While Theodore Roosevelt was President of the United States, Bok was
sitting one evening talking with him, when suddenly Mr. Roosevelt turned
to him and said with his usual emphasis: "Bok, I envy you your power
with your public."
The editor was frankly puzzled.
"That is a strange remark from the President of the United States," he
replied.
"You may think so," was the rejoinder. "But listen. When do I get the
ear of the public? In its busiest moments. My messages are printed in
the newspapers and read hurriedly, mostly by men in trolleys or
railroad-cars. Women hardly ever read them, I should judge. Now you are
read in the evening by the fireside or under the lamp, when the day's
work is over and the mind is at rest from other things and receptive to
what you offer. Don't you see where you have it on me?"
This diagnosis was keenly interesting, and while the President talked
during the balance of the evening, Bok was thinking. Finally, he said:
"Mr. President, I should like to share my power with you."
"How?" asked Mr. Roosevelt.
"You recognize that women do not read your messages; and yet no
President's messages ever discussed more ethical questions that women
should know about and get straight in their minds. As it is, some of
your ideas are not at all understood by them; your strenuous-life
theory, for instance, your factory-law ideas, and particularly your
race-suicide arguments. Men don't fully understand them, for that
matter; women certainly do not."
"I am aware of all that," said the President. "What is your plan to
remedy it?"
"Have a department in my magazine, and explain your ideas," suggested
Bok.
"Haven't time for another thing. You know that," snapped back the
President. "Wish I had."
"Not to write it, perhaps, yourself," returned Bok.
"But why couldn't you find time to do this: select the writer here in
Washington in whose accuracy you have the most implicit faith; let him
talk with you for one hour each month on one of those subjects; let him
write out your views, and submit the manuscript to you; and we will have
a department stating exactly how the material is obtained and how far it
represents your own work. In that way, with only an hour's work each
month, you can get your views, correctly stated, before this vast
audience when it is not in trolleys or railroadcars."
"But I haven't the hour," answered Roosevelt, impressed, however, as Bok
saw. "I have only half an hour, when I am awake, when I am really idle,
and that is when I am being shaved."
"Well," calmly suggested the editor, "why not two of those half-hours a
month, or perhaps one?"
"What?" answered the President, sitting upright, his teeth flashing but
his smile broadening. "You Dutchman, you'd make me work while I'm
getting shaved, too?"
"Well," was the answer, "isn't the result worth the effort?"
"Bok, you are absolutely relentless," said the President. "But you're
right. The result would be worth the effort. What writer have you in
mind? You seem to have thought this thing through."
"How about O'Brien? You think well of him?"
(Robert L. O'Brien, now editor of the Boston Herald, was then Washington
correspondent for the Boston Transcript and thoroughly in the
President's confidence.)
"Fine," said the President. "I trust O'Brien implicitly. All right, if
you can get O'Brien to add it on, I'll try it."
And so the "shaving interviews" were begun; and early in 1906 there
appeared in The Ladies' Home Journal a department called "The
President," with the subtitle: "A Department in which will be presented
the attitude of the President on those national questions which affect
the vital interests of the home, by a writer intimately acquainted and
in close touch with him."
O'Brien talked with Mr. Roosevelt once a month, wrote out the results,
the President went over the proofs carefully, and the department was
conducted with great success for a year.
But Theodore Roosevelt was again to be the editor of a department in The
Ladies' Home Journal; this time to be written by himself under the
strictest possible anonymity, so closely adhered to that, until this
revelation, only five persons have known the authorship.
Feeling that it would be an interesting experiment to see how far
Theodore Roosevelt's ideas could stand unsupported by the authority of
his vibrant personality, Bok suggested the plan to the colonel. It was
just after he had returned from his South American trip. He was
immediately interested.
"But how can we keep the authorship really anonymous?" he asked.
"Easily enough," answered Bok, "if you're willing to do the work. Our
letters about it must be written in long hand addressed to each other's
homes; you must write your manuscript in your own hand; I will copy it
in mine, and it will go to the printer in that way. I will personally
send you the proofs; you mark your corrections in pencil, and I will
copy them in ink; the company will pay me for each article, and I will
send you my personal check each month. By this means, the identity of
the author will be concealed."
Colonel Roosevelt was never averse to hard work if it was necessary to
achieve a result that he felt was worth while.
"All right," wrote the colonel finally. "I'll try--with you!--the
experiment for a year: 12 articles... I don't know that I can give your
readers satisfaction, but I shall try my very best. I am very glad to be
associated with you, anyway. At first I doubted the wisdom of the plan,
merely because I doubted whether I could give you just that you wished.
I never know what an audience wants: I know what it ought to want: and
sometimes I can give it, or make it accept what I think it needs--and
sometimes I cannot. But the more I thought over your proposal, the more
I liked it... Whether the wine will be good enough to attract without
any bush I don't know; and besides, in such cases the fault is not in
the wine, but in the fact that the consumers decline to have their
attention attracted unless there is a bush!"
In the latter part of 1916 an anonymous department called "Men" was
begun in the magazine.
The physical work was great. The colonel punctiliously held to the
conditions, and wrote manuscript and letters with his own hand, and Bok
carried out his part of the agreement. Nor was this simple, for Colonel
Roosevelt's manuscript--particularly when, as in this case, it was
written on yellow paper with a soft pencil and generously
interlined--was anything but legible. Month after month the two men
worked each at his own task. To throw the public off the scent, during
the conduct of the department, an article or two by Colonel Roosevelt
was published in another part of the magazine under his own name, and in
the department itself the anonymous author would occasionally quote
himself.
It was natural that the appearance of a department devoted to men in a
woman's magazine should attract immediate attention. The department took
up the various interests of a man's life, such as real efficiency; his
duties as an employer and his usefulness to his employees; the
employee's attitude toward his employer; the relations of men and women;
a father's relations to his sons and daughters; a man's duty to his
community; the public-school system; a man's relation to his church, and
kindred topics.
The anonymity of the articles soon took on interest from the
positiveness of the opinions discussed; but so thoroughly had Colonel
Roosevelt covered his tracks that, although he wrote in his usual style,
in not a single instance was his name connected with the department.
Lyman Abbott was the favorite "guess" at first; then after various other
public men had been suggested, the newspapers finally decided upon
former President Eliot of Harvard University as the writer.
All this intensely interested and amused Colonel Roosevelt and he fairly
itched with the desire to write a series of criticisms of his own
articles to Doctor Eliot. Bok, however, persuaded the colonel not to
spend more physical effort than he was already doing on the articles;
for, in addition, he was notating answers on the numerous letters
received, and those Bok answered "on behalf of the author."
For a year, the department continued. During all that time the secret of
the authorship was known to only one man, besides the colonel and Bok,
and their respective wives!
When the colonel sent his last article in the series to Bok, he wrote:
"Now that the work is over, I wish most cordially to thank you, my dear
fellow, for your unvarying courtesy and kindness. I have not been
satisfied with my work. This is the first time I ever tried to write
precisely to order, and I am not one of those gifted men who can do so
to advantage. Generally I find that the 3,000 words is not the right
length and that I wish to use 2,000 or 4,000! And in consequence feel as
if I had either padded or mutilated the article. And I am not always
able to feel that every month I have something worth saying on a given
subject.
"But I hope that you have not been too much disappointed."
Bok had not been, and neither had his public!
In the meanwhile, Bok had arranged with Colonel Roosevelt for his
reading and advising upon manuscripts of special significance for the
magazine. In this work, Colonel Roosevelt showed his customary
promptness and thoroughness. A manuscript, no matter how long it might
be, was in his hands scarcely forty-eight hours, more generally
twenty-four, before it was read, a report thereon written, and the
article on its way back. His reports were always comprehensive and
invariably interesting. There was none of the cut-and-dried flavor of
the opinion of the average "reader"; he always put himself into the
report, and, of course, that meant a warm personal touch. If he could
not encourage the publication of a manuscript, his reasons were always
fully given, and invariably without personal bias.
On one occasion Bok sent him a manuscript which he was sure was, in its
views, at variance with the colonel's beliefs. The colonel, he knew,
felt strongly on the subject, and Bok wondered what would be his
criticism. The report came back promptly. He reviewed the article
carefully and ended: "Of course, this is all at variance with my own
views. I believe thoroughly and completely that this writer is all
wrong. And yet, from his side of the case, I am free to say that he
makes out the best case I have read anywhere. I think a magazine should
present both sides of all questions; and if you want to present this
side, I should strongly recommend that you do so with this article."