies--I am guessing that he was either not shown, or would have considered it inappropriate to his readership to describe a similar display of corpses on the allied side--but his insistence on promoting the saccharine caricature of the grinning, high-spirited, simple-minded, game for anything American doughboy is almost offensive even to me. However I try to keep in mind that Bok, an important and successful man in the life of his time, viewed the war in terms of being an unavoidable fact of life that he bore, in his various organizational roles, no small amount of personal responsibility for winning. That was his task, not to engage in a lot of hand-wringing about its inanity, or that of the various national governments, especially one's own, or what the possible purpose of the entire catastrophe could be. He respected American institutions, and believed that working tirelessly to strengthen them if they appeared to be functioning in a lackluster manner was the productive way to address problems, and not adopt the stances of nihilism and negativity.
Bok Tower in Florida, Site of Gardens built by Bok, and his Burial
The Challenge
1. Andrew Solomon--Far From the Tree: Parents, Children & the Search For Identity.......630
2. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings--The Yearling.............................................................................207
3. All That Heaven Allows (movie)..........................................................................................126
4. Wendy Ruderman & Barbara Laker--Busted: A Tale of Corruption & Betrayal in the City of
Brotherly Love......................................................................................................................111
5. Meta Given's Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking....................................................................37
6. Lloyd Lofthouse--Crazy is Normal: a Classroom Expose.....................................................27
7. Leslie Barringer--Gerfalcon.....................................................................................................7
8. Anne Stibbs Kerr--Crossword Lists & Crossword Solver.......................................................6
9. Leland Stone--They Shall Not Sleep.........................................................................................3
10. Scott Joplin--"Maple Leaf Rag"..............................................................................................1
11. E. Alexander Powell--Where the Strange Trails Go Down (1921)........................................0
12. Ezra Pound--If This Be Treason (1948)..................................................................................0
13. The Organic Directory (1971)................................................................................................0
14. Long Island Sound: Prospects For the Urban Sea (2013).....................................................0
(For seeding purposes, ties are broken by the date of publication)
Not a great tournament this time, though not an atrocious one either. We could not even fill the whole field this, allowing the top two seeds byes into the Elite 8.
Round of 16
Top 2 seeds receive byes
#3 All That Heaven Allows over #14 Long Island Sound
A movie that is supposed to be pretty good over a book that is essentially unavailable & sounds boring.
#4 Laker & Ruderman over #13 Organic Directory
Plus the intriguiging bonus of being a Philadelphia book.
#12 Pound over #5 Meta Given
#11 Powell over #6 Lofthouse
Surprisingly, the Lofthouse book is not available in a single New Hampshire library, while there is one copy of Powell at the University of New Hampshire.
#10 Joplin over #7 Barringer
A rare song getting into the competition (and a good one), beats a book that is completely unavailable.
#9 Stone over #8 Kerr
The Stone book is from 1944, and there are copies of it in 3 libraries, including the State Library in Concord, where I have an account.
Elite 8
#1 Solomon over #12 Pound
Because this work of Pound's seems to be a rarity.
#2 Rawlings over #11 Powell
#3 All That Heaven Allows over #11 Joplin
The toughest call of this round. The nature of the competition makes it hard for a song to win if I have any interest in its opponent. But there is no reason not to listen to it on its way out:
#4 Laker/Ruderman over #9 Stone
The greater ubiquity and shorter length of the Philadelphia book overwhelm the antiquated Stone. And for the first time in the history of the Challenge, the top 4 seeds advance to the Final Four.
Final Four
#1 Solomon over #4 Laker/Ruderman
A close call. I kind of decided the winner on an impulse in a matter of seconds due to a hunch I had about which book had truly the smarter readers, and I feel obligated to stick to it.
#2 Rawlings over #3 All That Heaven Allows
Championship
#2 Rawlings over #1 Solomon
The Rawlings book has some status as a classic, and somehow it has never made it onto any of my other lists. It has a reputation as a children's book, and it is in content, though it won the Pulitzer Prize* in 1939 and it is written in a way that I think most children would find rough going nowadays--slow-paced, long descriptive passages of nature, pretty long in general (400 pages). So we'll see how that goes.
*Related to the earlier point about the regard in which women authors were held, in this country anyway, it should be noted that during the 1920s 5 of the 9 Pulitzer Prizes for fiction went to women, and 6 of 10 in the 30s. Again, I was surprised by this, given that the award has a certain amount of prestige, and probably more in the 1930s than now. These numbers dropped to 1 of 9 in the 40s, 0 of 8 in the dark days of the 50s (actually no women were awarded the prize from between 1942 and 1961), 3 of 9 in the 60s, and 2 of 8 in 70s before rising to a fairly consistent 4 of 10 in the decades since then. I have a theory that part of this evident decline in the perception of the quality and importance of women authors is a direct result of the emigration to this country of the many brilliant and formidable continental European intellectuals and musicians and writers fleeing totalitarianism during the 1930s and 40s, who came to dominate, certainly in spirit, many important colleges and universities, including my own, and heavily influenced the tone of most highbrow criticism and other writing during this era, emphasizing the far greater depth and seriousness of the (heavily male-dominated and oriented) continental European tradition while dismissing American (and even much of British) culture, seemingly more female-friendly on the surface, as wholly trivial and juvenile. This theory of course is not fully worked through yet...
