America is a land of newspapers, and the newspapers are very largely
the same. To a certain extent many of them are exactly the same, for
the vastness of the country makes it possible to syndicalise various
features, so that you find Walt Mason's sagacious and merry and punctual
verse, printed to look like prose but never disappointing the ear, in
one of the journals that you buy wherever you are, in San Francisco,
Salt Lake City, Chicago or New York; and Mr. Montagu's topical rhymes
in another; and the daily adventures of Mutt and Jeff, who are national
heroes, in a third. Every day, for ever, do those and other regular
features occur in certain of the papers: which is partly why no American
ever seems to confine himself, as is our custom, to only one.
Another and admirable feature of certain American papers is a column
edited by a man of letters, whose business it is to fill it every
day, either with the blossoms of his own intelligence or of outside
contributors, or a little of each: such a column as Don Marquis edits
for _The Sun_, called "The Sundial," and Franklin R. Adams for _The
Tribune_, called "The Conning Tower," and Christopher Morley for the New
York _Evening Post_, called "The Bowling Green." Perhaps the unsigned
"Way of the World" in our _Morning Post_ is the nearest London
correlative.
These columns are managed with skill and catholicity, and they impart
an element of graciousness and fancy into what might otherwise be
too materialistic a budget. A journalist, like myself, is naturally
delighted to find editors and a vast public so true to their writing
friends. Very few English editors allow their subscribers the
opportunity of establishing such steady personal relations; and in
England, in consequence, the signed daily contribution from one literary
hand is very rare--to an American observer probably mysteriously so. The
daily cartoon is common with us; but in London, for example, I cannot
think of any similar literary feature that is signed in full. We have
C.E.B.'s regular verse in the _Evening News_ and "The Londoner's" daily
essay in the same paper, and various initials elsewhere; but, with us,
only the artists are allowed their names. Now, in America every name,
everywhere, is blazoned forth.
Whatever bushel measures may be used for in the United States the
concealing of light is no part of their programme.
Another feature of American daily journals comparatively unknown in
England is the so-called comic pictorial sequence. All the big papers
have from one to half a dozen of these sequences, each by a different
artist. Bud Fisher with "Mutt and Jeff" comes first in popularity, I
believe, and then there are his rivals and his imitators. Nothing more
inane than some of these series could be invented; and yet they persist
and could not, I am told, be dropped by any editor who thought first of
circulation.
After the individual contributions have been subtracted, all the
newspapers are curiously alike. The same reporters might be on every
one; the same sub-editors; the same composers of head-lines. If we think
of Americans as too capable of cynical levity it is largely because of
these head-lines, which are always as epigrammatic as possible, always
light-hearted, often facetious, and often cruel. An unfortunate woman's
failure at suicide after killing her husband was thus touched off in one
of the journals while I was in New York: