Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [93]
An insatiable national appetite for current events meant that daily papers proliferated as well. Fifty-five publishing chains controlled 230 daily newspapers with a combined circulation of over thirteen million. Although many of these papers were “sex and sensation” tabloids like W. R. Hearst’s Daily Mirror, and most placed as much importance on the twenties obsessions of sports and entertainment as on politics or international affairs, this was a publishing revolution. Increasingly Americans observed events through the media, rather than participating directly in them.
The American Mercury’s ambitious Aesthete was at the heart of this publishing boom. Although not yet thirty, as “Editor-in-Chief, Editor, Managing Editor, Contributing Editor, Bibliographical Editor, or Source Material Editor” of a newspaper or magazine he had “an accredited mouthpiece, a letterhead conferring authority, a secure place from which to bestride the narrow world in which he is already a colossus” and he reveled in his influence and fame.
Mencken himself, the editor who had commissioned Ernest Boyd’s parody of the Aesthete, could not have been further from Boyd’s precious creation. Grinning good-humoredly, Mencken reveled in sending up the pretentious and the sententious—anyone who took themselves too seriously. His Smart Set and, later, American Mercury, attacked what he called “boobus Americanus” and catered for a “civilized minority”: “men and women,” as he jokingly put it, “who had heard of James Joyce, Proust, Cézanne, Jung, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Petronius, Eugene O’Neill, and Eddington; who looked down on the movies but revered Charlie Chaplin as a great artist, could talk about relativity even if they could not understand it, knew a few of the leading complexes by name, collected Early American furniture, had ideas about progressive education, and doubted the divinity of Henry Ford and Calvin Coolidge.” More than any other writer of the day, Mencken swept provincialism and pettiness from America’s literary culture.
Like the poet Langston Hughes, who found inspiration in Harlem street slang and the strains of popular music, Mencken celebrated the vitality of modern American culture. “Nothing could exceed the brilliancy of such inventions as joy-ride, highbrow, road-louse, sob-sister, frame-up, loan-shark, nature-faker, stand-patter, lounge-lizard, has-foundry, buzzwagon, has-been, end-seat-hog, shoot-the-chutes, and grape juice diplomacy,” he wrote admiringly of his countrymen’s newly invented words in The American Language in 1919. “They are bold; they are vivid; they have humor; they meet genuine needs.”
Despite this embarrassment of literary riches, there was still room, according to Howard Ross, a straight-talking young editor and regular at the Round Table, for one more publication. Ross had been dreaming of editing his own magazine since returning from military service in Europe where he had run the U.S. army’s newspaper, Stars and Stripes.
Born in Aspen, Colorado, in 1892, Harold Ross had started his first job on a newspaper at fourteen years old as a stringer for the Salt Lake City Tribune. Over the next nine years he wrote and edited for seven different papers before leaving for France in 1917.
Ross met his future wife, the journalist Jane Grant, in Paris during the winter of 1918-19. Grant took one look at him and “decided he was really the homeliest man I’d ever met—he’d have to be good with that face and figure.” Ross’s fidgety ungainliness did nothing to soften the impression of his huge hands and