An Editor's Creed

by FREDERICK LEWIS ALLEN

ON an occasion like this, the target for all these rhetorical posies can’t help looking back and wondering what he thinks he’s been doing through all these thirty years of work on one magazine, and why he liked doing it, and what he thinks he has been contributing to the gaiety of nations by reading hundreds of thousands of manuscripts and spending tens of thousands of hours talking to authors and revising their stuff, and reading mile upon mile of proof.

It’s easy enough, to begin with, to acknowledge my debts. First, to Ellery Sedgwick, who in my first magazine job, on the Atlantic Monthly, taught me so much about editing that sometimes I feel that everything I’ve done since then might be described as variations on a theme by Sedgwick.

Second, to Tom Wells and Lee Hartman, my predecessors at Harper’s, wise guides and counselors, who knew when to give a junior his head and when to rein him in. And to Virginia Watson, that exacting and indomitable champion of good writing.

Third, to my individually and collectively brilliant colleagues on the magazine — Russell Lynes, Katherine Gauss Jackson, Eric Larrabee, Catharine Meyer, Anne Goodman Freedgood, John Kouwenhoven, and of course Jack Fischer—for the inspiring way in which they have worked together as a productive team, in complete candor, mutual trust, and devotion to our common purpose.

And finally to the management of Harper & Brothers — the only book publishing house which still publishes a general magazine — and especially to Cass Canfield, for setting a model of financial supervision and all-round counsel without the least interference with editorial freedom.

What have we all been aiming at, and why? However you look at Harper’s Magazine, it certainly has at least three marked characteristics. One is that it does not specialize: for it combines the publication of news — in the wide and long-range sense — and of ideas on public affairs, international affairs, education, science, personal and family life, and practically everything else under the sun, with the publication of fiction, reflective essays, and verse.

Another characteristic is that Harper's is not edited for any hypothetical mass audience, but for readers whom we assume to be at least as bright as ourselves, as wide-ranging in their curiosity, as sensitive to good writing, and as willing to go through pretty difficult reading assignments, on occasion, to get at some complex of fact or some nugget of thought that we believe can be reached in no other way. And the third characteristic is that it offers a medium for a variety of opinions, and revels in that fact.

There are many sorts of magazine journalism today in the United States. I should like to pay humble tribute to the way in which the best of the mass-circulation magazines have lifted their standards during the past generation; to their salutary over-all influence in hastening the American approach to a classless society; and to the frequency with which their editors put into print material which in an earlier time would have been considered over the heads of their readers. I marvel, too, at the best of the staff-written magazines, whose organized coverage of the course of human events is so thorough, and so expert, that reading them often makes the rest of us feel like ill-informed amateurs. And then there are the specialized magazines in all their bewildering variety — shelter magazines, fashion magazines, age-group magazines, trade and technical and hobby magazines, magazines dedicated to this or that cause — some of them splendid in appearance, and many of them extraordinarily useful in broadening and deepening the special knowledge and equipment of their readers. What room is left in this variegated picture for the peculiar sort of general, nonspecialized, limited-audience, contributor-written journalism that Harper’s represents?

Well, sometimes we get a manuscript at 49 East 33rd Street which puts forth new ideas about the national economy, or about American policy toward Germany, or about the place of science in our lives, or what not, and the author says to us, in effect: “If you don’t publish this manuscript, who will? It’s probably too highbrow for this magazine, too contentious for that; it won’t fit the strict editorial policy of this or suit the special concerns of that; and it bears no wellknown name to make it palatable to another. My only chance would seem to be with Harper’s, or maybe the Atlantic—unless it’s to go to some somber and little-read review.” That’s the sort of remark that makes me realize all over again why we believe in what we are trying to do: to facilitate a lively traffic in ideas; in an age of conformity, to welcome satire and dissent, without ever embracing dissent as a form of counterconformity; in an age of orthodoxies, to invite unorthodoxies; in the congress of opinions, to offer a hearing not only to the yeses and the noes, but to the yes-buts and the no-buts, and even to those who say that the whole discussion is proceeding on the wrong premises; in short, to nourish, in the realm of ideas, that inventive and fruitful diversity which in the realm of practical affairs is already the peculiar genius of America. For this kind of journalism there is very ample room in the country today. And if America is to set the mark which now appears to be within its possible reach, not only in material progress and economic health, but in cultural and spiritual enrichment, the job must not be left undone.

I think it’s the realization that what we have been doing — however fumblingly and inexpertly — is well worth doing, that has given us the wallop that we at Harper’s have got out of our daily chores on the magazine. I am confident that my successors will hold fast in this faith and in these changing times will find new ways of making their service of it effective. Not only that; I hope, too, that they will never lack for rivals in the business of looking for fresh ways of leavening Western thought. For I am sure that whoever serves our American diversity serves both the republic and the cause of freedom.