Modern Mind

their way. Too much was being published, and even important articles were often too wordy and could easily be reduced. So while he was convalescing in hospital in France, he started to clip articles from the many magazines that were sent through from the home front. After he was discharged and returned home to Saint Paul, Minnesota, he spent a few more months developing his idea, winnowing his cuttings down to thirty-one articles he thought had some long-term merit, and which he edited drastically. He had the articles set in a common typeface and laid out as a magazine, which he called
Reader’s Digest.
He ordered a printing of 200 copies and sent them to a dozen or so New York publishers. Everyone said no. 20
    Wallace’s battles to get
Reader’s Digest
on a sound footing after its launch in 1922 make a fine American adventure story, with a happy ending, as do Briton Hadden’s and Henry Luce’s efforts with
Time,
which, though launched in March 1912, did not produce a profit until 1928. The Book-of-the-Month-Club, founded by the Canadian Harry Scherman in April 1926, had much the same uneven start, with the first books, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s
Lolly Willowes,
T. S. Stribling’s
Teeftallow,
and
The Heart of Emerson’s Journals,
edited by Bliss Perry, being returned ‘by the cartload.’ 21 But Wallace’s instincts had been right: the explosion of education in America after World War I changed the intellectual appetite of Americans, although not always in a direction universally approved. Those arguments were especially fierce in regard to the Book-of-the-Month Club, in particular the fact that a committee was deciding what people should read, which, it was said, threatened to ‘standardise’ the way Americans thought. 22 ‘Standardisation’ was worrying to many people in those days in many walks of life, mainly as a result of the ‘Fordisation’ of industry following the invention of the moving assembly line in 1913. Sinclair Lewishad raised the issue in
Babbitt
and would do so again in 1926, when he turned down the Pulitzer Prize for his novel
Arrowsmith,
believing it was absurd to identify any book as ‘the best.’ What most people objected to was the mix of books offered by the Book-of-the-Month Club; they claimed that this produced a new way of thinking, chopping and changing between serious ‘high culture’ and works that were ‘mere entertainment.’ This debate produced a new concept and a new word, used in the mid-1920s for the first time:
middlebrow.
The establishment of a professoriate in the early decades of the century also played a role here, as did the expansion of the universities, before and after World War I, which helped highlight the distinction between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow.’ In the mid- and late 1920s, American magazines in particular kept returning to discussions about middlebrow taste and the damage it was or wasn’t doing to young minds.
    Sinclair Lewis might decry the very idea of trying to identify ‘the best,’ but he was unable to stop the influence of his books on others. And he earned perhaps a more enduring accolade than the Pulitzer Prize from academics – sociologists – who, in the mid-1920s, found the phenomenon of Babbitt so fascinating that they decided to study for themselves a middle-size town in middle America.
    Robert and Helen Lynd decided to study an ordinary American town, to describe in full sociological and anthropological detail what life consisted of. As Clark Wissler of the American Museum of Natural History put it in his foreword to their book,
Middletowm,
‘To most people, anthropology is a mass of curious information about savages, and this is so far true, in that anthropology deals with the less civilised.’ Was that irony – or just cheek? 23 The fieldwork for the study, financed by the Institute of Social and Religious Research, was completed in 1925, some members of the team living in ‘Middletown’ for eighteen months, others for five. The aim was to select a ‘typical’ town in the Midwest, but with certain specific aspects so that the process of social change could be looked at. A town of about 30,000 was chosen (there being 143 towns between 25,000 and 50,000, according to the U.S. Census). The town chosen was homogeneous, with only a small black population – the Lynds thought it would be easier to study cultural change if it was not complicated by racial change. They also specified that the town have a