Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [97]
By 1927 the New Yorker was beginning to flourish. Vanity Fair featured Ross in its Hall of Fame for the year: “and finally because he is now editor-in-chief of The New Yorker.” The British journalist Beverley Nichols, sent to New York in 1928 to model the American Sketch in the New Yorker’s image, said Ross was producing a “high-powered, streamlined little magazine” that impressed its rivals—namely Nichols’s publisher, George Doran. That year, for the first time, the New Yorker turned a profit. Not only had it survived but it had thrived, and would continue to do so. Today, in much the same form as Ross first imagined it, his creation continues to disregard the old lady of Dubuque. Somebody once asked James Thurber whether he thought the New Yorker had succeeded “because, or in spite of, Harold Ross?” His answer was that the magazine had been “created out of the friction between Ross Positive and Ross Negative.”
By the time the New Yorker had rounded the corner, the heyday of the Round Table was over. Most of the regulars had moved on, going to Hollywood to write for the movies or producing their own plays on Broadway rather than merely reviewing them. Ross and Jane Grant’s marriage broke up and they sold the house in Hell’s Kitchen.
Harold Ross, who would marry twice more, never found a greater passion than the New Yorker. Every apartment he lived in became an extension of his office until, appropriately, he moved into the Algonquin just before he died in 1951—having edited every single edition of the New Yorker up until that point. Incurably restless to the end, it was said that after he died a fat envelope marked “Getaway Money” was found in his safety deposit box.
Celebrated lawyer Clarence Darrow, in suspenders, leaning on the desk in front of his defense team in Dayton, Tennessee, July 1925. The defendant, science teacher John Scopes, is in a white shirt with his elbows on the desk.
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“YES, WE HAVE NO BANANAS TODAY”
IS POSSIBLE THAT THE PLACE IN AMERICA LEAST PREPARED TO welcome journalists of the stamp of Harold Ross and his wearily sophisticated writers was the small mountain town of Dayton, Tennessee, population 1,800. But in the summer of 1925, according to the journalist Joseph Wood Krutch, Dayton was “selected as the site of an Armageddon.” Over two hundred eager reporters, one from as far away as London, moved into this pious, provincial town to chronicle a great clash between the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism.
In the 1920s the Deep South was dominated by evangelical Protestant fundamentalism which taught a literal acceptance of the Scriptures. If one could not believe that Christ actually rose from the dead, ministers argued, then one could not believe a word of what He said. Fundamentalists celebrated ignorance, preaching that simple faith was more important than all the learning in the world. Books, apart from the Bible, were violently mistrusted. If their contents were true, then they should already be in the Bible; if false, then reading them would imperil the soul. One Georgia assemblyman said that a man needed only three books: the Bible, as a guide to behavior; the hymn book, for poetry; and the almanac, to predict the weather.
This return to the source was, like the revival of the Ku Klux Klan (which exploited fundamentalists in its recruiting process), a howl of protest against the forces of modernity sweeping the United States—urbanization, industry, immigration, technology, immorality. Anyone who dissented from their view of the universe was by definition a sinner, a heretic and an enemy. “The modernist juggles the Scripture statements of