One Summer: America, 1927

incontestably bechinned face. Time wasnoted for its repetitious devotion to certain words – ‘swart’, ‘nimble’, ‘gimlet-eyed’ – and to squashed neologisms like ‘cinemaddict’ and ‘cinemactress’. It also had a fondness for odd, distorted phrases, so that ‘in the nick of time’ became, without embarrassment, ‘in time’s nick’. In particular it had a curious Germanic affection for inverting normal word order and packing as many nouns, adjectives and adverbs as possible into a sentence before bringing in a verb – or as Wolcott Gibbs put it in a famous New Yorker profile of Luce, ‘Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind.’ Despite all their up-to-the-minute swagger, Luce and Hadden were deeply conservative. They would not, for instance, employ women for any job above the level of secretary or office assistant.
    Above all, the 1920s was a golden age for newspapers. Newspaper sales in the decade rose by about a fifth, to 36 million copies a day – or 1.4 newspapers for every household. New York City alone had twelve daily papers, and almost all other cities worthy of the name had at least two or three. More than this, in many cities readers could now get their news from a new, revolutionary type of publication that completely changed people’s expectations of what daily news should be – the tabloid. Tabloids focused on crime, sport and celebrity gossip, and in so doing gave all three an importance considerably beyond any they had enjoyed before. A study in 1927 showed that tabloids devoted between a quarter and a third of their space to crime reports, up to ten times more than the serious papers did. It was because of their influence that the quiet but messy murder of a man like Albert Snyder could become national news.
    The tabloid, both as a format and as a way of distilling news down to its salacious essence, had been around for a quarter of a century in England, but no one had thought to try it in the United States until two young members of the Chicago Tribune publishing family, Robert R. McCormick and his cousin Joseph Patterson, saw London’s Daily Mirror while serving in England during the First World War and decided to offer something similar at home whenpeace came. The result was the Illustrated Daily News , launched in New York in June 1919, price 2 cents. The concept was not an immediate hit – circulation at one point fell to 11,000 – but gradually the Daily News built a devoted following and by the mid-twenties it was far and away the best-selling newspaper in the country with a circulation of one million, more than double that of the New York Times .
    Such success inevitably inspired imitators. First came the New York Daily Mirror from William Randolph Hearst in June 1924, followed three months later by the wondrously dreadful Evening Graphic . The Graphic was the creation of an eccentric, bushy-haired businessman named Bernarr Macfadden, who had started life rather more prosaically some fifty years earlier as a Missouri farm boy named Bernard MacFadden. Macfadden, as he now styled himself, was a man of strong and exotic beliefs. He didn’t like doctors, lawyers or clothing. He was powerfully devoted to body-building, vegetarianism, the rights of commuters to a decent railroad service, and getting naked. He and his wife frequently bemused their neighbours in Englewood, New Jersey – among them Dwight Morrow, a figure of some centrality to this story, as will become apparent – by exercising naked on the lawn. Macfadden’s commitment to healthfulness was so total that when one of his daughters died of a heart condition he remarked: ‘It’s better she’s gone. She’d only have disgraced me.’ Well into his eighties he could be seen walking around Manhattan carrying a 40-pound bag of sand on his back as a way of keeping fit. He lived to be eighty-seven.
    As a businessman, he seems to have dedicated his life to the proposition that where selling to the public is concerned no idea is too stupid. He built three separate fortunes. The first was as the inventor of a cult science he called Physcultopathy, which featured strict adherence to his principles of vegetarianism and strength through body-building, with forays into nakedness for those who dared. The movement produced a chain of successful health farms and related publications. In 1919, as an outgrowth of the latter,Macfadden came up with an even more inspired invention: the confession magazine. True