spirits, for example, who recently compelled a woman to seek the
protection of a police department because of the persecution of a gang
of boys and young men shouting “hee-haw” whenever she appeared on the
street; the rowdies whose exploits figure so frequently in metropolitan
newspapers; or that class of adults who tell indecent stories at the
dinner-table and laugh joyously at their wives’ efforts to turn the
conversation. But the Sunday comic goes into other homes than these, and
is handed to their children by parents whose souls would shudder at the
thought of a dime novel. Alas, poor parents! That very dime novel as a
rule holds up ideals of bravery and chivalry, rewards good and punishes
evil, offers at the worst a temptation to golden adventuring, for which
not one child in a million will ever attempt to surmount the obvious
obstacles. It is no easy matter to become an Indian fighter, pirate, or
detective; the dream is, after all, a day-dream, tinctured with the
beautiful color of old romance, and built on eternal qualities that the
world has rightfully esteemed worthy of emulation. And in place of it
the comic supplement, like that other brutal horror, the juvenile comic
story, which goes on its immoral way unnoticed, raises no high ambition,
but devotes itself to “mischief made easy.” Hard as it is to become an
Indian fighter, any boy has plenty of opportunity to throw stones at his
neighbor’s windows. And on any special occasion, such, for example, as
Christmas or Washington’s Birthday, almost the entire ponderous machine
is set in motion to make reverence and ideals ridiculous. Evil example
is strong in proportion as it is easy to imitate. The state of mind that
accepts the humor of the comic weekly is the same as that which shudders
at Ibsen, and smiles complacently at the musical comedy, with its open
acceptance of the wild-oats theory, and its humorous exposition of a
kind of wild oats that youth may harvest without going out of its own
neighborhood.
In all this noisy, explosive, garrulous pandemonium one finds here and
there a moment of rest and refreshment—the work of the few pioneers of
decency and decorum brave enough to bring their wares to the noisome
market and lucky enough to infuse their spirit of refinement, art, and
genuine humor into its otherwise hopeless atmosphere. Preëminent among
them stands the inventor of “Little Nemo in Slumberland,” a man of
genuine pantomimic humor, charming draughtsmanship, and an excellent
decorative sense of color, who has apparently studied his medium and
makes the best of it. And with him come Peter Newell, Grace G.
Weiderseim, and Condé,—now illustrating _Uncle Remus_ for a Sunday
audience,—whose pictures in some of the Sunday papers are a delightful
and self-respecting proof of the possibilities of this type of
journalism. Out of the noisy streets, the cheap restaurants with their
unsteady-footed waiters and avalanches of soup and crockery, out of the
slums, the quarreling families, the prisons and the lunatic asylums, we
step for a moment into the world of childish fantasy, closing the iron
door behind us and trying to shut out the clamor of hooting mobs, the
laughter of imbeciles, and the crash of explosives. After all, there is
no reason why children should not have their innocent amusement on
Sunday morning; but there seems to be every reason why the average
editor of the weekly comic supplement should be given a course in art,
literature, common sense, and Christianity.
THE AMERICAN GRUB STREET
BY JAMES H. COLLINS
I
New York’s theatres, cafés, and hotels, with many of her industries, are
supported by a floating population. The provinces know this, and it
pleases them mightily. But how many of the actual inhabitants of New
York know of the large floating population that is associated with her
magazines, newspapers, and publishing interests?—a floating population
of the arts, mercenaries of pen and typewriter, brush and camera, living
for the most part in the town and its suburbs, yet leading an unattached
existence, that, to the provincial accustomed to dealing with life on a
salary, seems not only curious but extremely precarious—as it often is.
The free-lance writer and artist abound in the metropolis, and with them
is associated a motley free-lance crew that has no counterpart elsewhere
on this continent. New York’s “Grub Street” is one of the truest
indications of her metropolitan character. In other American cities the
newspaper is written, illustrated, and edited by men and women on
salaries, as are the comparatively few magazines and the technical press
covering our country’s material activities. But in New York, while
hundreds of editors, writers, and artists also rely upon a stated,
definite stipend, several times as many more live without salaried
connections, sometimes by necessity, but as often by choice. These are
the dwellers in Grub Street.
This thoroughfare has no geographical definition. Many of the natives of
Manhattan Island know as little of it as do the truck loads of visitors
“seeing New York,” who cross and recross it unwittingly. Grub Street
begins nowhere and ends nowhere; yet between these vague terminals it
runs to all points of the compass, turns sharp corners, penetrates
narrow passageways, takes its pedestrians up dark old stairways one
moment and through sumptuous halls of steel and marble the next,
touching along the way more diverse interests than any of the actual
streets of Manhattan, and embracing ideals, tendencies, influences, and
life-currents that permeate the nation’s whole material and spiritual
existence. Greater Grub Street is so unobtrusive that a person with no
affair to transact therein might dwell a quarter-century in New York and
never discover it; yet it is likewise so palpable and vast to its
denizens that by no ordinary circumstances would any of them be likely
to explore all its infinite arteries, veins, and ganglia.
Not long ago there arrived on Park Row for the first time in his life a
newspaper reporter of conspicuous ability along a certain line. In the
West he had made a name for his knack at getting hold of corporate
reports and court decisions several days in advance of rival papers.
Once, in Chicago, by climbing over the ceiling of a jury-room, he was
able to publish the verdict in a sensational murder trial a half-hour
before it had been brought in to the judge. A man invaluable in
following the devious windings of the day’s history as it must be
written in newspapers, he had come to Park Row as the ultimate field of
development for his especial talent. To demonstrate what he had done, he
brought along a thick sheaf of introductory letters from Western
editors. There was one for every prominent editor and publisher in the
New York newspaper field, yet after all had been delivered it seemed to
avail nothing. Nobody had offered him a situation.
“The way to get along in New York is to go out and get the stuff,”
explained a free lance whom he fell in with in a William Street
restaurant. “Get copy they can’t turn down—deliver the goods.”
In that dull summer season all the papers were filled with gossip about
a subscription book that had been sold at astonishing prices to that
unfailing resource of newspapers, the “smart set.” Charges of blackmail
flew through the city. Official investigation had failed to reveal
anything definite about the work, which was said to be in process of
printing. In twenty-four hours the newcomer from the West appeared in
the office of a managing editor with specimen pages of the book itself.
Where he had got them nobody knew. No one cared. They were manifestly
genuine, and within two hours a certain sensational newspaper scored a
“beat.” At last accounts he was specializing in the same line, obtaining
the unobtainable and selling it where it would bring the best price.
This is one type of free lance.
At the other end of the scale may be cited the all-around scientific
worker who came to the metropolis several years ago, after long
experience in the departments at Washington. Lack of influence there had
thrown him on the world at forty. Accustomed to living on the rather
slender salary that goes with a scientific position, and knowing no
other way of getting a livelihood, he set out to find in New York a
place similar to that he had held in the capital. He is a man who has
followed the whole trend of modern scientific progress as a practical
investigator—a deviser of experiments and experimental apparatus, a
skilled technical draughtsman, a writer on scientific subjects, and a
man of field experience in surveying and research that has taken him all
over the world. New York offered him nothing resembling the work he had
done in Washington; but in traveling about the town among scientific and
technical publishers he got commissions to write an article or two for
an encyclopedia. These led him into encyclopedic illustration as well,
and then he took charge of a whole section of the work, gathering his
materials outside, writing and drawing at home, and visiting the
publisher’s office only to deliver the finished copy. Encyclopedia
writing and illustration has since become his specialty. His wide
experience and knowledge fit him to cope with diverse subjects, and he
earns an income which, if not nearly so large as that of the free-lance
reporter, is quite as satisfactory as his Washington salary. As soon as
one encyclopedia is finished in New York, another is begun, and from
publisher to publisher go a group of encyclopedic free-lances, who will
furnish an article on integral calculus or the Vedic pantheon, with
diagrams and illustrations—and very good articles at that.
II
Who but a Balzac will take a census of Greater Grub Street, enumerating
its aristocrats, its well-to-do obscure bourgeois, its Bohemians, its
rakes and evil-doers, its artisans and struggling lower classes? Among
its citizens are the materials of a newer _Comédie Humaine_. The two
personalities outlined above merely set a vague intellectual boundary to
this world. In its many kinds and stations of workers Grub Street is as
irreducible as nebulæ. Its aristocracy is to be found any time in that
“Peerage” of Grub Street, the contents pages of the better magazines,
where are arrayed the names of successful novelists, essayists, and
short-story writers, of men and women who deal with specialties such as
travel, historical studies, war correspondence, nature interpretation,
sociology, politics, and every other side of life and thought; and here,
too, are enlisted their morganatic relatives, the poets and versifiers,
and their showy, prosperous kindred, the illustrators, who may be
summoned from Grub Street to paint a portrait at Newport. This peerage
is real, for no matter upon what stratum of Grub Street each newcomer
may ultimately find his level of ability, this is the goal that was
aimed at in the beginning. This is the Dream.
Staid, careful burghers of the arts, producing their good, dull, staple
necessities in screed and picture, live about the lesser magazines, the
women’s periodicals, the trade and technical press, the syndicates that
supply “Sunday stuff” to newspapers all over the land, the nameless,
mediocre publications that are consumed by our rural population in
million editions. The Bohemian element is found writing “on space” for
newspapers this month, furnishing the press articles of a theatre or an
actress the next, running the gamut of the lesser magazines feverishly,
flitting hither and thither, exhausting its energies with wasteful
rapidity, and never learning the business tact and regularity that keep
the burgher in comfort and give his name a standing at the savings bank.
The criminal class of Grub Street includes the peddler of false news,
the adapter of other men’s ideas, and the swindler who copies published
articles and pictures outright, trusting to luck to elude the editorial
police. The individual in this stratum has a short career and not a
merry one; but the class persists with the persistence of the parasite.
Grub Street’s artisans are massed about the advertising agencies,
producing the plausible arguments put forth for the world of
merchandise, and the many varieties of illustration that go with them;
while the nameless driftwood which floats about the whole thoroughfare
includes no one knows how many hundreds of aspirants whose talents do
not suffice for any of these classes, together with the peddler of other
men’s wares on commission, who perhaps ekes out a life by entering as a
super at the theatres, the artists’ models, both men and women, who pose
in summer and are away with a theatrical company in winter, the dullard,
the drone, the ne’er-do-well, the palpable failure. At one end, Art’s
chosen sons and daughters; at the other, her content, misguided dupes.
The free lance is bred naturally in New York, and thrives in its
atmosphere, because the market for his wares is stable and infinitely
varied. The demand he satisfies could be appeased by no other system.
The very life of metropolitan publishing lies in the search for new men
and variety. Publishers spend great sums upon the winnowing machinery
that threshes over what comes to their editors’ desks, and no editor in
the metropolis grudges the time necessary to talk with those who call in
person and have ideas good enough to carry them past his assistants.
Publicly, the editorial tribe may lament the many hours spent yearly in
this winnowing process. Yet every experienced editor in New York has his
own story of the stranger, uncouth, unpromising, unready of speech, who
stole in late one afternoon and seemed to have almost nothing in him,
yet who afterwards became the prolific Scribbler or the great D’Auber.
Not an editor of consequence but who, if he knew that to-morrow this
ceaseless throng of free lances, good, bad, and impossible, had declared
a Chinese boycott upon him and would visit his office no more, would
regard it as the gravest of crises.
New York provides a market so wide for the wares of the free lance that
almost anything in the way of writing or picture can eventually be sold,
if it is up to a certain standard of mediocrity. A trained salesman
familiar with values in the world of merchandise would consider this
market one of the least exacting, most constant, and remunerative. And
it is a market to be regarded, on the whole, in terms of merchandise.
Not genius or talent sets the standards, but ordinary good workmanship.
Magazines are simply the apex of the demand—that corner of the mart
where payment is perhaps highest and the byproduct of reputation
greatest. For each of the fortunate workers whose names figure in the
magazine peerage, there are virtually hundreds who produce for
purchasers and publications quite unknown to the general public, and
often their incomes are equal to those of the established fiction writer
or popular illustrator.
New York has eight Sunday newspapers that buy matter for their own
editions and supply it in duplicate to other Sunday newspapers
throughout the country under a syndicate arrangement. Perhaps an average
of five hundred columns of articles, stories, interviews, children’s
stuff, household and feminine gossip, humor, verse, and miscellany, with
illustrations, are produced every week for this demand alone; and at
least fifty per cent of the yearly $150,000 that represents its lowest
value to the producers is paid to free-lance workers. The rest goes to
men on salary who write Sunday matter at space rates. This item is
wholly distinct from the equally great mass of Sunday stuff written for
the same papers by salaried men. Several independent syndicates also
supply a similar class of matter to papers throughout the United States,
for both Sunday and daily use. This syndicate practice has, within the
past ten years, made New York a veritable journalistic provider for the
rest of the nation. The metropolis supplies the Sunday reading of the
American people, largely because it has the resources of Grub Street to
draw upon. Syndicate matter is cheaper than the provincial product, it
is true; but not price alone is accountable for this supremacy of the
syndicate. By the side of the workmanlike stories, articles, skits, and
pictures supplied by Greater Grub Street, the productions of a
provincial newspaper staff on salary grow monotonous in their sameness,
and reveal themselves by their less skillful handling.
The Sunday-reading industry provides a market, not only for writers and
artists, but also for photographers, caricaturists, cartoonists, makers
of squibs and jokes, experts in fashions, devisers of puzzles, men and
women who sell ideas for novel Sunday supplements, such as those printed
in sympathetic inks, and the like. It is a peculiarity of our country
worth noting, that all our published humor finds its outlet through the
newspapers. Though England, Germany, France, and other countries have a
humorous press distinctly apart, the United States has only one humorous
journal that may be called national in tone. An overwhelming tide of
caricature and humor sweeps through our daily papers, but the larger
proportion is found in the illustrated comic sheets of the leading New
York dailies; and these are syndicated in a way that gives them a
tremendous national circulation. The Sunday comic sheet, whatever one
wishes to say of its quality, was built in Greater Grub Street, and
there, to-day, its foundations rest.
In Grub Street, too, dwells the army of workers who furnish what
might be called the cellulose of our monthly and weekly
publications—interviews, literary gossip, articles of current news
interest, matter interesting to women, to children, to every class
and occupation. As there are magazines for the servant girl and
clerk, so there are magazines for the millionaire with a country
estate, the business man studying system and methods, the woman with
social or literary aspirations, the family planning travel or a
vacation. To-day it is a sort of axiom in the publishing world that
a new magazine, to succeed, must have a new specialty. Usually this
will be a material one, for our current literature deals with things
rather than thought; it is healthy but never top-heavy. Each new
magazine interest discovered is turned over to Greater Grub Street
for development, and here it is furnished with matter to fit the new
point of view, drawings and photographs to make it plain, editors to
guide, and sometimes a publisher to send it to market.
Then come, rank on rank, the trade and technical periodicals, of which
hundreds are issued weekly and monthly in New York. These touch the
whole range of industry and commerce. They deal with banking, law,
medicine, insurance, manufacturing, and the progress of merchandise of
every kind through the wholesale, jobbing, and retailing trades, with
invention and mechanical science, with crude staples and finished
commodities, with the great main channels of production and distribution
and the little by-corners of the mart. Some of them are valuable
publishing properties; more are insignificant; yet each has to go to
press regularly, and all must be filled with their own particular kinds
of news, comment, technical articles, and pictures. Theirs is a
difficult point of view for the free lance, and on this account much of
their contents is written by salaried editors and assistants.
Contributions come, too, from engineers, scientists, bankers, attorneys,
physicians, and specialists in every part of the country. Foremen and
superintendents and mechanics in some trades send in roughly outlined
diagrams and descriptions that enable the quick-witted editors to see
“how the blamed thing works” and write the finished article. The
American trade press is still in an early stage of development on its
literary side. It has grown up largely within the past two decades, and
still lacks literary workmanship. To hundreds of free-lance workers this
field is now either unknown or underestimated. Yet year after year men
disappear from Park Row and the round of Magazinedom, to be found, if
any one would take the trouble to look them up, among the trade
journals. Some of the great properties in this class belong to
journalists who saw an opportunity a decade ago, and grasped it.
III
The trade journals lead directly into the field of advertising, which
has grown into a phenomenal outlet for free lance energies in the past
ten years, and is still growing at a rate that promises to make it the
dominant market of Grub Street. A glance through the advertising
sections of the seventy-five or more monthly and weekly magazines
published in New York reveals only a fraction of this demand, for a mass
of writing and illustration many times greater is produced for
catalogues, booklets, folders, circulars, advertising in the religious,
agricultural, and trade press, and other purposes. Much of it is the
work of men on salary, yet advertising takes so many ingenious forms and
is so constantly striving for the novel and excellent, that almost every
writer and illustrator of prominence receives in the course of the year
commissions for special advertising work, and fat commissions, too.
Often the fine drawing one sees as the centre of attraction in a
magazine advertisement is the work of a man or woman of reputation among
the readers of magazines, delivered with the understanding that it is to
be published unsigned.
The advertising demand is divided into two classes—that represented by
business firms which prepare their own publicity, and that for the
advertising agencies which prepare and forward to periodicals the
advertising of many business houses, receiving for their service a
commission from the publishers. It is among the latter especially that
the free lance finds his market, for the agencies handle a varied mass
of work and are continually calling in men who can furnish fresh ideas.
One of the leading advertising agencies keeps in a great file the names
and addresses of several hundred free-lance workers—writers, sculptors,
illustrators, portrait painters, translators, news and illustrating
photographers, fashion designers, authorities in silver and virtu,
book-reviewers, journalists with such specialties as sports, social
news, and the markets. Each is likely to be called on for something in
his particular line as occasions arise.
This concern, for example, may receive a commission to furnish a
handsomely bound miniature book on servants’ liveries for a clothing
manufacturer, or a history of silver plate to be privately printed and
distributed among the patrons of a great jewelry house. For a simple
folder to advertise a brand of whiskey, perhaps, the sporting editor of
a leading daily newspaper is asked to compile information about
international yacht-racing. From Union Square may be seen a large wall,
upon which is painted a quaint landscape of gigantic proportions. It is
a bit of thoroughly artistic design, fitting into the general color
scheme of the square, and its attractiveness gives it minor advertising
value for the firm that has taken an original way of masking a blank
wall. This decoration was painted from a small design, made for the
above advertising agency by a painter of prominence. The same agency, in
compiling a catalogue of cash registers some time ago, referred to their
utilitarian ugliness of design. The cash register manufacturers
protested that these were the best designs they had been able to make,
whereupon the advertising agency commissioned four sculptors, who
elaborated dainty cash-register cases in the _art nouveau_ manner, for
installation in cafés, milliners’ shops, and other fine establishments.