"Playing Up"

When the fruit man hawks through the alley of a morning, he does not cry a catalog of his cart. He calls particular attention to the absurd price for which he will part with his bananas today, or to the utterly ridiculous figure he has set upon his prunes.

When the publisher takes his wares to market, a similar selling psychology teaches him that announcement of his table of contents has nowhere near the magnetism of a striking hint, a single graphic stroke of advertising along a popular line. Depending on the elevation of the publisher's mind, this stroke will be "high" or "low"--something between popular religion or popular sex-- a brilliant, mental contortion, or a vulgar, scandalizing distortion. Very, very seldom will the stroke be accurately indicative of the nature of the table of contents, or even of the nature of that feature in the table of contents which suggested the stroke.

During the past fortnight, magazine publishers crying their December wares in the public prints, gave many persons to contemplate how far necessity had schooled the publishers in the gentle art of "playing up." Many pondered the question: "When does "playing up." one's wares become misrepresentation, innocuous or otherwise?"

Came the publishers of Liberty, for example, "playing up" articles about Woodrow Wilson by Editor William Allen White of Kansas. Said the newspaper blurb: "That Whispering About Woodrow Wilson's Love Affairs," etc. Juxtaposed with the eminently responsible name of the editor of the Emporia Gazette, this blurb was irresistible. Yet in Editor White's article, "that whispering about Woodrow Wilson's love affairs" constituted an entirely secondary element of interest, and reference to it occupied scarcely an eighth of the article. Friends of Editor White were irritated to think that the publishers of Liberty had thus misrepresented him, since his purpose in mentioning "that whispering" was rather to squelch it than, as the blurb sought, to bring it to life.

Again--came the publishers of The Woman's Home Companion, filling a whole newspaper page with tidings of a new study of Jesus of Nazareth. The blurbs talked about Jesus with that striking familiarity that characterizes the sermons of the Humanists. There was nothing misleading or misrepresentative about this, for it was the view of the article itself. Strictly orthodox folk were shocked, perhaps, and liberals delighted, to hear Christ spoken of as "the most popular dinner guest in Jerusalem . . . criticized because he spent so much time in the company of publicans and sinners and enjoyed society too much."

What interested them more, however, was the statement that The Woman's Home Companion was publishing serially a new book about Jesus, written by "a business man" who had had certain vivid spiritual experiences. "A business man," said the blurb, and curiosity was at once aroused. A new man, evidently; someone unknown. Possibly he had a new point of view. This sounded fresh and worth looking into.

But when one opened to the story in the December Woman's Home Companion, however, one found "a business man" to be whilom Editor Bruce Barton, with the workings of whose mind one was already familiar. An earnest, sincere man, Editor Barton has a huge following.-- There are, however, many people whom he interests and inspires no whit, people who never would have bought The Woman's Home Companion to consider a new portrait of Jesus had they known Editor Barton was its author. "Why," said such people, "did Editor Barton's name not appear in that advertisement? It is a big name, a good name. Many people would have been glad to see it. And its appearance would have saved me the expense of buying this fat magazine and the trouble of lugging it home."

Another Crowell publication. The American Magazine, advertised the story of William Muldoon, "the greatest rebuilder of men in the world." Health was to be the general burden of this story--health and how Muldoon dispenses it. Then an item in the blurb said: "When he (Muldoon) blew his bugle, Elihu Root jumped out of bed. And when he said, 'Hurry up !', Chauncey M. Depew broke into a trot."

"This should be good," thought the reader, having in his mind two vener able figures, the sight of whom leaping from bed or trotting would be diverting. But the article in the magazine barely mentioned Messrs. Root and Depew; their names were simply listed as one time patrons of Mr. Muldoon. Furthermore, not a single bugle blew in the article and no one leapt from his bed. The blurb, perfectly harmless to be sure, was misrepresentative, was a pure picturesque invention out of probabilities suggested by the article. "Innocuous," said the reader, "but misleading and disappointing. This constant exercising of imagination by advertisers destroys one's faith in what they say."

Hyperbolic

Much less subtle is the blanket-exaggeration type of publicity, the hypnotism by hyperbole, the spellbinding clouds of adjectives and exclamations such as patent medicine vendors send up. Last week an example of this kind of advertising came before the public, announcing the debut of The Idea, a publication issuing from Mount Morris, Ill.

One Adon A. Yoder, League of Nations enthusiast, had experienced the journalistic equivalent of a Negro evangelist's "seizure." Whereupon, Yoder yodeled to the world at large that he would bring forth "the most different magazine ever published--with the reddest red cover, rich and expensive, the finest printing, the most excellent paper, cherry-colored U. S. bond, and there is not an ad in it--no man has money enough to buy one in this beauteous and breezy paper dedicated to America's greatest son and the Planet's benefactor, founder of the greatest governing structure ever conceived by the mind of man. . . .''

"America's greatest son," "greater than Washington or Lincoln," yodeled Yoder, was Woodrow Wilson.

Typical of 80 pages: "And yet in all this category of greatness there was not one to excel in intelligence, wisdom or foresight, the gifted hero from the vale of the Shenandoah amid the azure and rock-ribbed mountains of Virginia. . . ."

The people among whom Editor Yoder's work will be most appreciated will be those to whom his prefatory note was appealing. The note said: "For Men Only. The Idea is not written and published for infants, neither is it expected that the sisterly will find comfort in its perusal. ... If, however, you are a real heman; if you can stand strong drink or meaty food for thought; if your mind can be stimulated without blowing the top of your head off; if your brain has not been emasculated by the poison of tradition and convention, if you are neither a suckling nor an imbecile, nor such an old maid as to put pants on table legs for modesty's sake; then, bless your gizzard, read the blooming Idea. It's poison only to fools.

"Now let not the women get offended. Man embraces woman. That is, whenever the occasion is ripe."

On Monday

Monday is the newspapers' blue day. Governments, business, sport-men all having been inactive the day before, a Monday's news is scant. Aside from summaries and forecasts, it consists chiefly of the disorderly Sabbath conduct of idle folk--shootings, riotings and worse.

But there are the ministers. A good spectacular divine is as much of a godsend to the press as to his parish. The Manhattan press is blessed with at least three such godsends--the Revs. Percy Stickney Grant, John Roach Straton and William Norman Guthrie, and last Monday this trio filled the front pages as never before.

Dr. Guthrie supplied a capital story by inviting Red Indians into his church (St. Mark's-in-the-Bomverie) and having them dance an aboriginal fandango before the uncurtained altar. Os-Ke-Non-Ton, the Running Deer, took the lectern in feathered headdress and hailed the elements in his native tongue. The organ beat a tom-tom. Incense burned. Dr. Guthrie explained: "If you think you can treat religion like a bug and put it under a microscope, you are wrong. Religion can be found alive only in experience."

This was a fine story for the newspapers because Dr. Guthrie had clashed before with his spiritual overlord, Bishop Manning, over the subject of eurytlunic dancing in St. Mark's (TIME, Dec. 31 et seq.). The Indian dance seemed a direct defy to the Bishop. All Manhattan journals printed the tale.

Dr. Straton. The contribution of Dr. Straton was an open confession of his dissolute youth. "I was deep in sin, loving sin, following sin and living for sin . . .", and all on account of articles in magazines. Dr. Straton averred that religion had redeemed him, but that such articles continue. He particularized The World's Work, The Century, the staid Atlantic Monthly as prints that are putting "into the literary and intellectual pot enough poison from their wild gourds to utterly destroy the people."

But Dr. Percy Stickney Grant, one-time rector of the Church of the Ascension, made the biggest news contribution of all. The newspapers learned that he had been forced to repair to a hospital, the victim of a nervous breakdown. It was known that Dr. Grant had been in an extremely nervous condition when he resigned his pastorate last June, and the cause of the breakdown was thought to be a recurrence of an old ailment, anemia.

Two newspapers, however, spoke of another cause. While the Times, World, and even the gum-chewers' Mirror dwelt only upon the diluted condition of Dr. Grant's blood, the Herald-Tribune joined with the gum-chewers' Daily News in suggesting that the breakdown was due in some part to the strain occasioned by Dr. Grant's efforts to break himself of an attachment for one Nelly Kelly, unfortunate female whom Dr. Grant had befriended, employed as housemaid, then loved. Both the Herald-Tribune and the News, each in its own manner, de voted several columns to accounts of this affair, the news value of which seemed to them to be considerable.

*Mr. Barton, onetime editor of the Home Herald, Housekeeper, Everyweek. author of The Ressurection of a Soul, etc., now has an even larger following as President of Barton, Durstine & Osborn, famed advertising agency.