The Common Touch
(See Cover)
It is read in foxholes in Korea, in the cockpits of transatlantic planes, by Swedish farmers, Brazilian housewives, Japanese coal miners, Igorots in G strings.
The Reader's Digest is one of the greatest success stories in the history of journalism. It is also a unique proof that circulation alone can turn the trick, with no help from advertising revenue. In its 30 progressively successful years, the Digest has run not one line of paid advertising in its domestic edition (9,500,000 copies). This year the Digest should gross between $25 and $30 million, and net about $1,500,000.
The Digest's world circulation is now 15,500,000.
In France and Belgium, the Selection du Reader's Digest is the biggest (936,070) of all monthlies. In Sweden, Det Baesta ur Readers Digest (circ. 268,184) is the biggest monthly, as Selezione dal Reader's Digest is in Italy and Valitut Palat koon-nut Reader's Digest is in Finland. The Portuguese-and Spanish-language Digests are tops all over the continent of South America; the Japanese edition is now 651,000. The Digest is printed in eleven languages, read in 58 nations. In the U.S., 31,000 U.S. blind read it in Braille or hear it on Talking Book editions.
And the Digest is still growing. This week it added a 59th nation to its list, when Spain agreed to let in 20,000 copies a month of Selecciones, the Digest's Spanish-language edition. The magazine hopes for approval soon on its application to the Spanish government to print in Spain and step up circulation. Plans are afoot to start editions in The Netherlands and India.
By world circulation standards, DeWitt Wallace, the Digest's founder, owner and boss, is the most successful editor in history. Wallace and his wife, Lila Bell Wallace, the Digest's co-editor, between them seem to have discovered a magic formula. What is it?
The Formula. Wally ("I gave him that name," says Lila Bell, "and allow others to use it") claims that there is no hard & fast recipe. Says he: "I simply hunt for things that interest me, and if they do, I print them." One of his frequent contributors, Author Louis Bromfield, puts it differently. He thinks the magazine's main appeal is to "intellectual mediocrity" and that Wallace's own "strictly average" mind "completely reflects the mentality of his readers," who like the Digest because "it requires no thought or perception."
The formula has changed somewhat over the years, but it is still essentially the one Wallace hit on in 1920; simplified, condensed articles, most of them striking a note of hope, the whole interspersed with pifhy saws or chuckly items. It tries to minimize the negative and accentuate the positive. The Digest has always been careful not to burden its readers with somber or brain-taxing articles. But the Digest is no longer really a digest. More than half its articles now are written by Digest authors; some of these are "planted" in other magazines so that the Digest can later "reprint" them. Overall, the Digest leans heavily on the chatty, the cheerful and what it considers the spiritual side of life. Since both Wallaces are the children of Presbyterian preachers, this homiletic flavor is not surprising. But Wallace, who likes certain kinds of jokes, adds spice to the bland mixture (e.g., December's roundup of unintentional double-entendres on double-feature movie marquees: We Want a Child and Things Happen at Night; Groom Wore Spurs and Woman on the Run).
In the Digest's world, things are usually getting better, faith moves mountains, prayer can cure cancer and poverty holds hidden blessings ("Innumerable poor wretches," said an early Digest article, "have nothing but money"). The Digest keeps a hopeful eye peeled for new miracle drugs, and regards old age as nothing more than a state of mind. Even death is not fearsome ("It is not unpleasant to die"). It is a world of plants that act like animals ("Some Remarkable Carnivorous Plants"), animals that think and act like humans ("Seeing Ourselves in Our Dogs"), and humans who often seem more like saints ("God's Eager Fool," Dr. Albert Schweitzer). "The Most Unforgettable Character I've Met," one of the Digest's most popular features, often tells about people dedicated to helping others. The wonders of nature are inexhaustible ("If there were but one sunrise in every century, all beds would be empty"), sermons are found in stones, and birds are God's own choir. Digest readers are left with a warm feeling about themselves, about life, and about the Digest.
The Formula Makers. The magazine's own most Unforgettable Characters are DeWitt, 62, and Lila Bell Wallace, 61. A perfect team, each complements the other: Wally is tall (6 ft. 1 in.), Lila Bell is small (5 ft. 3 in.); he is bony, angular and shy; she is dainty, cheerful and forthright. He is a worrier, torn by inner doubts and subject to spells of melancholy; she is self-possessed and an optimist to the bone. He calls her his "pillar of strength," and cannot talk for long without praising "that incredible and wonderful woman." "He always expects the best of everyone," she says. "Even when they do him an ill turn, he doesn't remember it. But I have a memory like an elephant." As one intimate described them: "Wally is the genius, all right, but Lila unwrapped him."
William Roy DeWitt Wallace was born, amid genteel poverty, at tiny Macalester College, near St. Paul, where his father, Dr. James Wallace, was teaching. He became president when DeWitt was six. Dr. Wallace, a Presbyterian preacher and a Greek scholar, raised five children on his $1,500-a-year salary. He did it in the stern fashion of his own boyhood, when he was nourished (as he later wrote) on "cornmeal mush, buckwheat cakes . . . family worship morning and evening, the shorter catechism and two long services on Sunday, rain or shine." DeWitt, the second youngest, rebelled against this regime. An indifferent student, he preferred baseball and pranks (when a cow was found in a third-floor chapel, DeWitt was suspected).
After his sophomore year at Macalester College, he wanted a change of air, and left to attend the University of California. There he enrolled again as a freshman, because "the freshman year is more fun."
During the Christmas holidays of 1911 an old friend from Macalester, Barclay Acheson, took DeWitt home with him to Tacoma, Wash. DeWitt was much taken with Barclay's sister Lila, but she was already engaged.
The Great Idea. The next year DeWitt dropped out of college and went back to St. Paul, where his father got him a job writing promotion circulars for a farm-book publisher. DeWitt soon quit and got up a book of his own (a guide to all the free pamphlets on farming, briefly "digesting" the subjects of each). He hitchhiked through the West trying to sell it to banks and department stores. He barely broke even, but it started him thinking about a digest of business articles for businessmen. One night, after working in a Montana hayfield, he was trying to sleep in a bunkhouse when the great idea came to him. Why not "a general digest of the best magazine articles?"
Before he could do much about his great idea World War I began. Wallace enlisted, and fought in France as a sergeant in the 35th Division. In the Verdun offensive in 1918, he was hit by four pieces of shrapnel (one piece worked out of his nose only last year), and spent four months in the hospital. While he was convalescing, he tried his hand at condensing magazine articles and found that it was easy.
Back in St. Paul, he spent six months in the public library, reading magazines, some of them ten years old, condensing and copying articles by hand. In January 1920, he printed up "31 articles of enduring value and interest" in 200 copies of a pocket-sized sample magazine. He called it the Reader's Digest. He mailed copies to a dozen Manhattan publishers and others he hoped might back the magazine. Luckily for him, all of them turned it down. Wallace says he undoubtedly would have "given it away" to anybody who would have made him editor.
He had another bit of luck. In St. Paul, he ran across his old friend Barclay Acheson, now a Presbyterian minister, and learned that Lila Bell had not married after all. During the war she began doing morale and recreation work for women factory workers, and was still doing it. Elated, Wallace sent her a telegram: CONDITIONS AMONG WOMEN WORKERS IN ST. PAUL GHASTLY STOP URGE, IMMEDIATE INVESTIGATION. A week later, as luck would have it, Lila was temporarily assigned to St. Paul, and Wallace saw her again for the first time in eight years. On the first night, Wallace proposed to her; on the second, she accepted; then he bashfully showed her a copy of the Digest. "I knew right away," she recalls, "that it was a gorgeous idea." But they had no money to start the Digest or marriage. Lila went back to her welfare work in New York, and Wallace to Pittsburgh to write promotion copy for Westinghouse. Not long after, Wallace was fired.
It was now or never. With $4,000 borrowed from his father and brothers, Wallace mailed out thousands of subscription appeals for the Reader's Digest, "The Little Magazine." Then he rejoined Lila, and in the tree-grown suburb of Pleasantville, N.Y., 31 miles north of Times Square, they were married by Barclay Acheson. They rented a Greenwich Village apartment, took time out for a two-week honeymoon in the Poconos. When they returned they found 1,500 letters, each with $3 enclosed. Says Lila: "I was enthralled that so many had answered. He was disappointed because everybody hadn't."
Under the Speakeasy. The first issue was no problem. Wallace had a lot of articles ready, in his 1920 sample ("Useful Points in Judging People," "The Firefly's Light," "Is the Stage Too Vulgar?" "Whatever Is New for Women Is Wrong") and in the stockpile he had condensed in St. Paul; the rest he got from magazines in Manhattan's Public Library. When he visited editors to ask permission to reprint articles, Wallace was so shy that he sometimes took Lila along. Editors readily gave him permission to reprint especially as Wallace assured them that the Digest would carry no ads, would therefore be no competition that way.
Since Wallace believed that the magazine's principal appeal would be to women, he headed the list of editors with "Lila Bell Acheson," and added, along with his own, the names of two women who had nothing to do with the magazine. For an office, he rented a basement room under a speakeasy at 1 Minetta Lane, in Greenwich Village. When the first issue of 5,000 copies arrived from the Pittsburgh printer, Wallace hired barflies from the speakeasy to help him and Lila wrap and address them. They piled the mail sacks into a taxicab, took them to the post office, then stopped in a cafe to toast the future.
The future was on them before they knew it. The mail poured in from subscribers, bringing ecstatic testimonials. Wrote "L.M.W." from Pennsylvania: "Its contents seem like nuggets of gold." "The Reader's Digest," announced Editor Lila Bell Acheson in the second issue, "is successful beyond all anticipations." The fifth month brought a crisis; the Digest couldn't pay the printer, and Wallace was plunged in gloom. At first Lila was crushed by these moods, which would "just descend on him like a black cloud. It was all new to me--it just isn't in my nature to worry. Then I realized he liked to worry, so I started kidding him out of it." Another flood of subscriptions ended the crisis.
In the Pony Shed. After that hot, sticky summer, remembering the shady trees of Pleasantville, they decided to move there. They found a $25-a-month "studio"--a single room above Manhattan Public Relations Man. Pendleton Dudley's garage--and used it as a bedroom, sitting room and office. The Wallaces cooked on a two-burner gas stove in the corner, washed in a stall shower in the garage below.
When Wallace bought a huge old desk and moved it--with a secretary--into their already cramped quarters, Lila rented an empty pony shed next to the garage for $10 a month, and turned it into the Digest's office. When Ralph Henderson, a jungle-born son of missionaries, dropped in from nearby White Plains to see what the little magazine was like, the Wallaces hired him as business manager, soon made him an editor. They later hired Harold Lynch, an assistant Episcopal rector, to handle the money. The Digest soon outgrew the pony shed, and spread all over Pleasantville. The mail got so heavy that the town had to have a bigger post office. By 1929 the seven-year-old Digest had 216,190 subscribers and was grossing more than $600,000.
On the Way. Yet Wallace was still haunted by fears of failure. He had taken great pains to keep the Digest's growth a secret,* and had kept the magazine off newsstands, for fear of attracting imitators. He was also afraid that other magazines would stop letting him reprint articles, and that someone else would beat him at his own game. Some of these fears were justified. When Wallace started to make so much money that he began to pay for the articles he reprinted, the other editors woke up to the Digest's size. They started to talk about refusing reprint privileges. Wallace soothed the grumbling magazines by agreeing to pay fat annual fees for reprint rights, in addition to paying for each article used. Imitators of the Digest sprang up by the score--many to wither after one season.
The fear of being boycotted by his source-magazines continued to haunt Wallace. If such a boycott were made, it would put him out of business overnight. In 1933, he decided on a drastic change in the Digest: it would start publishing its own original articles. There was another reason besides insurance against boycott. Says Editor Wallace: "We simply couldn't find enough articles of lasting interest and wide enough variety to fill the magazine."
Wallace thought up ideas for the articles he wanted, and hired free-lance writers to turn them out. Soon he made some of them Roving Editors and paid them annual retainers just to get first crack at their work. To keep up the illusion that the Digest was a digest, Wallace started giving articles to other magazines, then "condensing" and reprinting them. Big, successful magazines had no need for Digest articles, but struggling, small magazines were glad to get stories by authors they could not afford.
The fact that the Digest had become a competitor in the writers' market went almost unnoticed by other magazines--until 1935. Then Wallace had J. C. Furnas write an article, "--And Sudden Death," about traffic accidents. It became a sensation : hundreds of newspapers reprinted it, radio stations dramatized it, judges read it to traffic offenders or made them copy it. Fellow editors who had regarded Wallace as only a scissors & paste man began to change their minds. They began to realize that he had an extraordinarily common touch--a feeling for what the reading public wanted and how they wanted it.
The tangible evidence to this fact piled up rapidly. In the four years after Wallace had started to print original articles, Digest circulation shot from 449,666 to 2,469,527, a fantastic climb in a depression. By 1939, the Digest had outgrown all the vacant offices in Pleasantville. Wallace built a $1,500,000 red brick Georgian headquarters near Chappaqua, a few miles north of Pleasantville. But he kept the old mail address; Pleasantville sounded more like the Digest's right address;
Snug Harbor. As the magazine grew, it no longer hired everybody who stuck his head in the door. Wallace even took on some professionals. Some of them are ex-editors of magazines which Wallace had once "digested," and which later died. Kenneth W. Payne came from the North American Review, at 61 is now executive editor of the Digest. The managing editor, Alfred S. ("Fritz") Dashiell, came from Scribner's. After the Review of Reviews and the Literary Digest folded, Howard ("Skipper") Florance, who had edited both, came over; as senior editor, he now runs the "planting" of Digest-originated articles in other magazines. Other ex-editors who joined Wallace: Business Week's Marc Rose, American Mercury's Paul Palmer, American's Merle Crowell, Liberty's Fulton Oursler.
But the Digest's business affairs meandered along until 1939. Then Albert L. Cole, publisher of Popular Science, came on as full-time general business manager. He had been advising Wallace for seven years, and had put over the Digest on the newsstands. Now, he blueprinted the plan for worldwide expansion. In World War II, as a cheerful miniature of the home front, the Digest was so eagerly bought by soldiers that circulation jumped from under 4,000,000 to more than 9,000,000. With the blessings and assistance of the Federal Government on priorities, paper, etc., Cole expanded the overseas editions, which began with the British (1938) and the Spanish-language (1940). The foreign Digests broke the long-standing rule against running ads; they took them to bring the price of the magazine down to within reach of its foreign readers.
Barclay Acheson, who had joined the Digest in 1935 after making a name in foreign-relief work, runs the international editions. The foreign editors can publish only articles already run in the domestic Digest, although they can dig back as far as they like (the Japanese edition recently ran Dale Carnegie's 14-year-old How to Win Friends and Influence People). If the overseas editors think a piece isn't suitable for their country they can leave it out (e.g., in Italy, an article on birth control; in Sweden, where it is old-hat, an article on social security). But occasionally Chappaqua will order an article run anyway. When the Italian editor rejected a piece on fence-painting because Italians don't paint their own fences, Chappaqua reversed him, saying, "Well, they could start."
A big problem is translating U.S. idiom. Maurice Chevalier, hired by the Paris editor to translate Billy Rose's Broadwayese, turned "It was a cinch bet" into "C'elait du nougat" (It was candy). Another less gifted translator turned "guts" into "gizzard." "How," asked one bewildered translator, "can you expect a Frenchman to understand that 'lower the boom' means unleash heavy fire--or does it?"
Organized Chaos. The Digest still operates in what one senior editor calls "organized chaos." Says another staffer: "It's the most disorganized magazine in the world. Wally started this little magazine with his wife, hoping to make $5,000 a year, with both of them working like hell. Then--bang, look at it now! It grew up disorganized, and they said, 'Let's not change it, it might break the spell. If the black canary is hanging upside down, let him stay.'"
Nobody can draw an exact chart of command, because there isn't any. Wallace is the top boss, but there are many other bosses. One Rover may report--i.e., take his article ideas--to Ken Payne, another to Dashiell, while others (e.g., William Hard, Stanley High) report directly to Wallace. Senior Editor George Grant and his staff handle the reading of some 300 magazines, pick likely stories, and do the preliminary cutting. But any one of the top editors may "spot" and "cut" an article on his own.
All the articles are sent along through their line of offices, called Murderers' Row, where any one of them may take another whack at the stories, and Wallace, "the best cutter of us all," may whack them still more. Senior Editors Marc Rose and Bill Hard Jr. take turns at dummying up a tentative issue. But a day or two before the deadline, Wallace may toss out a third of it and put in something else. He makes the final decisions, when he is at Chappaqua. But he is often away: he and Lila may pick up suddenly and go off on a three months' trip to Honolulu or Pago Pago, and no one will hear from him until he walks back into the office.
Upset Apple Cart. Wallace, as his wife says, "likes to upset the apple cart." He periodically rejiggers the masthead, rearranging the Rovers' names according to their performance. He does not like too many hard & fast rules, and he does like to keep everybody guessing.
Despite the missionary flavor of his magazine, Wallace does not go to church. Despite his famous anti-cigarette crusades ("One cigarette," quoted the first Digest, "will kill a cat"), he smokes steadily. He also likes to drink, and regularly used to sit up all night playing poker. He learned to fly his own plane, and, until the Army commandeered it during World War II, liked to scare Lila by buzzing their house. He drives his car so recklessly that few who know him will ride with him. He still likes to play pranks. Once, on his way to a Halloween party, he sent word that he had been hurt in an auto accident. Then he tottered in, in Mercurochrome-splashed bandages. On another occasion, calling on a Digest editor to meet his new bride, Wallace broke the ice by starting a game of leapfrog with her on the lawn.
He is not an expansive man; he does more listening than talking, and when he does talk, it's short and to the point. He is the boss but not the tyrant of the Digest. Says one of his senior editors: "Several of us don't hesitate to argue with him." Managing Editor Dashiell helped organize a chapter of the Americans for Democratic Action, which the Digest has attacked as the advance-guard of Communism. An unpretentious man, Wallace not only answers his own office phone (Chappaqua 1-0400), but may chat with a subscriber complaining that he missed an issue.
Wallace does much of his work at night at High Winds, the five-bedroom, castle-like stone house he and Lila built on a bluff above a small lake five miles from the Digest. They have little social life outside occasional cocktail parties for the staff. In the evening, after dinner, they like to dance for 15 minutes in their rumpus room.
Then, while Lila reads, Wallace walks up a winding staircase to his medieval-tower workroom. Beneath its hewn beams, soothed by soft music piped in from a control-panel below, he works, usually till midnight, at the sprawling mountain of manuscripts piled on his desk. Memos have been known to molder in the pile for years, before Wallace got around to scrawling in the margin: "Sure. Go ahead. Wally." But the stuff he regards as important does not linger there long. Next morning, Wallace loads his completed work into his briefcase and careens off to the office in his battered old 1941 Chevrolet.
Winged Horse. Lila Wallace no longer does much editing, although if Wallace is unsure of a manuscript he may ask her to read it. But the traces of her hand are all over the Digest offices. She planned their decoration and amenities herself: soft pink and green pastel walls, patterned linen draperies, 18th-Century Georgian tables and leather-topped desks, fresh-cut flowers changed twice a week, music piped in for 15 minutes of every hour, a cafeteria with low-priced good food. (There used to be a free mid-morning snack of milk and vitamin-enriched peanut-butter sandwiches, but the staff began to look like sofas.) On the walls of individual offices, and in the corridors, hang paintings by such modern masters as Renoir, Braque and Chagall. "My God!" cried an astounded visitor. "Is this a place of business or a girls' seminary?"
Lila also suggested the four green, winged horses which adorn the Digest building's 32-ft. white cupola and have since become the Digest emblem. "It was a happy thought," says Lila, "because according to the myth, when Pegasus stamps his little feet, writers get their inspiration."
But writers and editors of the Digest get their inspiration from something more tangible than Pegasus. Rovers may get $10,000 to $20,000 a year as a salary, plus a minimum of $1,200 for each article published, plus bonuses. Wallace encourages them to travel wherever they fancy, at the Digest's expense. When Roving Editor Lois Mattox Miller asked Wallace if she might take a trip to Georgia, he said: "What are you asking me for? You can go anywhere in the world." Now Mrs. Miller seems to feel she is cheating the Digest if she doesn't go to Europe at least once a year. A stock Digest joke has four Rovers meeting in the middle of the Sahara, and finding that they are all on the same story. Along with bonuses, Wally sends his editors and Rovers warm notes of praise. An "especially fine job of cutting" may bring his note that an editor "deserves the Distinguished Service Medal." Especially pleased with Rover Miller, author of an article on needless tonsillectomies, he wrote her: "If you ever have your tonsils taken out, can I have them in a bottle to keep on my dresser? I could even love them after your latest wonderful article."
Clutched Hands. Wallace pays outsiders well also. For every article digested, he pays the writer a minimum of $200 per Digest page; the magazine may get $800 a page. The Digest's senior editors reportedly get anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 a. year, and sometimes half as much again in bonuses. Salaries and bonuses vary widely. Wallace keeps his staff guessing on their pay. One year Executive
Editor Payne drew a salary of $34,400 and a bonus of $87,600; in a later year, he got a salary of $84,500 but no bonus. In one year Al Cole got a salary of $99,500, two years later got $84,500. Wallace has paid himself a salary of $99,500 in some years, in other years didn't get enough to be listed on the Treasury's $75,000-plus list (Lila never has drawn enough to get listed). All the Digest's 1,060 regular employees are covered by a liberal pension plan, and by life-insurance policies.
Few are fired from the Digest. One man in the London office was reluctantly let go only after he had failed to show up for eight weeks. The Wallaces, being childless, have no desire to accumulate great wealth. "The dead," Wallace is fond of saying, "carry with them to the grave in their clutched hands only that which they have given away." His father lived to be 90, and at 62, Wallace is going strong. But in preparation for the day their turn comes, he and Lila are gradually turning over their stock to a charitable foundation which may run the Digest.
Plus or Minus? What is the journalistic reckoning on Wallace?
Numerous sins, of commission and omission, have been charged against him. Doctors have criticized him for leaping too hastily into print with Paul de Kruif's overenthusiastic articles about short-lived "wonder" cures.* The Digest has offset that criticism lately by getting its medical articles printed in medical journals first. On broader questions, like politics, Wallace thinks of himself as "left of center"; he says most people are middle-of-the-roaders. But most middle-readers would consider him well right of center. Not a deep or profound thinker, Wallace sometimes originates and runs glib, superficial articles on U.S. and world problems which other top editors would wastebasket. He thinks the Democrats' "Big Government" is dangerous, but admits he would probably be critical of the Government no matter which party was in power. In the main, his political outlook seems to be colored by a nostalgic yearning for the less complicated days of his boyhood, when every man could become his own master without help or hindrance from the Government.
Wallace tries to make the Digest simple enough for almost anybody to understand. But in making reading painless, he sometimes oversimplifies complex questions to the point of absurdity. The average man shouldn't think the subject of inflation is complicated, said the Digest recently. "The core of the matter is within the grasp of anyone who can balance a checkbook or play bridge." The dangers 'in this kind of primer-reading, as Harvard's Howard Mumford Jones points out, is that "children get to thinking that everything should have the same order of clarity. When they come up against something that is difficult they don't know what to do."
No one can measure the influence the Digest has had on its readers, but it has certainly been considerable. It has also had a marked influence on other U.S. magazines--and, through them, on U.S. education. Thanks largely to the Digest's successful example, nonfiction articles now play a dominant role in U.S. magazines. Thus Wallace has lured many people to read about serious topics, and in this sense, has helped raise the reading level of America.
He may even succeed in getting more Americans to read books--in abridged form. Recently he started publishing quarterly books, each consisting of four or five outstanding books, predominantly fiction, condensed into a single volume. The last one sold 460,000 copies, much greater than the usual sale of a Book-of-the-Month-Club book.
In the long run, Wallace's greatest contribution to the nation may be found in the cumulative effect of his overseas editions. Invariably, his readership surveys show that articles which U.S. readers like rate equally high with readers everywhere. The Digest's articles--depicting the innate decency, kindness and simple virtues of ordinary Americans, the triumphs of a George Carver or a Helen Keller--have probably done more than all the Government propagandists combined to allay the fears, prejudices and misconceptions of the U.S. in other lands. As one French Digest fan said last week: "We have discovered that Americans are just like other people."
Insofar as they are "just like other people," the Digest is doing a worldwide educational job of telling the truth about Americans. Is it the whole truth? The Digest tells the world that Americans are optimists who believe that happiness, as well as success, can not only be pursued but captured. If the whole truth is deeper and more difficult, the Digest has no concern with that.
* Ken Payne, Marc Rose, Ralph Henderson, Mrs. Wallace, Paul Palmer, Wallace, Fritz Dashiell. * The Digest did not have to publish circulation figures, since it carried no ads. * Some Digest believers got sore feet after trying a De Kruif cure for athlete's foot.
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