Read One Summer: America, 1927 for Free Online Page A

young members of the Chicago Tribune publishing family, Robert R. McCormick and his cousin Joseph Patterson, saw London’s Daily Mirror while serving in England during the First World War and decided to offer something similar at home whenpeace came. The result was the Illustrated Daily News , launched in New York in June 1919, price 2 cents. The concept was not an immediate hit – circulation at one point fell to 11,000 – but gradually the Daily News built a devoted following and by the mid-twenties it was far and away the best-selling newspaper in the country with a circulation of one million, more than double that of the New York Times .
    Such success inevitably inspired imitators. First came the New York Daily Mirror from William Randolph Hearst in June 1924, followed three months later by the wondrously dreadful Evening Graphic . The Graphic was the creation of an eccentric, bushy-haired businessman named Bernarr Macfadden, who had started life rather more prosaically some fifty years earlier as a Missouri farm boy named Bernard MacFadden. Macfadden, as he now styled himself, was a man of strong and exotic beliefs. He didn’t like doctors, lawyers or clothing. He was powerfully devoted to body-building, vegetarianism, the rights of commuters to a decent railroad service, and getting naked. He and his wife frequently bemused their neighbours in Englewood, New Jersey – among them Dwight Morrow, a figure of some centrality to this story, as will become apparent – by exercising naked on the lawn. Macfadden’s commitment to healthfulness was so total that when one of his daughters died of a heart condition he remarked: ‘It’s better she’s gone. She’d only have disgraced me.’ Well into his eighties he could be seen walking around Manhattan carrying a 40-pound bag of sand on his back as a way of keeping fit. He lived to be eighty-seven.
    As a businessman, he seems to have dedicated his life to the proposition that where selling to the public is concerned no idea is too stupid. He built three separate fortunes. The first was as the inventor of a cult science he called Physcultopathy, which featured strict adherence to his principles of vegetarianism and strength through body-building, with forays into nakedness for those who dared. The movement produced a chain of successful health farms and related publications. In 1919, as an outgrowth of the latter,Macfadden came up with an even more inspired invention: the confession magazine. True Story , the flagship of this side of his operations, soon had monthly sales of 2.2 million. All the stories in True Story were candid and juicy, with ‘a yeasty undercurrent of sexual excitation’, in the words of one satisfied observer. It was Macfadden’s proud boast that not a word in True Story was fabricated. This claim caused Macfadden a certain amount of financial discomfort when a piece in 1927 called ‘The Revealing Kiss’, set in Scranton, Pennsylvania, turned out, by unfortunate chance, to contain the names of eight respectable citizens of that fair city. They sued, and Macfadden was forced to admit that True Story ’s stories were not in fact true at all and never had been.
    When tabloids became the rage, Macfadden launched the Graphic . Its most distinguishing feature was that it had almost no attachment to truth or even, often, a recognizable reality. It conducted imaginary interviews with people it had not met and ran stories by figures who could not possibly have written them. When Rudolph Valentino died in 1926, it produced a series of articles by him from beyond the grave. The Graphic became famous for a form of illustration of its own invention called the ‘composograph’, in which the faces of newsworthy figures were superimposed on the bodies of models who had been posed on sets to create arresting tableaux. The most celebrated of these visual creations came during annulment proceedings, earlier in 1927, between Edward W. ‘Daddy’ Browning and his