Girl Sleuth

by Melanie Rehak

  Alas, even a man of such consistency as Stratemeyer could not make a success of Bright Days in the imperiled market. It soon became critical to adapt to changing conditions, chief among them the shift from magazines to books for children. Stratemeyer began to cast his eye on the emerging children’s book market, for which, with his instinct for both business and the passions of young people, he proved to have a knack. By the end of 1897, he had published twelve books in a series called Bound to Win. Soon thereafter he began what he called “an experiment in historical writing,” offering a book based on the Revolutionary War called The Minute Boys of Lexington to the very respectable Boston publishing company Estes & Lauriat. It sold well, and Edward wrote a second one, The Minute Boys of Bunker Hill, after which he abandoned the series.

  For in that same year, Stratemeyer struck his first juvenile storybook gold in a manner that would have thrilled his forty-niner father. The Spanish-American War was escalating, making publishers loath to take any risk at all as their sales slumped. As one editor told Stratemeyer in a letter, “The people do not seem to have the time to read anything but the newspapers at present.” Not one to be daunted, Stratemeyer decided that if Americans were interested in the news, they would be interested in fiction that was based on it. When Commodore Dewey defeated the Philippine-based Spanish squadron at Manila on May 1, 1898, in one of the United States’ great victories of the war, Stratemeyer was ready with the Old Glory Series for Young People.

  The first volume was entitled Under Dewey at Manila; or, The War Fortunes of a Castaway. Requisitioning the country’s top hero of the moment, Dewey’s executive officer Charles Gridley—who had let off the first shots of the battle at Dewey’s famous command, “You may fire when ready”—the book chronicled the adventures of a boy named Larry Russell who was “lost overboard while on a trip with his folks from Honolulu to Hong Kong. Adrift on a bit of wreckage, he is picked up by the ‘Olympia,’ Captain Gridley, Commodore Dewey’s flagship.” A publisher bit, and the book came out, with blinding speed, in August of 1898. Its sale price was $1.25, and it was resplendent with a sailor on the cover waving a brightly colored American flag that was three times his size. As one account embellished the event rather grandly, adding to the Stratemeyer legend: “Almost before the smoke of battle had cleared away, Stratemeyer had produced Under Dewey at Manila. And as the popularity of the Little Admiral swelled and soared, so the book sold edition upon edition. It established Stratemeyer as a writer of juveniles.” By Christmas of that year, Dewey had sold six thousand copies—no mean feat for a wartime publication.

  Not one to waste a smash hit, Stratemeyer immediately sent out a proposal for the series that would become his other early success: The Rover Boys Series for Young Americans—affectionately known, in no time at all, as “the Rovers.” The exploits of Dick, the sober eldest brother; Tom, the fun-loving practical joker in the middle; and Sam, the straight man for his brothers, were set at a military school. Their mother was dead and their father was away “exploring in Africa,” so the boys were sent off to boarding school, free from meddling adults once and for all. They (and later their doppelgänger sons) would go on to break sales records for clothbound books. At the peak of their success, according to one reporter, “The Rover Boys broke out upon the country like measles.” As far as their adventures were concerned: “Motivations were of the essence of simplicity. A face at the window, a missing suitcase or the overheard conversation of the enemy was sufficient to send the Rovers off on stirring trips that lasted for 52,000 words.”

  It was the first series that bore a resemblance to those that would make Stratemeyer’s fortune. In contrast to his historical stories, the Rover Boys were anything but timely; instead, they were ageless, and their “author,” Arthur M. Winfield, was, too. They were also middle class. The familiar Alger story had become outdated, and the Rovers, as one critic put it, “were never embarrassed by a lack of funds . . . they had less to strive for than to protect.” Both boys and girls loved the brothers without reserve and hoped they might come alive right off the page. One young man, Luther Danner of Loudonville, Ohio, received the following gentle letdown from Stratemeyer in response to a passionate fan letter: “Although many of the incidents in the stories are taken from life, the Rover boys are not real individuals, and consequently I cannot send you their address.”

  For the next five years, Stratemeyer turned out series after series. He was by now firmly established, and expectations were that he would stay that way. One critic wrote, “Mr. Stratemeyer thoroughly deserves his popularity, and he drives his typewriter without becoming careless or indolent as a result of the remarkable success he has attained.”

  Proving the point, in 1904 Stratemeyer dreamed up another wildly successful series of stories about a group of well-off children who had adventures all over the world and always remembered their manners. Their names were Bert, Nan, Freddie, and Flossie, otherwise known as the Bobbsey Twins. Stratemeyer wrote the first book himself, under the pen name Laura Lee Hope (he later assigned the series to Howard Garis, one of his first “employees” and the author of the Uncle Wiggily books). Their first adventure, The Bobbsey Twins; or, Merry Days Indoors and Out, appeared in the fall of that year. The two sets of twins, aged eight and four (they would later grow up to twelve and eight), were the epitome of simple, cozy stability, right down to their perfectly complementary personalities and physical attributes: “Nan was a tall and slender girl, with a dark face and red cheeks. Her eyes were a deep brown and so were the curls that clustered around her head. Bert was indeed a twin, not only because he was the same age as Nan, but because he looked so very much like her . . . Freddie and Flossie were just the opposite of their larger brother and sister. Each was short and stout, with a fair, round face, light-blue eyes and fluffy golden hair.” With this jolly band, Stratemeyer tapped in to the kind of world that was to become the mainstay of juvenile books for the next fifty years. It was real enough to be recognizable to readers, but everything in it was improved upon. Parents were generous, punishments rare, and everything always seemed to work out in the end.

  These were also the first books by Stratemeyer that took into account not only a younger age group, but female readers. It was not yet popularly believed that little girls were worth catering to as an audience, as they had shown themselves to be perfectly happy to borrow books from their brothers to get their adventure fix. As Stratemeyer sized it up, “Almost as many girls write to me as boys and all say they like to read boys’ books (but it’s pretty hard to get a boy to read a girl’s book, I think).”

  Furthermore, there was competition for girls once they reached a certain age in a way that there was not for boy readers, and publishers—and Stratemeyer—believed it made the investment of both time and money in too many girls’ series unwise. In an interview around this time, Stratemeyer displayed his admirable grasp of both publishing and human nature: “The little girl begins at perhaps 7 years of age to read girls’ books written for her. By the time she is 12, she is ready for the [adult] ‘best seller’ and will have nothing else. A boy will cling to the boys’ book till he is 15 or 16, often older.”

  Still, the success of the Bobbsey Twins could not fail to affect Stratemeyer. He began to expand his winning formula to include the opposite sex, taking into account another, more personal reason for doing so. As he noted in a letter to a successful girls’ book author: “I have two little girls growing up fast, so I presume I’ll have to wake up on girls’ books ere long.”

  By 1905 Edward was easily the most successful juvenile writer in the country, and he had even more ideas than he could keep up with: As he had confessed in 1903, he had “the plots and outlines of a score of books in [his desk].” He had also begun to recognize that his pseudonymous works, written under the names of Arthur M. Winfield and Laura Lee Hope, were earning him more money than books by Edward Stratemeyer, such as the Old Glory series. The market would never be saturated, he reasoned, as long as he could think
up another pen name. As he wrote to one publisher: “A book brought out under another name would, I feel satisfied, do better than another Stratemeyer book. If this was brought out under my own name, the trade on new Stratemeyer books would simply be cut into four parts instead of three.” He was also “neck deep in contracts on books” and could barely keep up with himself.

  So he decided to act on a consolidation scheme he had been thinking over for some time. He intended to model his new company on the Street & Smith plan, writing outlines for series and handing them out to ghostwriters, who would work under the pen name assigned to each series. This way, no one would ever be the wiser about who was actually doing the writing, and if it became necessary to change authors, there would be no risk of alienating readers. He himself would edit all the manuscripts for consistency, so that even if volumes in the same series were written by more than one person, the final product would be of apiece with the entire series. By controlling all of his characters, pen names, and manuscripts, and more or less renting them out to publishers for royalties, he would be able to sell different books to different houses, thereby grabbing a larger share of the market and putting his many idle story ideas to use. He would pay his ghostwriters, whom he hired from local newspapers and by placing ads in trade publications like the Editor, a flat fee for each manuscript, usually ranging from $75 to $150 depending upon their effort and experience. The amount of work done by the ghostwriter versus the amount of work done by Stratemeyer on any given book could not be determined, though Stratemeyer always had the last word. In addition, he required that his authors not tell anyone which books they wrote and under which pen names—they gave up “all right, title and interest” to their stories in every release form they signed and further agreed that they would “not use such pen name in any manner whatsoever”—though they were allowed to say they worked for the Syndicate, and Stratemeyer did not prevent them from writing elsewhere.

  The Stratemeyer Syndicate, in essentially the form in which it would remain for the next three decades, had been launched. In 1905, the first year of its existence, Edward Stratemeyer earned $6,757.74, triple his earnings just a few years earlier. The following year, he earned $8,757.18 and paid out $2,267.00 for manuscripts and advertising, leaving him with $6,490.18. It was almost the same amount of money for less work on his part; his business idea had been a sound one. “The syndicate idea is booming, and I am now negotiating for sixteen copyrights of A No. 1 stories,” he wrote to Mershon Company, one of his New Jersey publishers. “I think when all is in shape I shall have the best line of juveniles on the market, written by those who know exactly what is wanted.” Edward Stratemeyer was on his way to becoming, as one magazine would later anoint him, “the father of . . . fifty-cent literature.”

  THANKS TO HER father’s wise scheme, by the time Harriet was fifteen, the young, well-to-do Stratemeyer clan had moved to a large, stylish three-story Queen Anne house on North Seventh Street in Roseville. In addition to three bedrooms, the house had a fireplace in the parlor, a small balcony off the second floor, and a laundry room in the basement where their hired help did the wash. The Stratemeyers also employed a cook and a chaffeur for Lenna. The third floor contained Edward’s flower-papered private study, where he dreamed up his characters and committed them to the page first by hand, and then by typewriter. His debut as an operator of this technological marvel was thrilling enough to merit mention in his literary account book. In the same way that he reveled in keeping up to the moment with his car purchases and enthusiastically embraced all the newfangled timesaving devices America had to offer, he adapted, with marvelous aplomb, to his new luxury. “Did you ever use a typewriter?” he wrote to a friend. “It took me just a week to get used to it and now I would not work in any other way for the world.”

  While Edward wrote, his girls were constantly being reminded to keep quiet lest they should disturb their father’s great imaginings upstairs. Harriet recalled her father’s private aerie as “a sunshiny room, book-lined, attractive and warm,” and it had the lure of the forbidden for the children, who were not allowed in very often. Far above the street, wearing a three-piece suit even for writing at home, Edward would put in two chapters’ worth of work on his typewriter in the morning, come down for lunch with his family, and return for a third chapter in the afternoon. As if to repay them for their indulgence of his mental process—for he was a generous father, if a strict one—Edward never worked in the evenings or on weekends and took his family on long summer vacations to the Jersey Shore, Martha’s Vineyard, or other pleasant locales.

  When she was not on such a leisure trip, Harriet attended the prestigious public Barringer High School. She had long passed the age at which she could climb trees, and social activities around the turn of the century were restricted mostly to groups. Dating was unheard of unless a boy had serious intentions—and even then he had to work up to seeing his girl unchaperoned—so, like most girls of her social standing, the structure of Harriet’s teenage life was built upon school, family, and church. Adolescence was just starting to emerge as a period of life that was set off from what came before and what came after, and as high school enrollment increased dramatically in the early years of the century, school became the organizing principle behind adolescence in a way it had never been before. Teenage girls were not yet in thrall to fashion, consumerism, or pop culture of the kind that would become synonymous with the very idea of adolescence by the twenties, and so Harriet led a fairly quiet life. Thanks to her family’s money, she, unlike the majority of teenagers at that time, did not have to work after school either at home or outside of it. Instead, she spent her spare hours with her family and friends and concentrated on her schoolwork.

  She did not always study as hard as she could have, though. A pop quiz about Sir Walter Scott’s “The Lady of the Lake” near the end of her secondary schooling ended in an episode similar to her elementary school gaffe about the donkey. The story, which opens with a famous scene of a stag hunt in a forest and evolves into an epic tale of love and clan rivalry, intertwines James Douglas, the outlawed uncle of the royal family, his daughter Ellen, and several other characters, two of whom are suitors to Ellen. Amazingly enough, considering her father’s line of work and her own interest in books, Harriet had never been taught what a heroine was. The books of her childhood tended to feature rather weak, weepy little girls whose main function was to overcome adversity with good Christian values. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, star of the eponymous book published in 1903, when Harriet was eleven, joined earlier counterparts like the melodramatic Elsie Dinsmore, a deeply pious poor little rich girl who longs for love from her father and has to contend with a mean schoolteacher. True heroines were few and far between, and girls were barely aware that there was any alternative. Even the ones who sought adventure by turning to boys’ books did not venture very far. As one reading study noted, “The exciting stories mentioned by the girls are very quiet compared to those mentioned by the boys.” Harriet had few examples, and her father, for one, was certainly not in the habit of encouraging his daughter to be an adventuress, lest it should spoil her for what he considered to be the true calling of all women. “He thought I should stay home and keep house,” she remembered later. As a result, she believed that the hero was the most important character in the story, and the heroine the second most important. When asked to fill in the pop quiz blanks for who occupied each of these roles in “The Lady of the Lake,” she wrote, without hesitation, that the hero was James Douglas and the heroine was the stag. Poor Ellen was nowhere to be found.

  But this overconfident streak also made Harriet determined from a young age to seek out an education when the majority of teenage girls did not even consider it. At the turn of the century, 40 percent of college students were women, but that was still less than 4 percent of women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. Though it was girls of Harriet’s class who made up most of the student bodies at elite eastern colleges—tuition and fees
even at public schools were expensive for a middle-class family, and scholarships were rare—the majority of wealthy girls took the more traditional path of simply finishing high school and living at home until they were married. It never took long; the average marriage age for women in 1910 was twenty-one. Not Harriet, however. Fully supported by her parents, who, while they were not exactly progressive, placed great stock in intelligence and rigorous education and believed that their daughters would be better wives if they had the ability to help their husbands in their professions, Harriet began to ponder her future. So it was that in the winter of 1909, Edward Stratemeyer contacted a select group of colleges on his daughter’s behalf. Among them was Wellesley, already at that time a venerable institution with a reputation for having, in the words of one observer, “a strong religious undercurrent and a subtle something, one might call it an upper current, of idealism.”

  Certainly there was no question that whatever college Harriet attended, it would not be coed, nor would it be too far from home to preclude frequent visits in both directions. In addition to Wel-lesley, Edward’s letter requesting information went out to a group of well-established women’s colleges up and down the East Coast: Vassar (founded in 1861), Barnard (1889), Smith (1871), and Bryn Mawr (1885). By the end of 1909, Harriet had settled on Welles-ley, saying later that she preferred it because it was more conservative than the other options she reviewed. As was the custom, Harriet’s high school diploma and her father’s ability to cover her bill were enough to reserve a spot for her in the class of 1914. Edward had offered financial references to prove he could pay the $175 annual tuition, plus the cost of his daughter’s room, board, and extra music lessons. Included among these references were not only his bank in New Jersey but also the publishing house of Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, which he no doubt chose for its location in Boston, very close to Wellesley. He often used business meetings with the company as an excuse to go up to the college, beginning with a trip in April of 1910, with Harriet along to inspect the campus.