Associated Sunday Magazines and the Origins of Every Week
In December 1903, publishing entrepreneur Joseph Palmer Knapp launched the Associated Sunday Magazines (ASM) to produce a Sunday supplement magazine for nine newspapers in major metropolitan centers that were not part of the Hearst or Pulitzer syndicates (these syndicates published their Sunday magazines for distribution by their affiliates). 1 Knapp printed a supplement for each independent newspaper, altering only the title page so that each newspaper could market the content as its own (e.g. The Washington Sunday Star Magazine). In 1906, with several other investors, Knapp acquired the Crowell Publishing Company, becoming a majority shareholder. Although the affiliates in the ASM syndicate changed over time, distribution was primarily in the Northeast, Midatlantic, and Midwest. In 1914, the ASM boasted to potential advertisers that its “cooperatively and simultaneously published Sunday Editions” of twelve Sunday papers in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Washington, Minneapolis, Buffalo, Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Cincinnati was “1,500,000 in round numbers.” 2
Despite this boast, by 1914, ASM was in trouble. World War I began in Europe in 1914, and the cooperative began losing affiliates as a result of the economic and material pressures of the war. Many affiliated papers canceled, and more were planning to exit the syndicate. In response, Knapp “conceived the idea of saving national circulation and the character of the ASM” 3 by launching a new weekly, Every Week Magazine, which would duplicate the contents of the ASM but be distributed through other channels. In 1914, the Crowell Publishing Company hired Bruce Barton, an ambitious 27-year-old Amherst College graduate with experience in publishing, sales, and advertising, to carry out Knapp’s plan. 4 When Every Week finally launched in 1915, the Every Week Corporation, a separate entity, controlled it; in addition to being editor in chief of the magazine, Barton was an officer of the corporation (secretary).
As ASM explained to advertisers in April 1915, despite the loss of traditional affiliates and concomitant decrease in circulation, the launch of Every Week would restore and even increase aggregate circulation. Supplementing ASM’s distribution with Sunday newspapers, Every Week would be distributed: “1. As an independent weekly whose local sale will be supervised and published by important newspapers in various sections of the country….2. By direct sales from news-stands at 3ȼ per copy. 3. By carriers direct to the homes…4. By direct subscription, 52 numbers at $1.00 per year.” The ASM and Every Week, advertisers were assured, “combined will give a complete and thorough national distribution.” 5 Advertisers were given the option of buying space in one or both versions of the magazine. 6 As a result, ASM magazines and Every Week are very similar, but not identical—they sometimes carried different advertisements, necessitating shifts of editorial content within or between issues as space considerations dictated. 7
This digital edition presents the Every Week face of the magazine, the first issue of which appeared on May 3, 1915. By the time of its demise, Every Week claimed circulation of more than 600,000, making it a significant magazine phenomenon of its day. ASM, however, continued to lose affiliates, and by early 1918, the ASM face of the magazine had all but vanished. 8
The Contents of Every Week
Published in a large format with colorful pictures of pretty girls by top illustrators on its front cover, Every Week featured an evolving mix of fiction, advice, commentary, and news items, all with a human interest focus. Advice and commentary filled about one third of the magazine, fiction another third, and photographs and very brief non-fiction items the remaining third.
Regular contributors of advice and commentary included Albert W. Atwood and Burton J. Hendrick. Atwood, who had written for the muckraking McClure’s Magazine (where Managing Editor Edith Lewis had worked), wrote a regular financial advice column. Hendrick, who left a position as a contributing editor at McClure’s in 1913 to become associate editor of The World’s Work, regularly contributed articles analyzing politics, world affairs, economics, and business. Of the editorial staff, Bruce Barton, the Editor in Chief, was the most visible contributor of signed commentary. His editorials were unsigned in 1915, but when he began signing them in 1916, their provocative titles and prominent placement made Barton the public face of the magazine. Fifty of these editorials, which combined Christian moralizing with patriotism, capitalist boosterism, and self-improvement advice, were published in book form in 1917 under the title More Power to You. As Barton proclaimed in his editorial commemorating the magazine’s first anniversary, it sought readers who “as Lincoln did, win their education through their reading. We stand with him—and them—for thrift, for a better national health, for more outdoor living, for better homes, clean amusement, for progress through self-help, for devotion to an ideal” (8 May 1916). He explicitly disavowed any connection to organized movements for reform, however, proclaiming in his editorial marking the magazine’s second anniversary that it sought to “help each reader to institute his own individual millennium in his own life, by making the most of himself” (30 April 1917).
At least one, and sometimes two, lavishly illustrated serial novels ran in each issue, as well as one or more short stories. Every Week fiction leaned heavily towards popular genres, such as Westerns, mysteries, and romances. Most of the contributors were stalwarts of magazine fiction, now forgotten, such as Sewell Ford, Gertrude Brooke Hamilton, Grace Sartwell Mason, Holworthy Hall, Frederick Orin Bartlett, James Oliver Curwood, and Arthur Summers Roche. Ford had been a regular contributor to the Associated Sunday Magazines, and he continued as a regular contributor to Every Week, with his comic tales of the adventures of working-class New York hero “Torchy” appearing in nearly every issue for three years. Every Week also occasionally published fiction by writers whose names continue to appear in literary history, such as Susan Glaspell, Conrad Richter, Sinclair Lewis, Edna Ferber, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Zona Gale, and Christopher Morley. Perhaps the most significant literary work published in Every Week was Glaspell’s story “A Jury of Her Peers” (1917), adapted from her one act play Trifles (1916), about an Iowa farm wife suspected of murdering her husband and the two women who come to understand her motive for the crime while male legal authorities remain baffled.
Captioned photographs and very brief articles were Every Week’s most innovative and popular non-fiction contents. The month-long production lag caused by national distribution (including Sunday supplement distribution with geographically disbursed newspapers) precluded coverage of breaking news. Many newspapers and locally produced Sunday supplements included pages and pages of war photographs and news well before the U.S. entered World War I. Unable to tap into this reader interest, Every Week turned the handicap of a lack of timeliness into a spur for innovation. As editor-in-chief Bruce Barton later recalled, “We had to close so far in advance of publication that it would be impossible for us to use current news pictures. So I invented the picture-caption article in the form of double spread (center) of pictures and long, factual, information, and (often) amusing captions. The picture-caption feature was a big success; as well as the great variety of short material.” 9
The picture-caption section was also called the “rotogravure section” because Every Week used this superior technology for photographic reproduction to print the sheets appearing at the center fold of the magazine. The thematic topics of the this section ranged widely. Another key feature presenting a “great variety of short material” was “The Melting Pot.” This two-page feature first appeared in October 1916 under the descriptive title “Our Own Carnegie Library on These Two Shelves—The New Books and Magazines,” before becoming “So You Have No Time to Read” in November. In April 1917, the title changed to “The Melting Pot: In Which the New Books and Magazines are Boiled Down to Give you Fifteen Minutes of Health, Efficiency, Travel, Biography and Adventure.” The feature continued under this title until Every Week’s demise, expanding with the magazine to encompass war news.
Every Week’s Editorial Staff
Bruce Barton was the only member of the magazine’s editorial staff whose name regularly appeared in the magazine, appended to his editorials inside the front cover. There was no masthead listing other editorial staff and their titles. However, the names and details of the lives of the ever-changing cast of characters who labored anonymously behind the scenes can be traced in the personal papers and published writings of Barton and staff members Brenda Ueland, Freda Kirchwey, and Lella Secor.
Barton, like many of the staff editors and writers who toiled anonymously behind the scenes at Every Week, was a Midwesterner transplanted to New York City, then as now the publishing center of the nation. Three staff members worked as journalists in Minneapolis before joining Every Week, and one in Michigan and Seattle. From his editorial bully pulpit in New York City, Barton became a prominent voice of Middle American values and the capitalist ethos.
Unlike Barton, however, most Every Week staff members became Greenwich Village bohemians, whose lives sometimes contradicted the magazine’s politics and values. They lived in Greenwich Village, wrote plays staged in its little theaters, violated norms of sexual behavior, organized pacifist demonstrations in Washington Square against U.S. involvement in World War I, and joined the feminist luncheon club Heterodoxy. They were also personally connected before they began work on the magazine (they had known each other in college and worked for the same newspapers), and developed additional social connections while working at Every Week that outlasted the magazine.
Bruce Barton (Editor in Chief): Born on August 4, 1886 in Robbins, Tennessee, Barton moved as a child to Oak Park, Illinois, when his father was called as a minister of the First Congregational Church of Oak Park. Barton attended Berea College in Kentucky for a year before transferring to Amherst College, graduating with the class of 1907. After jobs with several short-lived periodicals, he was hired by P. F. Collier & Son, New York publishers, to supervise their national door-to-door sales force. As part of his work there, he devised promotional strategies and wrote advertising copy for the books his salesman peddled. In his free time, he wrote extensively for national magazines, a practice he would continue for the rest of his life. In 1914, the Crowell Publishing Co. hired him to launch Every Week Magazine. When Every Week ceased publication in 1918, Barton supervised publicity for the United War Work Committee. After the Armistice, he and two colleagues from the United War Work Committee, Roy Durstine and Alex Osborn, founded the advertising agency Barton, Durstine, and Osborn, which would later merge with George Batten Company to become Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn (BBDO). Barton authored the phenomenal bestseller The Man Nobody Knows (1925), which portrayed Jesus Christ as a modern business executive and advertising man. He served two terms as a Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives (1937 to 1941), but his 1940 campaign for the U.S. Senate was unsuccessful. He died in New York City in 1967. 10
Edith Lewis (Managing Editor): Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on December 22, 1881, to a transplanted Dartmouth College graduate and lawyer from New Hampshire and an Iowa-born mother from a Rhode Island Quaker family, Lewis earned a year of college credit at the University of Nebraska before transferring to Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, from which she graduated in 1902, with a degree in English. She returned to Nebraska for a year to teach elementary school, but in 1903, she moved to New York City, determined to find a position in publishing. After working several years for the Century Publishing Company, she became an editorial proofreader at McClure’s Magazine in 1906, when her friend Willa Cather became an editor there. 11 In 1908, Cather and Lewis established their first shared residence, an apartment off Washington Square in Greenwich Village. By the time Lewis left McClure’s to take a position at Every Week and Associated Sunday Magazines in 1915, she was acting managing editor of McClure’s. Her first position at Every Week was as assistant managing editor, but by early 1916, she had been promoted to managing editor, the position she held until the magazine’s demise. In 1919, she became an advertising copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson Company, where she worked until her retirement in 1945. 12 She remained an important friend and mentor to younger Every Week staff members, especially Brenda Ueland and John Chapin Mosher. She died August 11, 1972, in New York City in the Park Avenue apartment she and Cather had shared, having survived Cather by twenty-five years and serving as her literary executor.
Other Editorial Staff
John Colton: Born in Minnesota on December 31, 1889, his father’s business took the family to Japan. Around 1911, Colton returned to Minnesota to work as a journalist and drama critic at the Minneapolis Daily News, 13 where Anne Herendeen later became his colleague. He met Brenda Ueland and her family while covering a fundraising party for women’s suffrage held at the Ueland home in August 1912. 14 By early 1916, he moved to New York to join the staff of Every Week. His stint as full-time staff member at Every Week was brief, however. In mid-1916, his National Guard cavalry regiment, Squadron A, was called up during the so-called “Punitive Expedition” against Mexico, and he spent nine months on the border under the command of General John J. Pershing. 15 On his return to New York, Colton became a free-lance contributor to Every Week, publishing two short stories in the magazine, but did not return to a full-time staff position. His poor eyesight exempted him from the draft instituted on the U.S. entry into World War I. In the 1920s, he co-authored the sensational and successful Broadway melodrama Rain (1922) and singly authored another, The Shanghai Gesture (1925) (adapted as a film in 1941). He moved to Hollywood in 1929, where he worked as a screenwriter. 16 He died in Gainesville, Texas, on December 28, 1946.
Anne Herendeen: Born in Geneva, New York, on April 22, 1888, to a wealthy and socially prominent family, Herendeen graduated from Wells College in Aurora, New York, in 1910. 17 Brenda Ueland’s sister Anne was Herendeen’s roommate at Wells, and with the encouragement and support of the Ueland family, Herendeen moved to Minneapolis after college. She cut her teeth as a journalist as a general reporter for the Minneapolis Daily News, where John Colton was the drama critic. 18 When she moved to New York City in 1914, she quickly became involved in feminist social and political circles, joining the famous Greenwich Village feminist luncheon club Heterodoxy 19 and the New York Chapter of the Women’s Peace Party (NYWPP). With Freda Kirchwey, she served as part of the editorial collective for the NYWPP’s short-lived magazine The Four Lights: An Adventure in Internationalism. 20 Herendeen worked at Every Week for its entire three-year run. After Every Week ceased publication, she took a paid position at Everybody’s Magazine for a year. On the side and with aid of Brenda Ueland, Betty Shannon, and others, she produced a short-lived independent feminist magazine, Judy. She married journalist and theater critic Hiram Kelley Moderwell (later spelled Motherwell) on November 15, 1915. 21 In late 1919, she moved to Europe with him when he became a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. Her two children were born in Europe, and she occasionally contributed to U.S. magazines and newspapers while abroad. The family did not return to live in the United States until 1927. On her return to New York, she worked as at temporary employee at the J. Walter Thompson Co. under Edith Lewis, 22 but she struggled to re-establish herself professionally, especially after she and Motherwell divorced in 1936. 23 She remained friends with and corresponded regularly with Brenda Ueland, Freda Kirchwey, Ruth Pickering, and Lella Secor, ghost-writing a book for Pickering’s brother-in-law, Gifford Pinchot, 24 and editing Secor’s book on birth control. 25 Her voluminous correspondence with Bruce Barton, which extends into the 1960s, is an important source of information about the operations and staff of Every Week. Her death date is not known.
Freda Kirchwey: Born in Lake Placid, New York, on September 26, 1893, to a prominent New York City progressive family (her father served as Dean of the Columbia University Law School), Kirchwey graduated from Barnard College, the women’s coordinate college of Columbia, in 1915. 26 She and Brenda Ueland were classmates there. 27 For a year after graduation, she was employed as a journalist by the New York Morning Telegraph. Her quiet civil “marriage by contract” to Evans Clark in 1915, with their agreement specifying that she would maintain her surname rather than take his, became a minor cause célèbre in New York. When Clark lost his faculty position at Princeton because of his socialist leanings and when their first child died in infancy, they took an apartment in Greenwich Village, and Clark became research director and legislative secretary for the Socialist members of the New York City Board of Alderman. During this period, Kirchwey was active in the New York Chapter of the Women’s Peace Party and served, with Anne Herendeen, on the editorial collective of the chapter’s short-lived magazine, The Four Lights: An Adventure in Internationalism. 28 Kirchwey began working at Every Week in late 1917. When it ceased publication, she took a position at the Nation magazine, rising to editor by 1932, a position she held until her retirement in 1955. She died on January 3, 1976, in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Loren Palmer: Born in Chateauguay, New York, on March 15, 1881, to a Protestant minister and his wife, Palmer graduated from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1903. He began working as a reporter for the New York Sun shortly after graduation and served as assistant city editor and Sunday editor from 1914 to 1917. In 1917, he became an associate editor at Every Week. After Every Week’s demise, he became managing editor of Popular Science Monthly, leaving for a position as associate editor of Collier’s Weekly. He left Collier’s after becoming full editor, then held a series of editorial positions at Everybody’s, The Delineator, Designer, and Liberty magazines. When he died in 1930, he had been editor of Liberty for two years. 29
John Chapin Mosher: Born in Ogdensburg, New York, on June 2, 1892, to a doctor and his wife, Mosher graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts in 1914. 30 He moved to New York in 1915 to take a staff position at Every Week. He quickly became involved in the avant-garde theater community centered in Greenwich Village. During the first New York season of the Provincetown Players in late 1916 and early 1917, the company staged his one-act plays Sauce for the Emperor and Bored, with Bored sharing a bill with plays by Floyd Dell and Eugene O’Neill. 31 In November 1917, Mosher enlisted as a Private in the Medical Corps at the U.S. Base Hospital in Albany. After training at Camp Merritt in New Jersey, he sailed to Liverpool on May 1, 1918, and served in the shell shock ward at the U.S. Base Hospital at Portsmouth England, until February 1919. 32 Mosher spent several years of his life aimlessly as a member of the post-war “lost generation.” He placed fiction and essays in magazines and traveled, including to Europe. In 1922, he was living in Paris and socializing with his fellow young American creative artists, composer Virgil Thomson and painter Eugene Chown. 33 From 1923 to 1925, he was an English instructor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. 34 By 1926, he had landed back in New York and had joined the staff of a new magazine, The New Yorker. He became the magazine’s first regular film critic in 1928, and he also served for years as the editor responsible for reading the “slush pile” (unsolicited submissions). 35 He contributed short stories to the magazine about community life on Fire Island, where he and his partner Philip Claflin were the first gay property owners in the emerging gay vacation colony at Cherry Grove. 36 His New Yorker short stories about Fire Island were published in book form in 1940 as Celibate at Twilight. He and Edith Lewis remained close friends until his early death from heart disease. 37 He died September 3, 1942, in New York City.
Ruth Pickering: Born June 23, 1893, in Elmira, New York, Pickering graduated from Vassar College in 1914. 38 She was a childhood friend of iconic Greenwich Village radicals, brother and sister Max and Crystal Eastman, living for a time in their loosely organized cooperative house on Washington Place. 39 A member of the Greenwich Village feminist luncheon club Heterodoxy with Anne Herendeen, 40 Pickering was a regular free-lance contributor to Every Week and other magazines. She served briefly as dance critic at The Nation, where Freda Kirchwey later worked. In 1919, she married Clifford Pinchot, and she became an associate editor of Arts and Decoration in 1930. 41 She died December 24, 1984.
Lella Faye Secor: Born on January 13, 1887, in Battle Creek, Michigan, Secor’s family, struggled economically after her father drifted away and left her mother as the family’s sole support. While still a teenager, Secor persuaded the Battle Creek Journal to hire her as a reporter. She left journalism long enough to prove up a homestead claim by herself in Washington state, before becoming a reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Secor came to New York in early 1916, fresh off Henry Ford’s “Peace Ship” to Europe. She initially signed on to the Peace Ship as a non-partisan journalist. However, she became disillusioned by the scandal-mongering of her fellow journalists and, converted to the pacifist cause, became an official member of the peace delegation. At the end of the trip, armed with letters of introduction from “prominent publishers and literary people” she had met on the expedition, she resolved to stay and work in New York. 42 Sharing Anne Herendeen’s feminist and pacifist convictions, Secor and Herendeen began a lifelong friendship when Secor joined the staff of Every Week. Like many other staff members at Every Week, Secor first contributed free-lance and then became a full-time employee. John Colton’s mid-1916 National Guard deployment opened up a full-time staff position for the pacifist Secor. 43 In her spare time while employed at Every Week, she worked to organize the American Neutral Conference Committee, which advocated for continuous neutral mediation between the warring nations in Europe. 44 She resigned her position at Every Week in December 1916 to devote herself to peace work full time. She married Philip Florence, a British economist, and moved with him to England in 1921. Deeply involved in promoting access to birth control, she published Birth Control on Trial (1930), which Anne Herendeen edited. 45 She died in England in January 1966.
Betty Shannon: Not much is known about the nature and length of Shannon’s work for Every Week. 46 After Every Week’s demise, she was on the editorial staff of the short-lived feminist magazine Judy with Anne Herendeen and Brenda Ueland. She appears to have contributed to a variety of magazines in the late teens and the 1920s and 1930s, particularly profiles of celebrities.
Brenda Ueland: Born on October 24, 1891, into a large and progressive Minneapolis family (her father was a judge, and her mother a prominent suffrage organizer), Ueland’s sister Anne had been Anne Herendeen’s Wells College classmate. 47 Brenda Ueland began her college career at Wells but transferred to Barnard College, the women’s coordinate college of Columbia University, from which she graduated in 1913. 48 After graduation, she returned to Minneapolis and worked as a reporter, first for the Minneapolis Tribune and then for the St. Paul Daily News. 49 She returned to New York in 1914 to study art, sharing a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village with Herendeen. Their hair cropped and wearing fashions of their own creation, they frequented Village bohemian haunts together. 50 Through the influence of her friend, who was already on the staff of Every Week, Ueland began working at the magazine as a free-lance contributor, paid by the piece, in September 1915; she eventually became a full-time staff member. In 1916, Ueland married Wallace Benedict, with whom she had been carrying on an affair for some time while he was married to Crystal Eastman. 51 In the summer of 1917, Ueland followed her husband to Philadelphia, but continued to contribute to Every Week in a free-lance capacity. 52 Her husband was notably unsuccessful in all of his jobs and business ventures, and they separated and ultimately divorced, leaving Ueland struggling to support herself and her daughter through free-lance writing and magazine staff work, including a position at Liberty Magazine in New York in the 1920s. She returned to Minnesota after her mother’s death in 1930 to care for her aging father, and lived there for the rest of her life, teaching and writing, including a memoir Me (1939) (which is a key source of information about Every Week Magazine) and If You Want to Write (1938), an advice book for writers. In her later years, she became an important influence on three young people who grew up near her home on Lake Calhoun and went on to become university-based writers, Alice Kaplan, 53 Patricia Hampl, 54 and Charles Baxter. 55 She died in Minneapolis on March 5, 1985.
The Production of the editorial content of Every Week
Because Every Week had no masthead and left no complete office archive, it is difficult to attribute responsibility for various tasks to individual staff members or to assign authorship credit for anonymous text (including text accompanying photographs in the picture-caption section and paragraphs in “The Melting Pot”). In later years, former staff members made conflicting claims about their responsibilities for the magazine’s innovations. Both Bruce Barton and Anne Herendeen claimed to have “invented” the picture-caption section, 56 while Edith Lewis claimed responsibility for “the organization of gravure picture pages and 'The Melting Pot,' two of the most successful departments of the magazine.” 57
These conflicting accounts suggest a different truth—that the Every Week office was free-wheeling, lively, and collaborative. Week after week, staff members, individually and collectively, rushed to assemble enough (but not too much) heterogeneous content to fill the portion of each issue not dedicated to fiction, regular columns, and occasional longer articles. Lella Faye Secor wrote to her mother in 1916 that she found the nine-to-five office life confining; however, she also conceded that “Members of the editorial staff come and go as they like, and no one pays any attention to them. If we want to spend two or three hours at lunch, or stay home for half a day, we can, but of course the work is too heavy most of the time to permit dallying.” 58 Indeed, the office atmosphere was casual enough that Secor managed to use the office typewriter in the evenings to carry on the anti-war work of the American Neutral Conference Committee. 59 Brenda Ueland recalled that the office atmosphere was “frolicksome,” with Bruce Barton writing up funny captions for photographs with his left hand while simultaneously telephoning with his right. 60
Even though Barton claimed he “invented” the picture-caption section, he also described it as “a joint production—three or four of my bright young people wrote them, and Miss Edith Lewis, my Managing Editor, edited them, and then I finally ran them through my typewriter.” 61 Furthermore, the work of creating a picture caption spread was often parceled out to new free-lance contributors aspiring to staff positions. Ueland ruefully recalled her own process as she created a picture-caption spread as a free-lance contributor: “The procedure went like this: First I had an idea. Say it was ‘Famous Bachelors.’ Then I collected twelve good pictures of twelve world-famous bachelors, including Eleanora Sears of Boston. Then the public library and the New York World morgue…for information about each of them. Then to write a hundred-word caption for each, crammed with much labored wit.” 62 Ueland is describing an actual picture-caption spread published in Every Week, which puts the unconventional, unmarried female socialite in the company of eligible men. As Ueland makes clear, staff members primarily “collected” existing photographs for the rotogravure section (Sears and her wealthy male peers were common targets of society photographers)—the magazine rarely commissioned or purchased new ones. Freda Kirchwey’s journal from January 1917, shortly after she joined the staff, references many references to similar trips to the New York Public Library to gather materials, and both Ueland and Kirchwey left materials in their papers documenting their authorship of text published anonymously in Every Week. Some staff members (including Ueland, Kirchwey, Herendeen, John Colton, and John Chapin Mosher) also contributed articles with by-lines.
Information about who was responsible for managing the staff and soliciting and editing content by non-staff is scant, but suggestive. Barton seems to have been relatively hands-off, while Edith Lewis as managing editor was more hands-on. In letters to her mother, Lella Secor referred to Lewis simply as “the editor,” the person who judged her free-lance submissions and who would decide whether or not she would be asked to do more work, while she designated Barton “the chief mogul.” 63 Similarly, Ueland described Barton as focused on dreaming up ideas for promoting the magazine, while she described Lewis as “our real boss on Every Week.” 64 Lewis also seems to have had primary, if not sole, responsibility for acquiring and editing fiction for the magazine, with fiction often circulated to the magazine through literary agents as intermediaries. 65 George Buckley, president of the Crowell Publishing Company, said Lewis was “one of the best judges of fiction they had ever known; that she had rewritten a great deal of the stuff that had come in to them.” 66
Every Week’s Demise
Although Joseph Knapp created both Associated Sunday Magazines and Every Week, he did not exercise entire control over Every Week. In May 1916, he assumed more control by becoming president of the Every Week Corporation and “remov[ing] his offices” there. He was, concurrently, chairman of the Crowell Publishing Company’s executive committee. 67 Five months later, the Crowell Publishing Company purchased Every Week Corporation, adding Every Week to its portfolio of magazines, namely the Woman’s Home Companion, the American Magazine, and Farm and Fireside. 68 As it boasted to advertisers, together its magazines reached every class of consumers: women (the Companion), men (the American), farmers, and “the whole family” (Every Week). 69 Crowell also consolidated editorial offices in 1917, moving Every Week from its offices at 95 Madison Avenue to Crowell’s offices at 381 Fourth Avenue.
Having full control of Every Week gave Crowell the power to shut the magazine down. The board of the Crowell Publishing Co. voted Every Week out of existence in May 1918, over the objections of Knapp, the only member of the board who voted to continue the magazine. 70 The final issue (which would have been produced in late May) appeared on June 22nd. “Under the conditions that the war has produced,” a notice signed “The Crowell Publishing Company” explained, “it seems to us wise to suspend the publication of Every Week.” Citing paper and other material shortages produced by the war, the notice suggested it was better to go out on top than to languish without proper resources. Acknowledging the unusual extent to which the magazine has developed a “living, breathing personality,” the notice continues, So we take leave of what has been to us—the publishers—not merely a property, but a real friend, and object of affection and a source of pride. There is nothing in the record of Every Week to be sorry for. It has been a clean magazine, a magazine of ideals, a magazine of helpfulness and high thinking. No other editorials have been more widely quoted or have better expressed the spirit of true, clean Americanism. Its picture pages have almost established a new fashion in the treatment of pictures in American periodicals. It has been packed with an amount of fact and helpful information that is astonishing in its variety and interest considering how slender the pages at the disposal of its editors. If we were to do it again we would not do otherwise: if we were to have another weekly after the war, it would be Every Week—not something different. Having lost both Every Week and ASM, Knapp managed to launch yet another Sunday syndicated magazine in 1935, This Week, which lasted far longer than ASM, ceasing publication in 1969. Every Week, despite its popularity and Bruce Barton’s later celebrity, all but vanished from the public and historical consciousness, with few libraries having collected and preserved it because of its large format and fragile pulp paper. This digital edition makes it accessible again to scholars, teachers, students, and general readers.
Interpretive Possibilities
The contents of Every Week provide a rich resource for those interested in World War I (both the battlefront and the homefront), popular fiction, advertising, and constructions of race and gender in the nineteen-teens. Although Bruce Barton’s editorials set the tone for the magazine, the progressive politics of many junior staff members, and particularly the feminism of the female staff, shaped the contents of the magazine in subtle but important ways. For example, these young women were largely responsible for producing the picture-caption section, and they often chose themes foregrounding popular feminism and the status of women in society. One thus finds photospreads devoted to women in unusual jobs (police officers, farmers, judges, artists) or other categories of women who transgressed gendered expectations of conduct (women who wore trousers, women who married but did not take their husbands names, women who were suffrage activists). These contents provide an illuminating new context for reading Susan Glaspell’s short story “A Jury of Her Peers,” first published in Every Week in 1917. Glaspell’s story appears in a substantial cluster of issues mounted on this pilot site.
1 Associated Sunday Magazines, “Five Years Old” (advertisement), McClure’s Magazine 1 January 1909: 118. John Arberry Haney, “A History of the Nationally Syndicated Sunday Magazine Supplements” (PhD diss Univ. of Missouri, 1953), 169. [back]
2 Associated Sunday Magazines, Advertisement, Printers’ Ink, 1 Oct. 1914, 22. [back]
3 Bruce Barton to Charles H. Brower, 1953, Bruce Barton Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WI. [back]
4 "Bruce Barton Now with Crowell Pub. Co.," Printers’ Ink, 22 Oct. 1914, 85. [back]
5 Associated Sunday Magazines, Advertisement, Printers’ Ink, 8 Apr. 1915, 40-41. [back]
6 Ibid. [back]
7 This observation is based on a comparison of the Washington Sunday Star Magazine with Every Week and a review of “Volume of Advertising” information published every month in Printers’ Ink, a trade publication. Early in Every Week’s run, Printers’ Ink published information only for ASM. By early 1916, Printers’ Ink listed a combined figure for “Every Week and Associated,” and then finally listed separate statistics for each beginning in April 1916, making visible the difference in the quantity of advertising published in each. [back]
8 By early 1918, Printers’ Ink listed advertising volume only for Every Week, with no statistic for ASM. [back]
9 Bruce Barton to Charles H. Brower, 1953, Bruce Barton Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WI. [back]
10 Biographical information on Barton is derived from a recent authoritative biography, Richard M. Fried, The Man Everybody Knew: Bruce Barton and the Making of Modern America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005). [back]
11 For Lewis’s early career, see Melissa J. Homestead and Anne L. Kaufman, “Nebraska, New England, New York: Mapping the Foreground of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis’s Creative Partnership,” Western American Literature 43, no.1 (2008): 41-69, and Melissa J. Homestead, “Edith Lewis as Editor: Every Week Magazine and the Contexts of Cather’s Fiction,” Willa Cather: A Writer and Her Worlds, Cather Studies 8, ed. John J. Murphy, et. al. (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2010), 325-52. [back]
12 For her employment record in advertising, see Edith Lewis, Personnel File, J. Walter Thompson Co. Archive, Hartman Center for Advertising and Marketing History, Duke University, Durham, NC. [back]
13 Colton is a tricky figure to pin down biographically. Reference books in film and theater usually characterize him as the son of a British diplomat born in Japan. See, e.g. Who Was Who in the Theatre, 1912-1976 (Detroit: Gale, 1978), and Gerald Martin Bordman and Thomas S. Hishack, Oxford Companion to American Theatre (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004). On a variety of government documents (census records, passport applications, ship’s passenger lists, draft registration applications), he sometimes claimed to have been born in Japan, and other times Minnesota. However, he did consistently identify his parents as American-born, the “British diplomat” claim apparently a colorful self-invention. The most plausible biographical source is “Mr. Colton of Rain,” New York Times, 7 Feb. 1926, the facts in which official documents largely corroborate. This article was adapted and republished in a Minnesota newspaper (without acknowledging the Times), later the same year. “Author of ‘Rain’ Former Reporter in Minneapolis. John Colton Covered Police and Later Became Dramatic Critic—Play Here Next Week,” clipping from unnamed paper, George Arthur Barton Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN. [back]
14 Barbara Stuhler, Gentle Warrior: Clara Ueland the Minnesota Struggle for Woman Suffrage (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1995), 72-3. [back]
15 “Mr. Colton of ‘Rain’.” [back]
16 Colton was clearly gay, but there is reason to doubt the reliability of the accounts of his behavior in the memoir of his friend, Mercedes de Acosta, Here Lies the Heart (1960), in which she describes a non-stop bacchanal at his rented house in Hollywood. However, 1930 census records show that his elderly parents and younger siblings were living with him at the time. [back]
17 Anne Herendeen to Bruce Barton, 7 Feb. 1960, Bruce Barton Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WI. Brenda Ueland, Me: A Memoir (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1939), 84. [back]
18 Anne Herendeen to Bruce Barton, 16 Mar. 1960, Bruce Barton Papers. “Personals,” JWT Co. Newsletter, 15 Oct. 1928, 3. [back]
19 Judith Schwarz, Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy: Greenwich Village 1912-1940 (Norwich, VT: New Victoria Publishers, 1986), 120. [back]
20 See Erika Kuhlman, ‘‘'Women’s Ways in War:' The Feminist Pacifism of the New York City Woman’s Peace Party,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, 18.1 (1997): 80-100, Mark Van Wienen, “'Women’s Ways in War:' The Poetry and Politics of the Women’s Peace Party, 1915-1917,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 38.3 (1992): 687-714, and Mark Van Wienen, “Poetics of the Frugal Housewife: A Modernist Narrative of the Great War and America,” American Literary History 7.1 (1995): 55-91. [back]
21 “Hiram Kelly Motherwell,” Harvard College Class of 1912 Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Report (Cambridge: Cosmos Press, 1937), 525. [back]
22 “Personals.” [back]
23 “Hiram Kelley Motherwell,” 525. [back]
24 Anne Herendeen to Bruce Barton, 29 Mar. [1928?], Bruce Barton Papers. [back]
25 Anne Herendeen to Bruce Barton, 18 Nov. 1956, Bruce Barton Papers. [back]
26 Except as noted otherwise, all biographical details derive from Sara Alpern, Freda Kirchwey: Woman of the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), 17. [back]
27 Brenda Ueland, Me: A Memoir (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1939), 103. [back]
28 See Erika Kuhlman, ‘‘Women’s Ways in War’: The Feminist Pacifism of the New York City Woman’s Peace Party,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, 18, no. 1 (1997): 80-100, Mark Van Wienen, “Women’s Ways in War: The Poetry and Politics of the Women’s Peace Party, 1915-1917,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 38, no. 3 (1992): 687-714, and Mark Van Wienen, “Poetics of the Frugal Housewife: A Modernist Narrative of the Great War and America,” American Literary History 7, no. 1 (1995): 55-91. [back]
29 “Loren Palmer Dies,” New York Times, 24 June 1930. His obituary describes him as “managing editor of Every Week,” but letters addressed to him at the magazine give his title as associate editor. See, e.g., Agnes Lockhart Hughes to Loren Palmer, 24 Jan. 1918, Bruce Barton Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI. [back]
30 The Williams College Archives provided me with photocopies of various materials, both print and manuscript, documenting Mosher as an alumnus. [back]
31 Edna Kenton, The Provincetown Players and the Playwrights Theatre, 1915-1922, ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), 48, 49. [back]
32 These details come the materials provided by the Williams College Archives and from his obituary, “John C. Mosher, 50, Critic of Screen,” New York Times 4 Sep. 1942. [back]
33 Tim Page and Vanessa Weeks, eds., Selected Letters of Virgil Thomson (New York: Summit), 54. [back]
34 E-mail from Kevin B. Leonard (Northwestern University Archives) to the author, 26 Nov. 2007. [back]
35 Dale Kramer, Ross at the New Yorker (New York: Doubleday, 1951), 200; Thomas Kunkel, Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross at the New Yorker (New York: Random House, 1995), 137. [back]
36 Esther Newton, Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town (Boston: Beacon, 1993), 23. [back]
37 Edith Lewis to Brenda Ueland, 4 Feb. 1961. Brenda Ueland Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN. [back]
38 Birth date from a photograph of her gravestone at http://www.findagrave.com. Information concerning birth place and college graduation from “Amos R. E. Pinchot is Married Again. Lawyer and Publicist Weds Miss Ruth Pickering in Saugatuck, Conn. Bride is 27 and Writer. Vice Chairman of American Union Against Militarism was Divorced Last December,” New York Times 10 Aug. 1919. [back]
39 Max Eastman, Love and Revolution: My Journey through an Epoch (New York: Random House, 1964), 79-80. [back]
40 Judith Schwarz, Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy: Greenwich Village 1912-1940 (Norwich, VT: New Victoria Publishers, 1986), 124. [back]
41 “Ruth Pickering,” in These Modern Women: Autobiographical Essays from the 1920s, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Feminist Press, 1989), 58. [back]
42 Barbara Moench Florence, ed., Lella Secor: A Diary in Letters, 1915-1922 (New York Burt and Franklin, 1978), 35. [back]
43 Florence’s edition of Secor’s correspondence omits a brief passage from one letter in which Secor explains that if her predecessor returns from Mexico, Barton may expect her to step aside so that he can have his job back. Lella Secor to Loretta Secor, [July 1916], Lella Secor Florence Papers, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, PA. [back]
44 Barbara J. Steinson, American Women’s Activism in World War I (New York: Garland, 1982), 101. [back]
45 On Herendeen’s editing of the book, see Anne Herendeen to Bruce Barton, 18 Nov. 1956, Bruce Barton Papers. [back]
46 However, she is repeatedly referenced in Anne Herendeen’s letter to Bruce Barton as an Every Week staff member. See, e.g., Herendeen to Barton, 7 Apr. 1960, Bruce Barton Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI. [back]
47 Brenda Ueland, Me: A Memoir (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1939), 83-4. [back]
48 Donald Glassman, Barnard College Archivist, e-mail to the author, 26 Mar. 2007. [back]
49 Ueland, Me, 111-20. [back]
50 Ueland, Me, 121-44. [back]
51 In Me, Ueland is exceedingly coy about the identities of both Eastman and Benedict, calling her “Minerva Newman” and him “R.” She is more straightforward in her memoir of her mother, left unpublished at her death. Brenda Ueland, O Clouds, Unfold! Clara Ueland and Her Family (Minneapolis, MN: Nodin, 2004). [back]
52 Ueland, Me, 173-174. [back]
53 Alice Kaplan, “Lady of the Lake: Writer Brenda Ueland and the story she never shared,” American Scholar, Autumn 2007, 71-82. [back]
54 Patricia Hampl, “Introduction,” Me: A Memoir, by Brenda Ueland (Minneapolis: Holy Cow Press, 1996). [back]
55 Barbara Demarco-Barrett, “Charles Baxter Q&A,” 28 June 2008, http://penonfire.blogspot.com/2008/06/charles-baxter-q.html [back]
56 Bruce Barton to Charles H. Brower, 1953, Bruce Barton Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WI (Barton’s claim). “Personals,” JWT Co. Newsletter, 15 Oct. 1928, 3 (Herendeen’s claim). [back]
57 Edith Lewis, Personnel File, “Application for Employment,” 27 Nov. 1918, J. Walter Thompson Co. Archive, Hartman Center for Advertising and Marketing History, Duke University, Durham, NC. [back]
58 Lella Faye Secor to Loretta Secor, July 1916, in Lella Secor: A Diary in Letters: 1915-1922 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1978), 82. [back]
59 Florence, Lella Secor, 152n17. [back]
60 Brenda Ueland to Bruce Barton, Nov. 1931, Bruce Barton Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WI. [back]
61 Bruce Barton to David A. Balch, 4 Sep. 1956, Bruce Barton Papers. [back]
62 Brenda Ueland, Me: A Memoir (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1939), 158. [back]
63 Lella Secor to Loretta Secor, 27 Feb. [1916] and 15 Mar. 1916, in Florence, Lella Secor, 41, 51. [back]
64 Ueland, Me, 156. [back]
65 See Melissa J. Homestead, “Edith Lewis as Editor: Every Week Magazine and the Contexts of Cather’s Fiction,” Willa Cather: A Writer’s Worlds, ed. John J. Murphy, et al., 325-52 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2011), for a brief case study of Lewis’s role in acquiring and editing Conrad Richter’s stories for the magazine, and documenting the dealings of agent Paul Revere Reynolds with Every Week and Edith Lewis. [back]
66 Edith Lewis, Personnel File, Memo from J.C. Waller documenting telephone conversation with George Buckley, 3 Dec. 1918. [back]
67 “Joseph P. Knapp Heads ‘Every Week’ Corporation,” Printers’ Ink, 18 May 1916, 20. [back]
68 Crowell Publishing Company, Advertisement, Printers’ Ink, 19 Oct. 1916, 70. [back]
69 Crowell Publishing Company, Advertisement, Printers’ Ink, 2 Nov. 1916, 14-15. [back]
70 Bruce Barton to David A. Balch, 4 Sep. 1956, Bruce Barton Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WI. [back]
By the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, in conjunction with the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis.