The Way the World Works

by Baker, Nicholson

  So anyway, I’ve been taking lots of pictures; I enjoy doing it, because when you take a picture of something, you are forced to think about only it for a little while. You draw a mental frame around it, with the help of the camera’s viewfinder, and everything else recedes, and after a minute or two, the thing that you’re photographing takes on a fetching particularity—one page in a universe of possible pages. As a result of this camerawork, I have done a great deal of a certain kind of newspaper reading, and I am full of little ill-digested snippets of knowledge about 1898 and 1903 and 1939—and a feeling has grown in me that is difficult to convey. It’s a sort of primitive amazement at how incredibly much has gone on. So much has happened. Massive numbers of named people have done an enormous number of things—some good, some horrible—and each good or horrible thing is potentially interesting. My head is crawling with old headlines—SUSAN B. ANTHONY SAYS THERE ARE WORSE THINGS THAN POLYGAMY, from the front page of the New York World at the turn of the century, or ONE WOMAN AND A THOUSAND RATS, also from the World, about a woman who raised rats and guinea pigs to sell to laboratories. And from the Chicago Tribune in 1909, HOW SUFFRAGE MADE ME BEAUTIFUL. Around 1900 there was a tiny, two-paragraph article entitled WILD EYED MAN ATE STAMPS. A man became deranged and ate some stamps—that was the article.

  I have read articles on opium dens in New York and on how John D. Rockefeller acted in church, and I’ve come across stories by P. G. Wodehouse and F. Scott Fitzgerald, poems by Rudyard Kipling and Robert Frost and Dorothy Parker, essays by Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken, war dispatches by Stephen Crane, and I have a better notion of the grain of the past, the texture and rhythm of events, which is, I think, a prerequisite to doing many kinds of history. But I’m not a historian. I’m just someone who thinks that what historians do is important, and that they ought to be able to consult, if they have a mind to, what we as a nation published and read, and read in huge numbers.

  Is there any publication that has had so wide a readership—that has entered so many people’s lives at precisely the same time? Somewhere between half a million and a million copies of a big-city paper like Pulitzer’s World, or the Chicago Tribune, went out every day. A million people read the Tribune’s headline from 1945, BOMB FOUR DOOMED JAP CITIES, and saw its front-page color cartoons, with their drawings of the Jap Buster Bomb. If you look at that page on microfilm, it seems to come from very long ago. It is lost in a rainstorm of scratches. Its words are heard through static, its immediacy is destroyed, and you think therefore that the people who read that paper must have been entirely different creatures than we are. But they weren’t.

  Again, think of the number of copies. Life magazine had a huge circulation at midcentury—five million—but that was five million copies per month. The Chicago Tribune printed six times that many copies every month. And each daily issue had much more in it—more brute wordage, more advertising, more miscellaneousness, more rough edges—than Life. Not that Life isn’t fascinating, of course. But there are hundreds of bound runs of Life magazine in research libraries today. No long runs of the Chicago Tribune survive in libraries, and none of the twentieth-century New York World, and even the New York Times, especially the real Times, and not the rag-paper library edition, which though it cost more for libraries to subscribe to wasn’t nearly as well printed, is on the edge of total oblivion. Hands placed all those tiny want ads, each representing some particular human want, the stories were typeset piecemeal by hundreds of compositors, and when they heard “Give it away” they knew to space out the remaining lines of Linotype so as to use up the rest of the column, and when the composing was done, the compositors clamped their three-hundred-pound forms tight and watched them roll away. All the editors and composers could proofread at high speed upside down and backward. Pulpy paper squashed over the forms, making a mold for more molten lead, and the curved plates were clamped to the presses and the paper began writhing through, twenty million or more sheets cut and folded each day, leaving those softly fluted edges that a newspaper has, and then bundlers tied them and truckers drove off into the city with them and they went out, hitting the sidewalk near the newsstand with a whoomp of something heavy—a big cube of todayness. Every day it happened. No matter what is in a newspaper, even if every word is untrue, we know for sure that these particular words and drawings and pictures happened—were published—on that day—and that is a precious sort of elementary knowledge to have.

  (2002)

  The Times in 1951

  Written for the 150th-Anniversary Issue of the New York Times

  Being a backward-looking person, I was curious to know what the New York Times was like in 1951, on its last big birthday. I happen to have handy an original bound run of the newspaper from that era, in all its wood-pulp bulk and glory—a set of daily papers which once looped and cavorted through the groaning machines that dwelled in the basement of Forty-third Street, in an atmosphere heavy with ink mist and paper dust. I pulled out some of the old volumes, set them on a long table and began turning my way through them.

  1951’s pages are bigger than today’s by about the width of a current column. The passage of time has dyed them a champagney hue; as they slowly rise and fall they bring to mind the intermittent wingstrokes of some great hovering bird. There are fewer photographs and more monochrome Lord & Taylor fashion watercolors, signed by now-forgotten commercial artists like Karnoff and Hood: these are deftly blurry, like Japanese sumi paintings of twigs and birds. Only in the magazine section, in the ads, are there four-color illustrations: “It’s HELLMANN’S the WHOLE-EGG Mayonnaise!”

  But what strikes one first about the publication of fifty years ago is how much it looks like what we read now. The delivery trucks and printing presses have disappeared from Forty-third Street (the New York edition is now printed in stylishly automated factories in Queens and New Jersey); reporters no longer chain-smoke at their Underwoods, or shout “Copy!”, or play cards, or place bets with Frenchie, the in-house bookie (who wore a beret and an ascot), or slip over to Gough’s, the bar across the street. But the Sulzbergers’ broadsheet has nonetheless remained faithful to its typographical traditions. And Al Hirschfeld’s pen, I was pleased to see, was there on the theater pages—precise, frolicsome, full of genius, then as now.

  What was the news in 1951? Well, there was the Korean War. Lists of killed and wounded appeared on page three in small type; in April, after General Douglas MacArthur made one too many unauthorized remarks about the necessity of bombing China, President Truman relieved him of his command in the Far East. The uproar was immediate. The Daughters of the American Revolution were deeply troubled; there was talk of impeachment; private citizens took out ads protesting the president’s shameless act. The Times’s editorialist, however, sided with Truman. “In this controversy this newspaper has taken an unequivocal stand in favor of the Government and against General MacArthur,” it said on April 17; there was no need for another world war, and Truman was right to assert “the supremacy of the civil government over any military authority.”

  MacArthur’s farewell speech to Congress, though, was good—the Times found it “eloquent and deeply moving.” Lots of people saw it live, thanks to all those Emerson and Philco and Magnavox TVs that were advertised every day in the paper. “It was extraordinary television, whatever a viewer’s political feelings,” wrote Jack Gould, the Times’s TV critic. Gould was particularly struck by MacArthur’s forceful comb-over: “He parted his hair low on the right side and had brushed it almost directly across his forehead.”

  Whether MacArthur was in charge or not, the Korean War had to continue, many at the paper believed. The alternative was withdrawal, “throwing in the sponge before the knockdown,” and that would have “intolerable political, moral and psychological consequences,” according to a military analyst for the Times. Couldn’t nuclear weapons help somehow? In an article headlined ATOMIC DEATH BELT URGED FOR KOREA, the paper quoted from a letter to Harry Truman from Congressman Albert Gor
e Sr. The congressman suggested that the United States “dehumanize a belt across the Korean peninsula by surface radiological contamination.” The belt, Gore said, could be “regularly recontaminated” until the Korean problem was solved; such a show of nuclear force would be, according to Gore, “morally justifiable under the circumstances.”

  In September the U.S. Army announced plans to test tactical atomic weapons on front-line combat troops at Frenchman Flat, Nevada. Following up, the Times’s science writer, William Laurence (who had been an observer on the Nagasaki bombing mission) wrote a story entitled A HYDROGEN BOMB NOW SEEN AS SURE. Some well-placed fusion bombs could “blanket an army in the field,” Laurence said, “and raise havoc with its personnel and equipment, as well as with its morale.” The weapons, properly used, could nullify a superiority in manpower, “such as, for example, the hordes of Russia.” By November a labor union was complaining that its members had been shut out of work on the billion-dollar hydrogen-bomb factory (“the largest construction project the world has ever known,” according to one of its managers) that DuPont was building near Augusta, Georgia.

  DuPont had other big launches that year as well. At a press event, a company representative showed off a suit made of a new miracle fiber, Dacron. The suit had been worn by a businessman for sixty-seven straight summer days without needing pressing. “To keep it clean,” reported the Times, “the owner went swimming in it twice and at thirty-two days of wear it was washed in a home washing machine.” A men’s clothing store, John David, advertised a tie made of 100 percent Dacron: “DACRON is rated, along with cellophane, Nylon and neoprene rubber as one of DuPont’s greatest technological achievements,” said the ad. The tie was, according to the ad, “a sure conversation starter.”

  A conversation of sorts had started between the United States and the Soviet Union, but it wasn’t going all that well. At a November United Nations conference in Paris, the Russians, trailing badly despite some bomb secrets obtained through the Rosenbergs (who had been sentenced to death in April), condemned the “mad armaments race.” Vishinsky, the Soviet foreign minister, proposed a ban on all nuclear weapons and the destruction of existing stocks. Secretary of State Dean Acheson offered some halfhearted counterproposals, saying however that the Atlantic community was “building its strength.” This prompted the Times’s James Reston, wise in the ways of diplomacy, to conclude that the practical purpose of the U.S. proposals was “not to end the ‘cold war,’ as the Allies proclaimed, but to wage the ‘cold war’ more effectively.”

  With increasing bomb-consciousness came civil defense. The Trucking Industry National Defense Committee ran a full-pager to point out that if the United States were attacked, railroads would be a primary target. “The Trucking Industry can’t be bombed out of existence because it doesn’t move over fixed road beds. Because it isn’t concentrated. Because it is instantaneously mobile!” Armed men in jeeps began a round-the-clock protection of New York City’s reservoirs, equipped with “two mobile laboratories in which quick water analyses will be made in the event of an atomic bomb attack.” An NYU professor of psychology suggested that hymn singing would help allay panic among bomb survivors. At 7:30 p.m. on November 14, over a hundred thousand participants staged a gigantic civil defense drill. Two atom bombs were assumed to have gone off—one over Bushwick and Myrtle Avenues in Brooklyn, and one near the Manhattan-Bronx line, “devastating a large area of both boroughs.”

  But in the event, no bombs fell, and New Yorkers carried on as they had. In four out of seven of the new model rooms in the furniture department at Bloomingdale’s, designers had chosen “restful pale blond color schemes.” Peacock feathers and the color green were back in women’s hats. Rachel Carson’s first book, The Sea Around Us, was an up-from-the-deeps best-seller. Salinger’s first novel, Catcher in the Rye, was “rambunctiously fresh and alive,” in the opinion of a Times book reviewer. A movie called I Was a Communist for the F.B.I. contained “ugly bugaboos” and “reckless ‘red’ smears,” said a Times critic; another critic liked Howard Hawks’s monster movie The Thing, warning however that parents “should think twice before letting their children see this film if their emotions are not properly conditioned.”

  “Let Me Greet You Personally At My Restaurant,” said Jack Dempsey, at the bottom of page two, on April 20; in June, Jake LaMotta, fighting as a light heavyweight, was “battered into a sick and gory spectacle” at Yankee Stadium—General MacArthur was in the audience. “Do you ever wish your child were going to a nudist camp?” was Macy’s attention-grabber, promoting its extensive summer-camp outfittery. Two women ran unsuccessfully for seats on the AT&T board—there were “a number of Rip Van Winkles” in the company, according to one stockholder. Automatic ten-number dialing, using area codes, was introduced in New Jersey. Bus stops moved to the far sides of city intersections, and parking meters appeared in Manhattan. The Yonkers Police Department hired ten women to serve as traffic officers at school crossings at a rate of four dollars a day. Ex-King Zog paid for an estate in Syosset with a bucket of diamonds and rubies. The runoff from Long Island duck farms was killing beds of bluepoint oysters. Dashiell Hammett got six months in jail for refusing to reveal who had contributed to a pro-Communist bail-bond fund; “I think I dealt with him in an extremely lenient manner,” said the sentencing judge. When a ring slipped from the finger of the daughter of the governor of Assam, in India, and fell into a lake, the governor had the lake drained in an attempt to recover the ring, causing “a storm of protest.”

  Someone stole four thousand ball bearings. There was a surplus of sweet potatoes in New Jersey; the Department of Agriculture was advising housewives to serve them often. An inedible cake in the shape of Winged Victory atop a Roman temple was a prizewinner at the Salon of Culinary Art. Stopping Joseph McCarthy was “the most important single political job that has faced Wisconsin in many years,” said Henry S. Reuss, a Milwaukee lawyer and Democrat who wanted a seat in the Senate. An intentionally soporific phonograph record called “Time to Sleep” was determined to fall within the control of the Pure Food and Drug Act. An ad announced a free home trial of the sensational new Polaroid camera—“Takes and Prints Finished Pictures in One Minute!” Ten cases of major psychiatric illness were observed to follow heavy doses of certain steriods. Roy M. Cohn, the assistant United States attorney, arrested some dealers in “hot tea”—marijuana. Attorney Cohn said that one marine with a distinguished war record “fell into the hands of these people so that his health and his entire life has been ruined”; the accompanying picture showed Police Commissioner Murphy dumping a shovelful of drug packets into the furnace in the basement of the police headquarters annex.

  Old newspapers can pull you in deep very quickly. For a little while, as I turned the pages, the headlines and columns expanded and pushed aside all the rest of history—ungeneralizably rich and busy and full of telling confusions. On January 1, 1951, Anne O’Hare McCormick, the foreign affairs columnist, wrote, “News is the destroyer of illusions and the ultimate policy maker.” I found myself agreeing with her.

  The newspaper covered its own birthday, of course. On September 18, 1951, the Times, in a forgivable burst of pride, printed dozens of congratulatory messages—President Truman praised the newspaper for its “generally fair and accurate” reporting, the City Council passed a laudatory resolution, the American Polar Society cheered, and Cuba’s Diario de la Marina wrote: “May you continue your brilliant and efficient life as the pride of the American Press.” Even the archrival Herald Tribune paid tribute to the Times’s “high standards of dignity, thoroughness and accuracy.”

  There was more the next day: MESSAGES OF CONGRATULATION CONTINUE POURING IN ON 100TH ANNIVERSARY, reads one headline. The New York Post offered a “warm typewriter toast”: “You would not want us to pretend that we always love you but as Americans and as journalists we can hardly imagine living without you.” Fifty years on, the Post is still right.

  (2001)

  Take
a Look at This Airship!

  Introduction to The World on Sunday,

  by Nicholson Baker and Margaret Brentano

  Joseph Pulitzer, the fretful, sleepless, Hungarian-born genius who, at the close of the nineteenth century, created the modern newspaper, understood Sundays better than most people.

  When you got up on Sunday a hundred years ago, in the age of the six-day workweek, and you had a moment to rest and to feel the restlessness that attends rest, what did you want? News? Did you want headlines about Washington and Tammany Hall and Albany? Well, some, but not so much. You definitely wanted a newspaper: you wanted the comfort of a fresh floppy creation that had required the permanent marriage of tankfuls of ink and elephantine rolls of white paper in order to proclaim the elemental but somehow thrilling fact that this very morning in which you found yourself, despite its familiar features, was incontrovertibly, datably, new.

  So, yes, you wanted a Sunday newspaper, but what you wanted from it wasn’t really news—it was life. You wanted romance, awe, a close scrape, a prophecy, advice on how to tip or shoplift or gamble, new fashions from Paris, a song to sing, a scissors project for the children, theories about Martians or advanced weaponry, maybe a new job. You wanted to be told over and over again that your city was a city of marvels like no other, but you also wanted to escape for a few minutes to the North Pole or South Dakota or the St. Louis World’s Fair, or to take a boat trip down the Mississippi. You wanted something with many sections that you could dole out to people in the room with you. And you wanted imagery—cartoons, caricatures, “gems of pictorial beauty”—layouts and hand-inked headlines that made your eyeballs bustle and bounce around the department-store display of every page. And that’s what you got when you spent a nickel and bought Joseph Pulitzer’s Sunday World.