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.