Magazines and Modern Identities : Global Cultures of the Illustrated Press, 1880–1945 9781350278639, 9781350278660, 9781350278646, 9781350278653, 9781350278677

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Magazines and Modern Identities

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Magazines and Modern Identities Global Cultures of the Illustrated Press, 1880–1945 Edited by Tim Satterthwaite and Andrew Thacker

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Selection and editorial material © Tim Satterthwaite and Andrew Thacker, 2023 Individual chapters © their authors, 2023 Tim Satterthwaite and Andrew Thacker have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Cover of The Home: The Australian Journal of Quality, March 1 1938 © Suzanne Annand All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Satterthwaite, Tim, editor. | Thacker, Andrew, editor. Title: Magazines and modern identities : global cultures of the illustrated press, 1880-1945 / edited by Tim Satterthwaite and Andrew Thacker. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts 2023. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023001626 (print) | LCCN 2023001627 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350278639 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350278660 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350278646 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350278653 (epub) | ISBN 9781350278677 Subjects: LCSH: Illustrated periodicals–History–19th century. | Illustrated periodicals--History--20th century. | Modernism (Aesthetics)--History--19th century. | Modernism (Aesthetics)–History–20th century. Classification: LCC PN4834 .M34 2023 (print) | LCC PN4834 (ebook) | DDC 070.4/9--dc23/eng/20230125 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023001626 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023001627 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-7863-9 ePDF: 978-1-3502-7864-6 eBook: 978-1-3502-7865-3 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: ‘The Rapid Rhythm of Modern Life’ Andrew Thacker

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Part I Modern times: Magazines in the USA at the turn of the twentieth century 1 ‘A Monthly Album of Crazy Fancies’?: The Arena Magazine, Alternative Modernities and US Radical Print Culture (1889–1909) Jean-Louis Marin-Lamellet 19 2 ‘The Young Man of To-Day is Not the Young Man of Fifty Years Ago’: Themes of Masculinity as Pictured in Popular American Periodical Cover Art, 1830–1920 Richard Junger 38 Part II The age of extremes: European magazines of the interwar decades 3 Spearheading the Iconic Turn: German Illustrated Magazines in the Interwar Period Patrick Rössler 59 4 The Left-wing Illustrated Press in the German Reich Konrad Dussel 80 5 Acrobatics of the Printed Page: The Cosmopolitanism of Rizzoli’s Periodicals Maria Antonella Pelizzari 95 6 Visual Modernism and its Others in VU Laura Truxa 111 7 ‘The Greater Britain of Fascism’: Politics, Propaganda and Photography in Action (1936–40) Emma West 127 Part III Transnational modernities: Culture and lifestyle magazines in Canada and Australia 8 Memories and Promises: Australian Modernism and National Identities in Home During the 1930s Melissa Miles and Geraldine Fela 147 9 Seeing the World and One’s Place Within It: Australian Quality Magazines and the Asia-Pacific in the 1920s and 1930s Susann Liebich and Victoria Kuttainen 163 10 To be or Not to be Modern: The Paradox of Modernity in the FrenchCanadian Magazine La Revue moderne During the 1930s Adrien Rannaud 176

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11 Magazine Digest, Canadian Invader? Jaleen Grove 186 Part IV Future states: Chinese, Soviet Turkic and Mexican magazines 12 Global Magazine Culture and Modern Chinese Identities Michel Hockx and Liying Sun 207 13 Photographic Portraits of Leaders of the 1911 Revolution: The Promise of Historical Rupture in the Chinese Republican Press Giulia Pra Floriani 223 14 Publishing the Nation: Periodicals and Nation-Building in Soviet Turkic Communities, 1921–37 Michael Erdman 238 15 Female Identities and Translocal Networks in Mexican Folkways Claudia Cedeño Báez 258 Afterword Faye Hammill

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Bibliography Index

277 294

Contributors Claudia Cedeño Báez is an assistant professor in romance philology at the University of Tübingen (UT). Prior to her appointment at UT, she dedicated much of her career to publishing and designing books and cultural magazines. She was trained as an artistic designer, obtaining an MA degree in science and arts from the Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM), Mexico, and a BA degree in design from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Her research interests lie in the intersections between literature, art and visual culture studies. Konrad Dussel is Professor of Modern History at the University of Mannheim. Since his doctoral dissertation about theatre in Nazi Germany (1987) and a post-doctorate in broadcasting under public law (1994), his research has focused on the development of the media, particularly German broadcasting (Deutsche Rundfunkgeschichte, 4th ed. 2022) and newspapers (Deutsche Tagespresse im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. 2nd ed. 2011), and, most recently, illustrated magazines (Bilder als Botschaft, 2019). Michael Erdman is the Curator of Turkish and Turkic Collections at the British Library. His research interests focus on twentieth-century Turkic historiography, publishing cultures across Turkic and Kurdish communities, and marginal political and ideological movements in twentieth-century Turkey. He has published on intellectual history in early Soviet Turkic communities and on Christian Arabic cultural production. His current project focuses on the publishing activities of Turkic exiles in the interwar period. Geraldine Fela is a research fellow in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, Australia. Her research examines the intersection of oral history, labour history, histories of gender and sexuality and social movement studies. She has published in Sexualities, Australian Feminist Studies and Labour History. Giulia Pra Floriani is a PhD candidate at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies and a lecturer at the Institute of East Asian Art History of Heidelberg University. Her research interests focus on Chinese photography and illustrated magazines, and the history of collecting Chinese Art in Europe. She is co-editor, with Sarah E. Fraser and Shen Kuiyi, of the forthcoming volume Ink and Oil: Chinese Artists trained in Europe (1920–45). Jaleen Grove is Assistant Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she teaches in the Department of Illustration. She is one of three editors of History of

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Illustration (2018), and an associate editor of the Journal of Illustration. Her work on magazines has appeared in the Journal of Canadian Studies and Modernism/Modernity. Faye Hammill is Professor of English literature and Canadian studies at the University of Glasgow, UK. She is author or co-author of six books, including Modernism’s Print Cultures (2016), with Mark Hussey; Magazines, Travel, and Middlebrow Culture (2015), with Michelle Smith; and Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History (2010). Her current research project, ‘Ocean Modern’, is on literature and ocean liners and is funded by an AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship. Michel Hockx is Professor of Chinese literature and Director of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on modern Chinese literary communities, their products and values, and their relationship with the state. His book publications include A Snowy Morning: Eight Chinese Poets on the Road to Modernity (1994), Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China (2003) and Internet Literature in China (2015). Richard Junger is Professor of Communications at Western Michigan University. A former news reporter, his book publications include The Journalist as Reformer: Henry Demarest Lloyd and Wealth Against Commonwealth (1996) and Becoming the Second City: Chicago’s Mass News Media, 1833–1898 (2010). Victoria Kuttainen is an associate professor in English and Writing at James Cook University in Australia. Her research interests focus on Australian and postcolonial literatures, geography, and the print cultures of late colonial modernity. She is co-editor of the peak body journal JASAL: The Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and a forthcoming special issue of The Space Between focused on the modern girl around the world. Her most recent book, co-authored with Susann Liebich and Sarah Galletly, is The Transported Imagination: Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographies of Colonial Modernity (2018). Susann Liebich is Assistant Professor in Modern History at Heidelberg University. Her research interests focus on book history, oceanic and environmental history, and cultures of maritime mobility in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how these fields intersect. She has published on Australian and New Zealand magazine culture, on the history of reading in New Zealand and Britain, and on print circulating at sea. Most recently, she co-edited Shipboard Literary Cultures: Reading, Writing, and Performing at Sea (2021). Jean-Louis Marin-Lamellet is Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Languages at Université Savoie Mont Blanc, France. His research interests focus on the interplay between print culture and protest movements at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. He has published on Populism, Progressivism, and controversies over the meaning of ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’ in the 1890s. His most recent publications include ‘Mobilising Agrarian Men and Women in the Late Nineteenth Century’ in

 Contributors ix (Re)Mobilizing Voters in Britain and the United States (2021) and ‘Woman Suffrage, Women’s Political Participation, and the Populist Movement’ in Transatlantica (2022). Melissa Miles is Professor of Art History in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Monash University, Australia. Her research focuses on photography, social history and intercultural relations. She is the author of Photography, Truth and Reconciliation (2019), Pacific Exposures: Photography and the Australia-Japan Relationship (with Robin Gerster, 2018), The Language of Light and Dark: Light and Place in Australian Photography (2015), The Burning Mirror: Photography in an Ambivalent Light (2008), and co-editor of The Culture of Photography in Public Space (with Anne Marsh and Daniel Palmer, 2015) and Photography and Its Publics (with Edward Welch, 2020). Maria Antonella Pelizzari is Professor of History of Photography at City University of New York (CUNY). She has been associate curator of photography at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, and has held teaching positions at Concordia University in Montreal and Ryerson University in Toronto. Her book publications include Photography and Italy (2011) and Painting in Italy, 1910s-1950s: Futurism, Abstraction, Concrete Art (2015). She recently co-edited a volume for the Yale Center for British Art, The Idea of Italy: Photography and the British Imagination, 1840–1900 (2022). Adrien Rannaud is an assistant professor in Quebec Literature and Culture at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the literary and cultural history of Quebec, women’s writing and cultural practices, the history of media culture, celebrity studies, and middlebrow culture. He is the author of two books: De l’amour et de l’audace: Femmes et roman au Québec dans les années 1930 (2018) and La révolution du magazine: Poétique historique de La Revue moderne, 1919–1960 (2021). Patrick Rössler is Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies, University of Erfurt. He has published on theories of media impact, social research methods, public relations of the Bauhaus and magazines of the interwar period. His most recent books include New Typographies: Bauhaus & beyond: 100 years of Functional Graphic Design in Germany (2018), Bauhausmädels: A Tribute to Pioneering Women Artists (2019), and Illustrated Magazine of the Times: A Lost Bauhaus Book by László Moholy-Nagy and Joost Schmidt (2019). Tim Satterthwaite completed his PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2016, and now lectures in History of Art and Critical Practice at the University of Brighton. He is the author of Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal (2020). His current research project, ‘Pattern Theory’, explores the legacy of the Gestalt tradition in critical practice in the light of present-day cognitive science. Liying Sun is visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Iowa. She completed her PhD in modern Chinese studies at Heidelberg University, and was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral

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fellow in the Digital Humanities Program at the University of Southern California (USC), 2016–18. Current projects include a book manuscript titled Unclothed Bodies: The Circulation of Nudes in Modern Chinese Popular Culture, and a book-length project: ‘Hollywood Silent Films in China: Historical Audiences and Transcultural Receptions (1890s–1920s)’. Andrew Thacker is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at Nottingham Trent University (NTU). He is the author or editor of several books on modernism and modernist magazines, including the three volumes of The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (2009–13) and, most recently, Modernism, Space and the City (2019). He was a founder member and the first Chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies. Currently he is the UK PI for the Spaces of Translation project on European magazines, 1945–65, and the co-director of the Periodicals and Print Culture Research Group at NTU. Laura Truxa is a doctoral candidate at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France. Her areas of interest concern the history of graphic design and mass-circulated magazines, and the intersections of advertising and print culture. She has published articles on the French periodical VU and on the professionalization of graphic design in 1960s France. Emma West is an honorary research fellow in the School of English, Drama and Creative Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (2017–22) examined the public reception of modern art, design, literature, and performance in interwar and postwar Britain. She has published on print and periodical culture, and is the co-editor of ‘Word and Image on the Printed Page’, a special issue of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies (2022). She is currently writing her first book, Art for the People: Everyday Encounters with the Arts in Modern Britain.

Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank again the many institutions and individuals that have supported the research in this collection; their contributions are credited in captions and endnotes in the chapters that follow. For our own part, we are particularly grateful for the continued support and encouragement of our colleagues at the Periodicals and Print Culture Research Group (PPCRG) at Nottingham Trent University, and the Centre for Design History (CDH) at University of Brighton.

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Introduction

‘The Rapid Rhythm of Modern Life’ Andrew Thacker

Three magazines One way to introduce the culture of the illustrated press from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth century is to take, more or less at random, three representative issues to demonstrate the variety of this form of periodical and to introduce some of the key questions that arise when analysing it. The three instances discussed here are: a copy of the English monthly, The Strand (1891–1950), from 1904; a copy of the French weekly, VU (1928–40) from 1932; and an issue of the US monthly, Vanity Fair (1914–36), in its first Condé Nast version, from 1935. By focusing upon the periodical codes of these three examples we can surmise something of the range and multiplicity of the material that comes under the rubric of ‘the illustrated magazine’ and which is the subject of this book.1 The Strand was launched by George Newnes in 1891 and promised ‘Information as entertainment’.2 It published around 120 pages of literature and journalism aimed at a middle-class, predominately male, readership. Illustrations to the articles appeared on most pages, with at least one on all double-page spreads. Vast quantities of other visual material could be found in the advertising material, which often matched the number of pages of text in any one issue: a copy from November 1910, for example, has 120 pages of ‘content’, preceded by 90 pages of adverts, along with another 27 pages of adverts towards the back of the issue. Newnes’s vision for the magazine was modelled upon the format established by North American magazines such as Harper’s, Munsey’s, and Scribner’s in the previous decade. One key innovation that Newnes took from these periodicals was the idea that by selling large quantities of advertising space, based on the promise of large circulations, publishers could keep the cost of the issue low (around 10 cents a copy) and generate profit from the adverts rather than relying upon sales.3 It was a formula that was to prove a success in Britain: soon after its launch as a sixpenny monthly The Strand reached a circulation of around half-a-million copies per month. Some estimates put the worldwide readership as high as three million.4 The July 1904 issue of The Strand typifies the coding of the magazine.5 After the usual number of pages devoted to adverts (97) the reader encounters 120 pages of ‘content’ laid out in two columns; each article or story opens with an illuminated drop capital, a deliberate archaism by this point, and the same serif font is mostly used throughout

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for titles, captions and the main text. The coding of the way that the text appears is thus uniform, while it is in the placement of the illustrated material that variety occurs. Only in two places in the issue do we find a full-page illustration, with the first being on the initial page of content after the advertisements. This is a drawing by British artist Sidney Paget to accompany one of the signature contributions to The Strand, a Sherlock Holmes story by Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Golden PinceNez’ (some fifty-six Holmes stories appeared in the magazine) (Figure i.1). After this beginning, the ‘visual diet’, as David Reed describes it, of the magazine is of small image ‘blocks peppered across each spread’, an appearance designed to be ‘energetic or lively, calculated to stimulate rather than relax the reader’.6 The quantity and placement of the illustrations varies greatly: in the literary material it is somewhat more restrained, with often a single image appearing centrally on the page (7) or to one side (8). An extract from Sarah Bernhardt’s memoirs offers more visual material, with four images (22–3) taking up the equivalent of a full page. In contrast an article on a theatrical dressing room (54–5) disrupts the layout of the text quite severely, as if to represent the visual experience of the room in question. Another heavily illustrated piece addresses the topic, ‘How a Woman Should Walk’, with sixteen illustrations over seven pages, including reproductions of Greek sculpture, paintings by Renaissance artists such as Botticelli and Fra Filippo Lippi, a series of photographs depicting how to walk in a skirt and ‘The Ideal Walk for an Englishwoman’. Overall, however, the text dominates the images: the vast majority of the issue is devoted to fiction (The Strand never published poetry), with stories from Marie Corelli, E. Nesbitt and Max Pemberton.

Figure i.1  Page spread from ‘The Return of Sherlock Holmes’, The Strand Magazine, July 1904.

 Introduction 3 As Reed notes, over 50 percent of the page space for issues between January and June 1900 was occupied by fiction, a proportion continued in this 1904 issue.7 Among the journalistic pieces we can read number 76 in a series on ‘Wonders of the World’, which presents short pieces on a Chinese kite, ‘The Most Intellectual Dog in the World’, and the development of a weed-killing train in South America. The final section is a longrunning series entitled ‘Curiosities’, comprising photographs of unusual images sent in by readers: this issue includes a wall constructed from petrified sacks of wheat; a cloud formation resembling a cauliflower; and a large sparrow’s nest. Curious rather than challenging is one way to characterise both the visual and verbal components of The Strand. Material appears in a curious guise, only for it to be explained in the text; in this respect the centrality of detective fiction like that of Holmes in The Strand is perfect: a mystery is presented to the reader which is then solved by the detective. Such material thus matches the spatial layout of the pages, offering what Patrick Collier, discussing a similar publication, The Illustrated London News, calls a ‘modern regime of legibility’ and visibility, whereby links between London (represented by the Holmes story and the geographical location of The Strand) can be connected smoothly to ‘curiosities’ uncovered in the rest of the world. Curiosity is piqued, but then resolved for the reader. As Emma Liggins and Minna Vuohelainen argue, The Strand was a leading middlebrow publication in this period, able to offer a heterogenous variety of visual and verbal material while remaining culturally ‘readable’.8 In this representative issue from 1904, The Strand thus engages with modernity in a restrained and ‘readable’ fashion, with little registration in its pages of new technological developments (aside from in its advertisements) or more challenging modern social or cultural movements. The Strand continued in this format for several more decades, only closing after the conclusion to World War Two. However, by the interwar years its coding began to appear dated in comparison to many similar publications. An examination of an issue of the French magazine, VU, from 1932 demonstrates the changing face of illustrated periodicals, with modernity and modernism now making their presence felt more strongly on the page. The most obvious difference between the two is one of size: The Strand was 24 x 16 cm (9½ x 6½ inches), while VU measured 37.5 x 28 cm (13¾ x 11 inches). VU, a weekly begun in 1928 and priced at 1 Franc 50, utilised this capacious page size in order to provide a coverage of news and world affairs in which visuality dominated the periodical codes of the magazine. The editorial of the first issue promised a magazine to capture ‘the rapid rhythm of modern life’, one which was designed ‘in a new spirit and produced through new means [technologies]’ and which would offer France ‘a new formula: the illustrated reporting of world affairs’ that would be ‘animated like a beautiful film.’9 As Tim Satterthwaite notes, VU’s identity as a modern magazine ‘reflected the ascendancy of photography in 1920s visual culture’, bringing together American-style consumerism, new technological inventions, and a visual style borrowing heavily from the post-war European avant-garde.10 VU 14 September 1932 was one of several special issues devoted to a single topic, this one on radio. At around seventy pages it was around twice the length of the normal issues, but the format and periodical codes were similar for all issues. Unlike the two columns of The Strand, VU employed three columns, but in a very flexible fashion. The issue’s dedication to the new medium of radio signified the modernity of the magazine,

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embracing the many possibilities offered in the new technology: ‘We are in the age of noise’, proclaims Pierre Descaves in one article.11 We thus learn of radio’s use for political communication, by journalists for reporting, the medical uses of radio waves, as well as an article on an even newer technology, television. The cover, a photomontage by ‘Alexandre’, shows a woman looking up to the future in a nod to constructivist aesthetics, with a wave shooting between two radio masts (Figure i.2).12 Unlike the strict division between adverts and content in The Strand, in VU the opening pages seamlessly blend advertising content (many selling radios) with photographic images, such that the separation between the two is blurred: 1446–7 has a half-page photoessay on ‘La Radio et la Guerre’ sandwiched between an advert for Rolleiflex cameras and a full-page advert for a Radiola radio set. In terms of its emphasis upon visuality VU feels much more avant-garde than The Strand. In VU double-page spreads are frequent and inventive: six images accompany an article on radio stations; there is another striking photomontage by ‘Alexandre’ on radio’s possibilities; and a double-page map of Europe marking sites of radio masts. The relations between text, particularly titles, and images is another instance of a periodical coding which marks VU’s embrace of the European avant-garde: an article on foreign radio employs two different fonts, with the text overlapping; one font is all lower-case. Another article on radio journalism employs a growing font size, echoing the Futurist mode of ‘words-in-freedom’; most of the titles use various forms of serif font, a favoured form of European modernist designers. The asymmetrical layout of text is common. By such practices the textual components of VU thus form another

Figure i.2  Front cover of VU, 14 September 1932, ‘Radio’ special edition. Scan, copyright Musée Nicéphore Niépce.

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Figure i.3  Front cover of Vanity Fair, July 1935.

kind of visual experience for the reader, presenting the ‘rapid rhythm of modern life’ as a kaleidoscope of images from around the globe. Like VU, Vanity Fair was a large, three-column, illustrated magazine in which photography came to the fore (Figure i.3). However, although its coding employed many modernist features (double-page spreads, sans-serif fonts, overlapping images) it did not embrace the avant-garde styles so vigorously as its French counterpart. And while its subtitle, ‘The Kaleidoscopic Review of Modern Life’, might equally describe the contents of VU, the approach taken to modernity is that of a cooler form of cosmopolitanism: Vanity Fair was often described as a ‘smart’, ‘slick’, or ‘quality’ magazine, mixing literary material with reviews, current affairs, fashion and photography. As Faye Hammill and Karen Leick argue, Vanity Fair was modernist in the way in which it was ‘marketed in terms of novelty and making new’ and negotiated a complex position between the commercial and the aesthetic.13 Its roots in the long tradition of American illustrated magazines, discussed later, are clear, although its focus was not upon the United States alone. From 1914 to 1936 it was published by Condé Nast and edited by Frank Crowninshield, a connoisseur and collector of modern art. This interest in modernism was represented in the magazine by the publication of authors and artists such as Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Picasso and Brancusi. The July 1935 issue is divided into several sections: ‘Articles’, ‘Short Stories’, ‘Photographs’, and ‘Art and Caricature’. In some ways such divisions, or departments, hark back to The Strand, particularly in the space allotted to fiction (a genre which was largely absent from VU). The issue runs to sixty-four pages, with adverts

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mostly confined to the opening and closing pages. This copy of Vanity Fair has far fewer adverts than were found in VU or The Strand, perhaps an indication of the financial difficulties that were to lead to its closure less than a year later.14 The more extensive use of colour – both for the cover and internal pages – adds to the feeling of a sophisticated production for the well-heeled, an impression confirmed by Tess Slesinger’s article on ‘How to Throw a Cocktail Party’. Most of the photographs are, however, in black-and-white, and the key difference from the work in VU or The Strand is that many of them are isolated and treated as works of art in their own right, rather than simply as design features of the magazine. While there are only four short stories in the issue, there are fourteen headings on the contents page listed for photographs. There are around a dozen photographs by named celebrity photographers, such as Cecil Beaton and Edward Steichen (credited by their surnames alone). These often appear on a single- page spread in studio portraits, such as the photos by Beaton of the American film star Katherine Hepburn and the French writer and artist Jean Cocteau. Photos by Steichen include one of the tennis player, Helen Jacobs, and one of Robert Moses, commissioner of New York. The page layout tends to focus upon the single rather than double page, but there is a documentary photo-essay by Remie Lohse across two pages on the underbelly of New York City, with images of a soup kitchen in the Bowery and a flophouse on the Lower East Side. The image of Cocteau illustrates how Vanity Fair, under Crowninshield’s leadership, kept a transatlantic eye upon European modernism: the boxed text accompanying the image states: ‘News has reached America to the effect that Cocteau is soon to appear in the French movie version of Dr. Caligari . . . Cinema-goers in America will recall his Surrealistic film, Le Sang d’un Poète’.15 The passing references here to Expressionism (Dr. Caligari) and Surrealism imply a readership au fait with such European modernist movements, even if Cocteau was a new name to them. Such an impression is confirmed by an advert within the back pages of the issue promoting ‘Vanity Fair’s Portfolio of Modern French Art’, offering thirty-nine colour reproductions of artists including Picasso, Braque, Modigliani and Matisse. In addition to this glance to modernism, the magazine also has two articles enthusing over the technology of modernity: one concerns the building of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, with the short text accompanied by six photographs of parts of the bridge; the second article has a longer text promoting Pan-American airlines, promising quicker flights to Shanghai or Paris. To accompany this article a full-page photo by Lusha Nelson shows an image of the designer of the new ‘Clipper’ plane, the Russian Igor Sikorsky (Figure i.4): Sikorsky is a small figure emerging from a cockpit, the clean lines of the plane emphasising the smooth modernity of the image; it is a photo that could easily have appeared in VU. In these three instances of the illustrated magazine, we therefore see some of the variety of the periodical codes employed, as well as some of the features they shared in common. We can also observe that all engage, in diverse ways, with ideas of modernity and modern identities, sometimes exploring national cultures and issues while at other times signifying wider transnational elements to their concerns. Central to making sense of them is an understanding of how the elements of text and image work together to produce specific periodical codes upon the page.

 Introduction 7

Figure i.4  ‘Igor Sikorsky in the new Pan-American Clipper’, photo-illustration, Vanity Fair, July 1935.

Methodologies and technologies Several critics working in modern periodical studies have argued recently for shifting attention from the ‘much studied modernist little magazine’ to a wider ‘print media ecology’ in the early twentieth century, exploring pulp or glossy magazines, newspapers or newsletters.16 Moving to a wider ‘print media ecology’ could also help explore how magazines and modernity are related by understanding the modernist little magazine within the wider field of contemporary periodicals.17 The focus of this book is thus upon another subset of the explosion of modern periodical culture from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, that is, the illustrated magazine. The chapters in Magazines and Modern Identities are not only a testament to this burgeoning interest in a wider ‘print media ecology’ but also to the many varied methodologies that can be brought to bear upon modern periodicals, involving close reading, surface reading, distant reading, the small archive, design history, visual culture studies, graphic design, photographic and architectural history, book history, media studies, corpus linguistics and so on. Modern periodical studies is a relatively new discipline (certainly in contrast to several decades of work by scholars of Victorian periodicals) and it is still uncovering how best to approach and analyse both the myriad content and the diverse material forms of its object of study.18 In particular, the illustrated magazines under discussion in this volume call for methodologies able to analyse both the visual and verbal qualities of the objects under discussion, as well

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as the external features important for all periodicals (e.g. sales, circulation, funding, distribution, advertising). In a volume of essays devoted to the ‘lure of illustration’ in nineteenth-century British periodicals, Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor suggest that the key ‘combinations’ to be studied are ‘Text and image, text alongside image, text as image’.19 This approach applies equally to the illustrated magazines of the twentieth century, although one key difference is the impact of modernism upon the style and form of text/image relationships in this later corpus. The discussion of The Strand, VU, and Vanity Fair which opened this introduction confirms that the kinds of combinations of text and image proposed by Brake and Demoor, along with the periodical codes they signify, are indeed crucial when addressing the question of how to read an illustrated magazine. One of the earliest attempts in the twentieth century to develop a methodology for the study of text/image relationships in magazines can be found in the work of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who edited the socialist weekly, L’Ordine Nuovo, from May 1919 onwards in a volatile revolutionary context in Turin. When Gramsci was imprisoned in 1926 and commenced his ‘prison notebooks’, some of the most fascinating (and somewhat overlooked) remarks concern how to analyse and understand ‘Types of Periodical’. Informed by his knowledge of early Italian reviews, such as the Futurist magazines La Voce and Lacerba, and his reading in prison of British newspapers such as The Times and the Manchester Guardian, Gramsci offers one of the earliest guides on ‘how to study a modern magazine’20 by reference to types of periodical, their contents, their readership, and their external appearance: The surface appearance of a review is of great importance both commercially and ‘ideologically’ (to secure fidelity and affection) . . . Factors: page, including setting of margins, spacing between columns, column width (length of line), compactness of columns, i.e. number of letters per line and face of each letter, paper and ink (attractiveness of headlines) . . . the same attention must be paid to the ‘external’ appearance of a publication as to its ideological and intellectual content. In reality the two things are inseparable, and rightly so.21

Gramsci’s reminder of the inseparability of external appearance from intellectual and ideological content is, for scholars of modern periodicals, a salutary and significant one. Modern theorists of periodical studies have developed similar ideas, such as Jim Mussell’s focus on the space and time of periodicals, or Patrick Collier’s attention to what he terms the ‘material forms of print artefacts’; that is, ‘textual form as embodied in spatial organisation, page layout, spacing and the tactile materials of textual objects; most crucially, periodical form’.22 Many of the chapters in this volume, are concerned to explore how ‘periodical form’ can be connected to the ideological meanings communicated in the textual and visual material of particular illustrated magazines. Magazines had long included some illustrated material, but it was the advent of key technological innovations towards the end of the nineteenth century that propelled the format forwards, making it one of the most popular genres of periodical publication across the world. In nineteenth-century serials wood engraving was the dominant form utilised for reproducing visual images, replacing the earlier, more expensive, technique

 Introduction 9 of steel engraving.23 However, the half-tone photographic plate, invented by Frederick E. Ives, began to replace wood engravings from the early 1880s onwards; by 1893 twothirds of illustrations in Scribner’s magazine were half-tone.24 Clement Shorter, editor of the Illustrated London News, a magazine whose popular appeal relied heavily upon what Richard Altick calls its ‘policy of subordinating text to pictures’, stated in 1899 that wood engraving in periodicals was ‘all but dead’.25 In American magazines the impact of illustrated material was keenly observed: ‘It is confessed that no literary magazines in the world equal ours in the matter of illustration’, noted a contributor to the New York Tribune in 1885.26 By the end of the nineteenth century Arthur Reed Kimball would argue that in popular North American illustrated magazines like Harper’s or Scribner’s, ‘it is often the text which is illustrative, rather than the pictures’; and of Munsey’s magazine another commentator suggested that in its pages ‘the writers are only space-fillers’.27 Half-tone illustrations were thus a crucial factor in the rise of the 10 cent mass-circulation American magazines of the turn of the century, such as Munsey’s and McClure’s. The chapters in this volume by Jean-Louis Marin-Lamellet and Richard Junger consider some of these kinds of publication, exploring the radical print culture of Arena (1889–1909) and how the cover art of magazines such as Harper’s represented American masculinities.28 In such popular and pioneering magazines in the United States, Brake and Demoor’s key combinations of ‘Text and image, text alongside image, text as image’ thus operated in very new ways. As Richard Ohmann argues: Magazines had long been illustrated, but the new ones greatly increased visual display, and – Munsey’s in particular – made halftone photoengraving’s a staple. To flip through the pages of one of these magazines was to have the eye pictorially arrested dozens of times, hundreds if the advertising pages are included. The initial impression, and perhaps the appeal, was as much of pictures accompanied by print as vice versa. That impression was partially borne out by the internal relations of photographs to print. Illustrations had been just that: pictures that illustrated something in the text; and whereas the new editors sometimes used photographs that way, often the photographs were the point of an article, with text demoted to commentary.29

The application of new technologies in the reproduction of visual images thus provides a key measure of the impact of modernity and modernisation upon magazines.30 The shifting values assigned to text and image from The Strand in 1904 to VU in 1932 and Vanity Fair in 1935 indicate the developments which Ohmann highlights as significant features of turn-of-the-century magazines, changes which only intensified in the later decades of the twentieth century. As Ohmann suggests, innovations in print technologies did not just speed up the production process or cheapen the cost of publishing, they also raise fundamental questions about text-image relationships and the cultural significance of these innovations. Brake and Demoor argue that the study of illustration in journals in Victorian periodicals has taken a long time to fully emerge, partly because of a mistaken ‘assumption that images in newspapers and periodicals are a sign of low culture’, and partly due a need to focus upon the textual material

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in Victorian print media in order to establish the subject as worthy of attention in a discipline built around literary scholarship.31 Undoubtedly, similar views have held back consideration of twentieth-century illustrated magazines until relatively recently. Much of the early scholarship in Anglophone modern periodical studies in the twentieth century concentrated upon literary magazines, and the modernist little magazine in particular. In Hoffman et al. The Little Magazine (1946), there is little to no discussion of illustrated magazines; Alvin Sullivan’s multivolume British Literary Magazines discusses The Strand but not the Illustrated London News; similar omissions occuring in Edward E. Chielens, American Literary Magazines – Vanity Fair, for example, are ignored.32 A notable exception is the monumental five-volume A History of American Magazines, by Frank Luther Mott, which surveyed all types of magazines: for example, the fourth volume, covering 1885–1905, contains accounts of illustrated periodicals such as Collier’s, Munsey’s and McClure’s, but also chapters on engineering, sports and agricultural magazines.33 Literary magazines and notions of literary value have thus dominated modern periodical studies and, arguably, it was not until much later that cultural studies, photographic history and art and design history, began to study magazines with proper attention to their visual features.34 In magazines where, as Ohmann notes, it appears as if textual material is a mere commentary upon visual images, it is hardly surprising that modern periodical studies, operating within a theoretical paradigm established by literary scholarship, should virtually ignore this form of print media. The present volume is thus part of a broader tendency within modern periodical studies to study ‘Text and image, text alongside image, text as image’ as central features of all kinds of magazines.

Modernity, modernism and global culture As noted earlier, the impact of new photographic technologies can be understood through the theoretical lens of debates around modernity and modernism, and the essays in this collection approach these questions in multiple ways. The rise of cultural modernism and the aesthetics of the avant-garde profoundly changed illustrated magazines in the first half of the twentieth century, as we have indicated in the contrasting codes of The Strand and VU. For example, Tim Satterthwaite argues that ‘a visual language of popular modernism’ became influential in many German and French periodicals in the 1920s and 1930s, a language which alternated between a ‘modernism of the machine’, drawing upon technological developments and noticeable in geometric designs on the page, and ‘a modernism of the body’, linked to notions of freedom and a spiritual link to nature.35 Modernist ideas also impacted upon the graphic design of magazine, with Jan Tschichold’s influential The New Typography (1928) promoting new features such as the asymmetric page layout, sans-serif fonts, and the use of lower-case type for headlines and titles.36 Typefaces promoted by Tschichold, such as Paul Renner’s Futura were, according to Jeremy Aynsley, ‘designed to fit the machine aesthetic of modernism’.37 Laura Truxa’s chapter on VU, in this collection (Chapter 6), notes that the French trade journal Arts et métiers graphiques published an essay by Tschichold in 1930, and

 Introduction 11 describes VU’s promotion of double-page spreads of text and image as representing a commitment to this ‘visual modernism’ (pp. 111–13). Konrad Dussel’s survey of Germany’s left-wing illustrated press (Chapter 4) points to a similar use of doublepage spreads in the interwar magazine, AIZ, as an instance where illustrated news magazines embraced the formal techniques of the European avant-garde. As Dussel notes, perhaps the most famous instance of this was the photomontage work of John Heartfield in AIZ and other publications of this period (pp. 84–7). Patrick Rössler’s chapter (Chapter 3) also points to the impact of the New Typography upon the growth of magazines in the Weimar years in Germany, while stressing the ‘iconic turn’ in magazines as varied as Die Dame and UHU, whereby visual communication practices came to be diffused throughout everyday cultural experience (pp. 62–5). Another key technical invention that spearheaded this ‘turn’ in the 1920s was that of rotogravure printing, which greatly improved the quality of visual images, and brought colour reproductions to illustrated magazines. The quality of these images, as Gerry Beegan has argued, also enabled the illustrated magazine in the interwar years to respond to another important aspect of cultural modernism, the rise of cinema. Now, according to Beegan, magazines could reproduce virtually spotless images of the human (often female) face, replicating the close-up frequently employed by films.38 The examples noted in the previous paragraph are all drawn from European sources. However, one of the most profound changes in scholarship on modernism and modernity over the last two decades has been the call for a widening of the geographical focus to study forms of modernism and expressions of modernity from beyond the usual Paris-London-New York nexus.39 To take one early example of this work: in Modernity at Large (1996) Arjun Appadurai theorised ‘mediascapes’ as a key feature of the contemporary relationship between globalisation, localisation and modernity, whereby images and narratives of particular local places, via media forms such as film and television, are now consumed around the world by diasporic communities, producing an experience of ‘modernity at large’.40 Appadurai says very little about print media but in the years since 1996 scholars have begun examining in more detail the ways in which materials such as magazines were produced, distributed and consumed around the world in the earlier part of the twentieth century. For example, a fresh spatial history of modernism emerges when we expand the geography of the modernist little magazine beyond Europe and Anglo-America. Such a move reveals that the continents of South America, Africa and Asia all had publications we can understand as paradigmatic modernist little magazines, including Sur in Argentina, Klaxon in Brazil, Transition in Uganda, or Mavo in Tokyo. As Eric Bulson argues persuasively in Little Magazine, World Form, the little magazine was something like a ‘world form’ that was crucial in transporting modernism as a movement around the world, but which was also involved in complex negotiations with existing forms of national print culture.41 Magazines thus contributed significantly to the historical spread of modernism beyond Europe and the United States, demonstrating how modernist ideas travelled around the globe, interacting with national cultural traditions to produce new forms of modernist expression. In exploring the transnational travels of modernist little magazines we are, therefore, studying what Andreas Huyssens, drawing upon Appadurai, describes as ‘modernisms at large’, that is, ‘the cross-national

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cultural forms that emerge from the negotiation of the modern with the indigenous, the colonial and the postcolonial in the “non-Western” world’.42 Several of the chapters in Magazines and Modern Identities take up these and similar arguments to explore what we call the ‘global cultures’ of the illustrated magazine. What we discover in these chapters, echoing Huyssens and Bulson, is that the role of national identity and national cultural traditions play an important role in shaping the form and content of the magazines produced. Hence, Susann Leibich and Victoria Kuttainen’s discussion of Australian magazines Home (1920–42) and MAN (1936–74) (Chapter 9) indicates how these magazines presented readers with an image of ‘international modernity’, particularly in their travel writing, while also closely engaging with an emergent cultural nationalism at home (pp. 162–73). In another chapter devoted to the Australian design magazine, Home, Melissa Miles and Geraldine Fela discuss how the magazine charted what they call the ‘uncertainties of Australian modern identities in the interwar period’ (Chapter 8); Home, they argue, thus demonstrates how the ‘cultural forms of modernism were enmeshed with the larger conditions of modernity and the challenge of reconciling them with settlercolonial national identities’ in Australia. Turning to two chapters on magazines in China, we find that in the magazines examined by Michel Hockx and Liying Sun (Chapter 12), many had Western-language titles printed on their covers alongside the Chinese, and often contained material that was translated or reproduced from Western sources; hybrid modern identities for Chinese women thus emerge from the pages of Eyebrow Talk (1914–16) and Red Leaves (1930–3), particularly in the ways in which nudity was depicted in these magazines (pp. 208–16). Giulia Pra Floriani’s chapter (Chapter 13) considers how magazine portraits of charismatic leaders in the Chinese revolution of 1911 helped construct a vision of the modern Chinese nation. The chapters by Michael Erdman (Chapter 14) and Claudia Cedeño Báez (Chapter 15) expand the geographical range of ‘modernity at large’ in illustrated magazines by examining how periodicals contributed to the formation of modern national identities in, respectively, the Soviet Turkic countries and Mexico. In such magazines, then, the relationship between ‘Text and image, text alongside image, text as image’ partake both of circulating models of modernist and avant-garde cultural practices around the globe, while also being rooted in ideas and forms of local and national identities. In some instances, modernity is embraced as a way to overcome cultural inertia and the deadweight of tradition at home, often drawing upon American models of technology and consumption; in other examples, traditional cultural forms are embraced in order to prevent a seemingly homogenised global modernism from dominating local aesthetics. The two chapters on Canada, by Adrien Rannaud (Chapter 10) and Jaleen Grove (Chapter 11), are particularly interesting in respect of Canada’s complex relationship with the co-existent Anglophone and Francophone national traditions, alongside the cultural and economic power of its neighbour, the United States. Rannaud thus explores how the Quebecois magazine, La Revue moderne (1919– 60) embodied a cultural nationalism resistant to, yet borrowing from, the practices of American print culture. Grove’s chapter examines how the Toronto-based Magazine Digest aimed to present a more transnational version of Canadian identity in its pages, particularly through the work of its many Jewish contributors.

 Introduction 13 Two other chapters in the collection indicate how text/image combinations in illustrated magazines were open to other varieties of cultural politics, demonstrating how the text/image combinations of modernity and modernism were open to appropriation by differing interests. Maria Antonella Pelizzari’s chapter (Chapter 5) analyses the multiple illustrated periodicals produced in the Fascist era by the Milanese publisher, Angelo Rizzoli. Exploring what she terms the ‘politics of the Rizzoli page’, the chapter examines the ambiguous political coexistence between ‘cosmopolitan models’ and ‘nationalistic propaganda’ in these magazines (pp. 95–108). Emma West’s chapter (Chapter 7) considers how the British fascist magazine, Action (1936–40), drew upon a version of modernist aesthetics in its text/image combinations in order to promote its message, attempting to yoke its reactionary nationalist politics to its own version of the rhythms of modern life. Magazines and Modern Identities thus offers the first overview of the illustrated press in countries around the world, from the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century, exploring the impact of modernity and nationalism in an original series of essays. It argues that two particular tendencies dominate the way in which these magazines illustrated the new modernities of the early twentieth century. First, in the early decades of the twentieth century, ideals of technological modernity and consumerism (often linked to the United States) had a normative influence on cultures across the globe: popular periodicals in Australia, Britain and Europe, China, Latin America, and North America, expressed a shared internationalism and optimism around the impact of such forms of technological modernity. A second trend operated in a countervailing fashion: illustrated popular magazines were fora where modern discourses of patriotic or insurgent nationalism emerged, or where ideas of tradition in terms of culture and politics found expression. Magazines and Modern Identities explores these contrasting attitudes towards modernity in the magazines of countries across the world, analysing how national cultures drew on, resisted, and informed the ideals and visual forms of international modernism. The fifteen chapters in the book thus capture the diverse and evolving periodical cultures of a number of countries around the world.43 The structure of the book groups together magazines by geography, while also following a rough chronology. Thus, we open with Marin-Lamellet and Junger’s chapters on magazines from the United States, focusing upon the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As noted earlier, many of the pioneering technological developments and new formats for illustrated periodicals originated in the United States, so it seemed an ideal place to start. These are followed by a cluster of chapters on magazines in Europe: with two on German magazines (Rössler and Dussel); one each on Italian (Pelizzari) and French (Truxa) magazines; and concluding with West’s discussion of the British magazine Action. Then the focus shifts to four chapters exploring the building of national identities and the complex engagement with modernity in former British colonies: two chapters on Australia (Miles and Fela; Liebich and Kuttainen) and two on Canada (Rannaud; Grove). The final group of chapters, as noted earlier, develops further the notion of illustrated magazines as a ‘world form’ with two chapters on magazines in China (Hockx and Sun; Floriani), a critical survey of Soviet Turkic magazines (Erdman), and a final chapter on Mexico

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(Cedeño Báez). We are delighted that Faye Hammill, the author of much fine work on modern print culture, has provided an elegant and incisive Afterword to the volume. In 1928, VU promised a magazine that would capture the ‘rapid rhythms of modern life’. It is a claim that could be made, in diverse iterations, about all of the examples considered in this volume, for on the pages of these periodicals the many rhythms of modernity are captured in multiple text and image combinations – combinations that demonstrate the richness and fascination of the global culture of the illustrated magazine.

Notes 1 For the concept of ‘periodical codes’ see ‘General Introduction’ to Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 1: Britain and Ireland, 1880–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5–9. 2 See Jerold J. Savory, ‘The Strand Magazine’, in British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913, ed. Alvin Sullivan (London: Greenwood Press, 1984), 399. 3 See Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London: Verso, 1996), 25. 4 Emma Liggins and Minna Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction: Reassessing the Strand Magazine, 1891–1918’, Victorian Periodicals Review 52, no. 2 (2019): 221–34 ( 223) 6. This issue of Victorian Periodicals Review is dedicated to articles on The Strand. 5 The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly, XXVIII, no. 163 (July 1904). All page references to this issue are given in the main text. 6 David Reed, The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States (London: British Library, 1997), 96. 7 Ibid., 97. 8 Liggins and Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’, 221. 9 ‘Remarques sur un nouveau journal illustré’, VU, no. 1, 21 March 1928, 11–12. The original reads: ‘Mais on ne trouve pas chez nous un journal illustré dont la lecture traduise le rythme précipité de la vie actuelle . . .  Conçu dans un esprit nouveau et réalisé par des moyens nouveaux, VU apporte en France une formule neuve: le reportage illustré d’informations mondiales. . . . Animé comme un beau film’ All translations are my own. 10 Tim Satterthwaite, Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 203. 11 Pierre Descaves, ‘Éloge de la Radio’, VU, no. 235, 14 September 1932, 1456 (‘Nous sommes à l’age du bruit’). 12 ‘Alexandre’ was the pseudonym for Alexander Liberman, born into a Jewish family in Ukraine who emigrated to Paris, and later to New York, working for many years for Condé Nast as editorial director. See Satterthwaite, Modernist Magazines and the Social Idea, 268–70 for a discussion of the political dimensions of his work in VU. 13 Faye Hammill and Karen Leick, ‘Modernism and the Quality Magazines’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: vol. 2 North America, 1894–1960, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 178.

 Introduction 15 14 Hammill and Leick note that very few issues made a profit; it was expensive to produce and had a circulation often below the 100,000 mark, meaning that Nast had to subsidize its production costs; ‘Modernism and the Quality Magazines’, 180–1. 15 ‘Jean Cocteau – Figure in the Arts’, Vanity Fair 44, no. 5 (July 1935), 41. 16 See Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier, eds. Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): 5, 8. See Faye Hammill and Mark Hussey, Modernism’s Print Cultures (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), for an overview of this expanded field. 17 Though the bulk of the material studied in the three volumes of The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines was of the kind that could be characterised as the ‘modernist little magazine’, it was not exclusively so. Thus, the first two volumes included essays on magazines that cannot be easily defined as modernist ‘little’ magazines, such as the London Mercury, New Yorker, or The Smart Set. 18 For one overview of the state of the field from an Anglo-American perspective see Patrick Collier, ‘What is Modern Periodical Studies?’, Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 6, no. 2 (2015): 92–111. See also the special issue on ‘Modernity and National Identity in Popular Magazines’, Journal of European Periodical Studies 6, no. 2 (2021). 19 Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, ‘Introduction: The Lure of Illustration’, in The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century: Picture and Press, ed. Brake and Demoor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 12. 20 See Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 143–67. 21 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans. William Boelhower (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), 406. 22 James Mussell, Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth Century Periodical Press (London: Ashgate, 2007); Patrick Collier, Modern Print Artefacts: Textual Materiality and Literary Value in British Print Culture, 1890–1930s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 2–3. 23 See Brake and Demoor, ‘Introduction’, 4. For a detailed discussion of forms of pictorial reproduction see Gerry Beegan, The Mass Image: A Social History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian London (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 24 See Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, vol. IV: 1885–1905 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957), 154. 25 Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 344; Shorter, ‘Illustrated Journalism’ (1899), cited in Brake and Demoor, ‘Introduction’, 7. For an excellent discussion of the Illustrated London News see Collier, Modern Print Artefacts, 42–93. 26 Quoted in Mott, A History of American Magazines, 150. 27 Ibid. 28 See Ohmann, Selling Culture, 234–5. 29 Ibid., 224. 30 For one, influential and still useful, definition of these two terms see Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983). 31 Brake and Demoor, ‘Introduction’, 8. 32 See Frederick Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947); Edward

16

33 34 35 36 37 38

39

40 41 42 43

Magazines and Modern Identities E. Chielens, ed., American Literary Magazines: The Twentieth Century (London: Greenwood Press, 1992); Alvin Sullivan, ed. British Literary Magazines: The Modern Age, 1914–1984 (London: Greenwood Press, 1986). Mott, A History of American Magazines, 320–44; 371–82. See, inter alia, Janice Winship, Inside Women’s Magazines (London: Pandora, 1987); Jeremy Aynsley and Kate Forde, eds, Design and the Modern Magazine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Satterthwaite, Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal, 12. Ibid., 63–4. Jeremy Aynsley, cited in Hammill and Hussey, Modernism’s Print Cultures, 77. Gerry Beegan, ‘The Picturegoer: Cinema, Rotogravure, and the Reshaping of the Female Face’, in Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918–1939: The Interwar Period (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 185–203. Studies of modernism and the cinema are extensive; for one fine overview see Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). See, for example, Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); and The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 35. To film and television should now, of course, be added the internet. See Eric Bulson, Little Magazine, World Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). Andreas Huyssens, ‘Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World’, in Geographies of Modernism, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (London: Routledge, 2005), 9. In a book of this length, it is impossible to offer an exhaustive survey of the illustrated magazine in every location of the world but we have attempted to offer as wide a range as possible within the period we are studying.

Part I

Modern times Magazines in the USA at the turn of the twentieth century

18

1

‘A Monthly Album of Crazy Fancies’? The Arena Magazine, Alternative Modernities and US Radical Print Culture (1889–1909) Jean-Louis Marin-Lamellet

From 1889 to 1909, Boston reformer Benjamin O. Flower (1858–1918) edited what he considered to be ‘the leading progressive and liberal review in America’, The Arena (Figure 1.1).1 His magazine was one of the most unconventional publications of the Gilded Age and progressive era: a ‘multiple-crusade magazine of general circulation’, a general-interest magazine and a magazine of social protest open to new, radical ideas.2 In a country racked with urban squalor, labour conflicts, political corruption and arrogant plutocrats, Flower campaigned against monopolies, child labour, slums and saloons among other social ills.3 He imagined a magazine with a mission: to eradicate these ‘root evils’ by relentlessly exposing them and to implement ‘fundamental reforms’, promoting the cause of women’s suffrage, government ownership of railroads, socialism and Populism.4 The word ‘Populism’ was coined in 1891 by members of the ‘the People’s Party,’ also known as the ‘Populist Party,’ the most successful third party since the Republicans in the 1850s and therefore a threat to the political order.5 The party emerged from a progressive farmer-labour movement mobilising farmers, storekeepers, miners, railroad workers, nonconformist intellectuals and a coalition of reform organisations. They pushed for more equity on the commercial playing field and more representative institutions, basing their demands on ‘the incontrovertible certainties of “scientific” economy and government’.6 Flower was the only magazine editor on the east coast to support the Populist crusade. He also believed holistic practices, such as mind cure and Christian Science, to be the highest stage in the evolution of belief, opening ‘a new world in the realm of mind and laying the foundation for a scientific religion’.7 The Arena’s mission, for him, was to circulate all these progressive movements. Flower founded The Arena in December 1889. The 130-page, 9 x 6 inches 50-cent monthly was illustrated with numerous ‘finely executed photogravures’ – between fifteen and twenty per issue – and ‘full-page pictures printed on heavy plate paper’.8 In September 1890, Flower founded The Arena Publishing Company which set a ‘standard for the radical publisher in America’.9 He edited The Arena and published

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Figure 1.1  Cover of The Arena, March 1892 issue.

206 imprints until both the magazine and its companion publishing house went bankrupt in 1896. The magazine had been financed by a single benefactor: former Tiffany & Co partner Gideon FT Reed (1817–92).10 Reed’s largesse meant that The Arena did not depend as much as its competitors on advertising revenue: the magazine featured 20 pages of advertisements on average compared to 165 for popular magazines such as McClure’s.11 The Arena developed as the 10-cent magazine revolution of the 1890s ushered in a new era of low-price, mass-circulation magazines subsidised by advertising revenue.12 This auspicious period came to an end with Reed’s death in 1892, the Depression of 1893, and disagreements with Reed’s widow.13 A hostile environment for the radical press in 1896 made matters worse:14 banks and corporations, alarmed at Democratic presidential candidate William J. Bryan’s radical economic agenda, rallied behind Republicans, and Flower’s support for Bryan allegedly ‘led to a serious cutting off of advertising patronage’.15 After its bankruptcy, The Arena moved from one editor to another, all related to mind-cure circles, but they all failed to revive the magazine, editorially and financially, until Flower was finally called back in November 1900. In April 1904, printer and publisher Albert Brandt bought back The Arena; Flower then served as sole editor until the magazine’s final demise in August 1909.16 The Arena ran for 233 issues and 41 volumes. While it was probably profitable only for four or five years over a twenty-year period, Flower’s reputation as an able radical editor is confirmed by the initial editorial – and even financial – success of The Arena in the 1890s, and Brandt’s willingness to invest in the magazine as late as 1908.17

 ‘A Monthly Album of Crazy Fancies’? 21 Flower targeted both ‘honest toilers’ and ‘thought-moulders’ – mainly reformers, the press and the clergy.18 Radicals of all stripes did read The Arena, but readership remained limited to the white middle class. In the age of the 10-cent monthlies, Flower’s 50-cent Arena could only appeal to an educated, well-off middle class ‘who appreciate a live magazine that is up with the times’.19 Every issue featured a lawyers’ directory and a first-class ‘elite hotel directory’ for readers ‘accustomed to travel.’ Even when the price went down to 20 cents, The Arena did not significantly change its readership, which is confirmed by the circulation records of the Muncie Public Library: some workingclass readers but mostly middle-class professionals.20 Ordinary farmers did read it because they often did not have to buy it, since Farmers’ Alliances and Populist Parties subscribed to the magazine on behalf of their members. However, some reformers wondered how poor workers could buy – let alone read – The Arena after a hard day’s work.21 In the age of triumphant progress and evolutionary theories, being ‘modern’ had become a value in itself and conferred historical and scientific legitimacy: financiers and radicals alike claimed the credit. However, what the word meant remained disputed territory. This chapter uses The Arena as a case study to analyse the volatile and disputed definitions of this ‘contested truth’.22 It argues that Flower’s magazine publicised and embodied an alternative definition of economic, political and cultural modernity. Flower wanted to legitimise a progressive but radical democratic vision that has since been dismissed as eccentric and even retrograde, and has accordingly been erased from history. Flower not only presented his periodical as an example of a richly illustrated modern-day object but, intellectually and politically, it was ‘a great, progressive exponent of modern thought’.23 Technological, scientific and economic progress had been dissociated from social and moral progress, Flower explained; he therefore wanted to use print culture to circulate the alternative modernities he thought would reform the United States. Critics, on the other hand, reduced The Arena to ‘a monthly album of crazy fancies’.24 According to Printers’ Ink, the first national trade magazine for advertising, the magazine was ‘radical in about everything – religion, politics and sociology’.25 Flower’s association with Populism, socialism, spiritualism and women’s emancipation, in particular, earned him a reputation as the leader of ‘cranks’. Flower remained unfazed, and debunked conservative caricatures: ‘the vanguard of progress must ever be in the minority’, he argued, and being ridiculed proved radicals and reformers right – Flower did not make any distinction between the two.26 This chapter considers political-historical questions from the perspective of the history of journalism and periodical studies, thus providing new insights into the contested construction of the idea of ‘modernity’. First, it studies how Flower devised his magazine as a torchbearer in the global arena of progressive thought. It explores the ambivalence of his cooperative ideal, as it did not countervail nationalist tendencies but actually promoted them. After discussing how internationalist ideals and national identities were projected in The Arena, the chapter explores Flower’s magazine as a medium for the circulation and legitimisation of alternative modernities, focusing on the Populists’ fight against monopolies and on middle-class women’s struggle for emancipation. The chapter then closes with a discussion of what modernity entailed for magazines as material objects and examines Flower’s ambition to make his periodical

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a contemporary-looking review – though in hindsight, it appears more genteel and academic than the brisker popular periodicals of the 1890s. The use of illustrated material in The Arena, its advertising pages, aesthetic ideals and editorial practices reveal a contested – and now discredited – vision of modernity.

Scrambling for modernity: transatlantic reform discourses and the production of national identity Flower envisioned print culture as an agent of progress. His intellectual model was the British Anti-Corn Law League, an idealistic avant-garde grouping whose popular education movement in the 1840s had challenged the orthodox views of conservative media and churches. Britain had ‘literally [been] sown with pamphlets and tracts,’ awakening consciences and forcing government to act.27 Print culture had, therefore, caused a ‘successful revolution of a radical or fundamental character’ without any bloodshed. Fifty years later, in Flowers’s account, magazines took up the torch.28 They exposed corrupt business and government practices: newspapers were then ‘compelled to discuss them,’ thus showing how ‘the influence of the daily press had for the hour passed to the magazine’.29 Magazines set the political agenda, focusing on the ‘great living problems’ of the day and circulating the latest reform discourses (Figure 1.2).30 Flower conceived The Arena as a torchbearer in an era of transatlantic social politics.31 It expressed an optimistic vision of economic, political and international cooperation that could rationalise and humanise the chaotic and exploitative industrial system spanning the Atlantic. Laissez-faire created tramps and millionaires, thus threatening the social fabric. Cooperation, on the contrary, was both modern and moral: ‘it applied to its work the economic principles of the trusts as they relate to organization, systematization, and administration, while keeping it on the high plane of brotherhood’.32 In the United States, The Arena publicised Farmers Alliance cooperatives and Populist reforms: government ownership of railroads and telegraphs could promote equal opportunity and national cohesion. The ‘union of the wealthcreators and consumers for the mutual benefit of all’ meant the end of ‘class legislation’ and ‘special privilege’.33 The model again came from Europe, and Flower boasted that The Arena was the ‘first leading American magazine to advocate cooperation and to publish extended papers on the cooperative work in the Old World’.34 Flower also praised New Zealand’s nascent welfare state after 1900. He saw New Zealand as a cooperative organised by government on a national scale: government ownership meant the people owned modern infrastructures, not self-interested private companies.35 Politically speaking, cooperation implied direct democracy: by promoting deliberation, it would give a voice to the people and encourage a peaceful resolution to labour conflicts.36 Flower also campaigned in favour of compulsory arbitration to end labour disputes as well as wars between nations.37 He supported the creation of an international court and a ‘permanent congress of nations’ to settle disputes between countries.38 Flower assigned himself the mission of ‘acquainting readers and American reformers with work in foreign experiment stations’.39 The Arena gave a voice to a

 ‘A Monthly Album of Crazy Fancies’? 23

Figure 1.2  ‘The Leading Progressive Review of the World.’ Advertisement for The Arena, November 1891, n.p. Image courtesy of HathiTrust and the University of Michigan.

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Magazines and Modern Identities

vast transatlantic and transpacific network of like-minded reformers who gave the magazine ‘an international standing among the world’s great reviews of opinion’.40 These middle-class college-educated experts often relied on overseas precedents to demonstrate the practicability of new social policies. For example, Frank Parsons published a fourteen-part series on ‘The Telegraph Monopoly’;41 Carl Vrooman analysed ‘Railway Nationalization in France’; and William McCrackan direct democracy in Switzerland.42 Flower collected articles into books and published monographs, for instance McCrackan’s Swiss Solutions of American Problems and Marion Todd’s Railways of Europe and America, or Government Ownership.43 Flower wanted his magazine to belong to the new global culture of science-based progress. He encouraged contributors to write articles adhering to the modern, international standards of scientific journals complete with symposia, bibliographies, footnotes and statistics from official reports (Figure 1.3). Cooperation should foster brotherhood, but Flower saw the United States as uniquely equipped to lead the way. He promoted a cosmopolitan world of reformers, but that did not stop him and his contributors from harbouring nationalistic feelings. ‘Contrary to what seem[ed] to be the usual order of progress,’ Europe was the locus of innovative cooperation, not the United States.44 Humiliation was the dominant feeling when Arena reformers looked beyond the Atlantic. European and Antipodean experiments were a necessary detour to put an end to ‘the melancholy spectacle of that Republic . . . falling behind monarchies and other foreign States in the march of progress’.45 The United States, in short, was not living up to its self-definition as an exceptional country, its ‘Heaven-sent mission as the leader of civilization’s vanguard’.46 Imported reforms had, therefore, to be Americanised. The Arena was a forum where reformers discussed how to translate foreign ideas into an acceptable American idiom. Nationalisation became public ownership and government by referendum became direct legislation.47 The European cooperation-as-solidarity formula was turned into business-like wealth creation ventures because European cooperation was ‘plodding to the active, nervous American mind and hand’ and had to be modified ‘to adapt it to our industrial soil’.48 The Arena offered a patriotic vision of American-led progress. Politically, Flower suggested the superiority of homegrown reform movements: Populism in the 1890s and, after its demise, what he called ‘progressive or voluntary socialism.’ ‘Voluntary socialism’ protected individual freedom: it was different from the German kind of ‘compulsory’ or ‘military’ socialism where the state behaved like a despotic parent infantilising its citizens.49 The boundaries of exceptionalism were therefore not shifted in any significant way. American reformers had to explore Europe, bring back successful policies and, by Americanising them, recapture the USA’s lost position as the ‘moral leader of civilization’.50 As the imperial scramble for colonies forged nationalism, the scramble for reform was instrumental in producing American identity. Even though The Arena was concerned with transnational reform movements, distributed in London and Paris (Figure 1.1), and with its articles regularly reprinted in English-speaking countries, it was first and foremost addressed to a national audience and dealt with national issues.

Figure 1.3  Example of extensive footnotes. Frank Parsons, ‘The Telegraph Monopoly,’ The Arena, January 1896, 250–1. Image courtesy of HathiTrust and the University of Michigan.

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Alternative modernities: Populists, women and ‘cranks’ Writers and activists across the United States’ political spectrum were committed to a common ideal of ‘modernity’ but disagreed on its structure and ideological content: whilst grassroots protest movements cultivated a modern national sensibility, mainstream media and politicians dismissed them as dangerous fantasists. Populists’ fight against monopolies and women’s struggle for emancipation, in particular, were viewed as threatening the economic and social order. American writer Elbert Hubbard offered a derisive description of Flower’s work as a reform editor in his irreverent ‘Periodical of Protest’ The Philistine: The term ‘Crank’ is an expression used by people who have wheels to designate other people who are similarly equipt. Ethelyn Huston [a novelist] once called at the ‘Arena’ Office, Pierce Bldg., Boston, with a small homily on The Malthusian Theory, or Woman as a Free Immoral Agent. She wanted to see Mr. Flower and have him publish her amusing Little Thing. But B.O. Flower was not to be seen – excepting from a distance. Over two hundred wild-eyed cranks filled the hallways [and all their] pockets bulged with MS. on The Grinding of the Honest Proletariat by the Octopus of Capital.51

Flower’s detractors ridiculed his utopian vision of emancipated women and antimonopoly politics. Empowering women was perceived as a dangerous subversion of gender norms and redistributing economic and political power away from concentrated capital and cultural elites as ‘menacing socialism’ and anarchy.52 Although Populists ‘were influenced by modernity and sought to make America modern’, most of their contemporaries considered them to be backward-looking and dangerous radicals.53 Populists illustrated the ‘essential crankiness of cranks’ according to the New York Times.54 In this cultural climate, The Arena could not but appear cranky, as it was the textbook of the movement and the only Eastern magazine to support Populism.55 Flower believed a modern magazine should give radical ideas the full and fair hearing that the ‘current periodical literature’ and partisan press denied them.56 Populism led to an ‘awakening of language, of reading and speaking, of new and radical powers discovered in words’.57 The Arena, which was also full of fringe theories about mind cure, spiritualism and hypnotism, was the medium ‒ or hypnotist ‒ that awakened the sleeping consciences of readers and empowered reformers, or so Flower believed.58 Leaders of the Populist movement, such as Annie Diggs, James Weaver and Tom Watson, published eighty-seven articles in Flower’s monthly.59 Flower himself penned more than forty glowing editorials, published Populist books and reprinted Populist articles in pamphlet form.60 In 1896, Flower endorsed the Democratic and Populist candidate William J. Bryan – a gesture that allegedly precipitated the magazine’s bankruptcy.61 Populist leaders and speakers used Arena articles as a reservoir of authoritative arguments in debates.62 Rank-and-file Populists subscribed to the magazine and ordered books and pamphlets from The Arena Publishing Company.63 Flower publicised Populism, and Populists in return built readership for the magazine,

 ‘A Monthly Album of Crazy Fancies’? 27 a symbiotic relationship typical of radical movements which were ‘actually subsidiary to their organs’.64 Arena articles were also reprinted in radical periodicals. For example, the Populist weekly Southern Mercury published Flower’s editorials on the front page with the headline ‘Read and reflect’.65 It also attributed a critique of monopolies to Flower, though the text was actually written by another Arena contributor.66 The mistake shows how the rise of the modern newspaper and the magazine industry coexisted with older practices. In the nineteenth century, including the names of contributors and journalists was limited to famous men of letters.67 Reprints of anonymous texts prevailed: readers accessed an imagined, collective authorial presence, a ‘network author’ to use newspaper historian Ryan Cordell’s phrase.68 This legacy persisted in alternative and small-town print culture at the end of the century. At the same time, however, magazines defined a new role for editors and contributors: editors’ names became synonymous with their periodicals and writers who intervened in the public debate started to form a network of names soon to be called ‘intellectuals’.69 This explains why the Southern Mercury was both indifferent to the exact identity of its authors and why it did not have to clarify who wrote the article because it was selfevident that a text from The Arena had to be written by Flower. The Arena also advocated women’s emancipation. Flower claimed that his magazine was ‘more hospitable to women than any other great review published in the civilized world’.70 Reformers, among them suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frances Willard, wrote one-fourth of all articles in the magazine. Radical causes were interconnected: Flower celebrated the role of Populist women and published them in The Arena, Anne Diggs and Marion Todd among many others. Women became public speakers and representatives for the Populist Party, embracing a contentious modern social identity. They participated in the male political culture centring around elections and parties, and ventured into issues deemed outside the traditional female purview: economics and electoral politics. Detractors perceived the evolution as a threat to gender norms: women’s newly acquired power allegedly ‘unsexed’ them.71 Key to the magazine’s support for the suffrage campaign was the space it provided for women to act as civic agents without the vote. Female reformers invoked the idea of the ‘woman of the future’, and The Arena showed what she would look like. Dress reform could not only emancipate ‘fashion’s slaves’ but it was also urgent for scientific, medical reasons, as corsets created ‘a generation of debilitated mothers’.72 Frances Willard encouraged Flower to reprint his article in pamphlet form with anatomical charts, drawings of fashionable ‘moving monstrosities’, and photographs of the more practical rational dress. Based on reason, the classical model of beauty was ‘the next step forward for women’.73 ‘Rational dress’ exemplified order, purity and modernity (Figure 1.4). These ideals permeated US culture in the 1890s. The White City at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, for instance, showcased buildings in the neoclassical architectural style but powered by the latest advances in electrical engineering. In both cases, neoclassicism was conducive to modernity. Modernity implied classical order, technological progress, but also an ‘antipathy toward confinement in life and thought’ that expressed itself through activist reform and exercise in unbridled nature.74 Dress reform was part

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Figure 1.4 Example of rational ‘bicycle costume’. Flower, ‘Parisian Fashionable Folly (Illustrated),’ The Arena, June 1893, 130–44. Image courtesy of HathiTrust and University of California.

of a whole trend in favour of unrestrained movement: middle-class women took to cycling and therefore ought to dress accordingly. Unsurprisingly, The Arena was full of advertisements for bicycle companies. Dress reformers were another epitome of the ‘crank’. In satirical cartoons, Populists and utopian radicals were often dismissed as effeminate bike-riders in bloomers.75 Flower wanted to legitimise radical ideas and refute accusations of ‘crankiness’ by citing experts, such as doctors for dress reform and mainstream economists for Populism, who agreed with The Arena’s positions. For Flower, what was derided as ‘cranky’ and ‘radical’ was simply more advanced, but his definition of intellectual and political modernity was controversial to say the least.

What did it mean to be ‘modern’? Flower used photographs in The Arena to celebrate the achievements of US modernity. He called for a ‘great new world art’ but the examples he gave were American.76 For instance, idealistic works such as William Partridge’s neoclassical anti-war ‘Peace Statue’ would give ‘the republic a noble eminence as a leader in an elevating and ennobling art’.77 Flower wanted The Arena to be modern in aesthetics, but for him this meant the kind of modernity exhibited in the neoclassical White City, a symbol of

 ‘A Monthly Album of Crazy Fancies’? 29

Figure 1.5  Photographs of Boston tenement life: ‘Society’s Exiles,’ The Arena, June 1891, 45. Images courtesy of HathiTrust and the University of Michigan.

American technological superiority and impeccable cultural taste. Flower also used his periodical to promote Christian Science, an innovative homegrown sect based on faith healing. It was the first religion to be established by a woman, Mary Baker Eddy, and its modernity was showcased in photos of its neoclassical churches.78 Flower also reframed social problems as an opportunity to reform the United States. For example, Flower’s reports on Boston tenements documented everyday life in the slums, exposed behind-the-scene corruption and used photography for social activism (Figure 1.5). He did for Boston what ‘muckraking journalist’ and photographer Jacob Riis did for New York City.79 According to Flower, moralising society implied revealing its vices to awaken and uplift readers. Half-tone photographs and ‘photogravures made from flash-light’ gave The Arena a contemporary, journalistic look, as graphic photographs could ‘speak more eloquently than words’ and ‘impress terrible facts vaguely believed but not realized’ by ‘photographing’ them ‘on the mental retina’.80 Flower believed in hypnotism and mind cure, in other words in the power of the mind to literally shape other minds. He not only disseminated these fringe sciences in The Arena but they also became a metaphor to convey a spiritual conception of the influence of print: magazine visual culture, in particular photojournalism, could literally shape readers’ plastic minds. The Arena was politically radical, scientifically unorthodox but culturally traditionalist, with its emphasis on moral uplift and neoclassical ideals. It was a magazine for the moralistic, middle-class Protestant community who supported Populism and women’s emancipation and who ‘imagined a better future – of economic independence and collective morality – for Americans like themselves,’ in other words ‘egalitarian modernizers with little use for the culture of modernism’.81 No wonder The Arena has been overlooked by historians who tend to understand ‘modernity’ in US

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magazine culture through the lens of modernist little magazines of the 1910s such as The Masses, with their mix of political radicalism, aesthetic experimentation and bohemian lifestyle.82 Little magazines criticised ‘both the consolidating industrial order and genteel culture’.83 By contrast, Flower denounced monopoly capitalism but saw modernity in genteel culture: he subordinated aesthetics to ethics, showcasing social reform photography and a neoclassical visual identity. Because of Flower’s interest in campaigning journalism, historians have cast The Arena as a forerunner of muckraking.84 Flower wanted to publish a popular, generalinterest magazine in line with McClure’s. However, his style remained literary, abstract and even ‘dull’, far removed from the muckrakers’ energetic reports.85 The magazine revolution initiated by popular titles like McClure’s in the 1890s relied on ‘a brisker, more personal, and more muscular style, promoting reading for awareness of the new, the timely, and the most progressive’.86 For its contemporaries however, The Arena felt radical and refreshingly new. The free-thinking newspaper editor Charles Moore noted that Flower was one of the only editors in the 1890s to say ‘I’ instead of ‘we’ and he added: ‘he calls a spade a spade.’87 English editor William Stead found it ‘never dull’ because it discussed ‘subjects tabooed’ by other magazines.88 At the same time, the one-column layout looked more scholarly than the more dynamic two-column layout of periodicals like McClure’s (Figure 1.3). The Arena was politically more radical than popular magazines but more academic in form and genteel in style. Flower’s agenda was to legitimise ideas relegated to the political and intellectual margins and, to do so, adopted the codes of mainstream genteel culture. Flower wanted to put middleclass radicals on the mainstream intellectual map without toning down their texts but, by showcasing their full-page portraits, he included them in a non-radical visual tradition, that of the gallery of American democratic heroes (see Figure 1.2). Flower modelled his magazine upon older and more respectable ‘book magazines’, or ‘genteel family house magazines’.89 Harper’s Magazine and The Century were cases in point: they were founded by book publishers, and they sought to ‘elevate middleclass tastes through exposure to great literature and art’.90 The Arena advertised books from The Arena Publishing Company and devoted dozens of pages to book reviews. ‘The Arena will be a library in itself,’ Flower stated in the first issue.91 He sold bound volumes and cabinets in which to display them. He reprinted collections of articles as ‘side pocket series’ for ‘busy scholars’ to read in streetcars and railroad cars. This new traveller-friendly format would turn his magazine into a ‘portable library for a busy age’.92 Current affairs were the focus of Arena contributors, but the aim was more scientific: to produce up-to-date and reliable knowledge for the public. Albert Brandt, who published The Arena after 1904, explained that ‘[Flower’s] editorial policy was entirely too academic to attain a fair degree of popular appeal’.93 Circulation figures – the basis for advertising rates – were self-reported and unreliable but different newspaper directories confirm Brandt’s view. The Arena distributed an average of 25,000 copies a month,94 more than The Atlantic Monthly (14,000) but less than its rivals such as North American Review (40,000) and McClure’s (36,000); and, of course, much less than family house magazines such as Harper’s and The Century (165,000).95 Brandt modernised its dull layout: he adopted the more dynamic twocolumn layout and moved to more visual covers, even if neoclassical ideals were still

 ‘A Monthly Album of Crazy Fancies’? 31

Figure 1.6  Cover of Arena’s October 1905 issue. Author collection.

the norm (Figure 1.6). Monotype companies then used The Arena as a model of an ‘artistically printed’ modern review to demonstrate, as one advertisement put it, their machine’s ‘scientific simplicity’.96 The knowledge-driven approach and genteel aesthetics nonetheless set The Arena apart from the energetic reports of popular magazines such as McClure’s as well as from avant-garde little magazines and big magazines with their ‘conscious effort to expand their readerships by way of their textual and visual styles rather than their content’.97 Flower wanted The Arena to be modern, radical, scientific and respectable: advertising reflected this ambivalent editorial policy. Like other popular magazines, advertisements in The Arena promoted modernity, in the form of processed food and leisure products such as bicycles and cameras. These all nourished a ‘dream of material abundance,’ of health, energy and leisure.98 However, The Arena also featured advertisements for patent medicines: popular and ineffective – but sometimes dangerous – remedies denounced by the American Medical Association (AMA) and muckraker Samuel Hopkins Adams.99 In the 1890s, magazines endorsed modern expert knowledge and started to distance themselves from patent medicine advertising: The Ladies’ Home Journal was the first periodical to refuse it completely in 1892.100 In parallel, medical science was becoming professionalised by distinguishing its scientific approach from popular healing practices. Mainstream science and magazine culture considered patent medicine advertisements to belong to the outdated and vulgar world of nineteenth-century quacks. Dangerous cure-alls and cranky reform ideas became conflated: in the press, the politician William J. Bryan was portrayed, for instance,

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as a patent medicine salesman.101 By the end of the nineteenth century, cultural hierarchies had crystallised: cultural distinctions produced political and intellectual stigmatisation.102 As a consequence, eccentric and popular practices were branded as radical and archaic. There is also an economic side to the question, as the patent medicine industry often sponsored independent print culture. By contrast, Flower believed patent medicines to be popular natural remedies and, unless proven otherwise, no more dangerous than AMA-sanctioned drugs. Mainstream medicine, like monopolies, enjoyed ‘law-bulwarked privilege’ and had ‘impoverishing and demoralizing effects’ upon health.103 Flower wanted patients to be able to choose. He also wanted Christian Science and mind cure to be accepted as legitimate – and advanced – therapeutics since they were more spiritual. He relied on an older, radically democratic culture: he did not reject the patent medicine advertisements and the fringe sciences that many progressives saw as backward-looking. Flower saw these alternative cultures as part of modernity – they epitomised a cultural space where popular practices and pioneering ideas could meet. In this battle of modernities, Flower failed. Modernisation came to mean professionalisation and college-educated expertise. Popular healing practices were dismissed by doctors. Psychologists reduced spiritualism and mind cure to fringe science.104 Politically, his radicalism seemed groundbreaking or ‘cranky’ in the 1890s, depending on which side of the political divide one stood: Populism in particular was often ridiculed but it ‘provided an impetus for [the] modernizing process, with many of their demands co-opted and refashioned by progressive Democrats and Republicans’ after 1900.105 As muckraking gained traction in the new century, it solidified ‘a new liberal discourse . . . that integrated elements of both socialism and the anti-monopoly tradition (populism) into mainstream American culture’.106 Flower’s radical views eventually became legitimate and even perfectly normal. After 1900, The Arena therefore became a muckraking and reforming magazine among many others. Political cartoons and photographs multiplied. Patent medicine advertisements eventually disappeared.

Conclusion: Democratising modernity? Flower sought to democratise modernity. ‘Modern’ for him was a catch-all term he equated with American genius: in his exceptionalist reading, ‘modernity’ meant technological superiority, science-based progress, accessible up-to-date knowledge, but also classical order and beauty, radically democratic politics, economic independence, and collective morality. The Arena ran advertisements for railroad companies, even though they were constantly denounced within its pages. It presented the wonders of tourism-ready US wilderness: trains to Yellowstone National Park meant progress, a technical achievement that could effortlessly take any citizen, anywhere in the country, to sites of natural – and national – grandeur where they could morally regenerate their bodies and souls. However, railroad monopolies made the trip a luxury experience for the wealthy. Flower believed this should not be monopolised by a few, which is why government ownership could be an innovative solution, giving

 ‘A Monthly Album of Crazy Fancies’? 33 the most advanced technology – and their land – back to the people. Flower believed in political and economic transformation but his faith in modernity did not extend to the exploration of new art forms, quite the contrary. His aesthetics remained idealistic – his ‘modernity’ too traditional for twentieth-century tastes. That said, his ambition to use magazines to popularise the latest knowledge and democratise the modern identities imagined by artists, thinkers and reformers did offer readers dreams of social emancipation. Using modernist standards fails to account for The Arena’s originality. Even contemporary newspaper catalogues did not really know whether it was a ‘literary’ or an ‘economics’ magazine.107 As book historian Roger Chartier contends, ‘works and objects produce their own social area of reception much more than they are produced by crystallized and previously existent divisions’.108 Flower’s ‘monthly album of crazy fancies’ – a hybrid of scientific and popular magazine, radical in content but genteel in style, socialist but not Marxist, progressive but sceptical of mainstream medical science – built a loyal but small eclectic readership. The magazine did not live up to Flower’s egalitarian democratic ideal though, as it did not extend beyond the, mostly, Protestant white middle class. The Arena was read by ‘egalitarian modernizers with little use for the culture of modernism.’109 In their progressive ideology, the excesses of capitalism were regarded as relics of a primitive past and minorities only as objects of study and pity: they remained invisible except as a vanishing race – Native-Americans – or helpless victims to civilise, in the case of African Americans.110 Ironically, the same modern, scientific and hierarchical vision of progress that informed Flower’s dismissal of both subaltern social groups and inegalitarian ideologies as backward also accounts for the conservative backlash against political radicalism that branded Populism as ‘cranky’ and, retrospectively, for the erasure from history of the democratic modernity he advocated – in sum of The Arena.

Notes 1 Benjamin O. Flower, ‘Publishers’ Department. The Arena for the Ensuing Year’, The Arena, November 1890, xviii. 2 Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, Volume IV: 1885–1905 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957), 410. 3 Maureen A. Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 4 Flower, ‘The Story of a Victorious Social Experiment’, The Arena, June 1903, 623. 5 ‘We Are With You’, The American Nonconformist and Kansas Industrial Liberator, 28 May 1891, 1. 6 Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 14. 7 Flower, The Century of Sir Thomas More (Boston: The Arena Publishing Company, 1896), 290. 8 Flower, ‘Publishers’ Department’, xviii. 9 Roger Eliot Stoddard, ‘Vanity and Reform: B. O. Flower’s Arena Publishing Company, Boston, 1890–1896. With a Bibliographical List of Arena Imprints’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 76, no. 3 (1982): 279.

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10 Howard Francis Cline, ‘The Mechanics of Dissent: Benjamin Orange Flower and his Arena, the Story of a Man and his Magazine’ (senior honors thesis, Harvard, 1939, Harvard University Archives), 91. 11 Mott, A History of American Magazines, 21. 12 Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture. Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (New York and London: Verso, 1996), 24–9. 13 Cline, ‘The Mechanics of Dissent’, 112. 14 Elliott Shore, Talkin’ Socialism: J.A. Wayland and the Radical Press (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988), 102. 15 Benjamin Orange Flower, Progressive Men, Women, and Movements of the Past Twenty-five Years (Boston: The New Arena, 1914), 109. 16 Nick Mount, When Canadian Literature Moved to New York (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 82–91. 17 Benjamin Orange Flower, Letter to Henry D. Lloyd, 12 June 1895, reel 6, The Papers of Henry Demarest Lloyd (microfilm edition), State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, 1970. Albert Brandt, Letter to Tom Watson, 7 January 1908, Thomas E. Watson Papers, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 18 Flower, Progressive Men, 153. 19 Cline, ‘The Mechanics of Dissent’, 71. 20 ‘What Middletown Read’. Circulation records of the Muncie (Indiana) Public Library, Ball State University. Available online: http://www​.bsu​.edu​/libraries​/wmr/ (accessed 20 January 2022). 21 Myron W. Reed, ‘Scores the Money Changers’, Hagerstown Exponent (Hagerstown, IN), 2 August 1893. 22 Daniel Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 23 Flower, ‘Publishers’ Notes’, The Arena, December 1889, i. 24 ‘An Arena for Cranks’, Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY), 8 October 1894, 4. 25 L. J. Vance, ‘Some Radical Publications’, Printers’ Ink, 15 July 1896, 19. 26 Flower, ‘Is Socialism Desirable?’, The Arena, May 1891, 761. 27 Flower, ‘An Earnest Word to All Who Would Usher in The New Day Without Bloodshed’, The Arena, June 1894, xxiv. 28 Flower, ‘How England Averted a Revolution of Force’, The Arena, October 1900, 366. 29 Flower, Progressive Men, 155. 30 Flower, ‘The Leading Progressive Review of the World’, Advert for The Arena, November 1891, n.p. 31 Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998). 32 Flower, ‘The Struggle between Life and Death in the Economic World. The Warfare of Three World-wide Social Theories’, The Arena, March 1902, 322. 33 Flower, ‘Pure Democracy vs. Vicious Governmental Favoritism’, The Arena, July 1893, 260–72; ‘The Healthy Growth of Coöperation in Great Britain’, The Arena, November 1906, 556. 34 Flower, ‘Cooperation in America’, The Arena, March 1905, 326. 35 Flower, ‘How the Standard Oil Greed Has Recently Been Manifested in the Robbing of the Toilers of New Zealand’, The Arena, February 1906, 215. 36 Flower, ‘The Difference between a Real and a Pseudo Republic’, The Arena, April 1903, 421–4.

 ‘A Monthly Album of Crazy Fancies’? 35 37 Flower, ‘Industrial Peace through Arbitration’, The Arena, September 1904, 303. 38 Flower, ‘The Peace Congress and the Extension of the “War Against War” Movement’, The Arena, December 1907, 718–9; ‘The Movement for World Peace’, The Arena, September 1904, 541. 39 Flower, Progressive Men, 134. 40 Ibid., 5. 41 Frank Parsons, ‘The Telegraph Monopoly’, The Arena, January 1896, 250–65 (part 1). 42 Carl Vrooman, ‘Railway Nationalization in France’, The Arena, August−September 1908, 156–63. William D. McCrackan, ‘The Swiss Referendum’, The Arena, March 1891, 458–64. 43 William D. McCrackan, Swiss Solutions of American Problems (Boston: The Arena Publishing Company, 1894). Marion Todd, Railways of Europe and America, or Government Ownership, with Notes from Official Reports (Boston: The Arena Publishing Company, 1893). 44 Flower, ‘A Conversation with George F. Washburn, General Manager of the People’s Trust of America, on How To Meet the Trust Problem Through Co-operation’, The Arena, October 1902, 408. 45 Flower, ‘An Earnest Word to Young Men and Women of America’, The Arena, November 1900, 539–40. 46 Flower, ‘How England Averted a Revolution of Force’, 378. 47 Eltweed Pomeroy, ‘The Direct Legislation Movement and its Leaders’, The Arena, June 1896, 35–6. 48 Flower, ‘A Conversation with George F. Washburn’, 410. 49 Flower, ‘Is Socialism Desirable?’, 755; ‘Pure Democracy vs. Vicious Governmental Favoritism’, 263. 50 Flower, ‘Notes and Comments’, The Arena, May 1904, 552. 51 Elbert Hubbard, ‘Heart to Heart. Talks with Philistines by the Pastor of His Flock’, Philistine. A Periodical of Protest, January 1899, 62–3. 52 F. B. Tracy, ‘Menacing Socialism in the Western States’, Forum, May 1893, 322–42. 53 Postel, The Populist Vision, viii. 54 ‘Socialism and Populism’, New York Times, 2 August 1896, 4. 55 Mott, A History of American Magazines, 407. 56 Flower, Progressive Men, 18. 57 Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 178. 58 Flower, ‘Hypnotism and Its Relation to Psychical Research’, The Arena, February 1892, 316–34. 59 See, for example: Annie L. Diggs, ‘The Farmers’ Alliance and Some of its Leaders’, The Arena, April 1892, 590–608; J. B. Weaver, ‘The Threefold Contention of Industry’, The Arena, March 1892, 427–35; Thomas E. Watson, ‘The Negro Question in the South’, October 1892, 540–50. 60 Flower, ‘Pure Democracy vs. Vicious Governmental Favoritism’, 260–72. 61 Flower, Progressive Men, 109. 62 Ibid., 151. 63 Subscription to The Arena, 31 July 1894, Nebraska Farmers’ Alliance Papers, New York Public Library, microfilm ZT-691, roll 1-998. 64 Joseph Conlin, ed., The American Radical Press, 1880–1960 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1974), 7. 65 ‘Read and Reflect’, Southern Mercury, 22 February 1894, 1.

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66 ‘The Grip of Monopoly’, Southern Mercury, 14 November 1895, 1, 9. 67 Claire Bruyère, ‘From Boston, MA, to Kingsport, TN: Joseph Hamblen Sears (1865– 1946), a Forgotten Figure in American Publishing’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 52 (2014): 296. 68 Ryan Cordell, ‘Reprinting, Circulation, and the Network Author in Antebellum Newspapers’, American Literary History 27 (2015): 417–44. 69 Christophe Charle, Naissance des intellectuels, 1880–1900 (Paris: Minuit, 1990). 70 Flower, Fashion’s Slaves (Boston: The Arena Publishing Company, 1892), n.p. 71 Annie L. Diggs, ‘The Women in the Alliance Movement’, The Arena, July 1892, 179. 72 Flower, Fashion’s Slaves, 18. 73 Flower, ‘The Next Step Forward for Women; Or, Thoughts on the Movement for Rational Dress’, The Arena, October 1892, 635–44. 74 John Higham, ‘The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s’, in Hanging Together: Unity and Diversity in American Culture, ed. John Higham (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). 75 See, for example: Frederick Opper, ‘Cranks’, Puck’s Library, April 1892, cover; ‘She’d Better Look Out for a Puncture’, Los Angeles Times, 12 July 1896. 76 Flower, Progressive Men, 215. 77 Ibid., 224. 78 Flower, ‘The Recent Reckless and Irresponsible Attacks on Christian Science and its Founder, with a Survey of the Christian-Science Movement’, The Arena, January 1907, 47–67. 79 Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890). 80 Flower, ‘Ishmaelites of Civilization; or, The Democracy of Darkness’, The Arena, June 1892, 24. 81 Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Anchor Books, 2007), 207. 82 Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible, ‘Introduction’, in Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches, ed. Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible (New York: Routledge, 2016), 6. 83 C. Barry Chabot, Writers for the Nation, American Literary Modernism (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1997), 17. 84 Roy P. Fairfield, ‘Benjamin Orange Flower: Father of the Muckrakers’, American Literature 22, no. 3 (November 1950): 272–82. 85 Louis Filler, The Muckrakers (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 41. 86 Richard Ohmann, ‘Chapter 6. Diverging Paths. Books and Magazines in the Transition to Corporate Capitalism’, in A History of the Book in America. Volume 4. Print in Motion. The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, ed. Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway (Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press, 2009), 108. 87 Charles C. Moore, ‘The Arena’, The Blue-grass Blade, 21 February 1891, 3. 88 William T. Stead, ‘The Arena’, Review of Reviews, July 1891, 51. 89 Ohmann, Selling Culture, 104–8. Matthew Schneirov, The Dream of a New Social Order: Popular Magazines in America, 1893–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 84. 90 Ibid., 29. 91 Flower, ‘Publishers’ Notes’, i. 92 Ibid.

 ‘A Monthly Album of Crazy Fancies’? 37 93 Maurice F. Brandt, Letter to Howard F. Cline, 30 May 1939, Howard Francis Cline Papers, Container 125, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 94 Cline, ‘The Mechanics of Dissent’, 123. 95 N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual: containing a Catalogue of American Newspapers, a List of All Newspapers of the United States and Canada (Philadelphia: N. W. Ayer & Son, 1896). 96 ‘The Monotype’, Advertisement for the Wood & Nathan Co. monotype, American Printer and Lithographer, May 1904, n.p. 97 Donal F. Harris, On Company Time. American Modernism in Big Magazines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 6. 98 Schneirov, The Dream of a New Social Order, 127–61. 99 Arthur Cramp, Nostrums and Quackery: Articles on the Nostrum Evil and Quackery (Chicago: Press of American Medical Association, 1911), 318, Samuel Hopkins Adams, ‘The Great American Fraud’, Collier’s Weekly, 7 October 1905, 14–15, 29. 100 Ohmann, Selling Culture, 92. 101 ‘Bryan Tonic’, Boston Globe, 16 October 1896. 102 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 103 Flower, Progressive Men, 299. 104 Sally Morita, ‘Unseen (and Unappreciated) Matters: Understanding the Reformative Nature of 19th-century Spiritualism’, American Studies 40, no. 3 (1999): 99–125. 105 Postel, The Populist Vision, 271. 106 Matthew Schneirov, ‘Popular Magazines, New Liberal Discourse and American Democracy, 1890s-1914’, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 16 (2017): 133. 107 Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual, 1896, 321. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual, 1908, 555. 108 Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 14. 109 Kazin, A Godly Hero, 207. 110 Flower, ‘The Burning of Negroes in the South: A Protest and A Warning’, The Arena, April 1893, 630–40; ‘An Interesting Representative of a Vanishing Race’, The Arena, July 1896, 240–50.

2

‘The Young Man of To-Day is Not the Young Man of Fifty Years Ago’ Themes of Masculinity as Pictured in Popular American Periodical Cover Art, 1830–1920 Richard Junger

The arrival of large numbers of American soldiers to fight in the First World War in 1918 was a memorable event for many Europeans. Twenty-four year-old British nurse Vera Brittain watched as a contingent of Americans marched by her makeshift field hospital, young, healthy, robust, and optimistic, the diametric opposite of the fatigued, emaciated, and debilitated British soldiers she cared for daily. ‘They looked larger than ordinary men, their tall, straight figures were in vivid contrast to our undersized armies of pale recruits,’ she recalled. ‘So godlike, so magnificent, so splendidly unimpaired in comparison with the tired, nerve wracked men of the British Army.’1 Brittain’s description of American soldiers was hardly characteristic of how First World War–era Americans viewed their men. Instead, it seemed as if Americans had closed their eyes to the vitality, strength, and mental fitness of their young men, almost myopic to the good care and nutrition they had received in their formative years. Instead, early-twentieth-century president Theodore Roosevelt taunted them as ‘mollycoddles instead of vigorous men’.2 ‘They have no manual of principles,’ The Atlantic Monthly complained at about the same time. ‘They have been cast out naked into the wide universe.’3 Such impressions mirrored what the New York Evangelist had observed of their 1872 generation, that ‘young men of to-day . . .  give place to the young man of fifty years ago. . . .  He is the oak.’4 An 1883 periodical proclaimed that the best thing to do with their male generation was to give each one a thorough spanking and put them to bed.5 Mass-market magazines are not a perfect means to measure the shifting social and cultural trends of a country the size and population of the United States. Magazines have always been subject to capitalistic demands as well as the prejudices, eccentricities and pettinesses of their publishers and writers. Still, the men portrayed on the front covers of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American mass-market magazines provided a window into the perceptions of American masculinity of the times and the

 ‘The Young Man of To-Day is Not the Young Man of Fifty Years Ago’ 39 social and cultural expectations placed on men, even if that window was separated from everyday reality.6 In a seemingly indiscriminate pattern between the 1830s and 1925, white upper- and middle-class American men were variously portrayed as colonialists, war heroes, cannon fodder, invalids, henpecked husbands, and, in the 1920s, as active participants of a new consumer culture. Sadly, lower-class white men and men of colour were so rarely recognised in the mainstream Americans magazines of their time as to give a perception that they did not exist. In many cases, magazine men were portrayed as subservient or inferior to women, a remarkable fact given men’s social and political dominance in this period.7 In a country without national newspapers, magazines were the only national media platform. It was only with the widespread introduction of silent motion pictures in the late 1910s, and network radio starting in the mid-1920s, that there were any other competing national media platforms.

American masculinity in early magazines Gender roles were rarely discussed in the United States before the nineteenth century. Given the pervasiveness of rural and small community life, the only recognised role for early American adult men was as the head of a household.8 Talk of utilitarianism began appearing in American magazines in the early nineteenth century. The concept of following one’s own self-interest contradicted the previous notion of family and communal usefulness and found great favour among men, especially those intent on colonialising Native Peoples’ lands. ‘A proper estimate of one’s self is indeed essential to permanent, uniform success in life,’ counselled one 1821 magazine.9 When they appeared in pre–Civil War magazines, male figures were almost exclusively specific politicians, capitalists, military men, religious figures, or inventors. Generic representations were almost always European fashion models. The technology to print any illustrations was rudimentary. Etched intaglio plates, often hand-coloured, were the first forms of graphics beyond simple monotone wood and metal engravings. The New York City–based Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, started in 1855, and Harper’s Weekly, introduced two years later, featured hand-etched stone lithographic plates copied from daguerreotypes, collodions and other early photographs. Editorial copy references to men centred on self-interest based on John Stuart Mill’s ‘pursuit of happiness’ philosophy. ‘[Here] stands the young and vigorous pioneer,’ the Family Magazine wrote of men in 1840, ‘stripped for the mighty contest between human strength and the giant forest-sons of nature,’ a metaphor for the virgin forests.10 ‘Every man not only loves property . . . but allows considerations growing out of its rights to have a weight on his mind,’ The Atlantic Monthly observed in 1859.11

Post–Civil War masculinity The American Civil War, fought between 1861 and 1865, saw not only the creation of the first American mass armies but dramatic increases in magazine circulation. Still handicapped by technological limitations in graphics, soldiers were typically

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characterised in editorial copy in terms such as valiant, aggressive, impulsive, or irreligious. Words and phrases such as ‘brave hearted,’ ‘noble spirited,’ ‘robust,’ ‘stalwart,’ ‘strong’ and ‘full of vigor’ were common.12 The ‘discipline of the [Army] camp is a wonderful check upon effeminacy and self-indulgence,’ Harper’s Monthly maintained while a Southern magazine predicted ‘a higher, purer standard of manliness’ as a result of the war.13 A Union soldier was applauded in Vanity Fair for taking ‘the skull of [a] Confederate officer, found dead on the field, to make a tobacco-box of ’.14 Arthur’s Home Magazine observed that ‘the conversation of many of these volunteer [soldiers] was interlarded with terrible oaths,’ a reference to blasphemy and profanity, but such language was excused in camps and battlefields, or at least outside the hearing of women and children, because the men were fighting in a war.15 Perhaps because no one could long live up to such standards, the popular imagery of the postbellum male generations shifted from the brave and heroic to an imagery of perpetual crisis: American men were depicted as incompetent, irresponsible, entirely lacking in martial character, and as figurative if not literal cannon fodder if another war were ever to be fought. As such, the younger generations lived their lives seemingly trapped in the debt and shadow of their elders. ‘They speak of their fathers as the “governor” or as “the old man”,’ the Christian Advocate complained in 1884. ‘In such a state of mind the [only] natural tendency is to sow wild oats.’16 ‘Young men, to the front!’ declared an 1877 Christian publication. ‘We as a Church cannot afford to kill off our ripest talent, by thus overworking the best men,’ a reference to the older men of ‘breeding and intelligence’ who had fought in the war.17 ‘The fittest are the most Christ-like,’ another religious magazine lamented, suggesting that Jesus and surviving Civil War veterans were the religious keepers, in contrast to the postbellum generation.18 Another popular postbellum stereotype presented men as weak and diseased, due to overwork, intemperance, excessive tobacco usage, over-eating, sexual overindulgence, melancholia, or general physical and mental unfitness. Beginning as early as 1860, magazines warned male readers that apoplexy, the nineteenth-century term for stroke, had increased by a ‘frightful ratio’ since the 1830s, brought on by modern life and abuse of coffee, tobacco and spices. ‘Intemperance of any kind whether eating, drinking, working, violate God’s law,’ the Herald of Health wrote in 1869.19 Brandy, wine and other alcoholic stimulants could also bring on a fatal attack warned the Ohio Farmer in 1870, ‘in a few hours or even minutes’.20 An 1887 magazine noted that by ‘abstemiousness only can men attain what we ought to regard as the true limit of life’.21 Masculine weakness could also be due to ‘excessive venery and onanism,’ Victorian code words for sexual overindulgence and masturbation. ‘In some cases it may be necessary to keep a patient away from females altogether,’ a Pennsylvania clinical physician claimed in 1877.22 Class played a role in how postbellum white men were portrayed in magazines. Overwork among the labouring classes was never considered in the same way as overwork in the middle and upper classes. Little could be done to equalise that gap, for the differences between ‘the cultivated and uncivilized’ could be narrowed, the American Phrenological Journal warned in 1865, in not less than ‘three or four generations,’ time needed to properly indoctrinate ‘the children of boors’.23 ‘Among

 ‘The Young Man of To-Day is Not the Young Man of Fifty Years Ago’ 41 physicians, lawyers, and journalists, the performance of brain-work under pressure of time . . . is a common cause of ill-health,’ an 1885 medical journal reported.24 ‘It has become very common to hear of a prominent merchant or lawyer or scholar suddenly disabled,’ another magazine continued, ‘his nerves all unstrung, his brain refusing to do its wonted.’25 Yet firemen, the lower-class men who shovelled coal into nineteenthcentury steam ships, were considered expendable when they were overworked: in an 1881 Michigan Farmer article, a senior fireman admitted that ‘as soon as a man’s strength begins to fail he’s thrown aside’ from the occupation; ‘You see they want young, strong men just in their prime.’26 ‘Thousands of roués [upper-class degenerates] and rake-hells can live lives of debauchery, idleness, and luxury,’ a religious magazine complained a few years later ‘whilst millions who feed them drag out their sad days in want, wretchedness, and ceaseless toil.’27 An 1882 Harper’s Weekly line-art cover showed an elderly middle-class couple rocking away their final years in the parlour of their Victorian home as testament to a society which had lost its virility.28 Men of colour were denigrated when they were not excluded altogether from postbellum American magazines. A notable exception was a rare 1867 Harper’s Weekly cover which showed formerly enslaved men lining up to vote in their first election – a rare, truthful image of African Americans at a unique historical moment.29 With the end of War Reconstruction in 1877 however, black men, women, and children were caricatured in popular culture with animal-like features, behaving in exaggerated, ridiculous fashion, and speaking in distorted ‘race’ dialect.30 The situation differed little for Native peoples. An 1876 Thomas Nast Harper’s Weekly line-art cover showed a former Confederate officer, a masked white criminal, and a cowering Native American man holding a bloody club, agreeing to a reduction in the size of the US Army that had been published a few weeks after the notorious Battle of Little Big Horn.31 An 1882 Atlantic Monthly essay, written at the height of the so-called American ‘Indian Wars’, observed that ‘a great advance was made’ when the US government adopted a policy ‘which regards the Indians [sic] as wards of the nation, and not sovereign powers’. ‘A race that cannot itself contribute its redeemers will never be redeemed,’ the magazine wrote of Native peoples.32 With rare exceptions around the early 1900s to be discussed, such representations of Native Americans persisted well into the twentieth century.

The fin de siècle era The stereotype of late-nineteenth-century men, ranging from weak and unlucky to newly passionate, was influenced by several factors.33 To begin with, the popularisation of feminism through mass movements such as suffragism and temperance implied that women were not only claiming once male-exclusive communal attributes such as usefulness and inventiveness, but moving into other previously male-held spheres such as morality and politics. Feminism was women’s appropriation of the masculine and the masculinisation of women, complained late-nineteenth-century American magazinist and novelist Henry James.34 No matter how much James’s contemporary and fellow magazinist Mark Twain opposed the denigration of women in his writings, avoiding

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generalisations such as hysteria or simple-mindedness, he too was an adherent to what twenty-first century scholars have called gender essentialism, the conflation of sex and gender.35 By accident or design, many critics said that late-nineteenth-century women were acting more like men than men. A theatrical act generically labelled ‘The Henpecks,’ which swept the 1890s American version of musical and comedy theatre called vaudeville, also perpetuated a sissified male stereotype. An early-twentieth-century commentator blamed the skit, which featured men dressed in aprons performing domestic chores under direction of their wives, on men of ‘inferior personality’. An intelligent woman, the commentator continued, ‘knows [men] are not easily driven, but they can be led’.36 Argosy published an 1891 line-art cover of a ‘nincompoop,’ another name for a henpecked husband, being lectured by his wife.37 Ten years later, another henpecked husband image was used in a full-page cartoon in the humour magazine Puck.38 The henpecked husband stereotype did not diminish until after the First World War. ‘Idleness and luxury are making men flabby,’ a female North American Review writer had complained in 1894, perhaps mindful of the henpecked stereotype. ‘A great war . . . might help them pull themselves together.’39 Reinforcing this trend, one of America’s best known turn-of-the-century magazine illustrators helped define and popularise an emasculated, almost transgender American male stereotype during the 1890s. High-speed rotary printing presses and four-colour lithography using metal rather than stone plates allowed the nearly unlimited mass production of full-colour images beginning in the 1880s. Seemingly overnight, broadsides, single-sided wall art that had depended on clever typography for more than a century, were transformed into colourful posters displaying huge graphics advertising everything from beer to corsets. Magazines gradually adopted the trend, increasing their circulations from the thousands into the millions in the process, by at first advertising themselves on posters and then printing colourful generic ‘poster’ front covers. In turn, the covers transformed news-stands, formerly bathed in drab black-and-white typography, into fountains of colourful eye-catching magazine cover art.40 American-trained Edward Penfield first capitalised on the new technology by painting Art Nouveau posters in the style of Czech artist Alphonse Mucha and Frenchman Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. Such artistic endeavours paid poorly however, so he turned to creating posters and poster covers for popular mass-circulation American magazines such as Harper’s Monthly and its less stodgy sister-publication Harper’s Bazaar. One 1893 Bazaar Penfield poster cover showed a passionate but otherwise impotent-looking man sitting patiently listening to a woman play the banjo, a traditional American male musical instrument. Not only is the man acquiescent to her in terms of the banjo, his position relative to her and even the cover’s lighting pays homage to the woman.41 In another Penfield Bazaar cover, a man is portrayed flaunting new clothing in an ostentatious manner. Many said he looked better dressed than the woman sitting next to him.42 Sister-publication Harper’s commissioned Penfield to create a series of posters designed to stimulate news-stand sales. Each portrayed a foppish, seemingly clueless male figure. For instance, an August 1893 poster portrayed

 ‘The Young Man of To-Day is Not the Young Man of Fifty Years Ago’ 43

Figure 2.1  Front cover of Harper’s magazine, August 1893.

a well-dressed but confused man looking for help as he attempts to navigate Chicago’s massive 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition (Figure 2.1).43 An 1894 Penfield poster featured a scrawny-looking Yale athlete sporting an almost impertinent look as he glances at a sign promoting a forthcoming American football game, as if it were little more than a bore to him.44 Such graphics in upper-class magazines discounted a growing trend towards male physical fitness and personal development that had been quietly building in the United States since the 1850s. This new physical culture manifested itself primarily in a growing number of newly built YMCA, Turner, and other athletic gymnasiums and clubs, as well as a burgeoning interest in participant and team outdoor sports such as competitive walking, rowing, bicycling, baseball and American football. For example, the weekly news magazine Leslie’s Illustrated in 1882 showed what resembles a rugby scrum on a pitch or even a saloon brawl, but was actually one of the first widely seen images of what was evolving as American football.45 The physical fitness craze got a jump start in April 1899 when Spanish–American War ‘Rough Rider’ and future president Theodore Roosevelt challenged Americans, in a Chicago speech, to ‘manfully . . . dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs’. ‘We must send out [soldiers who are] good and able men, chosen for their fitness,’ he told the Chicago Republican Party gathering. ‘Weakness is the greatest of crimes.’46 Roosevelt’s provocation upgraded the stereotype of physical fitness, reminiscent of the colonialist imagery of the pre–Civil War years. Almost two years to the day

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of Roosevelt’s speech, The National Police Gazette, a magazine popular in lowerclass barbershops, billiard halls and saloons, defined Roosevelt’s ‘physical culture’ as ‘a continuous course of athletic exercise [that] fits one . . . for the arduous daily occupations men are engaged in.’ It established a $100 gold medal challenge for its typical lower-class male reader to exercise and build ‘up his muscles’ to personify Roosevelt’s vision.47 It wasn’t until 1956 and another president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, that male physical fitness received a comparable endorsement. The later nineteenth-century introduction of Spencerianism, or Social Darwinism as it was called in America, also confronted Penfield’s colourfully reticent male imagery.48 Social Darwinists held that men should be naturalistic, instinctive, even primitive in their conduct and appearance, if they wanted to survive in the competitive environment of the Industrial Revolution. One of Social Darwinism’s most fervent American advocates was naturalist and magazinist John Burroughs, a personal friend of Roosevelt’s. To survive and prosper in capitalist America, men had to be the ‘the master animal of the world, the outcome and crown of all the rest’, as Burroughs explained.49 Appeals to men’s inner animal appeared most frequently in lower-class publications such as the 1880s booklet John L. Sullivan’s Art of Boxing, one of the ‘sweet sport’s’ first instruction manuals. Sold at news-stands in working-class areas, the tract featured advice from bareknuckle boxing champion John L. Sullivan, a first-generation Irish-American nicknamed the ‘Boston Strong Boy’.50 An 1889 line-art National Police Gazette cover offered two barrel-chested boxers staring down each other as an example of the lower-class fad for brawn (Figure 2.2), ten years before the genteel

Figure 2.2  ‘After the big battle!’: cover of The National Police Gazette, 27 July 1889.

 ‘The Young Man of To-Day is Not the Young Man of Fifty Years Ago’ 45 Roosevelt elevated physical fitness for his own class. Interestingly, at the time of these publications, boxing was an illegal activity in most of the United States, only to become legalised briefly around the turn of the twentieth century. Theodore Roosevelt even spar-boxed in the White House until he detached a retina in 1903.51

The Spanish–American War In 1911, the Massachusetts-based Old Colony Club, America’s oldest male social organisation, feted a group of elderly Civil War veterans with the observation that they had fought a ‘real war’.52 The jibe was directed at Spanish–American war veterans who had fought in a five-month rather than four-year long conflict, between April and August 1898. Nevertheless, many mass-circulation magazines quickly retooled their pre-1898 stereotype of American manhood from weakness to war-inspired corporeality to capitalise on the new war. Perhaps the most conspicuous wartime magazine effort was made by Puck, a nominally weekly humour magazine centred on current events. On one July 1898 poster cover, illustrator Samuel D. Ehrhart, who had studied in Germany, matched solid physical builds with pensive facial appearances in an image of a generic US sailor and soldier being sent overseas by a sombre figure (often called Columbia), the mythical female spirit of America (Figure 2.3).53 The following week, another Puck illustrator, Udo Keppler, who was also German-trained, portrayed an even more aggressive US

Figure 2.3  ‘Proud of her boys’: cover of Puck magazine, 20 July 1898.

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combatant in the style of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders brandishing a six-shooter handgun and American flag as he tramples tiny figures of Cuban and Spanish fighters beneath his boots.54 Other magazines followed suit, even though the war’s short duration meant that many publication dates occurred after actual fighting had ended. Such was the case of illustrator Frederick Remington. He was better known in the early twenty-first century for his statuary, but he provided line drawings of actual American soldiers marching in Cuba that were published in Harper’s Monthly in late 1898, after the war had ended. Remington was largely self-trained, preferring reallife action figures to the still-life of his all-female Yale University art class. In one war illustration, Remington depicted a marching American, apparently more attractive than intimidating to a nearby senorita, as other Cubans jeer the passing soldiers.55 A May 1899 Scribner’s poster cover, also published after the war, was illustrated by Frederick C. Yohn, who had studied in Paris. His ideal Spanish–American war soldier was the hardened, ramrod straight, and steely-eyed General Leonard Wood, a Harvardgraduated military physician friend of Roosevelt’s who served later as governor of Cuba and of the Philippines.56

The Leyendecker era Influenced by Roosevelt and the war, the image of the American male took on an even more robust persona in the first decade of the 1900s. Barely ten years after Edward Penfield and vaudeville had made famous the useless and henpecked American male, a 1908 New York Times article admitted that ‘the Young Man of today is . . . equipped for the battle that is before him much better than his father was.’57 Significantly, pioneering American illustrator Howard Pyle had been creating masculine images in the spirit of Roosevelt since the 1880s, melding the new realism of photography with the artistry of paint, but his classical, medieval and pirate studies were published exclusively inside books and magazines, never on front covers, and never employed the four-colour lithographic technique.58 It was left to one of his protégés, Joseph C. Leyendecker, to bring Pyle’s illustration style to the masses, extolling virtues such as strength, aggressiveness and confidence in magazine cover art beginning in 1897.59 The German-born Leyendecker trained at the Chicago Institute of Art, where his family had immigrated in the 1880s, before breaking into the magazine business in New York City. A 1905 Scribner’s poster cover brought Pyle’s artistic style to a new generation (Figure 2.4). A group of visibly athletic Ivy-league oarsmen are portrayed bare chested in their boat on the cover, sporting only the most modest of athletic shorts.60 A similarly muscled Harvard rower wears a letter jumper and shorts, displaying his bare legs in a 1907 Leyendecker Saturday Evening Post cover.61 The message in both covers was that life for men was a battle, in these cases athletic, and only the fittest excelled. For the openly gay Leyendecker, who lived with his male partner for nearly fifty years, the prototypical Darwinian American male was lanky, muscular, stony gazed, with a chiselled jawline. Adonis-like Leyendecker men appeared on covers from Success and The Popular Magazine to Collier’s and Saturday Evening Post. Artists had been painting nude females in the guise of Greek and Roman deities for hundreds of

 ‘The Young Man of To-Day is Not the Young Man of Fifty Years Ago’ 47

Figure 2.4 Front cover of Scribner’s magazine, July 1905. Illustration by Joseph C. Leyendecker.

years, but a 1907 Leyendecker Collier’s poster cover displays a barely covered male figure as Mercury, the Roman god of commerce.62 A June 1908 Leyendecker Literary Digest cover was similarly risqué, featuring a scantily clad adult male figure as the ancient Greek poet Orpheus.63 In the realm of the attired, a 1908 Popular Magazine Leyendecker cover exhibited two muscular American football players in an unsto​ppabl​efor​ce-ve​rsus-​immov​able-​objec​t embrace. Along with many other sporting illustrations, a 1916 Colliers Leyendecker cover shows a solitary football player almost beastlike in his torn-jersey ferocity, a far cry from Edward Penfield’s useless man imagery of two decades previous.64 As the United States neared entry into the First World War, Leyendecker continued to create forceful graphical representations of American men that were seen by and influenced millions, although few were as overwhelming as his 1916 Collier’s football player. A 1910 Woman’s Magazine cover shows a well-dressed, square-jawed man carrying golf clubs (women were still mostly barred from the sport) while a female companion totes a tennis racket.65 A number of 1910s magazine advertisers used Leyendecker art to promote male clothing articles from dress shirts and shirt collars to underwear and socks, some featuring a model reminiscent of his partner, Charles Beach. A 1914 Saturday Evening Post cover displays a strong, rather subdued-looking sailor and soldier with imaginary angel-like wings protecting them from future harm.66 Another 1916 Leyendecker Post cover shows Uncle Sam, the male personification of the United States. He appears taller, older and harsher looking than previous Sams and looks unable to comprehend the intricacies of an 1840 Springfield musket rifle that he

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is holding. Another Pyle-influenced illustrator of the day, James Montgomery Flagg, turned a similar-looking Sam with a slightly stronger visage into a cultural icon the following year in his ‘I Want You!’ US Army recruiting poster.67 With the exception of servicemen and athletes, Joseph Leyendecker rarely portrayed lower-class white working men or any men of colour – unsurprising, given that the mass-circulation magazines for which he worked also refused to recognise such men in their editorial copy. One of the earliest male labourers to appear on a periodical cover was drawn by an artist recognised more as a cartoonist than illustrator. Thomas Nast’s line drawing of what he called the ‘Heroic Artisan’, a white working man, appeared on the front of several Harper’s Weekly issues in the 1870s and 1880s. One 1879 cover showed the aproned artisan lobbying in support of a ban on Asian immigration, ostensibly to protect native-born white jobs.68 An unsigned 1883 Leslie’s Illustrated engraving shows heavyset labourers dangling from the Brooklyn Bridge.69 Leyendecker’s younger brother Frank, a talented illustrator in his own right, painted a 1902 Collier’s cover with a white blacksmith, complete with rare-for-their-day tattoos, reminiscent of the 1889 National Police Gazette boxers. Frank’s male figures had brawn and grit but lacked the detail and vivacity of his brother Joseph’s men.70 Joseph did portray upper-class white men at office work in a 1917 clothing advertisement, but their impeccably starched shirts and crisply pressed pants were hardly suggestive of men who worked with their hands.71 Frank offered a different version of a workingclass man on a 1920 Colliers cover. Shirt unbuttoned, he is tending to his factory work holding an iron bar, eyes shut in confidence.72 Another type of male American worker made his first appearance on magazine covers around the turn of the century. The American public’s perception of the cowboy began as cavalry soldiers in illustrations such as an October 1886 Frederick Remington Harper’s Weekly line-art cover.73 Before that date, cowboys were considered either as participants in a nineteenth-century childhood game known disparagingly as ‘cowboys and Indians’ or as petty if not felonious criminals. Tributes such as rodeos and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show began improving their image during the 1890s. ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody did much to remake the ruffian cowboy image into a heroic figure in his shows.74 California-trained illustrator Maynard Dixon expanded upon Cody’s efforts to help create a new masculine stereotype, the cowboy, on the front of lesser-circulated periodicals such as Sunset during the early 1900s. Instead of uncivilised thugs, Dixon’s cowboys looked calm, brave if not heroic, romantic, rugged individualists intent on carving out their own place in life during an era of demanding bosses, clinging women and whining children.75 Illustrator pioneer Howard Pyle also inspired W. Herbert Dunton’s June 1906 cowboy poster cover on Munsey’s, the nation’s top-circulating turn-of-the-century magazine. Dunton’s cowboy looks anything but uncivilised as he leisurely smokes a cigarette while watering his horse.76 The American West gave illustrators a brief window of opportunity to depict men of colour in a more positive light around the turn of the century, and several took advantage of that chance. A highly atypical 1886 Remington Harper’s Weekly cover shows two white cavalrymen rescuing an African American colleague, popularly known as a Buffalo soldier.77 In a 1904 Sunset magazine cover, Maynard Dixon uses a colour palette made available by the new lithographic printing process to

 ‘The Young Man of To-Day is Not the Young Man of Fifty Years Ago’ 49 sympathetically portray a Native American man wearing a Navajo blanket (Plate 1).78 A Native American man wearing a feathered headdress appeared on a McClure’s Magazine cover in November 1906 as painted by N. C. Wyeth, another Howard Pyle student who became famous as an illustrator and painter.79 By contrast, a 1921 Joseph Leyendecker Saturday Evening Post cover features a middle-aged black man carrying a bass drum with visible pride, but his garish marching band attire reduces his dignity in the illustration.80 At least he did not look like the popular wide-eyed, thick-lipped, and dancing ‘Jim Crow’ magazine stereotypes.81 The only major exception was blackproduced magazines, which provided positive images of black men beginning in the 1890s. Unfortunately, those titles were rarely seen or read by whites.

The First World War era America’s 1917 entry into the First World War created a sudden and unexpected demand for masculine male imagery on mass-market magazine covers. Women had always outnumbered men in popular magazine cover art as previously discussed. The call for American soldiers beginning in April 1917 temporarily reversed this trend. As early as the following month, the Saturday Evening Post sported a poster cover painted by a young Norman Rockwell, another admirer of Howard Pyle and imitator of Joseph Leyendecker but now remembered for his white middle-class nostalgia and saccharine sentimentalism. Rockwell’s cover depicts a greyed Civil War veteran surrounded by smaller figures of a Boy Scout and a young woman with a flag in her lapel, presumably cheering the first new soldiers marching past them.82 A Leyendecker Post cover the following week displays an athletic, well-groomed, and firm-eyed soldier readying to take his leave for Europe. True, he is embracing a young woman, but his face is visible while her back is shown. Instead of Rockwell’s tepid schmaltz, Leyendecker’s cover provides a vigorous, Theodore Roosevelt–style masculinity that would soon become associated with many forms of the First World War propaganda and probably indirectly influenced English nurse Vera Brittain’s perception of American soldiers, as noted at the beginning of this chapter.83 Leyendecker’s propagandistic style influenced other magazine illustrators in turn, creating a hitherto unknown visual stereotype of male aggressiveness. For instance, a January 1918 Literary Digest cover shows the firing of howitzer artillery guns, not only as a display of the might of American soldiers but as evidence of American militarism itself, proof of a country able to produce massive quantities of heavy armaments along with millions of fighting soldiers.84 Another Digest cover features a platoon of bayonetflashing American infantrymen led by a charging sergeant armed with an American M1911 Colt handgun and an M1 ‘hand bomb’ or grenade (Figure 2.5). The message is reminiscent of John Burroughs’s 1880s ‘master animal’ philosophy, only with men hunting men instead of beasts.85 Even Edward Penfield, the creator of the 1890s effeminate American man, subscribed to the new aggressive American male stereotype in an August 1918 Collier’s cover showing two American infantrymen firing a newly developed M1917 Browning machine gun. The cover’s headline, ‘The Doughboys

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Figure 2.5  ‘Raiding an enemy dugout’: front cover of Literary Digest, 13 July 1918.

Make Good,’ also helped establish the word ‘doughboy’ as a slang term for American soldiers.86 Leyendecker carried his aggressive male stereotype to an extreme, perhaps to the point of homoeroticism, during the war. A November 1917 Collier’s cover is reminiscent of his 1905 bare-chested Scribner’s rowers previously discussed. Instead of swinging oars however, two sailors are portrayed loading an eight-inch artillery shell into a naval gun as an officer directs their fire. The sailor closest to the viewer is bare chested although seen from behind, and the sailor next to him is wearing a tank-top shirt rather than a regular uniform.87 Leyendecker included another Boy Scout in a March 1918 Saturday Evening Post cover, but instead of Rockwell’s meek figure giving a Scout salute, a resolute Leyendecker Scout was portrayed handing a heavy three-foot long sword emblazoned ‘Be prepared’ to a Columbia figure standing behind him. Instead of a woman as the symbolic Columbia however, Leyendecker uncharacteristically had a man draped in an American flag, wearing a Statue of Liberty crown, and holding a large shield embellished with the American seal.88 Leyendecker once explained that he felt that he could never paint women as well as men, which may explain his choice. A 1917 Leyendecker military recruiting poster presented an equally different perspective of US Marines than the stereotype of dishevelled, battle-hardened warriors popular in subsequent years. Instead, two Marines are portrayed from behind in an almost fashion model pose signalling a ship, wearing immaculately clean and well-fitted uniforms.89 With the end of the war in November 1918, most Americans resumed their pre-war lives, spared the death, destruction and rebuilding of Europe. Magazines were prompt

 ‘The Young Man of To-Day is Not the Young Man of Fifty Years Ago’ 51 in portraying white sailors and soldiers returning home, for the most part whole and seemingly in good mental condition. A rare exception was an April 1919 Life Norman Rockwell painting of a woman kissing a startled returning veteran so that he drops his cane.90 More typically, Leslie’s magazine has a hale-looking sailor embracing his mother as she makes apple pie for him, a popular symbol of American domesticity and consumerism, in a Frank Leyendecker illustration.91 An Everybody’s Magazine cover portrays a returning war veteran striding alongside a figure of Cupid. Both covers anticipate the abundance and prosperity that Americans would experience in the 1920s.92 Joseph Leyendecker painted a Saturday Evening Post tribute to returning soldiers a few months later showing a young veteran thrilling two younger boys with his battlefield exploits. He appears uninjured, as does the returning sailor in a September 1919 Red Cross Magazine cover, shown meeting his infant child for the first time.93 Fame was fleeting for the First World War veterans as America moved towards what came to be called the Roaring Twenties. Such a situation was not without precedent however. For instance, when magazine images of Civil War veterans began appearing in the 1880s and 1890s, they were always portrayed as infirm or disabled, and as older men, never as the younger, robust selves they once were. A March 1899 Puck magazine cover showed two such ‘gray-beard’ Civil War veterans, one Union and one Confederate, shaking the hands of a young returning Spanish–American War soldier, and a 1913 Joseph Leyendecker Saturday Evening Post cover portrayed two grey-beard Civil War vets marching in a parade.94 Just six years later, two elderly Civil War veterans were pictured on a Red Cross Magazine cover riding in a parade alongside a marching First World War soldier, no Spanish–American veteran in sight.95 And some thirty years after that, a Second World War vet smiles at a greying, cane-wielding First World War vet as he prepares to march in a 1947 parade on another Saturday Evening Post cover, while a bald-headed man looks on approvingly at a 1918 military museum exhibit on a cover for the American Legion Magazine, reliving his active service.

Conclusion A study of the men portrayed on the front covers of late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century American mass-market magazines provides a window into the shifting imagery of American masculinity. In the years from the 1830s to the 1910s, the roles that white upper- and middle-class men filled in American society changed significantly. From colonialists, capitalists and war-weary soldiers to henpecked husbands, hale and hearty soldiers, and active participants in an unprecedented consumer culture, the stereotypical American male of 1920 was manifestly different from his 1830 counterpart. Unfortunately, lower-class men and men of colour were so rarely recognised in mainstream American magazines as to create an impression of near invisibility in the cultural life of the country. As more magazines become digitised in the years to come, especially those produced by African Americans, perhaps more detailed studies will better define their roles. ‘You’re three or four different men but

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each of them [is] out in the open,’ early-twentieth-century American author F. Scott Fitzgerald warned in a 1920 short story. ‘Like all Americans.’

Notes AM = Atlantic Monthly CL = Collier’s CT = Chicago Tribune HM = Harper’s Monthly HW = Harper’s Weekly NPG = National Police Gazette NYT = New York Times SEP = Saturday Evening Post 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9

10 11

12 13 14 15 16

Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (New York: Penguin, 1994), 420–1. New York Times, 9 February 1919, 41. AM, 114 (August 1914): 179. New York Evangelist, 14 March 1872, 1. Brooklyn Eagle as quoted in Michigan Farmer, 23 January 1883, 6. Mary Ryan, Womanhood in America: From Colonial Times to the Present (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), 10. Carolyn Kitch, The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2001), 3–12. Theodore Greene, America’s Heroes: The Changing Models of Success in American Magazines (New York: Oxford, 1970), 43–4; Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 13–73; Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations In Masculinity From The Revolution To The Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 2–5; Kathleen Gerson, No Man’s Land: Men’s Changing Commitments to Family and Work (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 18–23. Western Review and Miscellaneous Magazine, 4 (May 1821): 216; Heather A. Haveman, Magazines and the Making of America: Modernization, Community, and Print Culture, 1741–1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Lyon Richardson, A History of Early American Magazines (New York: Nelson, 1931. Family Magazine, 7 (1 May 1840): 281. AM, 3 (April 1859): 394. Richard D. Brown, ‘The Rise of American Magazines’, 16, no. 3 (2016): 1–6; Jared Gardner, The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Timothy Helwig, ‘Melville’s Liminal Bachelor and the Making of Middle-Class Manhood in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine’, American Periodicals 24 (1–2014): 1–20. CT, 1 November 1862, 4; New York Evangelist, 6 July 1865, 3; Zion’s Herald, 6 May 1863, 1; Timothy P. Caron, ‘How Changeable are the events of War’, American Periodicals 16, no. 2 (2006): 151–71. HM, 24 (December 1861): 119; Southern Literary Messenger, 32 (May 1861): 402. Vanity Fair, 5 (12 April 1862): 175. Arthur’s Home Magazine, 20 (December 1862): 381. Christian Advocate, 59 (1 May 1884): 286.

 ‘The Young Man of To-Day is Not the Young Man of Fifty Years Ago’ 53 17 Messenger, 46 (21 November 1877): 1; John G. Sproat, Best Men (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). 18 Zion’s Herald, 2 September 1880, 1. 19 Herald of Health, 14 (September 1869): 129. 20 Ohio Farmer, 12 November 1870, 731. 21 Cosmopolitan, 5 (July 1887): 302. 22 Medical and Surgical Reporter, 22 December 1877, 481–2. 23 American Phrenological Journal, 41 (January 1865): 32. 24 Medical and Surgical Reporter, 52 (14 March 1885): 338. 25 Albion, 29 July 1871, 474. 26 Michigan Farmer, 12 July 1881, 7. 27 The Open Court, 1 August 1889, 1755. 28 HW, 1 April 1882, 1. 29 HW, 16 November 1867, 1; Penelope Bullock, The Afro-American Periodical Press, 1838–1909 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981). 30 Brian Sweeney, ‘Throwing Stones Across the Potomac: The Colored American Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Cultural Politics of National Reunion’, American Periodicals 71, no. 3 (2019): 1–6; J. Stanley Lemons, ‘Black Stereotypes as Reflected in Popular Culture, 1880–1920’, American Quarterly 29 (Spring 1977): 104. 31 HW, 29 July 1876, 1. 32 AM, 50 (October 1882): 561–2. 33 The Open Court, 1 August 1889, 1754; Rotundo, American Manhood, 5; Daniel A. Clark, Creating the College Man: American Mass Magazines and Middle-Class Manhood, 1890–1915 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010). 34 Leland S. Person, Henry James, George Sand, and the Suspense of Masculinity (Philadelphia: University Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 515–28. 35 Sara Krastins, ‘The Feminist Essentialism of Mark Twain’, Aisthesis 8 (2017): 29. Amy Tucker, The Illustration of the Master: Henry James and the Magazine Revolution (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010), 201. 36 Doris Blake, CT, 21 August 1925, 18, https://www​.loc​.gov​/resource​/cph​.3c07528/. 37 Argosy, 24 January 1891, 1. 38 Puck, 13 August 1902, centrefold. 39 North American Review, 158 (May 1894): 626. 40 Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741–1930, vol. IV (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957); American Mass-Market Magazines, ed. Alan Nourie(New York: Greenwood Press, 1990); David E. Sumner, The Magazine Century: American Magazines Since 1900 (New York: Peter Lang, 2010). 41 Harper’s Bazaar, ‘Midsummer’ Number poster, circa 1893. 42 HM, ‘February’ Number poster, February 1895. 43 HM, ‘August’ Number poster, August 1893. 44 HM, ‘November’ Number poster, November 1894. 45 Leslie’s Illustrated, 21 October 1882, 1. 46 CT, 11 April 1899, 1. The Rough Riders were a volunteer cavalry regiment that fought in the 1898 Spanish−American War which Roosevelt used to promote his flourishing political career. 47 NPG, 12 April 1902, 7. 48 Puck, 14 March 1883, 1. 49 John Burroughs, The Heart of Burroughs’ Journals (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), 98.

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50 John L. Sullivan’s Art of Boxing (New York: Popular Publishing Co., circa early 1880s). 51 NPG, 27 July 1889, 1; Stephanie Gorton, Citizen Reporters: S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America (New York: Harper Collins, 2020). 52 https://oldcolonyclub​.wildapricot​.org​/Detailed​-History​-1. 53 Puck, 20 July 1898, 1. 54 Ibid., 27 July 1898, 1. 55 HM, 97 (November 1898): 825. 56 Scribner’s, 23 (May 1899): 1; Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 14–21. 57 NYT, 16 August 1908, SM1; Donal Harris, On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big Magazines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Tom Pendergast, Creating the Modern Man: American Magazines and Consumer Culture, 1900–1950. (New York: University of Missouri Press, 2000). 58 HM, 112 (December 1905): 3–12. 59 Laurence Cutler, J. C. Leyendecker: American Imagist. (New York: Abrams, 2008), 25. 60 Scribner’s, 38 (July 1905): 1. 61 SEP, 29 June 1907, 1. 62 Collier’s, 19 January 1907, 1; SEP, 28 December 1907, 1. 63 Literary Digest, 13 June 1908, 1. 64 Popular Magazine, 12 (November 1908): 1; Collier’s, 18 November l916, 1. 65 Woman’s Magazine, 20 (July 1910): 1. 66 SEP, 4 July 1914, 1. 67 Ibid., 1 July 1916, 1. 68 HW, 22 March 1879, 1. 69 Leslie’s, 28 April 1883, 1. 70 Collier’s, 6 September 1902, 1. 71 Kuppenheimer Good Clothes (Sailor Farewell), 1917. Oil on canvas, 27 x 40 ½ inches. Unsigned House of Kuppenheimer advertisement. 72 Colliers, 20 March 1920, 1. 73 HW, 2 October1886, 1. 74 Ned Buntline, Buffalo Bill’s Best Shot (New York: Street & Smith, 1897). 75 Kimmel, Manhood in America, 127–31; Sunset, 13 (November 1904): 1; Sunset, 18 (January 1907): 1. 76 Munsey, 35 (June 1906): 1. 77 HW, 21 August 1886, 1. 78 Sunset, 10 (October 1902): 1. 79 McClure’s, 28 (November 1906): 1. 80 SEP, 24 September 1921, 1. 81 HW, 21 August 1886, 1. 82 SEP, 12 May 1917, 1. 83 Ibid., 19 May 1917, 1. 84 Literary Digest, 5 January 1918, 1. 85 Ibid., 13 July 1917, 1. 86 Collier's, 10 August 1918, 1; Kimmel, Manhood in America, 143–7; Nancy K. Bristow, Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Erika Kuhlman, Reconstructing Patriarchy after the Great War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Jennifer D. Keene, Doughboys, the

 ‘The Young Man of To-Day is Not the Young Man of Fifty Years Ago’ 55

87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

Great War, and the Remaking of America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Collier’s, 10 November 1917, 1. SEP, 2 March 1918, 1. Leyendecker, Lithograph poster for the U.S. Marine Corps during World War I (1917). Life, 10 April 1919, 1. Leslie's, 15 March 1919, 1. Everybody’s Magazine, 20 March 1919, 1. Red Cross Magazine, 14 (September 1919): 1. Puck, 31 May 1899, 1. SEP, 24 May 1913, 1. Red Cross Magazine, 15 (May 1920): 1.

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Part II

The age of extremes European magazines of the interwar decades

58

3

Spearheading the Iconic Turn German Illustrated Magazines in the Interwar Period Patrick Rössler

‘More Mags!’ The November 1924 headline of Simplicissimus,1 the most renowned satirical weekly published in the German Reich, addressed the flood of salacious periodicals available at the news-stands (Figure 3.1). Still, the climax of German magazine culture was yet to come: by the end of the 1920s, magazines contributed substantially to what has been called, in retrospect, an ‘iconic turn’ – the far-reaching diffusion of both illustrated press and silent film to broad sections of the population.2 The emergence of visual public communication implied distinct image practices and new modes of perception which increased the importance of visual phenomena in everyday culture.3 Today, the ‘iconic turn’ of the Weimar Republic is perceived as one of the main characteristics of the period, describing society’s hunger for ever more new imagery – an imperative to which the illustrated press eagerly responded.4 At the time, there were at least ten national publications in the realm of weekly illustrated magazines; if one includes the ten or so more widely distributed illustrated daily newspaper supplements, this adds up to more than 1,000 individual issues per year, or more than 20,000 issues in the two decades between the wars. Together with the hundreds of illustrated monthlies for fashion and sports, satirical tabloids, movie magazines, art journals and party pamphlets, a picture count in the millions reached almost the entire German population.5 This chapter provides an overview of selected genres of the German illustrated press during this period, based on the theoretical concept of magazines as ‘small archives’ explained below. It aims at providing insight into how new worlds of knowledge and experience were made accessible to the magazine audience of the time, often based on the visual grammar of the ‘New Vision’ and designed according to the principles of a ‘New Typography’.6 The chapter has a particular focus on politics and propaganda, arguing that illustrated magazines contributed significantly to an iconography of the political in the twentieth century.7 From a German perspective, this raises the question of how the limitations of media freedom from 1933 and the restrictions resulting from the Gleichschaltung of the press, which also affected popular magazines, changed their nature and appearance under Nazi rule.8

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Figure 3.1  Special magazines issue of Simplicissimus, cover, no. 34, 15 November 1924.

Illustrated magazines as ‘small archives’ Recently, the concept of ‘magazines as small archives’ has gained ground in media research, and will serve as a guiding principle for the discussion that follows.9 Developed in literary studies and based on Foucault’s concept of the archive, illustrated magazines are treated here as entities which produce knowledge structured and culturally negotiated in a specific way: These ‘archives’ are small because their knowledge production takes place with concrete-material, periodically successive issues that can be picked up individually and leafed through. They produce their own knowledge by printing and binding together more or less heterogeneous material; and they create this material themselves. With these medium-specific elements, an independent order is built up on pages, double pages, in booklets and volumes.10

The concept accomplishes four objectives: (1) it takes into account periodicals as a whole ‘from cover to cover’; (2) it is open to every format from every period; (3) it historicises its objects radically; (4) it is well aware of the tectonics of the wider world of (printed) media.11 The approach assumes that periodicals emerge because they maintain irreplaceable functions in particular historical constellations, located between ‘book’ and ‘newspaper’ to keep the knowledge flow between the daily and the durable alive: ‘Periodicals bridge modes of knowledge that could not be more different. While newspapers present ephemeral, heterogeneous and compartmentalised information,

 Spearheading the Iconic Turn 61 books deliver durable (i.e. temporarily exempted from periodical reprocessing), and homogeneous units. To appropriately account for and depict intermediality of the periodicals, we need to contemplate them as compactly merged artifacts.’12 These artefacts present their elements in a medium-specific manner: for instance, is a painting that gets reproduced in a magazine no longer a painting, but a magazinepainting, different in size, colour and resolution, and embedded within other elements? As a consequence, an order of different parameters and editorial regimes results in a genuine, low-threshold mode of bringing cultural elements together in a ‘little archive’. For the illustrated press, it should be noted that this order operates on several levels at once. In terms of visuals, page and issue design establish elementary and complex relationships of meaning between image and text units. Also, of course, the rhythmisation caused by the publication frequency of periodicals is effective in general, and the numerical (page count) or alphabetical categorisation procedures that structure the contents. A first application of this concept of periodicals as ‘small archives’ addressed the genre of movie periodicals – an apt choice, as it relates to film, the second principal medium of the ‘Iconic Turn,’ with cinema periodicals preserving the relics of another medium.13 In the case of the silent screen substantial parts of the cultural production are now lost forever. The brief synopsis in the film periodicals sometimes provides the only information about the plot, the directors and writers, and leading actors; the printed stills, albeit often in poor quality, reproduce the only visual impressions of a movie’s imagery. Finally, the reception and diffusion of the film in its period can usually only be retrieved from the periodical press, where critics’ opinions and audience responses, regional distribution and controversies in film policies are reflected. The silent film magazines thus have a double archival function, as they also represent a major source for the cinematic medium in its early days. In fact, in Germany as elsewhere, there was a flood of periodicals about cinema, including several daily film newspapers. Coverage often resulted from synergetic effects within the movie companies representing horizontally integrated media groups, which operated international film production, distribution and marketing from a single source.14 The star system, which was influenced heavily by Hollywood cinema, also aimed at global marketing via the imagery ubiquitously available from the studios. In general, the periodical press deliberately included movie stills and star portraits, too, as they were available in superior quality without any fees (Figure 3.2), all of this resulting in a singular medium-specific order.15

Magazine genres in interwar Germany Print media in the Weimar period dealt with the many political and cultural fields about which a specialised public, and increasingly also interested lay people, sought information: from architecture to photography, theatre to sports, crime to popular science. For all these topical areas, the traditional reporting of German periodicals was increasingly shaped by the ‘iconic turn’, and by the fact that the readership – including a growing educated middle class – demanded the use of photographs and illustrations.

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Figure 3.2  Movie icon Louise Brooks, cover of Das illustrierte Blatt, no. 46, 17 November 1928.

Some of the key magazine genres are described below in more detail; the list is far from comprehensive, due to limited space.

Women’s magazines: Die Dame As early as 1900, the press had discovered a wealthy target audience of educated women from the German upper classes. The first magazines about fashion and the household, such as Die Dame (Berlin, 1874–1943), focused on fashion illustrations, often with dress patterns as supplements. Their subject matter, however, soon expanded to include all aspects of household management. From the 1920s onwards, the vision of a ‘New Woman’ dominated, with females taking control of their own destiny, no longer dependent on the benevolence of the family or a spouse; instead participating in social life, playing sports and frequenting the entertainment venues of the metropolises. In reality, this idealised figure, projected in the images of the illustrated press, mainly represented a construction of German media rather than the actual living conditions of the female population – for instance, the popular figure of the ‘woman at the wheel’ (Figure 3.3) was rarely encountered in the real world.16 The fashion magazines of the Ullstein publishing house had been successful around the turn of the century with practical advice for housewives as well as pattern sheets. The company relaunched the traditional Illustrierte Frauen-Zeitung as Die Dame in

 Spearheading the Iconic Turn 63

Figure 3.3  The ‘woman at the wheel,’ a pure fiction for most segments of society; cover of Die Dame, no. 21, July 1929. Illustration: Tamara de Lempicka.

1912, and this upscale lifestyle-oriented magazine, led by editor Kurt Korff, quickly attracted the attention of the ‘high society,’ who found plenty of material for small talk at social events on its pages:17 Die Dame is the image and expression of a world where life is enjoyment of a refined culture. Wherever luxury and wealth meet, it is the ‘third in the group’. It owes this primacy to its enchanting influence on the indulged woman, to its richness in all areas that demand a culture of living.18

Although Die Dame’s range of topics revolved mainly around exclusive fashion, it also presented ‘beautiful houses, beautiful people, interesting actors, and all the wind bags that had long since made it to the upper class in society.’19 In its layout, Die Dame was free to reproduce its pictures large-size and even to leave areas unprinted, for the sake of a more spacious overall impression. The magazine aimed to express ‘elegance’ through its independent and self-confident appearance, claiming the role of an opinion leader for high society, based on its circulation of around 50,000 copies in 1929. Die Dame’s covers were often adorned with Art Deco portraits of women, a style borrowed from French and American Vogue, but also presented humorous scenes by Ullstein’s in-house illustrator Walter Trier. Moreover, the production of Die Dame on coated art paper was particularly well suited for the reproduction of photographic images. This resulted in the extensive use of picture spreads, reproducing work by renowned

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photographers associated with fashion houses, but also reporting on modern cultural events such as Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus theatre.20

Body culture magazines Another segment of the Weimar illustrated press dealt with body culture, including the gender discourse of the period.21 Campaigning social movements promoted women’s right to bodily autonomy, which also included discussions about abortion laws (German Civil Law, § 218). Magazines such as Die Ehe covered the need for advice on sexual hygiene and aimed, as an expression of female emancipation, to negotiate a new division of roles between men and women. Permissive images of women were based either on portraits from nightlife or on the endless rows of legs of the revue girls. Periodicals such as Berliner Leben, Ich und die Großstadt or Der Junggeselle portrayed a lifestyle of excess – albeit, one reserved for only a small elite, even in the big cities. Here, nude photography embedded in humorous essays or salacious short stories served primarily to visualise a pleasure-seeking hedonism whose repertoire deliberately included erotic escapades.22 At the same time, naturism established itself in Germany in the 1920s as a countertrend to an overregulated urban civilisation defined by capitalist work processes. It took up the ideas and ideologies of the ‘Lebensreform’ (life-reform) movement, criticising technological modernity and supporting a strong body in harmony with nature, steeled by regular sport.23 Life-reform magazines included nude images as a matter of course (Figure 3.4); significantly, the popular illustrated press also explored the ideas and practices of nudism, distinguishing Germany from other countries with similar movements.24

General-interest magazines By the mid-1920s, German publishers had successfully launched high-circulation periodicals focused on modern life. Those monthlies, produced with adhesive binding in an octavo format, offered their readership snippets of popular knowledge, chit-chat and entertainment, along with plenty of (photographic) illustrations. ‘Magazines,’ as they were called at the news-stands, sometimes also adopted the term ‘Revue’ (used for popular theatrical entertainments) due to the way they presented a bit of everything and everyone (e.g. Revue des Monats, or Neue Revue).25 A prime example of this genre was the magazine UHU, published by Ullstein, which reached a circulation of over 200,000 copies in 1929.26 Since its first appearance in October 1924, Uhu has been considered the leading German magazine. [. . .] Through its witty ideas, its original content and the

 Spearheading the Iconic Turn 65

Figure 3.4  Photomontage ‘Eroticism in popular life,’ cover of Die Aufklärung, no. 3, March 1931. Designer: ‘KW’.

unique form in which it takes a stand on even the most serious problems without boring its readers, it has conquered [. . .] the best strata of the modern German audience.27

With its colourful mix of materials, UHU was aimed at travellers on public transport, including the new class of commuters on suburban trains, who would find the format more convenient than the more unwieldy newspapers. Visually, the magazine was dominated by stock agency photos on a broad range of subjects, often the ‘beautiful portrait,’ and in particular it made frequent use of film stills and erotic scenes from the capital’s photography studios. Nudes and salacious photographs appeared regularly: whether as reportage from the milieu of cabarets and the demimonde, or shot open air with models from the life-reform and free body culture movement (as discussed earlier).28 Typical of magazines such as UHU, in which prominent authors such as Vicki Baum advocated modern female role models, were a particular sort of photo feature: staged picture stories, which preferably showed young girls in adventures of everyday life – predominantly anti-feminist in tone, and in nine out of twenty cases produced by the Berlin-based photographer Yva.29 With the takeover of Propyläen Verlag, Der Querschnitt also entered the Ullstein publishing portfolio in 1924. Originally created as a newsletter of Alfred Flechtheim’s renowned Berlin gallery it was perceived by its contemporaries as offering ‘artistic and social criticism with whimsy and irony, especially in its pictorial supplements’:30

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Figure 3.5 Visual juxtaposition of a life-reform dancer and a Shiva sculpture; in Der Querschnitt, no. 3, March 1929, 204.

In Der Querschnitt, the intellectual and artistic creativity of modern life pulsates. It offers no room for cheap sensation; here, there is no one-sided advocacy of a particular tendency. The motto of Der Querschnitt is: pro anything independent, sparkling, alive, for everything in the present and in the future. – Against everything musty, grandfatherly, traditional, small-minded, bourgeois.31

Its sophisticated selection of images often culminated in visual contrasts, which created a particular structure within the magazine (Figure 3.5). The way the images were used differed ‘categorically from the practice of other magazines with their rambling picture reports and photo essays.’32 Rather, it was characterised by an ironic approach, which sometimes resulted in absurd combinations of images. A resting countess, for instance, was contrasted with a sleeping polar bear, Marcel Proust’s girlfriends with howler monkeys; ‘Young ladies making their debut at the English court’ were placed against ‘Vagabonds gathered at the Congress in Stuttgart’.33 These contrasts were based on visual similarities, but also offered ironic commentaries on modern society. The high point of Der Querschnitt was in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when it addressed ‘a sophisticated, yet not necessarily perfectly intellectually trained stratum of citizens from all classes’; though ‘this stratum is never very large.’34 Expressed in figures, this was a rather small circulation of 16,740 copies in 1929, almost negligible by Ullstein standards. But the magazine’s value was not measured by its revenue alone, but rather by its image-building function. Serving as the intellectual flagship of the publisher’s magazines, its clientele were the opinion leaders of the Republic

 Spearheading the Iconic Turn 67 and beyond. That the concept soon became a model for the New Yorker underscores its influence on the cultural elites.35

The ‘New Typography’ and artistic magazines In the Germany of the1920s, the functionalism promoted by the Bauhaus and other radical artists and institutions, culminated in the so-called ‘New Typography’ – a catchword which expressed the fundamental change in the external appearance of illustrated magazines in Germany (as well as in some other nations). ‘New Typography’ soon became a major aspect of the media-specific order of illustrated magazines. In particular, the special interest magazines for typography, printing and advertising exerted an intensive impact on the field as they discussed all aspects of printed matter design, representing ‘small archives’ of the field today.36 German typographer Jan Tschichold, who was just twenty-three years old at that time, succinctly summarised some of the core ideas of ‘New Typography’ in October 1925: typography should work only with the necessary means to achieve its purpose in the shortest, simplest, and most forceful form. All national typefaces (including German Fraktur) were ruled out for lack of general comprehensibility. Protagonists of the movement preferred Grotesque (sans-serif) typefaces as an elementary form in all variations; capitals were used for emphasis. They considered axial symmetry obsolete as a design principle; they used white space as an element with visual effect and photography as a convincing means of expression. Their designs omitted ornaments, and featured simple shapes such as lines, squares, circles or triangles instead.37 Tschichold’s manifesto, which named Russian Constructivism and the de Stijl movement from the Netherlands as roots of the ‘New Typography,’ was printed in a special issue of the trade journal Typographische Mitteilungen. Thus, it reached all the relevant players in the graphic arts and printing industries. The Bauhaus was the first institution of its kind to consistently design its printed matter according to the principles of the ‘New Typography’. The Bauhaus exhibition in the summer of 1923 marked the key, catalytic event in the development of what would later come to be known as the ‘Bauhaus style’.38 A wide range of advertising and information materials was published to mark the occasion, and the magazine bauhaus, which came out in fourteen quarterly issues from 1926 onwards, served as a landmark periodical in the new style (Figure 3.6).39 Even more influential was das neue frankfurt (later relaunched as die neue stadt), which from 1926 to 1933, touched on all areas of the new life in the metropolises, and also addressed media such as film and photography. Designed in ‘New Typography’ by the Leistikow siblings and later Willi Baumeister, the magazine, printed in a striking square format, quickly became an icon of modernism in Germany. During the seven years of its existence, das neue frankfurt mediated between the avant-garde and mass production. The importance of this periodical for the cultural and intellectual reform movement in Weimar Germany can hardly be overstated: its issues went to opinion leaders among artists, architects,

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Figure 3.6  ‘Young people, join the Bauhaus!’ Cover of bauhaus, no. 4, fall 1928. Photo: Lotte Beese.

intellectuals and politicians, as well as to corporate decision-makers at home and abroad.40 Along similar lines, the monthly magazine die form made a significant contribution to the documentation of design and modern commodity culture. Its publisher, the Deutscher Werkbund, announced a cover competition in 1928, and from 1929–34 used the winning design by the Constructivist painter and commercial artist Walter Dexel (Figure 3.7). In keeping with the principles of ‘New Typography,’ the cover was dominated by a massive title block in light red capitals, supplemented by a bar in the same colour and the editorial information (also in capital letters), while allowing generous white space for a cover photo.41 However, the world’s most influential graphic design magazine of the period, the Berlin-based, bilingual Gebrauchsgraphik (with its subtitle ‘International Advertising Art’) integrated the principles of the ‘New Typography’ only implicitly, if at all. Well received in English-speaking countries, it represented an important platform for advertising artists and designers due to its lavishly illustrated portfolios, but without promoting the most radical typographic experiments.42

The ‘New Vision’ and current affairs magazines Until well into the 1920s, the illustration of daily newspapers still faced technical and organisational obstacles, which is why photography was initially prominent only in

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Figure 3.7  Magazine of the German Werkbund, die form, no. 8, 15 April 1930. Design: Walter Dexel.

the thin supplements usually included in their weekend editions.43 In comparison, the illustrated weeklies enjoyed greater popularity, whilst coming close to the daily press in terms of format, paper, layout and price. At this period, an independent masscirculation weekly was published in almost every major German city and metropolitan region, from the Hamburger Illustrierte in the north to the Münchner Illustrierte Presse in the south, from Girardet’s Wochenschau in the west to the Breslauer Illustrierte Zeitung in the east. This diverse offering was supplemented by party-affiliated illustrated papers, such as the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ) with its famous photomontages by John Heartfield (see below), the Illustrierte Reichsbanner-Zeitung and finally the Illustrierter Beobachter of the NSDAP. The undisputed market leader was, of course, the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ), based in the capital but distributed throughout the Reich. First published on 14 December 1891, it only ceased publication with the demise of the Nazi state in the final days of the Second World War.44 After pavement sales of newspapers and magazines became more widespread in the German Reich from 1904 onwards, the BIZ, which had been produced by Ullstein since 1894, quickly developed into the sole market leader not only among illustrated papers, but within the German press as a whole. Already in the years immediately before the First World War, with a circulation of almost one million, it outstripped even the highest-circulation German dailies. In 1930, with its notarised circulation of around 1.8 million copies, it amounted to about one-third of average weekday sales of all German illustrated magazines. Later on, it faced considerable declines in circulation, but in the final years of the Nazi state it once

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Figure 3.8  ‘Sports spouses’ – the ‘New Vision’ on the cover of a popular weekly, Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, no. 45, 9 November 1930. Photo: Martin Munkacsi.

again achieved the dominant position among the illustrated magazines (alongside the National Socialist Illustrierter Beobachter). Its readership most likely reached the tens of millions due to copies being passed around families, tenements and reading circles.45 It should be noted, of course, that the BIZ was subject to increasing pressure under Nazi rule. Replacing the editor-in-chief in the spring of 1933 did not save the Ullstein family from expropriation; being Jewish they had to sell the entire publishing house in the summer of 1934, which was then incorporated into the empire of the central NSDAP publishing company.46 The first thing that caught every BIZ reader’s eye was its title page – a full-page illustration (sometimes drawn, but more often a photograph) aimed at whetting the purchaser’s appetite at the news-stand (Figure 3.8). The BIZ, which today is sometimes considered synonymous with German photojournalism, established a modern style of visual reporting, ‘Neues Sehen’ (‘New Vision’), in the public sphere of the Weimar Republic.47 The large sums that the publishing house spent on image acquisition at the behest of the editorial staff went both to commissioned photo reporters such as Martin Munkacsi, and to freelance photographers such as Erich Salomon, Otto Umbehr (Umbo) and others.48 Contemporary rivals to the BIZ, such as the Frankfurt-based Das Illustrierte Blatt and Stefan Lorant’s Münchner Illustrierte Presse were equally pioneering – or even more so – in their use of modernist photography, at least in the years 1928 and 1929, with the Werkbund exhibition ‘Film und Foto’ featuring as a key event.49

 Spearheading the Iconic Turn 71 A statistical survey of around 30,000 photographs in the German popular press (BIZ, Die Woche and Illustrierter Beobachter) between 1905 and 1945 found that over one-third (37.5 percent) could be classified as political in the broadest sense. This share increased during wartime periods, and was highest in the party organ Illustrierter Beobachter. It may come as a surprise to learn that, when looking at the reporting in detail, the selection of images was considerably diverse. Only two percent of images from 1927 onward define a consensus across all three weeklies, i.e., they relate to events that were covered by all the titles. This proportion did not exceed 10 percent in any year, even in times of Nazi press control and alignment (Gleichschaltung). So even during the pre-war years of National Socialism in Germany, the political system apparently still, quite deliberately, left some leeway in visual reporting for the still ‘independent’ press.50

The illustrated press under Nazi dictatorship and in exile In 1933 – after the seizure of power by the National Socialists – the German illustrated press faced suppressions as numerous as in other areas of society. Those who came to terms with the new conditions were first able to continue as before, while unpopular or critical titles were closed down or aligned to the new regime: journalists and editors who seemed politically or ‘racially’ (as it was called at the time) disagreeable were removed from their positions, persecuted and driven into exile. Thus, inconspicuous and apolitical journals, with the usual concessions to the Führer’s birthday and major propagandistic events such as Nazi Party rallies, could continue to contribute to the diversion of their audiences.51 The rigid press and information policy of the Nazi rulers was an essential instrument of their exercise of power, including such coercive measures as the ‘Reich Chamber of Culture Law’, which institutionalised journalist and newsroom controls, and the Schriftleitergesetz (Editor’s Law). The latter established the profession of writing as a public duty, which obligated the journalist to uphold the National Socialist idea of the state.52 Although these measures were primarily aimed at the (political) daily press and newspaper journalists, de facto ‘Nazi press policy affected periodicals [. . .] to the same extent as the daily press’,53 because every journalistic activity was seen as political in itself.54 A synopsis of the ‘Cultural Press and Periodicals Conference,’ an official bulletin called Zeitschriften-Information (ZI; from 1939 onwards: Zeitschriften-Dienst), was distributed to all editors-in-chief of periodicals and of the cultural press via the various Reich propaganda offices. The rulers attached the greatest importance to images, which they assumed to have a huge impact on their audiences: special conferences were held for illustrated-magazine editors, in which special topics and the type of image propaganda were coordinated. The picture press was controlled with regard to their image procurement and selection, and there was also a variety of guidelines on photo bans, while stock photo agencies and image services were centralised.55 As a counter-voice in German-speaking exile, the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ, relaunched as Volks-Illustrierte in 1936) appeared as an organ of anti-fascist propaganda until 1938 in Prague. In the German Reich, reading this weekly in smuggled-in

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Figure 3.9 ‘His struggle with his “struggle” [Mein Kampf],’ photomontage by John Heartfield, cover of Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ), no. 34, 23 August 1923.

editions carried the risk of deportation to a concentration camp. A few issues were even distributed illegally in a special, scaled-down version. The AIZ set standards, especially in visual terms, with its most prominent feature: the acid-tongued, critical photomontages designed mostly by John Heartfield. A regular feature of the AIZ in exile, the full-page illustrations, combined press photos and staged pictures, always accompanied by a pithy, biting commentary. They became the trademark of the AIZ and its medium-specific order, and in many cases even made the front page (Figure 3.9). We owe them today a number of the most incisive characterisations of the fascist rulers and the dictatorships they installed.56 Even under the restrictive societal conditions in the German Reich, politically unsuspicious publications could still be acquired in Berlin and other metropolises, at least until the 1936 Olympics. Despite its rigid censorship, the Nazi’s media policy had to maintain a minimum of citizen approval. This legitimation was achieved, among other things, through an assumed variety of press sources. Thus, different forms of reporting appeared to exist among illustrated magazines in Germany, in a situation that can be described as ‘diversity within Gleichschaltung.’57 For the Nazi rulers, a complete standardisation of the content of illustrated media was neither possible nor desirable. On the one hand, various party entities struggled heavily for power over the press: Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda; the President of the Reich Press Chamber, Max Amann; its influential chief of staff, Rolf Rienhardt; and Otto Dietrich,

 Spearheading the Iconic Turn 73 Deputy President of the Reich Press Chamber. Later, the Foreign Office, the press department of the Wehrmacht, and the party organisation’s chief director, Robert Ley, also sought influence in the media landscape. On the other hand, authorities never seriously pursued the idea of gaining complete control over the press in the short term by imposing massive bans and by state-owned media organisations, for at least three reasons. First, national and international sensitivity around freedom of the press; second, fear that the public could completely escape the propagandistic grip if measures were too rigid; and third, the limited number of trained personnel loyal to the party – a number which had long since become insufficient after all the purges of left-wing and Jewish journalists: For the National Socialist press control . . . the principle was to avoid as far as possible the impression of a ‘Gleichschaltung’ which would have proven to be fatal in the long-term. . . . If propaganda wanted to achieve a conclusive success, it had to tolerate at least a few critical voices in the journalistic concert in consideration of the readers at home and especially abroad.58

The plan was to steer the press mostly from ‘behind the scenes’ so that readers would continue to believe in the existence of media that were independent of the party and the state, in order to maintain a pretence of diversity inherent in the system. Thus, elements of a certain liberality, albeit restricted to non-political topics, still remained effective, but they only served to embellish reality and to deceive the public. A whole series of periodicals can be cited as evidence of this, for instance the international lifestyle magazine die neue linie, the prestigious monthly Freude und Arbeit (Joy and Work), or the yellow press weekly Stern, in which politics was at best a residual journalistic category.59 Between 1940 and 1945, the Foreign Office and the Foreign Department of the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) published the bi-weekly magazine Signal, which was not available in Germany but produced especially for the conquered territories. In up to twenty different languages, but almost identical in content, it radiated international flair while agitating as a propaganda companion to Hitler’s invasion of Europe. Its role was to promote a reorganisation of the continent under German rule, ‘German spirit’ and ‘German culture’ (Figure 3.10).60 One focus, of course, was the events of the war, which Signal captured in gripping photo essays that won admiration even from the enemy: for the American magazine Life, it represented the most feared weapon in the arsenal of Axis propaganda, and even reporters from Paris Match later referred to Signal as their model.61 The magazine’s concept was shaped, on the one hand, by the Austrian Harald Lechenperg, who had been editor-in-chief of BIZ since 1937. On the other hand, chief of staff Franz Hugo Mößlang, who was responsible for the celebrated layout, later reported that despite its military content, Signal offered the journalists, reporters and designers involved an alternative working environment that allowed them to break out of the confines of the reporting usually permitted in the German press:

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Figure 3.10  ‘Attention, Spitfires!’ Propaganda magazine Signal, version in German language, no. 4, February 1941.

Compared to the repulsive bleakness of the majority of other German periodicals, Signal not only made an impression on the reader with its sophisticated layout and lively makeup, but certainly also fascinated the editors themselves, whose journalistic skills were here provided with a domain of technical experimentation that was otherwise no longer available . . . They devoted themselves to their task voluntarily and with conviction. In the delusion of the self-deceived, it appeared to them rather as an accolade, that sought and found its confirmation in praise and recognition by friend and foe alike.62

Conclusion On a global scale, the illustrated press of the interwar period was without doubt heavily influenced by the German magazine landscape. News-stands saw a singular wealth of periodicals that embodied new concepts, promoted new perspectives in photojournalism, and used a creative visual language (New Typography). It seems safe to say that developments originating in the German market were later deliberately adopted in other countries such as the United States and France.63 Beginning in the nineteenth century with general interest-, newspaper-like weeklies (e.g. Illustrirte Zeitung Leipzig, L’Illustration, Illustrated London News), this model diversified with

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Figure 3.11 and Figure 3.12 Jews in the press business, Nazi photomontage in Der illustrierte Beobachter, no. 50, 10 December 1932, 3–4.

technical progress in picture-processing and printing.64 In the 1920s in particular, magazines as ‘small archives’ of their period quickly took up the modernist zeitgeist and, at least in westernised industrial nations, addressed increasingly wider audiences. Whether current events or cultural movements, genres such as fashion or sports, the way in which the illustrated press presented information, opinions and sensations to its readers developed a certain uniformity. Transnational co-orientation processes on both the design and editorial levels contributed to this; for, unofficially of course, editors-in-chief kept a close eye on developments in other countries. Also, the global impact of artistic and graphic design movements (such as the ‘New Vision’ or the ‘New Typography’) led to a homogenisation of ambitious press products in a developing ‘International Style.’65 As in other areas, Germany lost much of its leadership in the magazine world with the National Socialists’ rise to power. The caesura that the fascist dictatorship caused for the entire social life of Germany did not spare the magazine industry. The Weimar Republic had been characterised by the battle of opinions between different parties and movements, including sharp criticism of the emerging National Socialism. With the persecution of persons of Jewish descent, who accounted for large sections of the media industry (Figures 3.11 and 3.12), many media professionals were arrested or exiled to safe countries, and Germany lost much of its creative power. In retrospect, the clearsightedness with which some contemporary observers foresaw the impending catastrophe is astonishing: left-wing papers such as Der wahre Jacob of the Social Democrats (with caricatures such as the ‘Butcher Hitler’) anticipated the horror scenarios of Nazi rule.66 The satirical magazine Eulenspiegel, edited by Communists, had also been agitating against the political forces of the right every month since the mid-1920s. As early as February 1931, a special issue entitled ‘Das dritte Reich’ (The Third Reich) presented a foreshadowing of what was to come in a totalitarian Führer state under the sign of the swastika. Its front page is perhaps one of the most pitiless and penetrative magazine covers ever, showing a caricature of Adolf Hitler, whose arms

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have grown into gramophone needles that only ever play the same two records: ‘Heil Hitler’ and ‘Juda verrecke’ (Juda perish) (Plate 2). This clear allusion to blind faith in authority and the murder of millions in the Holocaust indicates how visionary some German magazine editors had been – two years before the Nazis set out to destroy much of the culture and civilisation that had developed in the period of Weimar Germany.

Notes 1 On this magazine see most recently Simplicissimus 1896–1933. Die satirische Wochenzeitschrift, ed. Reinhard Klimmt and Hans Zimmermann (Stuttgart: LangenMüller, 2018). A complete run is available in digitised form from http://www​ .simplicissimus​.info/. 2 Edzard Schade, ‘Diskontinuierliche Entwicklung der visuellen Massenkommunikation: Visualisierungsschübe als Etappen der Medialisierung öffentlicher Informationsvermittlung’, in Historische Perspektiven auf den Iconic Turn. Die Entwicklung der öffentlichen visuellen Kommunikation, ed. Stephanie Geise et al. (Cologne: Herbert von Halem, 2016), 48–77. 3 For the epistemological background of the iconic turn see Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns. New orientations in the Study of Culture (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2016), 245–78. 4 Georges Didi-Hubermann and Bernd Stiegler, ‘“Iconic Turn” und gesellschaftliche Reflexion’, Trivium 1, no. 1 (2008), http://trivium​.revues​.org​/223 (accessed 29 July 2022). Iconic Turn: Die neue Macht der Bilder, ed. Christa Maar (Köln: DuMont, 2004). Wolfgang Hardtwig, ‘Vom Iconic Turn zur Visual History’, Kunstchronik 67, no. 7 (2014): 352–63. 5 Deutsche illustrierte Presse. Journalismus und visuelle Kultur in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Katja Leiskau, Patrick Rössler, and Susann Trabert (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2016). For plausible estimations on these circulation figures see also Harriet Scharnberg, Die “Judenfrage” im Bild. Der Antisemitismus in nationalsozialistischen Fotoreportagen (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2018), 41–53. 6 Christine Kühn, Neues Sehen in Berlin. Fotografie der Zwanziger Jahre (Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 2005). Patrick Rössler, Neue Typographien. Bauhaus & mehr: 100 Jahre funktionales Grafik-Design in Deutschland (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018). 7 Konrad Dussel, Bilder als Botschaft. Bildstrukturen deutscher Illustrierter 1905–1945 im Spannungsfeld von Politik, Wirtschaft und Publikum (Cologne: Herbert von Halem, 2019). 8 Karl-Dietrich Abel, Presselenkung im NS-Staat. Eine Studie zur Geschichte der Publizistik in der nationalsozialistischen Zeit (Berlin: Colloquium, 1968). 9 See first Gustav Frank, Madleen Podewski, and Stefan Scherer, ‘Kultur – Zeit – Schrift. Literatur- und Kulturzeitschriften als “kleine Archive”’, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 34, no. 2 (2009): 1–45. 10 Madleen Podewski, ‘“Kleine Archive” in den Digital Humanities – Überlegungen zum Forschungsobjekt “Zeitschrift”’, Zeitschrift für digitale Geisteswissenschaften, 2018, doi:10.17175/sb003_010 (accessed 23 November 2019), author’s translation.

 Spearheading the Iconic Turn 77 11 See Gustav Frank and Madleen Podewski, ‘The Object of Periodical Studies’, in Periodical Studies Today. Multidisciplinary Analysis, ed. Jutta Ernst, Dagmar von Hoff, and Oliver Scheiding (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022), 29–53, here 38–9. 12 Ibid., 40, 42. 13 Here and in the following see Patrick Rössler, ‘Die Zeitschriften des Stummfilms als transmediale “kleine Archive”’, Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik 50, no. 2 (2018): 211–45. 14 Patrick Rössler, Filmfieber. Deutsche Kinopublizistik 1917–1937 (Erfurt: Universität Erfurt, 2017). 15 Weimar Cinema, 1919–1933: Daydreams and Nightmares, ed. Laurence Kardish (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010). 16 See, for example, Patrick Rössler, ‘Es kommt . . . die neue Frau!’ Visualisierung von Weiblichkeit in deutschen Printmedien des 20. Jahrhunderts (Erfurt: Universität Erfurt, 2019). 17 50 Jahre Ullstein 1877–1827, ed. Max Osborn (Berlin: Ullstein, 1927), 62–4. 18 [Der] Verlag Ullstein zum Weltreklamekongress Berlin 1929, ed. Ullstein (Berlin: Ullstein, 1929), 151. 19 Die Dame. Ein deutsches Journal für den verwöhnten Geschmack. 1912–1943, ed. Christian Ferber (Berlin: Ullstein, 1980), 9. 20 Fritz Goro, ‘Masken und Gesichte. Neueste Wege der Bühnenkunst – Arbeiten von Prof. Oskar Schlemmer / Bauhaus Dessau’, Die Dame 55, no. 10 (February 1928): 2–6. 21 For more detail, see Patrick Rössler, ‘“Das Recht auf den eigenen Körper”? Weibliche Aktdarstellungen in der Illustriertenpresse der Weimarer Republik’, in Körperbilder – Körperpraktiken. Visualisierung und Vergeschlechtlichung von Körpern in Medienkulturen, ed. Elke Grittmann et al. (Köln: Herbert von Halem, 2019), 113–35. 22 Mel Gordon, ‘Deutschland: Das lasterhafte Weimar und die Lebensreformbewegung’, in The History of Men’s Magazines, Vol. I, 1900 to Post-WWII, ed. Duane Hanson (Cologne: Taschen, 2004), 92–109. 23 Ernst Horst, Die Nackten und die Tobenden. FKK – wie der freie Körper zum deutschen Kult wurde (Munich: Blessing, 2013), 30–4. 24 For a comprehensive overview see Patrick Rössler, ‘Schönheit! Natur! Lebensfreude! Nackte Körper in der populären Presse der Zwischenkriegszeit’, Fotogeschichte 37, no. 143 (2017): 5–17; here 13–14. 25 Access to digital copies of the major magazines from this period is provided by www​ .illustrierte​-presse​.de. 26 Tim Satterthwaite, Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 75–200. 27 Verlag Ullstein 1929, 157. 28 Sophie von Stackelberg, ‘Illustrierte Magazine als Zeitschriftentyp und historische Quelle. Der “Uhu” als Beispiel’, in Fotografie und Bildpublizistik in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Diethart Kerbs and Walter Uka (Bönen: Kettler, 2004), 133–50, here 143–5. 29 Satterthwaite, Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal, 196–8; Yva. Photographien 1925–1938, ed. Marion Beckers and Elisabeth Moortgat (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, 2001). 30 50 Jahre Ullstein, ed. Osborn, 111. 31 Verlag Ullstein 1929, 161. 32 Andreas Zeising, ‘Lenkung und Ablenkung. Bildkonfrontationen der Zeitschrift “Querschnitt”’, in Deutsche illustrierte Presse, ed. Leiskau, Rössler, and Trabert (BadenBaden: Nomos, 2016) 355–76, here 358.

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33 All examples from the July 1929 issue of Der Querschnitt. 34 Der Querschnitt. Das Magazin der aktuellen Ewigkeitswerte 1924–1933, ed. Christian Ferber (Berlin: Ullstein, 1981), 12. 35 Patrick Rössler, Viewing our Life and Times. A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Media Globalization (Dresden: Exhibition Catalogue ICA, 2006), 26. 36 For an overview see Rössler, Neue Typographien. Bauhaus & mehr. 37 Jan Tschichold, ‘Sonderheft elementare typographie’, Typographische Mitteilungen 22, no. 10 (October 1925). 38 Das A und O des Bauhauses. Bauhauswerbung, Schriftbilder, Drucksachen, Ausstellungsdesign, ed. Ute Brüning (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1995). 39 Juliana Raupp, ‘Architektur und Anekdoten. Die Zeitschrift ‚bauhaus‘ – vom Fachperiodikum zum Publicityorgan’, in Bauhauskommunikation, ed. Patrick Rössler (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2009), 297–307. 40 Patrick Rössler, ‘Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Dessau: “Neue Typographie” – The New Face of a New World’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Vol. III: Europe 1880–1940, ed. Peter Brooker et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 969–91. 41 Die Form – Stimme des Deutschen Werkbundes 1925–1934, ed. Felix Schwarz and Frank Gloor (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1969). 42 Patrick Rössler, Eine Zeitschrift als gedrucktes Schaufenster zur Werbewelt. Gebrauchsgraphik 1924–1944 (Munich: Stiebner: 2014). 43 Konrad Dussel, Pressebilder in der Weimarer Republik: Entgrenzung der Information (Berlin: Lit, 2012). 44 See, for instance, Patrick Rössler, Illustrated Magazine of the Times. A Lost Bauhaus Book by László Moholy-Nagy and Joost Schmidt – An Attempt at Construction (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2019), 24–51. 45 Scharnberg, Die “Judenfrage” im Bild, 41–53. 46 “Der ganze Verlag ist einfach eine Bonbonniere”. Ullstein in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. David Oels and Ute Schneider (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014). 47 Enno Kaufhold, ‘Die Berliner Illustrirte – überschätzt, unterschätzt, vergessen?’, in Presse- und Verlagsgeschichte im Zeichen der Eule, ed. Axel Springer Verlag (Berlin: Axel Springer, 2002), 34–9. 48 Bernd Weise, ‘“ullstein bild” – vom Archiv zur Agentur – Fotografie im Presseverlagsgeschäft’, in ‘Der ganze Verlag ist einfach eine Bonbonniere,’ ed. Oels and Schneider, 285–6, here 275–7. 49 Patrick Rössler, ‘1928: Wie das Neue Sehen in die Illustrierten kam. “Maxl Knips”, Sasha Stone, “Das illustrierte Blatt” und die Bildermagazine der Weimarer Republik’, Fotogeschichte 31, no. 121 (2011): 45–60. 50 Dussel, Bilder als Botschaft. 51 Here and in the following see Patrick Rössler, ‘“Wir zerstreuten uns zu Tode”. Formen und Funktionen der Medialisierung des Politischen in illustrierten Zeitschriften der NS-Zeit’, in Von der Politisierung der Medien zur Medialisierung des Politischen? Zum Verhältnis von Medien, Öffentlichkeiten und Politik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Klaus Arnold et al. (Leipzig: Universitätsverlag, 2010), 183–239. 52 Presse in Fesseln. Eine Schilderung des NS-Pressetrusts. Gemeinschaftsarbeit des Verlages auf Grund authentischen Materials, ed. Verlag Archiv und Kartei (Berlin: Verlag Archiv und Kartei, 1947), 19–26. 53 Kurt Koszyk, Deutsche Presse 1914–1945. Geschichte der deutschen Presse, Teil III (Berlin: Colloquium, 1972), 9.

 Spearheading the Iconic Turn 79 54 Walter Hagemann, Publizistik im Dritten Reich. Ein Beitrag zur Methodik der Massenführung (Hamburg: Hanseatischer Gildenverlag, 1948), 316–17. 55 Jürgen Wilke, Presseanweisungen im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert. Erster Weltkrieg – Drittes Reich – DDR (Cologne, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau, 2007), 135–6, 239. 56 David Evans, John Heartfield. AIZ/VI 1930–38 (New York: Kent, 1992). 57 Patrick Rössler, ‘Vielfalt in der Gleichschaltung – die ‘domestizierte Moderne’ am Kiosk. Eine Lifestyle-Illustrierte zwischen Bauhaus-Avantgarde und NS-Propaganda: “die neue linie” 1929–1943’, in Jahrbuch für Kommunikationsgeschichte, 9, ed. Holger Böning, Arnulf Kutsch and Rudolf Stöber (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2008), 150–95. 58 Bernd Sösemann, ‘Zwischen Distanz und Anpassung. Die “Frankfurter Zeitung” im Nationalsozialismus’, Die Zeit, no. 11 (6 March 1987): 50–1, here 50. 59 Patrick Rössler, Das Bauhaus am Kiosk. die neue linie 1929–1943 (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2007). See also Ute Brüning, ‘Bauhäusler zwischen Propaganda und Wirtschaftswerbung’, in Bauhaus-Moderne im Nationalsozialismus. Zwischen Anbiederung und Verfolgung, ed. Winfried Nerdinger (München: Prestel, 1993), 24–47; Tim Tolsdorff, Von der Stern-Schnuppe zum Fix-Stern. Zwei deutsche Illustrierte und ihre gemeinsame Geschichte vor und nach 1945 (Cologne: Herbert von Halem, 2014). 60 Rainer Rutz, Signal. Eine deutsche Auslandsillustrierte als Propagandainstrument im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Essen: Klartext, 2007). 61 Kiosk. Eine Geschichte der Fotoreportage 1839–1973, ed. Robert Lebeck and Bodo von Dewitz (Göttingen: Steidl, 2001), 14–15. 62 Willi A. Boelcke, ‘Einleitung’, in Facsimile Querschnitt durch “Signal”, ed. Hans Dollinger (München: Scherz, 1969), 5–10, here 7. 63 Rössler, Viewing our Life and Times; Patrick Rössler, ‘Neue Welten, neues Sehen, neue Typografien. Die deutsche Illustriertenpresse der Zwischenkriegszeit und eine Auswahl französischer Pendants’, in La presse et ses images. Sources – réseaux – imagiaires – méthodes, ed. Claire Aslangul-Rallo and Bérénice Zunino (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2022), 145–78. 64 Susanne Lachenicht, ‘Die neue Visualität der Zeitschrift im frühen 20. Jahrhundert und die culture de masse’, in Die Zeitschrift – Medium der Moderne. Deutschland und Frankreich im Vergleich, ed. Clemens Zimmermann and Manfred Schmeling (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2006), 63–84. 65 Rössler, Illustrated Magazine of the Times. 66 Karl Holtz, ‘Schlächter Hitler’, Der Wahre Jacob, no. 5 (27 February 1932), cover page.

4

The Left-wing Illustrated Press in the German Reich Konrad Dussel

At the turn of the twentieth century Germany’s daily press faced a new competitor: the illustrated-weekly news magazine.1 Unlike the older family magazines, with their emphasis on culture and entertainment, the news weeklies brought something entirely new into the foreground: images of contemporary life, particularly in the now practicable form of printed photographs. The pioneers were the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper) from the liberal Ullstein-Verlag, and Die Woche (The Week), published by the conservative-leaning Scherl-Verlag. Their success was remarkable: subscriptions and sales grew rapidly into the hundreds of thousands and, after the First World War, even to millions; by this measure, even the largest-selling daily newspapers were left far behind.2 Because daily newspapers were not initially able to reproduce pictures – and especially photographs – directly in their pages, they opted for an interim compromise, offering their weekend readership a kind of little illustrated magazine in the form of the so-called illustrated entertainment supplement (illustrierte Unterhaltungsbeilage). Only the largest publishers were in a position to produce such supplements themselves – most other publishers were obliged to call on specialist firms for this service – but they were well received by their readership.3 For the political left the bourgeois press was already an affront, and the new illustrated forms even more so. The bourgeois press was accused, in left-wing reporting, of preventing readers from seeing through their socioeconomic situation and thus gaining class consciousness; it was, therefore, to be confronted with the left’s own proletarian offering. There was a fairly rapid consensus that true political consciousness could not be delivered through political reporting alone: these efforts must also be flanked by educational and entertainment services. In practice, however, this was difficult to implement. Until the end of the Empire there were in fact no socialist illustrated magazines. The SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, German Social Democratic Party) limited itself to providing its press with an illustrated supplement titled Die Neue Welt (The New World). After the First World War this folded, and was replaced by the supplement Volk und Zeit (People and Times). Due to a split in the socialist workers’ movement, however, there was now also a left-

 The Left-wing Illustrated Press in the German Reich 81 wing alternative to the SPD. From within the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, German Communist Party), Willi Münzenberg launched a new illustrated magazine, the AIZ, as the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper) is known to this day. And not this title alone. The KPD also decided to produce an illustrated supplement for its newspapers: Der Rote Stern (The Red Star). Given the success of the AIZ, the SPD had to follow suit, and brought out alongside its existing supplements a new illustrated magazine, the Illustrierte Reichsbanner-Zeitung (The Illustrated Reichsbanner Newspaper), which was soon renamed the Illustrierte Republikanische Zeitung (Illustrated Republican Newspaper). The chapter that follows will introduce these four titles in more detail and consider what they took from their bourgeois competitors, but also how they sought to set themselves apart both from these titles and from each other.4 The distinct field of graphically illustrated satirical magazines can only be briefly covered in this chapter. Here too, the left responded to bourgeois magazines such as Fliegende Blätter (Flying Leaves), Kladderadatsch (Crash) and Simplicissimus, first with Der wahre Jacob (The True Jacob), and, during the Weimar Republic, with Der Knüppel (The Cudgel) and Eulenspiegel (Rascal) among other titles.5

From Die Neue Welt to Volk und Zeit The SPD’s first tentative attempt to counter the bourgeois family magazines with a title of its own came with the launch, in 1873, of a magazine with a sweeping, programmatic title: Social-politische Blätter zur Unterhaltung u. Belehrung für die deutschen Arbeiter (Socio-political pages for the entertainment and instruction of the German worker). Appearing at first more or less monthly, the Social-politische Blätter became, from July 1874, an eight-page weekly. As before, however, the priorities were clear: ‘At the top of each issue’ there was ‘a dignified editorial, and also interesting national-economic, cultural-historical and otherwise scientific articles’. A serialised novel was then offered for entertainment. Illustrations, declaring their artistic intent, were included sparingly from the end of 1874.6 The party’s big step came with the launch, in 1876, of Die Neue Welt. Illustrirtes Unterhaltungsblatt für das Volk (The New World. Illustrated Entertainment Journal for the People), in place of the Social-politische Blätter. The new title was certainly not cheap – costing 1,20 Mark per quarter, for a booklet of only eight pages – but direct instruction was clearly held back in favour of entertainment and there were also, regularly, at least two larger pictures. Reflecting the technological capacities of the time these were all woodcuts based on artistic templates; the extent was, moreover, soon increased to twelve pages.7 A price increase to 1,50 Mark followed, however, at the beginning of the 1881/82 publishing year, in October 1881. The first director of Die Neue Welt was Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the most prominent representatives of the SPD at this period, and a Reichstag deputy. The editorship was, however, soon taken over by Bruno Geiser, Liebknecht’s son-in-law. Due to internal party problems Geiser was obliged to give up the role in 1887. The magazine was suspended.

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In 1892 a new launch was undertaken, though the publication model was changed. Die Neue Welt no longer appeared as a separate magazine, but only as an ‘illustrated entertainment supplement’, as its new subtitle stated. Of the 39 SPD daily newspapers published in 1897, the supplement was included in at least nineteen. Each issue had around 200,000 copies as a result – a striking increase on the 40,000 the Neue Welt may have achieved as a standalone title.8 Until the end of the century, a series of editors came and went. Continuity returned only at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Louis Salomon took over the editorship. Salomon not only edited the supplement until its closure in 1919, he was then responsible for the successor project, Volk und Zeit, until its forced closure in 1933. Born in 1873 in Lessen in West Prussia, the son of Jewish parents, Salomon himself alternately took the names Salomon-Lessen and simply Lessen. Initially, he trained as a mechanical engineer, but then studied history, philosophy and literature, and began his own literary output. From 1893 onwards he was a permanent staff member of the Neue Welt. In 1933, as a Jew and social democrat, he was barred from professional work. In 1943 he took his own life.9 Salomon-Lessen situated his entertainment magazine firmly in the tradition of bourgeois family magazines, distinguishing it clearly from the illustrated news supplements of the period. While these placed images, and preferably photographs, of daily life in the foreground, Die Neue Welt prioritised text, with only occasional accompanying graphics or fine-art reproductions. As was traditional in the older family magazines, detailed comments on these reproductions were not dispensed with, but these were not presented next to the images, rather as a kind of addendum on the final page. The focus on timeless realities rather than current events was evident, finally, in the year-long pagination across issues, with a table of contents and a binding cover for the year purchasable from the publisher. Whole-year volumes were also available – costing four Marks for the complete run from 1893 to the end of 1907.10 In only one respect did Salomon-Lessen momentarily seek to break new ground: the inclusion of a two- or occasionally four-page advertising supplement, clearly separate from the magazine itself. This experiment was launched at the start of 1902, but curtailed in early 1905, if the records of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation are correct. While the frequency of art reproductions gradually diminished, photography, which took its place, only rarely pictured contemporary life: photographs also sought to capture timeless themes. Issue 15, 1907, for example, explored in detail the topic of fish smokehouses, and illustrated the text with a total of six photographs with generalised captions such as ‘seaman types’ or ‘beach idyll’. This was followed by ‘“Homesick”, a servant-girl’s story’, by the then widely read Ilse Frapan (1849–1908), a resolutely socio-critical but not radical author. In materials such as these, the editorial agenda of Die Neue Welt under Salomon-Lessen emerges: radical socialist texts were not offered, but rather socio-critical material based on educated middle-class ideals. The final issue of Die Neue Welt was published by Salomon-Lessen on 22 June 1919. This was just a four-page leaflet, printed on poor paper and with a single graphic etching on the subject of haymaking. There was no statement of closure; likewise, no

 The Left-wing Illustrated Press in the German Reich 83 programmatic introduction in the first issue of the successor supplement that appeared a week later. The readers held in their hands a new publication, with no commentary – title: Volk und Zeit, initially subtitled, ‘Pictures Forward’ (Bilder zum Vorwärts), later ‘Pictures of the day’ (Bilder vom Tage). From the outset it was an eight-page weekly, in the roughly 35 x 25 cm format typical of illustrated magazines. And like these, it was also extensively illustrated: up to twenty photographs (and later considerably more), reproduced via the now standard autotype process. At first, the immediate political agenda appeared to dominate: the cover image of the second issue was adorned not only with a photo of the Social Democrat Party congress in Weimar, the back page showed, in addition, six portraits of the ‘socialist majority in the new government’ (Figure 4.1). The overtly partisan character of the pictures quickly fell away, however. While Salomon-Lessen did not quite return to the Neue Welt style of the late Empire, blending broad social criticism with high-cultural ambitions, pictures dedicated to the socialdemocratic milieu in the broadest sense became notably less prominent. A detailed analysis of three issues from each of the years 1924 to 1932 reveals that scarcely onequarter of the total imagery was devoted to this.11 Between 1919 and 1933 the supplement was produced centrally in Berlin; however, there were during these years distinct regional editions, which only emerge through close comparative analysis of the issues. In the spring of 1925 separate ‘North’ and ‘South’ editions were launched; after 1927 at least two further editions

Figure 4.1  Front cover of Volk und Zeit, no. 1, 29 June 1919. The SPD’s new illustrated supplement was appropriately introduced, with a large photo of their party congress in Weimar. Image courtesy of Friedrich Ebert-Stiftung.

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appeared – ‘M’ (Mitte, central) and ‘B’ (Berlin?). A comparison of selected issues reveals a spectrum of differences, ranging from issues in which only stories with a regional reference were exchanged, to those in which almost the entire form of the magazine was different. Most probably, the Volk und Zeit supplement published by the Vorwärts-Verlag in Berlin had the highest general circulation, at least for some of the period. The SPD press reached its high point in 1929, when its 203 newspapers achieved a circulation of 1.3 million copies.12 If we assume that only around half of these newspapers distributed the supplement, that gives a circulation in the hundred thousands. By 1932, this figure must have significantly reduced: a handbook from this date lists only 23 SPD newspapers carrying the supplement; 10 of these released their circulation figures, amounting to a mere 102,000 copies.13 With the other 13, one reaches a figure of perhaps 250,000, or up to 300–350,000 if some papers did not mention the supplement’s inclusion. This was, at best, half of what their Communist competitors achieved. Moreover, how intensely these supplements were perused must remain an open question. Most probably, there was greater attention given to illustrated magazines such as the AIZ (or bourgeois magazines), which were actually purchased, than for supplements for which there was no financial outlay; these were after all just a give-away item.

The Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung The left-wing illustrated magazine best known today is Willi Münzenberg’s AIZ, or, as it titled itself, Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung.14 It was not originally intended to agitate programmatically against the bourgeois illustrated press, but to organise aid for the Soviet Union in the famine of 1921. To this end, Münzenberg founded first the Internationale-Arbeiter-Hilfe (International Workers’ Aid); this aid work would continue, from November 1921, through a dedicated monthly Sowjet-Russland im Bild (Soviet Russia in Construction). As early as 1922, Internationale-Arbeiter-Hilfe reported not only on the new Soviet state, but also on the situation of the German proletariat. As this was well received, and sales figures mounted, the magazine was renamed Sichel und Hammer (Sickle and Hammer) from November 1922. By its own count, it reached a circulation of up to 180,000 copies in 1923/24.15 At the end of 1924, Münzenberg decided on a radical innovation. He was a member of the KPD, even of its central committee, and was a Reichstag deputy. But he was able to retain considerable independence from the party leadership. In his role as publisher, he set out on a new venture with Paul Scholze as chief editor. The monthly Sichel und Hammer, previous subtitled ‘Illustrierte Internationale Arbeiterzeitung’ (Illustrated International Worker’s Newspaper), became a new fortnightly, the Arbeiter-IllustrierteZeitung, which was deliberately intended as a competitor for the leading bourgeois title, the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. As the new magazine was quickly able to establish itself with a circulation of 200,000–220,000 copies, the next big step was taken on 1 November 1926: the transition to weekly publication.16 Whether the magazine actually succeeded, as it reported in 1931,17 in reaching a circulation of 500,000, there are good

 The Left-wing Illustrated Press in the German Reich 85 reasons to doubt; it did, however, probably exceed 300,000 copies.18 But even this was a figure that only few of the bourgeois news magazines could surpass.19 The legally designated publisher of the magazine from the beginning of 1926 until early 1931 was Willi Münzenberg himself, after which Hermann Leupold took over – though the actual chief editor, from 1927, was Lilly Becher.20 During the National Socialist seizure of power in spring 1933, the AIZ was banned; it managed, however, to continue publishing, in exile in Prague under Franz Carl Weiskopf, until 1938 – from 1936 under the title Volks-Illustrierte (People’s Illustrated Magazine). In terms of page count, the AIZ was always fairly modest. For the then illustratedweekly standard price of 20 pfennigs, there were only sixteen pages per issue. The market-leading Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung boasted forty pages, and a few less successful rivals offered twenty-four pages. In the summer of 1929, the AIZ was indeed able to expand to twenty pages, but this was, in reality, achieved by a trick: the paper size and print area were reduced, so that there was, in reality, no quantitative change. Only at the beginning of 1932 was there a genuine expansion to twenty-four pages. To a certain extent, AIZ’s low page count can be ascribed to its limited appeal to advertisers. Where the Berliner Illustrirte could fill up to half of its page space with advertisements, and other bourgeois titles up to a third, the AIZ hit a ceiling of around one-tenth, and this even if one includes various advertisements for the publisher’s own products.21 In truth, the AIZ was never profitable; only subventions from Moscow and from Münzenberg’s group ensured the magazine’s survival.22 The AIZ owes a large part of its retrospective reputation to its avant-garde layout, for which the name John Heartfield stands above all. As recognised as his photo collages may be in terms of art history, their importance for the magazine should not be overstated. Certainly, Heartfield was the only individual whose artistic works in the AIZ were credited by name. But for one thing, he was a staff member only from 1930, and, for another, his contributions as a whole were quite limited. The first (and only) 10 issues that were still able to appear in the German Reich in 1933 offer a good guide. For these, he delivered precisely two front pages. To capture Münzenberg’s formula for success, one should not focus on individual names, however significant they may appear in hindsight. In reality, Münzenberg’s success lay in adopting the model of the bourgeois illustrated magazines, while modifying the contents sufficiently to sustain the interest of the readership yet contribute to raising left-wing consciousness. The appeal of the illustrated press was based, above all, on three factors: first, the pictures, and second, the serialised novels. And third, the ambience had to be right: a smattering of factual articles, humour and puzzles – and, indeed, display advertisements. All of this was taken into account by the AIZ, and, bit by bit, successfully put in place. Central to the visual identity of the illustrated magazines was the front page. Like its competitors, AIZ almost always presented large-format photographs; drawings were exceptional, and photo collages only appeared in the early 1930s. Female beauty was indeed not infrequently shown, though these were never film or theatre actresses, the stars and starlets of bourgeois magazines, but usually more or less anonymous: they were fresh-faced young women – and typically, of course, from the Soviet Union. Cover pages, year-round, only rarely contained direct political agitation; instead, they generally

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Figure 4.2  The AIZ depicted a wide range of political themes on its cover page. This was usually, however, done indirectly, as here in issue 39 from 1929, showing a cheerfully smiling, unnamed young ‘laundress by Lake Constance’. Author collection.

followed the optics of the illustrated press, presenting an alternative, more casual view of things. Charlie Chaplin, for example, was without doubt one of the biggest cinema stars of the day. He was also photographed for the AIZ in Hollywood – but between Upton Sinclair, the most prominent critical writer in the United States, and Erwin Egon Kisch, Germany’s left-wing star reporter.23 Only in 1932 did direct political action come to the fore, with dedicated headlines such as ‘Five Nazis dead in Dortmund and Schlesien’ (No. 7) or ‘8 days – 8 deaths’ (No. 28), and corresponding illustrations (Figure 4.2). Like its bourgeois competitors, AIZ’s pictures were concentrated at the front and back of each issue. Page 2, with picture stories from the previous week, was reserved for more political topics, selected and commented on from a left-wing perspective, though this did not mean that important news stories were always left out: in Issue 7 from 1929, Hugo Junker’s seventieth birthday was mentioned, as well as a terrible railway accident. The final pages were also picture-heavy, while generally devoted to sport and miscellaneous stories from around the world. Sport meant primarily workers’ sport, but there were exceptions here too. A similar principle applied to the final page, with pictures ‘Aus aller Welt – el tuta mondo’ (from around the world), with the motto of international solidarity also conveyed in Esperanto. While these focal points appeared at the beginning and end of every issue in all the illustrated press, AIZ introduced, at least occasionally, a special feature: the picturedominated centre-page spread. Inserted (without bothersome staples), it unfolded to

 The Left-wing Illustrated Press in the German Reich 87

Figure 4.3  A specialty of the AIZ was the design of the centre-page spread. These were particularly visually impressive when only one photo was presented, as in this spread showing a trades union demonstration in Berlin (1927, issue 37). Author collection.

roughly A3 format, and could thus present one or more photos to impressive effect (Figure 4.3). Pictures in the illustrated press were not, however, all that counted. And the left-wing magazines could not only carry left-wing text, if they wanted to succeed in terms of sales and readership. Sichel und Hammer had dispensed with all bourgeois trappings such as serialised novels, puzzles and humour; the AIZ kept all of these. Beginning with puzzles, at the beginning of 1926 the category ‘Humour’ was added, then in mid-1926 the serialised novel. Just as the Berliner Illustrirte was able to establish a reputation for its serialised novels, the AIZ also made an impact in this area by combining populist – not to say sensational – titles with left-wing content. In 1929, for example, featured Frank Arnau in Issue 8 with ‘The murder in the Fürstenstraße’ and, in Issue 28, ‘Plague in Paris’ by Bruno Jasienski. In 1932, during the vital election campaign for the Reich Presidency, a novel by Erich Wende was employed, from Issue 7 onwards, to declare a political stance through entertainment. The title was ‘Hart Backbord’, which translates to ‘steer sharp left’. Careful attention was also paid to the design of materials surrounding the two key elements, pictures and novels. Instructive content from all available sources was not to be overlooked, nor were humour and puzzles. From mid-1929, readers were further able to shape their own preferences, when, with the format change and associated increase in page count, the fortnightly ‘Children’s A-I-Z’ was introduced, with texts suitable for children and German and American comic strips (Pat Sullivan’s ‘Felix the Cat’ became ‘Kater Felix’s new adventure’).

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Der Rote Stern The first issue of Der Rote Stern (The Red Star) was published on 5 June 1924.24 For the next few years there was a new issue every two weeks, but initially not on a specific day of the week. Heinrich Knippschild (1894–1953), who also published the communist satirical magazine Der Knüppel, was its first editor. At first, Der Rote Stern was not visually appealing, and much less so than its commercial rivals. For a number of years it ran to only four large pages, a printed sheet simply folded in the middle. Nonetheless, it seems to have been well received, such that two significant changes were quickly made. In the spring of 1925, the directorship changed hands: the editor-in-chief of the KPD’s leading organ, Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag), Hermann Remmele (1880–1939), who had briefly been chairman of the KPD in 1924, now appeared in the masthead. A little later, Der Rote Stern also got a make-over. The format was reduced in size, making it now an eight-page booklet – similar to most of its bourgeois rivals. Overall, the content was increased by around a quarter and the print quality gradually improved. The switch from offset to gravure printing, combined with the use of calendared paper, allowed for the presentation of more appealing illustrations. A year later, in November 1926, Remmele’s place was taken by Ernst Schneller (1890– 1944), one of the most important members of the KPD faction in the Reichstag. Walter Schulz (1895–1972), previously editor-in-chief of a Bavarian KPD newspaper, and now secretary in the agitprop department of the party’s central committee, followed in June 1927. When Schulz lost this position in the fall of 1928, he also had to give up Roter Stern. He was replaced by Fritz Lange (1898–1981), another member of the agitprop department. With Lange there was, for the first time, a certain continuity, lasting almost four years. During his time two important innovations occurred. First, the format was enlarged again at the beginning of 1931, while the extent remained at eight pages, representing a near doubling in the content compared to the magazine’s early 1924 issues. Second, Roter Stern’s frequency was increased to weekly at the beginning of 1932. Both innovations underline the importance attached to the supplement by the party leadership. The final editor, from October 1932, was Alfred Fendrich (1897– 1937). Der Rote Stern enjoyed wide distribution. It was included not only with Die Rote Fahne, but also with some of the regional KPD newspapers, though not all. While it is difficult precisely to determine its circulation, one can assume that it was around 750,000 copies in 1932 – certainly far more than the AIZ, but also more than its SPD competitor Volk und Zeit.25 At first glance, Der Rote Stern was quite similar to the bourgeois magazines, particularly in its eight-page format. It had a front page with a large display photograph; the following pages carried picture after picture, supplemented with only limited text. There were almost no advertisements – though as a rule there were none in the bourgeois magazines either. The exceptions were advertisements for the publisher’s own products, such as other magazines or books. It was only a few years later, in early 1932, that commercial advertisements appeared, first for Russian snow shoes and

 The Left-wing Illustrated Press in the German Reich 89 rubber shoes, then also for skin cream and toothpaste. Crammed up against agitation for socialism, and against the threat of world war, toothpaste advertisements must, one suspects, have appeared rather incongruous. In short supply, for communist readers, was entertainment. The serialised novel was missing, as were self-contained short stories, not to mention jokes. All these were standard in bourgeois magazines. Even the puzzles in Der Rote Stern appeared only in reduced form – now and then a syllable puzzle or a chess problem. Pictorial entertainment was limited to the field of sport, reflecting the KPD’s imperative of reaching out to young men. But the concession to sport only went as far as classconscious working-class male – and occasionally female – athletes. In general, and unlike the bourgeois magazines, Der Rote Stern showed no beauties, no actresses or photographic models, but working women. In this respect also, it resembled the AIZ. Der Rote Stern was required not only to write about the world view of the communists, but also to represent it visually, in its pictures. Ultimately, a dualistic world view was presented: on the one hand, decadent, war-mongering, repressive capitalism; on the other, communism, the people’s liberator. For the KPD, this was no mere utopia. It had a concrete model in mind: the Soviet Union, first under the leadership of Lenin, then Stalin. This goal, which formed the main theme of Der Rote Stern, was one to which Germany also should aspire. The story of the rise of Bolshevik Russia was told with ever-changing, at times superabundant, images (Figure 4.4). In counterpoint, Der Rote Stern revealed the dark side of capitalism, though in much less detail. Striking examples from Germany were shown again and again – though

Figure 4.4  The KPD followed its own ‘Führer’: the Soviet party leader, Stalin. Front page of Der Rote Stern no. 16, November 1931. Author collection.

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Figure 4.5  As in the AIZ, the centre spread in Der Rote Stern was always designed for striking visual effect. Issue 19 from September 1927 showed a range of snapshots ‘From working life in the USA’. Author collection.

international examples were at least as numerous: Africa was particularly suitable, with its concentration of colonial states. The dark side of the United States was also repeatedly presented (Figure 4.5). There were, initially, two kinds of story about Germany. The first was about hope for the future: here the focus was entirely on growing electoral successes, and its promotion was correspondingly upbeat. The second recalled the heroic history of the party: this was particularly dominant at the end of 1928 and 1929, ten years after the founding of the Republic. In the late years of the Republic, in the early 1930s, the range of topics was expanded. Finally, after the stunning electoral success of the National Socialists in the Reichstag elections of 14 September 1930, the looming threat became clear to every communist. In response, Der Rote Stern included the struggle against Hitler in its picture stories. In this context, the changes in the use of images in Der Rote Stern come into focus. For years, the placement of the illustrations – almost exclusively photographs – was straightforward, limited to the orderly juxtaposition and superimposition of simple rectangular formats. Above all, the effect of the image relied on its content, not its form; one searches in vain for formal experiments in the early issues. At most, one photo was partly superimposed over another, or a circle or oval was chosen instead of a rectangle – techniques that were already in use in illustrated magazines and newspaper supplements before the First World War. From the early 1930s, image layouts began to reflect more recent innovations. Photographs were cropped more frequently, the traditional grid system was set aside,

 The Left-wing Illustrated Press in the German Reich 91 allowing for skewed and freely placed images, particularly in the case of images of people. It may be assumed that inspiration was drawn from the success of the AIZ, particularly from John Heartfield’s acclaimed photomontages. But whilst Willi Münzenberg in his magazine accepted the ‘bourgeois’ principle of naming an individual artist, at least in the case of Heartfield, it was characteristic of Der Rote Stern not to credit individuals: one can only speculate as to who created which photographs or photomontages, and who was responsible for the layout of the supplement. Despite the modifications in content and form over time, even in the late Weimar Republic priority was given to heroic reporting on the Soviet Union and the power of the party organisation. Der Rote Stern did stage confrontations with fascism and social democracy to some degree, but this by no means reached the extent and pictorial intensity of Willi Münzenberg’s AIZ at this period.

Die Illustrierte Reichsbanner-Zeitung (Illustrierte Republikanische Zeitung) Der Rote Stern was not the only left-wing title launched in 1924. On 22 November 1924, a week before Münzenberg’s revised AIZ was launched, the Illustrierte ReichsbannerZeitung (IRZ) first appeared, a supplement to the eponymous, official organ of the Reichsbanner organisation. The new supplement bore a temporary subtitle: ‘the first republican illustrated weekly’. The Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold (Black-Red-Gold) was founded in February 1924 by members of the SPD, the German Centre Party, the German Democratic Party (DDP), and trade unionists, to defend the young German Republic against right-wing and left-wing attacks. In 1925, the federal organisation already claimed three million members: it was probably, in reality, only around a million – but that was still significantly more than the right-wing extremist Stahlhelm (Steel Helmets).26 However, it quickly became apparent that real support for the Reichsbanner came only from supporters of the SPD, who represented around 90 percent of its membership. However, other forces in the Reichsbanner were not insignificant. This is particularly evident in its publications. After Waldemar Schulz’s short tenure as IRZ editor, Wilhelm Nowack, a young member of the DDP, became editor until the end of 1929, the year the magazine was renamed Illustrierte Republikanische Zeitung. Karl Wiegner became IRZ’s final editor, from 1930 until the magazine’s suppression in early 1933. The mass membership of the Reichsbanner was not reflected in the IRZ’s circulation figures, which peaked at 105,000 copies in 1928; in 1930 the figure was only 76,000 (Plate 3).27 For 20 pfennigs on open sale – ‘Federal comrades’ paid only 15 pfennigs – the magazine offered a standard 16 pages, initially without any advertisements. These were later permitted, but their share remained modest, usually amounting to only one page, reflecting the magazine’s limited commercial appeal – by comparison, even than the AIZ managed to fill up to four pages with advertising material. Expanding the extent of the magazine was out of the question. A price increase to 25 pfennigs from September 1926 also proved unsustainable, and soon had to be withdrawn. Programmatically, the aim was to counter ‘colourless, and anti-Republican imagery’ with an ‘illustrated newspaper standing on the soil of the Republic’ and thus ‘to push

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back against monarchical and “populist” Soviet ideals’.28 The magazine lived up to these principles: it repeatedly declared its support for the Republic, most visibly at the time of the constitutional celebrations in August each year. The strength of its own organisation was here demonstrated both in pictures and texts: for example, in Issue 33, 17 August 1929, under the headline ‘The Federal Constitutional Celebration in Berlin – The March of the 150,000’. The clearest marker of IRZ’s politics lay in its distantiation from both the left and, increasingly, the right. Here it soon became clear that the monarchical idea had been pushed into the background by the National Socialists. Before the Reichstag elections in September 1930, the IRZ took a clear position. The title page of No. 34 of 23 August showed a drawing by Alois Florath of a man being murdered by two SA men, with the comment in bold: ‘National Socialism is civil war! Anyone who votes for the Nazis on September 14 recognises murder and manslaughter as a political weapon!’ Again and again, the IRZ’s opponents were pilloried with caricatures and photomontages, while their own strength was demonstrated. This was especially true after the end of 1931, when the ‘Iron Front’ alliance of Reichsbanner, SPD, left-wing trade unionists and workers’ athletes was formed. In Issue 5, 30 January 1932, two full-page photomontages were placed opposite each other, as representing the only alternatives: on the left, under the headline ‘Harzburger Front?’, Hitler, Hugenberg and Seldte were shown as isolated figures with few followers; on the right-hand page, the banner headline ‘Iron Front!’ with huge crowds and the highlighted figure of Otto Braun, the Prussian Prime Minister. The IRZ neither closed its eyes to the misery of the global economic crisis, nor did it string together superficial photo-stories. From the end of October 1926, it presented socially critical literature of international standing, including a serialisation of Upton Sinclair’s The Money Changers; and even IRZ’s joke page was used for political enlightenment. In addition, much space was given to material that was not directly political, but rather educational or informative in the broadest sense. All in all, the IRZ’s makers presented a high-quality product that fully matched their intentions. Why it sold so poorly remains, in retrospect, difficult to determine.

Left-wing magazines: Possibilities and limitations The SPD and KPD perceived threats from not only bourgeois newspapers but also illustrated supplements and magazines, and tried to counter them with their own offerings, initially during the German Empire, but even more so under the Weimar Republic. After some initial difficulties, the left-wing alternatives were well designed and able to match the bourgeois competition in terms of the quality of presentation and printing. Despite their visual similarities, by the end of the 1920s, the differences in content remained unmistakable – both between the left-wing and bourgeois periodicals, and between Volk und Zeit and IRZ on the one hand and AIZ and Der Rote Stern on the other. Although the two social-democratic newspapers never concealed their political affiliations, they consistently sought to tie themselves to bourgeois traditions in their

 The Left-wing Illustrated Press in the German Reich 93 broader cultural content. This was not an issue for the Communists, for whom praising the Soviet Union was paramount – for the party organ Roter Stern even more than for the more independent AIZ. The success of their strategies is difficult to determine. Undoubtedly, all the newspapers would have made a significant contribution to the formation of their readers’ opinions. But this readership was limited, particularly that of the IRZ, which did not come close to winning over large numbers of potential Social-Democratic voters as purchasers: in 1930 the SPD had been able to mobilise more than 8.5 million votes in the Reichstag elections. The same applies to Volk und Zeit, whose distribution depended entirely on the sale of the SPD newspapers that carried it. Were they too leftwing for bourgeois readers, but too bourgeois for the leftists? The increasing reach of AIZ and Roter Stern speaks to the second part of this question. Moscow’s financial support for the KPD must have contributed, but growing circulation figures and more commercial advertising (in the AIZ) also provided greater financial freedom, which was invested in improving the content. This may have helped, to some extent, to increase the votes for the KPD in the Reichstag elections: from around 4.5 million in September 1930 to almost 6 million in November 1932. The Nazi state not only suppressed the left’s answers to bourgeois magazines, it also co-opted the bourgeois magazines. In the postwar era, these were able to exploit the new freedoms offered by the Federal Republic. However, there were no further leftwing answers.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Tim Satterthwaite for his excellent translation of my chapter. 2 Konrad Dussel, Bilder als Botschaft. Bildstrukturen deutscher Illustrierter 1905–1945 im Spannungsfeld von Politik, Wirtschaft und Publikum (Köln: von Halem, 2019). 3 Konrad Dussel, Pressebilder in der Weimarer Republik: Entgrenzung der Information (Berlin: LIT, 2012), 128–35; Konrad Dussel, ‘Getrennte Welten? Illustrierte Zeitungsbeilagen in der Weimarer Republik als Mittel soziokultureller Segregation’, in Deutsche illustrierte Presse. Journalismus und visuelle Kultur in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Katja Leiskau, Patrick Rössler, and Susann Trabert (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2016), 211–30. 4 I am grateful to Olaf Guercke of the Friedrich Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn, for his help in procuring this material. 5 Sabine T. Kriebel, ‘Radical Left Magazines in Berlin: “Die Pleite” (1919, 1923–4); “Der Gegner” (1919–22); “Der blutige Ernst” (1919); “Der Knüppel” (1923–7); “Eulenspiegel” (1928–31); and “AIZ/VI” (1924–38)’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Vol. III: Europe 1880–1940, ed. Peter Brooker et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 835–54. Most issues of Der wahre Jacob have been digitised by the Heidelberg University Library:https://​www​.ub​.uni​ -heidelberg​.de​/helios​/fachinfo​/www​/kunst​/digilit​/artjournals​/wahre​_jakob​.html. 6 Quotation from the appeal ‘An die Parteigenossen!’, title page of the 4 July 1874 issue. Both of the years 1874 und 1875 have been digitised by the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin: https://digital​.staatsbibliothek​-berlin​.de​/suche​?queryString​=PPN898906660.

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7 A semi-complete run of Die Neue Welt from 1876–1899 is available in digital form via the Friedrich Ebert-Stiftung at: http://fes​.imageware​.de​/fes​/web/ zugänglich. For the complete 1901–1912 run, visit: http://library​.fes​.de​/inhalt​/digital​/neue​-welt​.htm. 8 Hartwig Gebhardt, ‘Illustrierte Zeitschriften in Deutschland am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts. Zur Geschichte einer wenig erforschten Pressegattung’, in Buchhandelsgeschichte, vol. 45 (1983). 9 www​.deutsche​-biographie​.de​/sfz50612​.html​?language​=en. 10 Die Neue Welt, no. 52, 1907, 412. 11 Dussel, Pressebilder in der Weimarer Republik, 264. 12 Kurt Koszyk, Deutsche Presse 1914–1945. Geschichte der deutschen Presse, Vol. 3 (Berlin: Colloquium, 1972), 311. 13 Handbuch der deutschen Tagespresse, published by the Deutsches Institut für Zeitungskunde Berlin, 4th edition, Berlin, 1932. 14 Gabriele Ricke, Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung. Gegenmodell zur bürgerlichen Illustrierten (Hannover: Internationalismus, 1974); Heinz Willmann, Geschichte der Arbeiter-Illustrierten Zeitung 1921–1938 (Berlin: Dietz, 1974). 15 AIZ 11 (1931), no. 41, 838. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Andrés Mario Zervigón and Patrick Rössler, ‘“Die AIZ sagt die Wahrheit”. Zu den Illustrationsstrategien einer “anderen” deutschen Avantgarde’, in Deutsche illustrierte Presse, ed. Leiskau, Rössler, Trabert (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2016), 181–210, here 184. 19 Dussel, Bilder als Botschaft, 46. 20 Willmann, Geschichte der Arbeiter-Illustrierten Zeitung 1921–1938, 8. 21 For advertising in AIZ, see Konrad Dussel, ‘Wirtschaftswerbung als politischer Stimmungsmesser. Das Anzeigenaufkommen in der kommunistischen “ArbeiterIllustrierte-Zeitung” und dem nationalsozialistischen “Illustrierten Beobachter” 1929 bis 1932’, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 108 (2021): 318–43. 22 Zervigón and Rössler, ‘“Die AIZ sagt die Wahrheit”’, 184. 23 Cover image, AIZ 8, no. 21 (1929). 24 See Konrad Dussel, ‘Das Bild der Welt für deutsche Kommunisten. Die illustrierte Zeitungsbeilage “Der Rote Stern” in der Weimarer Republik’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 68 (2020): 618–31. 25 Dussel, ‘Das Bild der Welt für deutsche Kommunisten’, 622. 26 Sebastian Elsbach, Das Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold. Republikschutz und Gewalt in der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2019); Karl Rohe, Das Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold. Ein Beitrag zu Geschichte und Struktur der politischen Kampfverbände zur Zeit der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1966). 27 Börsenverein der Deutschen Buchhändler, eds, Sperlings Zeitschriften- und Zeitungsadressbuch, 1928 (Leipzig: Verlag des Börsenvereins der Deutschen Buchhändler, 1928), 368. Börsenverein der Deutschen Buchhändler, eds., Sperlings Zeitschriften- und Zeitungsadressbuch, 1930 (Leipzig: Verlag des Börsenvereins der Deutschen Buchhändler, 1930), 408. 28 IRZ, no. 1, 22 November 1924, 2.

5

Acrobatics of the Printed Page The Cosmopolitanism of Rizzoli’s Periodicals Maria Antonella Pelizzari

In January 1933, an article in the monthly journal Il Risorgimento Grafico took a position against the modern look of Italian rotogravure periodicals. Perceiving them as cluttered and hard to read, the article criticised mass periodicals for the irregularity of their graphic layouts and arbitrary use of photographs, which were considered too crammed, tilted, casually overlapped, and ‘abused by the scissors.’1 The page looked casual and rushed, the captioning was labyrinthine, and the overall content was exhausting for readers. The description of leafing through these pages was as accurate as it was disparaging: As you open a periodical, the eye, stunned by the solid and irregular masses distributed across the page, settles down, albeit restless, on the main points of chiaroscuro; it moves back and forth from one point to the other, and tries, in vain, to enter the middle ground, which is too fuzzy to make out an image; it is repeatedly hit by the most incongruous juxtapositions that force the eye to make progressive and acrobatic adjustments to the extraordinary range in size, and the violent disparity of tones and rhythms, of the single photographs.2

This compositional instability, remarked the article, was also prompted by the photographs’ uneven quality caused by the random gathering of these sources from reporting agencies, film production agencies, and even amateurs. The journal’s disapproval of these weekly publications was wide-ranging, targeting their mode of production (the haphazard process of acquiring, selecting and assembling photographs), and criticising the lack of meaningful messages, with contents that were just as shallow as toothpaste advertisements. Il Risorgimento Grafico (1902–41), a national bulwark of the classical Bodoni typeface,3 favoured a wholly different set of rules, whereby documentary delivery and orderly design showed eventful moments in history and positioned readers ‘to be aware, effectively, of what they were looking at.’4 The journal asked editors to discriminate the

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good from the poorly executed photograph, give full visibility to the image, and add a text that was as legible as it was informative. A comparison between two double-page layouts – one from Il Secolo XX, published by Rizzoli, and the other from La Rivista Illustrata del Popolo d’Italia, supported by the Fascist Party (PNF) – clarifies these points. In the first case, Venice is represented with an ensemble of unevenly trimmed photographs that illustrate disparate viewpoints and convey a perceptual disorientation (Figure 5.1). Massive wooden pilings dominate the top left and set the tone for a chaotic itinerary across pages where readers voyeuristically watch the tourists and lovers travelling on the vaporetto, playing hide-and-seek with the shadows of alleys and campielli, and looking up to suddenly discover the view of St. Mark’s Basilica. There is no topographical order in this tight pattern of chiaroscuros that blend the vernacular with the monumental, the interior with the exterior, the view from below with the view from above, zooming onto a group of pigeons that are isolated inside a circular frame. The text flows across the sequence like an impressionistic account jotted down by the journalist who also took the photographs, Luigi Antonio Garrone – a flâneur describing an intimate and lyrical city, timeless, secret, tucked away from the crowd. Venice is a completely different place – monumental and statuary in the photograph printed in full-page on the right side of the Rivista, where the imposing view of the Moor striking the hour of St. Mark’s clocktower introduces the cupolas of the Basilica in the distance (Figure 5.2). The image epitomises the glorious city, whose historical splendour is juxtaposed to a stately photograph that shows the triumphant entrance into the laguna of the Duce,

Figure 5.1  Luigi A. Garrone, ‘Ecco Venezia,’ Il Secolo XX, no. 36, September 1932, 8–9. Biblioteca Marco Besso, Rome.

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Figure 5.2  ‘Venezia,’ La Rivista Illustrata del Popolo d’Italia, no. 9, September 1934, 36–7. Biblioteca Comunale Centrale ‘Palazzo Sormani’, Milan.

an equally commanding presence on a motorboat. Unlike the phenomenological glance activated by the journalist of the Rizzoli periodical, the description of the Rivista reflects an official and glorifying report. The eye does not have to squint or climb or push its way across the page, but rather rests in contemplation of a full-frame photograph. This comparison suggests that the criticism of mass periodicals touched on both form and content, and that the compositional stability invoked by Il Risorgimento Grafico reflected a conservative position incited by the fascist cultural front. Proof that ideology lies behind these notations on form appears in a June review in the same journal, which addressed the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista and praised its dense montage for ‘the research of clarity and the study of contrasts that are founded on the aim of bringing a new animation to classical forms: alphabet, lines, pages.’5 What separated this monumental cut-and-paste from the sequences on the pages of mass periodicals was a persuasive message that marked the progressive steps of a revolutionary destiny. Here the spectator was instructed, not distracted. Building on Siegfried Kracauer’s formulation of ‘the cult of distraction’6 and his critique of media in Weimar Germany, this essay wants to bring this position into dialogue with Italy’s political context. My focus is on the magazine factory of Angelo Rizzoli in Milan, launched in 1927 and thriving until 1938 with a series of illustrated periodicals printed in rotogravure that contributed to a visual culture criticised by conservative fronts. How are we to account for this material, addressed to and consumed by the masses, during a decade of political oppression and heightened modernity?

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This research is sustained by a body of literature that argues against a consolidated notion of fascist hegemony and explores the negotiations of this regime with private culture industries like Rizzoli. These industries generated unspoken alliances with fascism. As David Forgacs has argued, ‘cultural policy is formed not simply out of directives from above but out of a complex horizontal interplay between these interests.’7 The coexistence of cosmopolitan models with nationalistic propaganda in modern Italy is at the core of these questions about visual literacy in weekly mass periodicals, where the photographic message was worldly, anecdotal, fantastic, and even cryptic. This chapter scrutinises the politics of the Rizzoli printed page, highlighting the key role of a journalist, Ettore Maria Margadonna, in contributing to a new form that celebrated the perceptual chaos of modern life.

‘The immense cauldron of actuality’ Angelo Rizzoli’s periodical industry was built on the assumption that modern media were a form of visual entertainment. An article published in Il Secolo Illustrato in July 1932 highlighted this idea. It explained the rotogravure process step by step and discussed photography as its essential ingredient. If the task of the daily newspaper was ‘to inform the reader,’ the illustrated weekly, ‘had to keep the reader engaged and entertained, documenting and commenting on the news with photographic illustrations.’8 The industry’s genesis dates back to 1927, when Rizzoli purchased a set of five magazine titles from the Milanese publisher, Alberto Mondadori. Among his editors, Guido Cantini, a playwright and screenwriter, envisaged a new identity for one of these periodicals, Novella, originally a small-size monthly literary journal. Cantini proposed that popular novels be interspersed with photographs of Hollywood stars. The initiative was an instant financial success. Printed in a rich purple ink, Novella showcased a seductive and glamorous movie star or loving couples on the cover and back cover; its interior pages featured a double narrative track whereby a popular serial novel or short novel, most frequently by an Italian writer, formed the textual background for film stills and loud cinematic sequences that took over the page and transported the reader elsewhere, inviting further ‘acrobatics’ of the imagination. North American cinema thrived in Italy in the 1930s and, for the most part, the stars were imported from Hollywood’s world of fabricated glamour. Through the decade, Italy’s own film stars began to appear, while Rizzoli profited from his own media to propagandise his small production company, Novella-Film, and a new diva, Isa Miranda.9 The popular origin story that Patrick Rössler has traced back to American movie and celebrity magazines like Photoplay applies to Rizzoli, and to an Italian culture that thrived on fantasy and escapism while living under Mussolini’s dictatorship.10 The glamour of the silver screen ran across the Rizzoli portfolio of publications, which comprised, besides Novella, Il Secolo Illustrato (initially a weekly supplement of the daily newspaper, Il Secolo,11 Il Secolo XX) (covering art and culture, and folded into Il Secolo Illustrato in 1933), La Donna (the first woman’s magazine in Italy, transformed into a deluxe fashion title), and Comoedia (a magazine dedicated

 Acrobatics of the Printed Page 99 to the world of theatre). In short order, more titles were added in the late 1920s: L’Illustrazione, Cinema Illustrazione, with popular articles focusing on film, and Piccola, dedicated to young female readers. Lei, a weekly addressed to the modern woman’s lifestyle, followed soon after, in 1933, keeping the same size, cost, and formula as the other periodicals (16 pages at 50 cents, with full-bleed photographs on the front and back). A colour code was created for marketing the individual titles, whose contents addressed specialised groups of readers. For example, Piccola was printed in a rich pink; Il Secolo XX and Il Secolo Illustrato presented a sepia brown tone or black ink; and the covers of Cinema Illustrazione, the closest to Hollywood glamour and gossip, were hand-coloured. These periodicals’ ‘journalistic sensibility’ consisted of a balance between the story and its photographic illustration. The photography was paramount since ‘every page, before being read, is looked at; and oftentimes, the crop of a photograph is all the reader needs to be alerted and sensitised, so to speak, to the subject.’12 In promoting this eye-catching journalism, the Rizzoli periodicals followed a modern trend advocated by an international cohort of publishers and journalists experimenting with rotogravure technology. Kurt Korff, the editor of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ), spoke of ‘the allure of the photograph,’ and remarked that the quintessential element for the success of these weekly illustrated magazines was the image ensemble in which ‘the eye of an artist is responsible for seeking out the strongest and best pictorial solutions – not only for individual pictures, but also in the grouping of pictures among themselves.’13 The first editorial of the French VU magazine announced that its main scope was to ‘translate the precipitous rhythm of modern life.’ Its pages were ‘stuffed’ with photographs that covered all manifestations of this world and the hectic nature of its movements and visual clutter.14 Carlo Rim, VU’s editor-in-chief, amusingly compared this new journalism to a kitchen where not one rigorous recipe was to be found, and expressed the chance and freedom running through the editorial offices, working ‘with a smile’ and aiming ‘to distract the reader.’15 Rizzoli’s editorial team was similarly described as a group of ‘cooks and waiters’ who savoured the weekly photographs assembled in ‘the immense cauldron of actuality.’ The metaphor of the ‘cauldron’ evoked the rich visual concoction of news that boiled slowly and acquired taste as it simmered over the course of a week. And this ‘cooking’ had many steps: the layout (positioning the selected photographs on the page and deciding their size); the printing of text and photographs on a transparent cellophane film (called pelure);16 and the manual montage of these elements on a glass-topped light table. This process, only possible with rotogravure technology, allowed great freedom to the monteur in composing the ensemble, including the ability to draw text by hand directly onto the cellophane film. A page of Il Secolo Illustrato from March 1930, featuring the fabrication of gramophone records, shows the elasticity of this process, where we can imagine the monteur working with a layout that has been given to him (four images along a diagonal line and other two images on the top right and bottom left) and playfully adding a pattern of records intersecting the photographic sequence like flying objects (Figure 5.3). In addition, the title (‘the record, the prison of sounds’) is a free-floating sentence juxtaposed on

Figure 5.3  F. Savorgnan di Brazza, ‘Il disco, prigione dei suoni,’ Il Secolo Illustrato, no. 9, 1 March 1930. Archivio Rizzoli. RCS Mediagroup.

 Acrobatics of the Printed Page 101

Figure 5.4 Grisauro, ‘Ingresso alla “Gloria”,’ L’Illustrazione, 10 August 1930. Biblioteca Braidense, Milan.

a pattern created by seven circular shapes. A confirmation of the liberating effect of this montage is the manual alteration of the top-right image where a circular shape is bursting from the frame. A cursory view of what remains of this photographic archive shows that an international range of photo agencies acted as feeders. Beside the already mentioned Hollywood sources (Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros, MGM, as well as the Globe Photo agency from New York), one finds the recurring stamp of Schostal photo agency, circulating images by modernist photographers such as Paul Wolff and Yva. Founded in 1929 in Vienna, Schostal became the exclusive Austrian distributor for Keystone Press Agency, based in New York, circulating photographs in Paris, London and Berlin, and opening a branch in Milan, hence becoming a local image bank for Rizzoli. Other agencies were Associated Press (reaching Italy via Berlin), Wide World, Wiener Foto-Kurier, the Italian Farabola, and from Berlin, Winterfeld Photos as well as UFA. New agencies (Fotoagenturen and Bielderdienste) had been formed in Germany in 1928 that packaged stock photo reportage and image series. The Rizzoli periodicals drew from these – Weltrundschau and Dephot – to illustrate moments of modern life, such as the locale of a theatre agency giving auditions, a common practice in Berlin, which, the article reported, was also growing in Italian cities (Figures 5.4, 5.5). As for individual photographers supplying the Rizzoli magazine factory, one finds names of expatriates such as Luigi Diaz, working in fashion in Paris, and a few occasional photo essays by Italian modernists such as

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Figure 5.5  ‘Die entscheidende Augenblick,’ Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, no. 21, 25 May 1930 (cover). Author collection.

Bruno Stefani, Achille Bologna, the photojournalist Armando Bruni, and Lucio Ridenti (a Leica dandy who inhabited the world of theatre). As already noted, the journalists occasionally contributed their own pictures. The range of photographs collected worldwide confirms that stories went far beyond the chronicling of national news, which conflicted with the nationalist ethos supported by fascist journalists and agencies. Among these journalists was Pietro Maria Bardi who battled against lightweight content (what he called ‘the futile and banal curiosity . . . that instructs empty brains’) and demanded a journalism that celebrated ‘the most significant episodes of our ascending population.’17 Similarly Manlio Morgagni, selected by Mussolini in 1924 to direct the official party organ, the Agenzia Stefani, proclaimed: ‘One cannot rely on foreign information as accurate and verifiable . . . when we compare it to the information that is gathered and recorded with an ear and an eye that is specifically Italian.’18 Another significant branch of the fascist establishment, the Istituto Luce, a government-sponsored reporting agency, also founded in 1924, produced documentary newsreels and photographs (starting in 1927) that showcased official events.19 In opposition to this use of photography as propaganda, Rizzoli’s periodical factory represented a living ‘cauldron’ where ingredients were constantly added from many parts of the world, contributing to a chaotic visual culture that pushed beyond the strict boundaries of the fascist national myth, and the constrictions of the magazine page itself.

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Cut-and-paste contraband A significant number of writers in the Rizzoli periodicals conceived photography as a medium that straddled documentary and fiction. This inclination derived from the literary and cinematic world, where these writers belonged. While it has not been possible to identify the name of the artistic director or directors responsible for the imaginative layout of these pages (with a similar authorial role as Kurt Szafranski in the BIZ, or Irene Lidova in VU magazine),20 one can conjecture that these individuals were in conversation with a group of writers who looked beyond their country’s borders. Among them was Raffaele Carrieri, a bohemian who lived in and out of Paris. Research has shown that his articles ran along page layouts that closely resembled those of VU.21 Cinema percolated through the work of Luigi Antonio Garrone (a journalist and actor in silent movies and later sound films), Cesare Zavattini (a writer who would become the spokesperson of postwar neorealism), Giuseppe Marotta (who conceived the earliest photo-novels for Cinema Illustrazione), and, most relevant for this discussion on photomontage, Ettore Maria Margadonna (a renowned journalist, film critic, and later screenwriter, the author of the first Italian history of film , Cinema ieri e oggi, published in 1932). Captivated by images distributed internationally, these journalists constructed a language that was equally international. My focus on Margadonna reflects how this critic’s knowledge of cinematic montage and his sensibility for the modern photographic aesthetic might have inspired the recurring use of cut-and-paste in these ensembles. He wrote about the optical manipulation of the world through the camera’s eye, observing that, ‘the camera has multiplied the appearances, and most important, has demonstrated to us . . . that images of objects are . . . [merely] images, that is, the most elusive, contingent, and relative representations we can grasp.’ Referring to a modernist ethos that echoed Russian Constructivism and the German New Vision, Margadonna championed disorienting effects over a normative and straightforward photographic vision. ‘The day we realize that photography is not limited to the daguerreotype, the carte de visite, the cabinet card, the postcard,’ he remarked, ‘when it finally dawns on us that it is humiliating, to say the least, to face the world with such a powerful machine and be passive, then we can truly say, without exaggeration, that a new muse has joined the illustrious chorus of the old ones.’22 These observations were amplified in his writings on film, disseminated in the numerous reviews he published in Comoedia, Il Secolo XX, Il Secolo Illustrato, L’Illustrazione, and, with increased frequency, Cinema Illustrazione. Margadonna’s critical engagement with cinema went with his support for a national industry that strived to find its own identity and emerge from the hegemony of North American film. As Fabio Andreazza has argued, he was sustained in this endeavour by likeminded cosmopolitan intellectuals who gathered around a literary journal in Milan, Il Convegno, and he belonged to a cine-club whose ideas were channelled through the journal Cine-Convegno. Among Margadonna’s friends and colleagues was Antonello Gerbi, a follower of the philosopher Benedetto Croce, and a philosopher in his own

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right, whose critical writings legitimised film as modern art and communication. Gerbi condemned the elitism in Italian culture – an attitude that, substantially, avoided any form of mechanical reproduction, telephone, photography and rotogravure. Gerbi’s sarcastic observations, below, reflect the elitism of many Italian literati at this time, who, in their retreat into a safe world of art and communication, were bewildered by the pages and montages found in the Rizzoli periodicals. As Gerbi points out, cinema permeated this new literacy: Cinema, understandably, could not belong to Arcadia. With cinema entered the wildest fictions, the visions of distant and foreign worlds, the rhythm of other lives, and the blow of violent passions. With cinema a crowd of elusive and bright shadows broke into the sacred green laurels: engineers and brigands, athletes and bankers, buffoons, popes, and sailors . . . Cinema was the denial of Arcadia.23

Margadonna shared with Gerbi this popular view that understood and gave space to the spectators’ imagination, their emotions and dreams. In his writings he aimed to distil the elements that made cinema a new art. His insistence on montage as the quintessential craft is an example. ‘Scissors are the pen for the filmmaker,’ he said, as ‘the lens is the pen of the photographer, the light and the instant represent the ink with which he can write.’24 The true art, he said, lay in montage: ‘the artist first prints what he wants to tell and follows an approximate script, but then he truly creates by cutting, moving, adding and editing the print he has shot.’25 One can speculate that these ideas, drawn from Margadonna’s own immersion in cinema, contributed to a creative dialogue with the team working with Rizzoli periodicals. Furthermore, Margadonna was involved in further ‘acrobatics’ that impacted his understanding of the cinema industry. In 1933, he spent four months in Berlin and studied film production in the UFA studios, arriving on the day of the Reichstag fire, on 27 February, at the cusp of the Nazi political turnover that would convulse the political world and have a big impact on the film industry. Following the elections of 5 March, Margadonna reported from Berlin that from this point one could only speak of ‘the old German film, or the dead film, because the brown shirts had made a clean sweep.’26 Witnessing a transformation in process, he spent his days watching Fritz Lang shooting The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (a film that Joseph Goebbels later banned) and exploring the connections between the German film industry and other media. In Margadonna’s view, ‘there is a game of interests behind the UFA production.’ The game was based on a media convergence that brought the publishing industry into conversation with the film industry. ‘One can only imagine,’ he writes, ‘what powerful synergy these industries can activate in their reciprocal collaboration – one rating the public taste through the circulation of books and periodicals; the other exploiting new subjects drawn from publications that are successful.’27 Margadonna’s 1933 article cites the example of a film, F.P.1, drawn from a popular novel, and produced in 1932 by Erich Pommer while he was the head of UFA. The mechanism was clear: ‘the film had 500,000 readers who promoted it, who ran to watch it, and who involved their friends to go. And while the film spread around and became successful in most German

 Acrobatics of the Printed Page 105 cities, the publisher sold the book in the foyer of each cinema.’28 Margadonna reflects on the collaboration of these industries as engines of propaganda, thinking about the models that would, in turn, impact the Rizzoli media and revamp the Italian film industry, at the very moment when German cinema was about to be incorporated into a totalitarian state. UFA, he explains, ‘held seventy percent of the national film industry and was part of a much larger publishing world, Scherl Verlag, that oversaw the international agency Telegraph Union, whose offices distributed news across Germany, [with] two large newspapers, twelve illustrated periodicals, agencies strategically positioned in the city, a travel agency, an art gallery, and books.’29 Scherl, owned by the right-wing tycoon Alfred Hugenberg, named Ludwig Klitzsch as the UFA CEO, and consequently, the Head of Scherl. Concurrently with the Nazi shift of power, Pommer, who was a Jew, was dismissed and soon after emigrated to North America where he worked for Fox-Film. Meanwhile, Scherl produced entertainment periodicals (Scherl’s Magazin, Filmwelt) whose images were often drawn from the UFA industry. Margadonna, immersed in these media dynamics, must have been familiar with these sources. A photograph of a giraffe by Zoltan Kluger, published in Scherl’s Magazin (and probably used as an UFA promotional still)30 must have caught his eye as we find this picture montaged in Il Secolo Illustrato a month after his return to Milan, in May 1933 (Figures 5.6, 5.7). The montage plays with size and proportion, juxtaposing the long neck of the animal, the tongue stretched out to reach food, with a calming photoessay in which an actress from the Italian theatre and later sound cinema, Dina Galli,

Figure 5.6  Zoltan Kluger, ‘Hoher geht’s nicht mehr,’ Scherl’s Magazin, no. 8, October 1932.

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Figure 5.7  ‘Allo zoo. Passeggiata di Dina Galli,’ Il Secolo Illustrato, 5 May 1933. Archivio Rizzoli. RCS Mediagroup.

feeds the animals behind the cages of the zoo in Rome. The article is written by Galli herself, who rambles through the animal world and the human world, explaining her ease with the animals, even ferocious ones. There are ironic nuances in her discussion of a domesticated world that can potentially bite back, and her naming of the lion as ‘Ras’, which insinuates a comparison between the ferocious animal and fascist thugs (a ‘Ras’ was a leader of the blackshirts). The montage activates a perceptual compression that layers three sights: the close-up view of the giraffe, the middle-ground where the actress is closer to the animals, and the background, where the four narrative vignettes suggest a casual newsreel of a day at the zoo. The ‘I’ of the actress is represented by her full figure standing on the left side of the giraffe and looking at the reader. What prompted the idea of this ensemble, one wonders, and who asked Galli to perform for the camera? There are no conclusive answers to these questions, but the modernist perspective of a giraffe shot from below, showing this animal’s power and possibly deriding the human world, resonates with Margadonna’s ideas about the visual as a distortion of the real and about montage as a narrative form.

The scourges of modernity As I have discussed thus far, the Rizzoli mass periodicals clashed with a fascist ethos that sought to celebrate ‘heroic gestures’ and dismissed lightweight content. Photography

 Acrobatics of the Printed Page 107 channelled a message that was both spectacular and ambiguous – as Kracauer observed for similar kinds of illustrated weeklies in Weimar Germany, ‘the blizzard of photographs betrays an indifference towards what the things mean’.31 But if this theorist’s reflections about the illustrated media served as a critique of the numbness that he observed in Weimar’s bourgeois society, in fascist Italy ambiguity could also signify creative freedom. The notion that the camera could reveal an invisible world in its most minute details, was, undoubtedly, antagonistic to the regime’s concept of a highly understandable and persuasive world. Hence it is not surprising to find montages in the Rizzoli periodicals that hint at the obscurity of the visible and touch on subjects that were prone to censorship. Among these was crime. A compilation of reports about fictitious murder stories runs across a spectacular photomontage in Il Secolo Illustrato in March 1932, featuring a sequence of narrative vignettes that illustrate detective work (Plate 4). A diagonal column of photographs resembling a film strip climbs the page, simultaneously revealing and concealing the detective’s search for clues. In vertical progression, these photographs illustrate three detectives performing acts of identification and incrimination. The scenes are staged, as suggested by the pretend play of a female figure standing by her doorstep and acting under the interrogation of a detective in a fur coat, or else, in the scene above it, engaging with an individual who is showing an ID document and likely asking her to identify a criminal. The styling of this woman’s scarf – protecting her shoulders or covering her head – contributes to the creation of this narrative situation. Right above, the still image of an open drawer acts like the hint to a clue, or the symbolic cipher of a detective’s finding. This sequence is interrupted by a montage of two images that are blown up and visually inscribed within the circular shape of a magnifying lens, held by the hand of a mysterious detective. This scrutinising gesture shows another detective in a trench coat who has caught the delinquent, firmly holding his head to the ground; above this scene is the blur of a furtive male figure, which suggests the presence of a thief and murderer who is about to be caught. The text accompanies this visual crescendo with the presentation of five short murder mystery stories that culminate in the finding of clues – what the article summarises in the title as ‘the murderer’s business card.’32 These are introduced with a gruesome local crime news about the finding of a woman’s body parts in some luggage on the compartment of the train from La Spezia to Rome. Crimes follow elsewhere and inhabit the realm of the fantastic, reminding readers of the literary world of Sherlock Holmes. Each short episode ends with a revelatory element that uncovers the culprit: a bicycle’s tracks on the ground, leading to a villa on the outskirts of London where the crime occurred; a stale piece of bread originating from the mill in the mountain resort of Sestriere, where the miller’s homicide was committed; a wooden match found beside the cadaver of a man who was robbed in his apartment in Düsseldorf; or a drop of wax left on a woman’s deathbed in Lyon, leading the detective to identify her governess as the murderer. Text and images collaborate in the fictional crescendo of this page layout and narrative; significantly, the title’s typeface under the magnifying lens is also enlarged, as the photographs are blown up, in a playful game between the textual and the visual substance of these stories. The game, I would argue, reflects the nature of this periodical, which invites

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readers to expand their perception of the real while also suggesting, through the re-enactment of these scenes and the artificiality of the photomontage, that there is no real or factual world. As Will Straw has pointed out in his analysis of true crime magazines, these ‘catered to a public fascination with police procedures . . . nourished the sense that crime took place in worlds more vivid and fantastic than our own, worlds of heightened expressivity and dream-like juxtaposition.’33 The Rizzoli page, like the crime fiction circulating at this time in Italy, was titillating for the reader, uncovering social taboos, and creating a distant (foreign) and imaginary (staged) dimension where the mind and the eye could wander. For these reasons, this genre was a target for fascism. Crime fiction was perceived, in Jane Dunnett’s words, as ‘a social illness of epidemic proportion,’34 a virus spreading uncontrollably throughout Italian society. The critique of this genre was not dissimilar to the fascist dismay about the world of fantasy and glamour found in mass periodicals. Its source was foreign, and its stories reflected a dark, sinister world, to be avoided at all costs by people who lived in a country that prided itself on law and order. The words of Giuseppe Bottai, the Minister of Corporations, in 1931, sum up the conservative essence of this abrasive criticism: ‘The passion for crime fiction is a sign of contemporary barbarism . . . The Anglo-Saxons have brought it to us, adding it to the three scourges of the modern world: cinema, the radio, the gramophone (speaking machine)’35 (see Figure 5.3). Soon after, crime news would be banned from Italian newspapers, with the precise goal of denying the possible existence of a social underworld.36 The Rizzoli periodicals were not impacted by these measures, nor was the thriving industry of crime novels (called gialli) published by Mondadori in translation from Georges Simenon and Anglo-Saxon authors, which obtained great popular success throughout the 1930s. As a form of social awakening, these novels, like the dreams of the silver screen and the captivating pages of the illustrated magazines, fabricated an alternative world – immersive, inexplicable, and potentially deceptive in its irresistible drive to embrace an ambiguous and cosmopolitan form of communication while living under the tight grip of a conservative and nationalistic regime.

Notes 1 Augusto Calabi, ‘Ebdomadari popolari illustrati’, Il Risorgimento Grafico, January 1933, 39. A similar article and critique was also published in this journal in July 1933. All translations are by the author. 2 Ibid., 38. 3 The Bodoni typeface was introduced by Giambattista Bodoni in 1798. Il Risorgimento Grafico was directed by the typographer and editor Raffaello Bertieri, in charge of the Milanese Scuola del Libro between 1919 and 1932. For the Italian debate over modern typography and its ideological dimensions, see Carlo Vinti, ‘L’estetica grafica della ‘nuova tipografia’ in Italia’, Disegno Industriale, no. 2, September 2002, 9. 4 Calabi, ‘Ebdomadari popolari illustrati’, 39.

 Acrobatics of the Printed Page 109 5 Raffaello Bertieri, ‘Alcuni aspetti grafici della Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista’, Il Risorgimento Grafico, no. 6, June 1933, 337. 6 Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Cult of Distraction’, in Thomas Y. Levin ed. The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 323–30. 7 David Forgacs, Italian Culture in the Industrial Era 1880–1980: Culture Industries, Politics, and the Public (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 56. 8 Luigi A. Garrone, ‘Un giornale in roto’, Il Secolo Illustrato, July 1932, 8. 9 See my forthcoming essay, ‘Media Convergence in Angelo Rizzoli’s periodicals: La Signora di tutti (1934)’, in Print Matters. Histories of Photography in Illustrated Magazines, ed. M. A. Pelizzari and Andres Zervigon (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2022). 10 Patrick Rössler, ‘Global Players, Emigres, and Zeitgeist. Magazine design and the interrelation between the United States and Germany’, Journalism Studies 8, no. 7 (2007): 575. 11 Alberto Mondadori purchased this title in 1923 and began to print it in rotogravure in 1925. See Arte Moltiplicata. L’immagine del ‘900 italiano nello specchio dei rotocalchi, ed. Barbara Cinelli et al. (Milan: Mondadori, 2013), 330. 12 Garrone, ‘Un giornale in roto’, 8. 13 Kurt Korff, “The Illustrated Magazine” (1927), in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimenberg (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 646–7. 14 ‘Remarques sur un nouveau journal illustré’, VU, no. 1, March 21, 1928, 11–12. 15 See Carlo Rim, ‘Le métier de journaliste’, VU, no. 249, 21 December 1932, 2065. 16 Garrone, ‘Un giornale in roto’, 10. 17 Pietro Maria Bardi, ‘Battifuoco 63’, Critica Fascista X/13 (1 July 1932): 247. 18 Manlio Morgagni, L’Agenzia Stefani nella vita nazionale (Milano: Alfieri & Lacroix, 1930), 27. 19 Istituto Luce was founded in 1924 with the aim of producing propaganda newsreels (‘cinegiornali’). Starting in 1927, it began to document fascism through photography. See Tatiana Agliano and Uliano Lucas, La realta’ e lo sguardo. Storia del fotogiornalismo in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 2015), 48. 20 See Thierry Gervais, ‘Making Life Possible’, in LIFE Magazine and the Power of Photography, ed. Katherine A. Bussard and Kristen Gresh (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum, 2020), 32. 21 Paolo Rusconi, ‘La divulgazione dell’arte contemporanea nelle riviste popolari illustrate di Rizzoli’, in Forme e Modelli del rotocalco italiano tra fascismo e Guerra, ed. Raffaele De Berti and Irene Piazzoni (Milan: Cisalpino, 2009), 527–74. 22 Ettore Maria Margadonna [Don X], ‘L’occhio inumano’, Il Secolo XX, 10 April 1931, 23–4. 23 Antonello Gerbi, ‘Malattie letterarie del tempo. Disprezzo del Cinema’, in Preferisco Charlot. Scritti sul cinema (1926–1933) (Turin: Aragno, 2011), 10–11 [my translation]. 24 Ettore Maria Margadonna [Luigi Sassoon], ‘Elogio delle forbici’, Cinema Illustrazione 31 (2 August 1933): 3 [my translation]. 25 Ibid. 26 Ettore M. Margadonna, ‘Conclusioni sul cinema tedesco’, La Stampa, 2 May 1933, 5. 27 Ettore M. Margadonna, ‘Inchiesta sul cinema tedesco. “Neubabelsberg”’, La Stampa, 7 March 1933, 5. 28 Ibid.

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29 Ibid. 30 My thanks to Daniel H. Magilow for sharing his thoughts on the visual and promotional interchange between UFA and Scherl. I also owe to him the information that Zoltan (Zvi) Kluger later became an important Zionist photographer. 31 Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Photography’, in The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays, Thomas Y. Levin ed. 58. 32 R. Corte-Enna, “La carta da visita del delinquente,” Il Secolo Illustrato, 3 December 1932, 3. 33 Will Straw, Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in ’50s America (New York: PPP Editions, 2006), 7. Police magazine (1930–32) has been found among the foreign periodicals in the Rizzoli archives. My thanks to Silvia Magistrali for this information. 34 Jane Dunnett, ‘Crime and the Critics: On the Appraisal of Detective Novels in 1930s Italy’, The Modern Language Review 106, no. 3 (July 2011): 753. 35 Giuseppe Bottai, ‘Novecento criminale’, Critica Fascista, 15 February 1931, 91 (cited in Dunnett, ‘Crime and the Critics’, 753). 36 Nicola Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime 1932–1943. Le veline del Minculpop per orientare l’informazione (Milan: Bompiani, 2005), 17.

6

Visual Modernism and its Others in VU Laura Truxa

Since the beginning of the 2000s, the French illustrated weekly VU (1928–40) has been the object of a renewed interest in the fields of press and photography history, and has been re-evaluated as a pioneer among twentieth-century news magazines.1 VU was created by Lucien Vogel, an editor and publisher who had been, until then, specialising in women’s periodicals, and was a collaborator of Condé Nast. Combining general news content with serials, fashion, sports and entertainment sections, praising the importance of advertising in ‘modern life’2 and championing photojournalism, it was the first of a new class of successful general-interest rotogravure magazines in interwar France. Its format of 27 × 37 cm and its price of 1.5 to 2 Francs situated it between sports-illustrated titles such as Match l’Intran, which was sold for a single Franc in 1930, and more traditional, high-end news illustrated magazines such as L’Illustration, which reached 4 Francs the same year. While multiple, and at times conflicting, political views cohabitated in its pages, its overall orientation until 1936 could be qualified as social democrat, distantly reflecting Vogel’s narrowing connexions to the communist circles.3 The magazine’s anti-fascism grew stronger in the mid-1930s, following the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the Spanish civil war.4 In this context, Vogel’s commitment to the Republican cause displeased his own company’s shareholders and apparently led to a forced resignation in September 1936.5 Vogel was replaced as editor by the conservative journalist Alfred Mallet, impacting the periodical’s appearance and editorial guidelines.6 The evolutions of the lesser-known 1936–40 period merit an analysis of their own, and a detailed comparison of both eras would be a welcome addition to the existing literature on VU. The following chapter will, however, focus on the first eight years of the magazine’s history, and especially on the pivotal early 1930s. One might argue that VU was not, in fact, a major publication. Its average circulation is estimated at between 50,000 and 150,000 copies a week, with some rare special issues occasionally reaching half-a-million copies.7 Meanwhile, L’Illustration sold an average of 210,000 copies a week around 1930, with some issues reaching 650,000.8 In 1938, VU printed 43,000 copies a week while competitor Match reached 2 million in 1940.9 Despite its limited audience, historians have emphasised VU’s cultural significance and innovative use of photography and graphic design. VU itself claimed to represent a new visual standard for modern printed media, and to offer an objective, unbiased access to ‘universal life’ by ‘bringing [it] within reach of the eye.’10 The 2006–7 exhibition

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‘Regarder VU’, which was held at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, as well as the ensuing catalogue, aimed attention at the periodical’s visual content, establishing VU as a milestone in the history of photography and stressing its relation to interwar artistic modernism.11 Nonetheless, the magazine’s content encompasses a great variety of visual styles and layouts. This visual eclecticism has long been noted, but not yet questioned in itself. Aside from Frizot and Veigy’s broad-ranging photo-historical approach, Danielle Leenaerts and Sophie Kurkdjian’s respective doctoral dissertations have provided invaluable insight into VU’s business history and editorial content.12 Specific aspects of the periodical, such as its use of photomontage or of visual patterns, have recently been analysed in more circumscribed studies.13 Building on this literature, the present chapter suggests that VU’s originality and historical value relies not only on its closeness to modernist photography and graphic design, but just as well on its nonuniformity and its frequent inconsistency with the principles of modernism expressed by some of its contemporary theorists. In VU’s pages, what might be recognised as modernism does not appear as a systematic, universal graphic language, but rather as an editorial tool among others – a stylistic device that underlined the modernity of some, not all, recurrent media narratives. What does VU’s selective modernism, and most of all what do modernism’s ‘others’ in VU tell us of its producers’ ideas about modernity? We will begin by defining more precisely what will, hereafter, be referred to as visual modernism. Both content analysis and an inquiry into VU’s context of production confirm its embrace of modernist principles of graphic design and photography. The theme of technological modernity stands out as systematically associated with ostensibly modernist designs. However, as will then be discussed, certain journalistic narratives were consistently denied a modernist treatment. The chapter will focus on two cases in which graphic design was recurrently used in VU to isolate a subject and emphasise its specificity. Articles concerned with events and topics explicitly defined as feminine, on the one hand, and foreign or exotic, on the other, were indeed associated with their own particular visual style. In a conclusive section we will propose an interpretation of VU’s unique mixture of visual modernism and its others, as a symptom of the complex relations connecting the rise of the French field of graphic design and international modernism. Most of the following argumentation relies on the content analysis of about 450 issues of VU, both analogue and digital. The preferred approach in this case was the study of a series of double-spreads, assembled first and foremost according to their journalistic content, later their visual similarities, rather than the analysis of individual designs or images.14 The method was greatly facilitated by the periodical’s digitisation by the Musée Nicéphore Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône, France, as well as by the use of the magazine’s yearly thematic indexes. Such content analysis hinges on the historical contextualisation of VU’s production process, which was in part enabled by Leenaerts and Kurkdjian’s earlier research. The scarcity of archives related to VU’s publication has been noted before.15 Consequently, biographies, autobiographies and testimonies by employees of the magazine, although inherently partial, have helped better situate VU in its professional and artistic network.16 Finally, the trade periodical Arts et métiers graphiques as well as commercial and promotional publications issued by the Deberny

 Visual Modernism and its Others in VU 113 & Peignot type foundry and available at the French National Library have supplied new information on the material conditions of VU’s graphic production.

New means for a new spirit By ‘visual modernism’, we will, hereafter, refer broadly to an interwar trend in the visual arts, including photography, typography and graphic design, which drew upon constructivism and early-twentieth-century theories of abstract painting. Artists and designers associated with the ‘New Vision’, ‘New Photography’ and ‘New Typography’ movements, most notably László-Moholy Nagy and Jan Tschichold, articulated an often utopian and universalist ideal of defining new means of communication adequate for the rapid changes in lifestyle expected from modern society. In his 1928 manifesto and handbook The New Typography, Jan Tschichold insisted that ‘the speed with which the modern consumer of printing has to absorb it means that the form of printing also must adapt itself to the conditions of modern life’,17 echoing VU’s own promise to ‘capture the brisk rhythm of contemporary life’.18 In its first-ever issue, VU also declared it would be ‘conceived in a new spirit and realised with new means’, perhaps implicitly referring to the Esprit nouveau movement that developed around Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier’s journal. Even before the 1920s, the expression ‘new spirit’ had come to be associated with modernist attitudes in poetry and the arts. The mutual resonances between modernist theories of art and design and VU’s editorial agenda and self-proclaimed ‘new formula’19 were more than coincidences: there is evidence of multiple links between the magazine’s producers and various French and German modernist currents. As early as 1928, VU was presented at the International Press Exhibition in Cologne, which also hosted a pavilion designed by Max Burchartz, an exhibition of Tschichold’s work, another of Tschichold’s and Renner’s Munich students’ work, and the Bauhaus’s ‘Elementar Buchteknik’ exhibition designed by Herbert Bayer.20 Vogel, a prominent figure of the interwar cosmopolitan cultural life in Paris, seems to have acted as art director for the first years of VU’s publication and may be presumed responsible for the magazine’s general aesthetic, along with later art directors Irène Lidova and Alexander Liberman.21 Another important key to understanding VU’s typographic richness is Vogel’s relation to Charles Peignot, art director of his family’s company, the Deberny & Peignot type foundry. In 1927, Vogel and Peignot created the luxurious trade journal Arts et métiers graphiques. Vogel’s contribution was not merely financial, as he sat on the editorial board of the publication and directed its special photographic issues.22 Arts et métiers graphiques familiarised French artists, printers and publishers with new trends in photography, book and poster design, including the New Typography: it published an essay by Tschichold in 1930.23 Peignot was also on the board of the company Vogel had created to publish VU.24 Peignot’s role in VU’s design is unclear, but a close study of the magazine, compared with Deberny & Peignot’s catalogues from 1926 and 1935, proves that all typefaces used in VU, with the exception of advertisements, were distributed by his foundry.

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Tschichold called for typographers to design spreads rather than individual pages, reduce margins, use sans-serif typefaces and avoid symmetrical compositions. Setting texts in all-caps or all-lower-case letters was favoured above conventional capitalisation. He strongly recommended his colleague Paul Renner’s geometrical typeface Futura. He also suggested periodicals should combine classical roman serif typefaces with sans-serif–set titles and captions.25 More generally, modernist graphic design and modernist photography followed similar formal principles. Forms were typically simplified towards abstraction and geometry, ornaments were cast away, asymmetry and strong visual contrasts were preferred to symmetry. Compositions favoured slants and diagonals, while forms and mediums were often combined, as in the cases of photomontage and typophoto.26 VU’s design increasingly followed the New Typography’s model after 1930. Margins generally shrunk, photographs became bigger and full-bleed printing became common. Pages were no longer designed individually but as double-spreads, with titles and illustrations crossing the fold. Diagonal compositions were habitual.27 The periodical also started using more sans-serif typefaces and in July 1930 introduced Futura, whose French distribution rights had just been acquired by Deberny & Peignot.28 Besides, VU collaborated with numerous ‘New Photographers’ such as Man Ray, Éli Lotar, Germaine Krull and André Kertész. Articles on technological innovations, in particular, called for bold, modernistinspired layouts. The subject was an important one in VU, especially in its first years. The first issue of the magazine featured an anthropomorphic automaton on its cover, and boasted about ‘the wonder of progress’.29 Automobiles and aviation were also major themes in VU’s early years. As of 1930, after Futura was introduced to the layout, articles

Figure 6.1 An example of Futura and double-spread layout: ‘Les belles voitures’, VU, special edition (1933): 36–7. Format: 54 × 37 cm. © Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Ville de Chalon-sur-Saône.

 Visual Modernism and its Others in VU 115 and special issues devoted to technical or industrial progress were systematically set in an ostensibly modernist manner, with sans-serif titles, slanted or sloped letterings and images, graphs and even photomontages, occasionally appearing to borrow from Russian constructivism. A 1932 cover featuring a montage of a woman’s face looking up at two radio towers shot from a low angle, crowned by a cut-out lightning bolt and a bold Futura-set title notably resembles some of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s 1920s works.30 Wide-spaced Futura titles, heavy black graphs and huge full-bleed photographs of shiny cars were frequent in VU’s special yearly automobile issues (Figure 6.1). The specificity of VU’s design as well as its context of production reflects the wider integration of the cultural and media industry with the avant-garde in the 1930s. As suggested earlier, VU was part of a network of artists, publishers and advertisers who brought modernist aesthetics into the mainstream. I have given elsewhere a more detailed account of Vogel and Peignot’s collaborations, connecting VU to the Union des Artistes Modernes (UAM), the Bauhaus, the Dorland advertising agency, Deberny & Peignot, and Condé Nast’s magazines.31 The resulting assimilation of modernist principles of graphic design is what we may designate as VU’s ‘visual modernism’.

The feminine as ornament However, there were topics in VU that did not ever seem suitable for such layouts and designs. The uses of visual modernism in VU were selective, and indicate unequivocal, albeit possibly unconscious, editorial choices to combine certain narratives with easily identifiable imageries and layout styles. A first striking example of this phenomenon would be the way femininity was represented in VU. The periodical attempted to appeal to a feminine audience: it often dealt with various women’s lifestyle matters, published special fashion issues and numerous articles about the changing roles of women in society. In fact, according to Kurkdjian, Vogel brought to VU around twenty collaborators from his previous enterprises, French Vogue and Le Jardin des modes.32 There is a possibility that these collaborators included studio employees. In any case, it is highly probable that Vogel actively tried to emulate the distinctive visual style of women’s fashion periodicals. His wife Cosette Vogel de Brunhoff, who had been French Vogue’s editor from 1920 to 1927, and who started teaching graphic arts in 1927, was also in charge of VU’s fashion issues.33 The periodical’s approach to ‘feminine’ topics, therefore, appears in large part borrowed from women’s magazines, by then a media genre with relatively consistent visual standards and graphic conventions, such as the use of very wide margins, delicate typography, and full-page illustrations. Indeed, VU’s fashion pages seem outstandingly ornamental when compared with the periodical’s general aesthetics, and recurrently feature calligraphic titles or script typefaces. For example, the fashion editor Francine’s recurrent pieces such as a presentation of winter hats, a piece on hair trends or a doublespread on artificial eyelashes all included variations of delicate, curled cursive titles.34 These designs are reminiscent of the French tradition of luxury women’s periodicals, whose design had evolved little since the nineteenth century. Vogel’s earlier publication

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La Gazette du bon ton was a notable example of this kind of press, and showcased a heavily flourished typographic heading on its otherwise plain cover. VU’s fashion segments and issues became increasingly coherent in design after 1932, producing a kind of parallel visual identity to the rest of the magazine. They presented their own brand of domesticated visual modernism, combining the traditional, ornamental aspects of fashion periodicals with Futura and strongly asymmetrical layouts. A great example of this phenomenon is the use of what was called the Coquemer style, an Art Déco printmaking trend which replaced capital letters by larger, lower-case ones (Figure 6.2), echoing yet subverting the new typographers’ call to get rid of capitals, and bringing ornament back to modern typography.35 VU also frequently featured modern cursive fonts, such as Marcel Jacno’s Scribe or the Bauer foundry’s Trafton Script, commercialised in France by Deberny & Peignot under the name Étoile. Stripped-down cursives were extremely popular in fashion magazines at the time, notably the cover of French Vogue in the late 1920s, as well as in advertising.36 VU was not, of course, a fashion periodical, and many of its articles related to women had nothing to do with sartorial matters, whether they took women as subjects or interlocutors. The magazine was not adverse to reformist feminist ideas and regularly discussed women’s labour and the specific effects of the economic crisis on their financial security.37 These articles cohabitated with fashion segments, portraits of athletes and movie stars, and montages of candid photographs or beach nudes: ‘A pretty swimmer, a javelin thrower . . . are among the most magnificent animals of our age’ stated a 1932 article.38 What all these diverse pieces had in common was their unusual graphic style, in comparison with VU’s standard layout. For example,

Figure 6.2  An example of the Coquemer typesetting style on a fashion spread. VU, no. 252 (1933): 48–9. Format: 54 × 37 cm. © Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Ville de Chalon-sur-Saône.

 Visual Modernism and its Others in VU 117 a 1935 ‘little retrospective of feminism’ consisted of a heavily decorated symmetrical double-spread, and a special issue on the ‘Joys and pleasures of women’ juxtaposing titles such as ‘Devouring print’ and ‘Not depending on men’ with elegant typographic ornaments.39 The case of the sportswoman is remarkable. While this figure was presented as a symbol of emancipation, her femininity was in multiple cases heavy-handedly highlighted by design choices. For example, the aviator Amy Johnson’s London– Australia flight of 1930 is presented under the title ‘The wonderful story of Amy’, set in ornamented script.40 In 1933, the introduction to a special issue discussing women’s accomplishments and the ‘natural’ evolution towards ‘equality of the sexes’ juxtaposed a full-length photograph of a javelin thrower and an eighteenth-century painting of a woman practicing embroidery. Yet the layout appears to emulate that of a luxury fashion album, with eight slender calligraphic drop capitals crowned by a gratuitous flourish.41 Despite its own discourse on sportswomen, VU’s graphic design betrayed a rather conservative, gendered representation of athletes, in line with that of the earlytwentieth-century sports illustrated La Vie au grand air.42 The prevalence of ornamental designs in VU’s representation of the feminine, even throughout its overall evolution towards visual modernism, echo Tschichold’s main concession to the sans-serif rule: parody. The New Typography suggested that ‘a comic cursive’ might be appropriate to parody ‘over-sentimentality’, although he noted that such uses must remain ‘rare exceptions’.43 In VU, however, this kind of parody appeared as an extensive design principle, either by choice or as an unwitting consequence of its producers’ own expectations of media genres and aesthetics. Being assigned to a singular visual identity reduced a wide range of articles to the monolithic theme of femininity, marginalised on the outskirts of VU’s ideal vision of modernity. Accordingly, VU offers an interesting and complex illustration of functionalist modernism’s gendered opposition to ornament, which has long been a subject of discussion for theorists and design historians.44

‘Scripts of the exotic’ VU’s layout similarly distanced itself from modernist graphic design when addressing international news items related to non-western countries and French colonies. In many such cases, the use of illustrative typography signalled the given topic’s otherness and functioned as a discrete, transparent kind of caricature. Foreign scripts were commonly mimicked by decorative titles. For example, the title of a 1931 article about the Kuomintang’s political activities in Paris imitated the brushstrokes of Chinese calligraphy (Figure 6.3). In October 1930, VU published an account of the reporter Alice Schalek’s travel in India. The title, ‘India, lavish and feudal’, appears hand-drawn and adorned in order to imitate the shapes of Devanagari.45 Multiple articles discussing the Zionist movement presented similar titles, with letterings imitating the shapes of the Hebrew alphabet.46 In 1930 a special issue glorified the centennial of the French flag and ‘French achievements’. It opened with three articles celebrating France’s ‘most beautiful accomplishment’, its three North-African colonies: Morocco, Algeria

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Figure 6.3 A decorative title mimicking brushstrokes in a political piece about the Kuomintang in Paris, VU, no. 190 (1932): 2464–5. Format: 54 × 37 cm. © Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Ville de Chalon-sur-Saône.

and Tunisia.47 Each piece was introduced by an illustrative heading, symbolising the discussed colony’s singularity. The chiselled, flourished title for the Moroccan segment seems to refer to the shapes of West Islamic art and architecture, while the Algerian segment’s title distinctly imitates the forms of Arabic calligraphy. Much like in the case of femininity, these frequent orientalist occurrences both tempered and, through contrast, reinforced the magazine’s otherwise modernist design. In Tschichold’s view, Grotesque or sans-serif type was ‘the only one in spiritual accordance with our time,’48 in opposition to the unnecessary shapes of Fraktur (blackletter) as well as those of serifs in Roman type, which were doomed to disappear. Tschichold was taking a radical stance on the long-lasting German Antiqua–Fraktur dispute, in the troubled context of the end of the Weimar era: only sans-serif could eventually fully reach the purity of form demanded by the new technological age, but the humanist Roman type was still in any case preferable to blackletter, understood as nationalist. In The New Typography, holding onto his anti-Fraktur position ultimately led him to advocate for the superiority and universality of Roman type and the Latin script over all others: The emphatically national, exclusivist character of fraktur – but also of the equivalent national scripts of other peoples, for example of the Russians or the Chinese – contradicts present-day transnational bonds between people and forces their inevitable elimination. To keep to these types is retrograde. Roman type is the international typeface of the future.49

 Visual Modernism and its Others in VU 119 Following that statement, a chart goes as far as to clearly equate nationalism with the use of the following list of scripts: ‘Fraktur, Schwabacher, Gothic, Greek, Cyrillic (= Russian and Bulgarian), Turkish (= Arabic), Chinese (= Japanese), Indian, scripts of the Exotic (Zulukaffern, Papuans, etc.)’.50 But the use of ‘old “decorative” faces’, according to Tschichold, was still justifiable for parodies of nationalism.51 In the 1930s, VU associated blackletter with articles about National Socialism and German rearmament, leading to some of the magazine’s most famous covers.52 However, blackletter was also frequently used to depict Germanness in general, as in the case of a 1932 article comparing the German and French scientific and philosophical traditions (Figure 6.4). It was not, then, merely supposed to mock nationalism. In a similar manner to the aforementioned exoticist display titles, the typography of such articles indeed assigned to them a perceived national identity. In these cases, VU’s graphic design constructed an aestheticised, stereotypical otherness, and along with femininity set it up to be seen as peripheral to, if not essentially unconcerned by, modernism. The intricacies of Tschichold’s politics – and his apparent conflating of type, script, language and nation – might not be directly relevant to the study of VU. Yet the New Typography’s faith in the supremacy of the Latin alphabet, and especially its sans-serif rendition, on one hand, as well as VU’s recurrent use of exoticist decorative typefaces on the other, hint at a profound cultural bias in the era’s ideal of modern visual communication. Moreover, as a general-interest illustrated magazine, VU relied on its graphic design to build a wide range of connotations – in the case at hand, problematic

Figure 6.4  An example of the use of gothic and roman letters to oppose ‘German genius’ to ‘French genius’. VU, no. 213 (1932): 5667. Format: 54 × 37 cm. © Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Ville de Chalon-sur-Saône.

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ones – that could not be attained by a uniform modernist design. The cohabitation of visual modernism and alternate, decorative designs within the magazine’s pages reveals the inherent limits to the project of a universal visual language. In addition, VU’s visual modernism itself was not devoid of contextual connotations. For example, in 1931 VU published a special issue about the Soviet Union.53 Its cover displayed a full-page photograph of a young woman carrying a sickle atop her head, crossed by a heavy display title set in bright red, Futura bold. Within its pages, a series of street photographs are connected by heavy black diagonal lines enhancing the images’ perspectives (Figure 6.5). On another spread, a selection of low- and high-angle shots of a water park are carefully laid out in a dizzying montage. None of these striking visual features were usual in VU at the time. In fact, this issue is extraordinary and seems to present itself as a pastiche of Russian constructivist design: in Issues 191 and 193, the closest in time of publication to the Soviet issue, the majority of titles were set in serif types. In both issues, only two double-spreads displayed photographs crossing the fold, and only one, in Issue 191, displayed type crossing the fold. Not a single spread included diagonally inclined images, text or rules. In any case, the kind of thick lines appearing in the Soviet issue were uncommon. The Soviet issue was the first in a series of special issues devoted to world powers. Whatever their theme, VU’s special issues were generally longer than regular ones, contained more photographs and displayed more ambitious designs. However, even compared to the other issues in this series, the Soviet issue stands out. The American issue, published a few months later, features one remarkable montage

Figure 6.5  An unusual use of thick black lines reminiscent of constructivist designs. VU, no. 192 (1931): 2544–5. Format: 54 × 37 cm. © Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Ville de Chalonsur-Saône.

 Visual Modernism and its Others in VU 121 of slanted photographs of skyscrapers, crowned by a Futura-set title.54 But other than that spread, most of its pages were rather similar to VU’s ordinary layout, and none displayed the audacious diagonal lines of the Soviet issue. Neither did the German issue, despite its multiple architectural montages55. The French issue did re-introduce spectacular black rules and rectangular shapes, however these were never slanted and were more reminiscent of Art Deco posters or movie magazines than of Russian constructivism.56 Diagonals as well as heavy type and rules were distinctive features of constructivism, which by 1931 was a well-established, soon to be discarded movement in the USSR. Along with photomontage, constructivist design was the main visual vehicle through which the Soviet Project came to be known in France, whether through posters and exhibition designs, such as the Soviet pavilion of the 1925 Parisian International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, or through the spread of international publications such as L’URSS en construction.57 It is thus not surprising that these typical features were chosen to symbolise the issue’s Sovietness. While, in another context, they might be considered as modernist, once situated within the visual culture and art direction habits of VU, they can be understood as illustrative. In VU, other typical features of visual modernism were sometimes used in strikingly non-modernist ways. An interesting case is that of sans-serif typefaces, especially Futura. In the French vocabulary of print, another name for sans-serif letters is ‘Antique’. Sans-serif typefaces had, indeed, traditionally been said to be inspired from Antique inscriptions such as Roman and Phoenician capitals.58 At the time of VU’s launch, sans-serif fonts started to be used as signs of modernity, but were still peculiar enough to be used as signs of ancientness. In fact, the first appearance of Futura in VU was in the ‘French achievements’ issue of 1930 discussed earlier. More precisely, it was used for the title of the article about Tunisia within the segment on French North-African colonies. Following the illustrative logic of the Moroccan and Algerian pieces, Futura was used to set the title ‘Antique visions in Tunisia: Djerba, island of the lotophagi’.59 Taking on a romantic tone and referring to the mythical people mentioned in the Odyssey, the paper and photographs depict an island which, ‘far from the evolutions of the world, has retained the treasure of its primitive life’. In this case, the major typeface of modernist graphic design was clearly used to symbolise antiqueness, and served the same purposes as typographic mimicry did elsewhere: it relied on orientalist stereotypes to underline a topic’s exoticness.

The ideal of French-filtered modernism Overall, VU’s art direction may be better understood in the light of French typographer Maximilien Vox’s ideas on modernity in graphic design. Vox, a prolific theorist of typography, was the head of Deberny & Peignot’s typographic department. He was closely connected to Peignot and other primary actors in the development of both VU and the graphic design trade in 1930s France, including the famous poster artist Cassandre, who designed the magazine’s logo. In a 1929 article published in the

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literary and art journal Le Cahier, Vox clearly expressed his view on France’s role in the worldwide diffusion of German modernist design: The centre of graphic design will be Paris, placed – even geographically – between those two poles that are New York (if not the United States) and Germany, bridgehead of Europe. The excellent German effort, so whole, so violent sometimes, so imbued with the excellence of technique, demands to be filtered and decanted by the judicious sensibility occurring in Paris, before finding its application in the kingdom of ingenuousness, of enormous simplicity and of integral goodboyishness that is advertising America.60

In Vox’s scarcely veiled nationalist view, the New Typography’s modernism is understood as German in essence. VU’s visual eclecticism and partial appropriation of radical modernist design must be read in this context. For the emerging field of French graphic design and its main actors – Arts et métiers graphiques, Deberny & Peignot, Vox, Cassandre and other members of the UAM – the New Typography was both a positive and negative model. Peignot himself claimed the Bauhaus’s influence, citing it as an inspiration for his foundry and for the UAM.61 Yet Deberny & Peignot chose to rename Renner’s Futura as ‘Europe’ for the French market, carefully disguising its author and geographical origins in a possible attempt to either dodge the company’s clients’ anti-German feelings or avoid an unflattering secondary position in the race towards typographic modernity62 – Tschichold himself had previously mentioned ‘the eclectic French fashion’ as incompatible with the ‘economy in type design’ demanded by the New Typography.63 Following Romy Golan’s exploration of the interplay of modern art and conservative themes and politics in interwar France, recent scholarship on the era has shed new light on the complex relations between modernism and ‘humanist’ photography and typography, which opposed the machine-age aesthetic.64 According to Yusuke Isotani, all the while it showcased modernist works, Arts et métiers graphiques campaigned for photography’s legitimisation as art, taking on an arrière-garde stance on the medium.65 Max Bonhomme has examined the appropriation of photomontage by French interwar graphic design, arguing it did not produce a tabula rasa but rather extended mainstream uses that were common in the press.66 In the field of typography, Manuel Sesma Prieto has explored the ‘Graphie latine’ movement in post-war France.67 Led by Vox, the trend attempted to rehabilitate France’s traditional ‘Latin’ types in reaction to the widespread success of modernist sans-serif, presented as German. These studies confirm that the emerging field of French graphic design was both entwined with, and somehow antagonist to, international modernism. VU occupies a unique position in this situation: it connected almost all of the key players in France’s renewal of visual communication, and its remarkable design embodies many of the conflicts opposing French producers’ ideal of cultural identity to the self-declared internationalist aesthetics of the New Typography. VU stands on a middle-ground between modernism and a more traditional approach to publication design. The fact that visual modernism was systematically used to symbolise topics such as technological innovations, reflecting the magazine’s own promise of technical

 Visual Modernism and its Others in VU 123 prowess, while other topics were assigned to different yet coherent visual styles, indicates that this intermediary position is no coincidence. VU did not fail to generalise its modernist designs by ignorance or lack of resources, it chose when and where to use them and succeeded in appropriating modernism as a symbol, a stereotyped signifier of modernity and especially technological modernity. In that sense, VU’s example also echoes the reception of the New Typography by the German industry, examined by design historian Julia Meer. Looking at the trade journals in the fields of printmaking and advertising, Meer suggests that most of the ‘new’ views of the New Typography were already common among printers and advertisers.68 While commercial artists and advertisers initially considered the strictly ‘rational’ designs called for by the New Typographers as inappropriate for many products and target groups, they did not reject modernist aesthetics and in fact greatly contributed to their dissemination. Similarly, by making visual modernism an option among other graphic styles, VU both popularised graphic modernism in France, and denied its very universality. Its synthesis of a modernist style with more ornamental, conservative designs finally indicate that despite the magazine’s overall progressive tone, VU’s producers had a rather narrow idea of modernity and how it could be translated visually. Its visual construction of topics such as the feminine and the exotic and their separation from modernist forms reveal sexist and nationalist preconceptions. In light of Vox’s discourse, VU’s design could be seen as an attempt to adhere to a long-lasting ideal of essential Frenchness in the arts, associated with eclecticism and ‘refined taste’, which was a cornerstone of the culture of the Third Republic.69 Ironically, many of the magazine’s regular photographers as well as art directors Lidova and Liberman were actually German, eastern European or Russian immigrants. French eclecticism was praised by Vox as the pipeline through which Germany’s supposedly excessive modernism might incorporate American advertising. The statement implied a superiority of American advertising and, mostly, of the French intermediary. In other words, for the community of graphic designers surrounding VU, not wholly embracing modernism but ‘filtering’ it with ornamental forms and emulating commercial art was a conscious intention. Perhaps, then, VU’s unique visual style is precisely what best depicts its idea of modernity, in that it entails an idea of modern media as essentially composite and heterogeneous, standing between art and advertising, internationalism and national culture, ‘new’ and ‘old’ typography, modernism and its others.

Notes 1 See: Andrés Mario Zervigón, ‘Rotogravure and the Modern Aesthetic of News Reporting’, in Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News, ed. Jason E. Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz (London: Routledge, 2015); Thierry Gervais and Gaëlle Morel, The Making of Visual News : A History of Photography in the Press (London: Bloomsbury academic, 2017). 2 VU, ‘Remarques sur un nouveau journal illustré’, no. 1, 21 March 1928, 11–12. All translations in this chapter are my own.

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3 For a summary of Lucien Vogel’s political connections and his involvement in the French left-wing press, see: Sophie Kurkdjian, ‘L’édition de presse selon Lucien Vogel : l’inventivité dans la diversité’, Revue de la BNF 49 (2015): 60–71; Max Bonhomme, ‘Propagande graphique : le photomontage dans la culture visuelle de la gauche française (1925–1939)’ (PhD diss., Université Paris Nanterre, Nanterre, 2020), 127–30. For an analysis of VU’s political stance, see: Danielle Leenaerts, Petite histoire du magazine Vu : (1928–1940) ; entre photographie d’information et photographie d’art (Bruxelles: PIE Lang, 2010), 36–8, 179–222; Tim Satterthwaite, Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 214–18. 4 Sophie Kurkdjian, ‘Enquêter pour mieux condamner: le magazine Vu face aux fascismes allemand et italien (1930–1935). Aperçus’, Aden 12, no. 1 (2013): 44–61. 5 Leenaerts, Petite histoire du magazine Vu , 37–9. 6 Ibid., 33. 7 Sophie Kurkdjian, Lucien Vogel et Michel de Brunhoff, parcours croisés de deux éditeurs de presse illustrée au XXe siècle (Clermont-Ferrand: Institut Universitaire Varenne, 2014): 369; Claude Bellanger et al., Histoire générale de la presse française III : 1871– 1940 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972): 598. 8 Jean-Noël Marchandiau, L’Illustration, 1843–1944: Vie et Mort d’un Journal, Bibliothèque Historique Privat (Toulouse: Editions Privat, 1987), 325. 9 Pierre Albert, Gilles Feyel, and Jean-François Picard, Documents pour l’histoire de la presse nationale aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris: Centre de documentation en sciences humaines, Éditions du C.N.R.S, 1977), 68; Christian Delporte, Claire Blandin, and François Robinet, Histoire de la presse en France : XXe-XXIe siècles (Paris: Armand Colin, 2016), 102. 10 VU, ‘Remarques sur un nouveau journal illustré’, 11–12. 11 Michel Frizot and Cédric de Veigy, Vu: le magazine photographique 1928–1940 (Paris: La Martinière, 2009). 12 Leenaerts, Petite histoire du magazine Vu; Kurkdjian, Lucien Vogel et Michel de Brunhoff. 13 Bonhomme, ‘Propagande Graphique’; Satterthwaite, Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal, 203–84. 14 The study was initiated in the context of a master’s thesis that was defended at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 2018. 15 Leenaerts, Petite histoire du magazine Vu, 15. 16 See especially: Irène Lidova, Ma vie avec la danse (Paris: Plume, 1992), Dodie Kazanjian and Calvin Tomkins, Alex: The Life of Alexander Liberman (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1993). 17 Jan Tschichold, The New Typography: A Handbook for Modern Designers, trans. Ruari Mc Lean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 64. 18 VU, ‘Remarques sur un nouveau journal illustré’, 11–12. 19 Ibid., 11. 20 Jeremy Aynsley, Graphic Design in Germany: 1890–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 147; Christopher Burke, Paul Renner: The Art of Typography (London: Hyphen Press, 1998), 57. 21 According to art director Irène Lidova’s autobiography, Vogel was the one teaching her the techniques of layout when he first hired her. Alexander Liberman also reports creating cover designs following Vogel’s instructions and sketches. See Lidova, Ma vie avec la danse, 22; Kazanjian and Tomkins, Alex, 54. 22 See Françoise Denoyelle, ‘Arts et Métiers Graphiques, histoires d’images d’une revue de caractères’, La Recherche Photographique 3 (1987): 5–17.

 Visual Modernism and its Others in VU 125 23 Jan Tschichold, ‘Qu’est-ce que la Nouvelle Typographie et que veut-elle ?’, Arts et Métiers Graphiques 19 (September 1930): 46–51. 24 Leenaerts, Petite histoire du magazine Vu, 26. 25 Tschichold, The New Typography, 208. 26 See László Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, ed. Hans Maria Wingler, trans. Janet Seligman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). 27 For a discussion of the ‘long diagonal’ as a modernist trope in VU, see: Satterthwaite, Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal, 221–4. For a most striking example of such designs, see the magazine’s special issue on poverty: VU, special issue ‘Vivre’, 30 May 1936. 28 Alexandre Dumas de Rauly and Michel Wlassikoff, Futura : une gloire typographique (Paris: Norma, 2011), 68. 29 Florent Fels, ‘La féerie du progrès’, VU, no. 1, 21 March 1928, 5. 30 VU, no. 235, 14 September 1932. 31 Laura Truxa, ‘Du journal illustré au magazine moderne : l’hebdomadaire VU (1928– 1940), un effort de moyennisation de l’avant-garde ?’, Belphégor. Littérature populaire et culture médiatique 19, no. 2 (2021). 32 Kurkdjian, Lucien Vogel et Michel de Brunhoff, 400. 33 Ibid., 105–6. 34 Francine, ‘Les nouveaux chapeaux d’hiver’, VU, no. 237, 28 September 1932, 1554–5; Francine, ‘Sur le front . . . ou sur la nuque’, VU, no. 363, 27 February 1935, 246–7; Francine, ‘Cils’, VU, no. 204, 10 February 1932, 180–1. 35 René Ponot, ‘Les années trente et l’innovation typographique française’, Communication & Langages 78, no. 1 (1988): 15–28, 17. 36 Ibid.,25. 37 See Robert Salomon’s series ‘Femmes victimes’, VU, no. 443, 9 September 1936 – no. 445, 23 September 1936. 38 Hervé Lauwick, ‘Femme varie . . .’, VU, no. 230, 10 August 1932, 1282–3. 39 VU, special issue ‘Joies et plaisirs des femmes’, 26 Octobre 1935. 40 Hervé Lauwick, ‘La merveilleuse histoire d’Amy’, VU, no. 117, 11 June 1930, 578. 41 VU, special issue ‘Femmes’, 9 December 1933, 18–19. 42 Luc Robène, ‘Exploits techniques, exploits sportifs ? Le traitement médiatique de l’aviation dans la revue La Vie au grand air (1900–1914)’, in L’imaginaire de l’aviation Pionnière : Contribution à l’histoire des Représentations de La Conquête Aérienne, 1903–1927, ed. Françoise Lucbert and Stéphane Tison (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2018), 119–45. 43 Tschichold, The New Typography, 176. 44 See Judy Attfield, ‘FORM/female FOLLOWS FUNCTION/male: Feminist Critiques of Design’, in The Design History Reader, ed. Rebecca Houze and Grace Lees-Maffei (London: Berg Publishers, 2010); Judy Attfield and Pat Kirkham, A View from the Interior: Feminism, Women and Design (London: Women’s Press, 1989); Penny Sparke, As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (London: Pandora, 1995). 45 Alice Schalek, ‘L’Inde, fastueuse et féodale’, VU, no. 113, 14 May 1930, 436–7. 46 See Jean de Kerlecq’s series, ‘Israël en Palestine’, VU, no. 234, 7 September 1932, no. 236, 21 September 1932, no. 237, 28 September 1932. 47 VU, ‘La plus belle réussite française: la colonisation de l’Afrique du Nord’, no. 121, 9 July 1930, 661–7. 48 Tschichold, The New Typography, 73. 49 Ibid., 75.

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50 Ibid.. ‘Zulukaffern’ is a derogatory term referring to the Zulu people. 51 Ibid., 74. 52 See the series of special issue on the German rearmament: VU, no. 318, 18 April 1934 – no. 320, 2 May 1934. 53 VU, no. 192, 18 November 1931. 54 VU, ‘Gratte-ciel’, no. 196, 16 December 1931, 2792–3. 55 VU, no. 213, 13 April 1932. 56 VU, no. 220, 1 June 1932. 57 On the influence of Soviet publications on French photomontage, see Bonhomme, ‘Propagande Graphique’, 247–50. 58 René Ponot, ‘Classification typographique’, Communication & Langages 81, no. 1 (1989): 40–54, 43. 59 D’Arcos, ‘Visions antiques en Tunisie: Djerba, l’île des lotophages’, VU, no. 121, 9 July 1930, 666–7. 60 Maximilien Vox, ‘Mot nouveau, mode nouvelle : le graphisme’, Le Cahier 5 (1929): 30–3, 31. 61 Charles Peignot, ‘Les Peignot : Georges, Charles’, Communication & Langages 59, no. 1 (1984): 61–85, 75–6. 62 Dumas de Rauly and Wlassikoff, Futura, 68. 63 Tschichold, The New Typography, 79–80. 64 Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 65 Yusuke Isotani, ‘Arts et Metiers PHOTO-Graphiques: The Quest for Identity in French Photography between the Two World Wars’ (PhD diss., CUNY, New York, 2019). 66 Bonhomme, ‘Propagande Graphique’. 67 Manuel Sesma Prieto, ‘The Graphie Latine Movement and the French Typography’, in Une émergence du design. France, 20e siècle, ed. Stéphane Laurent (Paris: Hicsa, 2019). 68 Julia Meer, Neuer Blick auf die Neue Typographie: Die Rezeption der Avantgarde in der Fachwelt der 1920er Jahre (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015). 69 See Marie-Claude Genet-Delacroix, ‘National Art and French Art: History, Art, and Politics during the Early Third Republic’, Studies in the History of Art 68 (2005): 36–53; June Hargrove and Neil McWilliam, eds, Nationalism and French Visual Culture 1870–1914 (Washington: Yale University Press, 2005).

7

‘The Greater Britain of Fascism’ Politics, Propaganda and Photography in Action (1936–40) Emma West

On 21 February 1936, a new twopenny weekly newspaper appeared on Britain’s newsstands. Entitled Action, the paper was produced by members of the British Union of Fascists (BUF). Unlike the official party newspaper, The Blackshirt, which was addressed to BUF members, Action hailed ‘the mass electorate’.1 Its aim was to ‘interest the millions of the electorate who are not politically minded in the cause of Fascism’.2 With a peak circulation of 26,000 – only slightly more than The Blackshirt’s peak of 25,000 – Action never achieved its aims, but it does offer an insight into the BUF’s attempts to reach a mass audience.3 Under the masthead ‘For King and People’ (a dig at the Daily Mail’s ‘For King and Empire’) and the slogan ‘Britain First’, Action aimed to promote its fascist and nationalist agenda among possible BUF sympathisers. With its anti-establishment take on current affairs, accessible introductions to international politics, and lighter features like its women’s, sport and book review pages, the newspaper cultivated a populist appeal, positioning itself and the BUF on the side of ‘the people’. The aim of Action, as with all BUF publications, was to help win power, whereupon the country would be raised to its ‘highest destiny – the Greater Britain of Fascism’.4 It is worth stating from the outset that I do not condone fascist ideology; quite the opposite, in fact. I denounce its anti-Semitic, xenophobic, violent form of nationalism. But I do think that the fascist press is worth studying, not only as a source of information on the British fascist movement, but also to show how the BUF mobilised the form of the illustrated periodical to spread their propaganda message. In this essay, I argue that Action’s use of photography on its front pages constituted an important part of its promotional strategy. Ranging from full-page photographs to photocombinations to photomontage, its eye-catching front pages used images, captions and sensationalist headlines to quickly communicate the party’s fascist ideology. Crucially, such photographic front pages appeared strikingly modern: the BUF was regularly described by its founder as ‘the Modern Movement’, one which embodied the ‘spirit of the modern age’.5 The BUF might have been outwardly opposed to modernism,

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but it was happy to draw on a watered-down version of modernist aesthetics and avant-garde experimentation to create an image of the BUF as a ‘new revolutionary creed of dynamic achievement’.6 In Action, Oswald Mosley and his editors combined modern photography, typography and graphic design with the British tabloid model pioneered by publications such as the Daily Express and the Daily Mail.7 The result was an illustrated periodical which used combinations of words and images to perpetuate misinformation. As such, it can be seen as an analogue forerunner of the contemporary far-right’s use of digital propaganda, in particular its use of memes.8 I will begin by introducing British fascist print culture, focusing on the BUF’s official organ The Blackshirt, before turning my attention to Action, launched in 1936. Both titles are routinely mentioned in accounts of British fascism, although they are often used as sources rather than as ‘objects of knowledge’ in their own right.9 One notable exception is the work of the historian Julie Gottlieb, who has undertaken detailed examinations of fascist print culture, focusing on the role of women in the movement, as well as broader explorations of fascist aesthetics and propaganda.10 This chapter builds on Gottlieb’s work, but makes two key innovations. First, it explores in detail Action’s development and launch, as outlined in articles and editorials in The Blackshirt. Such texts offer a rare insight into a new periodical’s aims, editorial policy and intended readership. Second, it shifts attention to Action’s use of photography. As Gottlieb argues, the BUF was a ‘quintessentially visual’ movement: it is therefore surprising that Action’s photographic front pages have not received any critical attention, especially since they have been digitised and made available via the British Online Archives.11 In an essay on the Illustrated London News in the 1890s, a ‘historical moment in which the complexity of the world was threatening’, Patrick Collier argues that the ‘weekly illustrated newspaper attempted to represent, package, and thereby manage a multiplex reality for its readers’.12 We can say the same of Action in the mid-to-late 1930s: through its photographic front pages, the newspaper attempted to explain – and offer solutions to – the complex domestic and international crises troubling its readers. In doing so, it hoped to convert them to fascism.

British fascist print culture The BUF was founded by the British politician Sir Oswald Mosley in October 1932. A former Labour MP, Mosley and a group of Labour dissidents had briefly formed the New Party in early 1931 after their radical proposals to tackle the deepening economic crisis failed to win support.13 In October that year the New Party launched Action, ‘The New Weekly of the New Movement’, edited by Harold Nicolson and featuring contributions by Vita Sackville-West, Christopher Isherwood and Osbert Sitwell. The New Party’s Action, in Gottlieb’s words, sought to ‘harness the modernist sensibility for political purposes’.14 Circulation started strongly, with a peak of 160,000, but fell to 60,000 after just four issues. With losses spiralling, its pages were cut from 32 to 24 to 16; by its final issue, it reached less than 20,000 readers.15 It folded in December 1931, after just thirteen issues. As Nicolson put it, the paper was ‘too high-brow for the general public, and too popular for the high-brow . . . too technical for the superficial

 ‘The Greater Britain of Fascism’ 129 reader, and too superficial for the serious student . . . too literary for the person who wanted politics, and too political for the person who was interested in books.’16 Action, like the New Party itself, was a failure. The ‘early appeal’ of the party for Bloomsbury intellectuals, writes Matthew Worley, ‘soon paled once a more visceral and assertive politics began to reveal itself.’17 Today, the New Party is best remembered as ‘the political “chrysalis”’ from which the BUF emerged in October 1932.18 Between its founding and 1940, the BUF published several periodicals. These included Fascist Week (1933–4), which was later incorporated into The Blackshirt (1933– 9), Fascist Quarterly (1935–6), which was later incorporated into the British Union Quarterly, the short-lived East Action Pioneer (1936–7), and finally a new version of Action (1936–40).19 Each periodical attempted, with varying levels of success, to appeal to a specific audience. Fascist Week and later The Blackshirt were weekly newspapers aimed primarily at BUF members. Fascist Quarterly, later the British Union Quarterly, was a more intellectual journal, intended as an alternative to the Left Book Club. It hosted lengthy articles about the theory and practice of fascism, and included essays by high-profile contributors such as Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and the popular journalist Beverley Nicholls, alongside BUF members and prominent fascists. The East London Pioneer was a short-lived monthly newspaper aimed specifically at residents in Bethnal Green, Hackney, Shoreditch and Stepney in East London. During 1936, the BUF centred campaigning and protest activities in East London; in 1937, they contested the London County Council elections in three London boroughs. Finally, Action, launched in 1936 and running until 1940, was a popular weekly newspaper, which aimed to serve the ‘general, non-politically-minded, public as well as the Fascist public.’20 Until Action was launched, The Blackshirt was the BUF’s primary mouthpiece. From its first issue, Mosley claimed that the paper would ‘work for the Fascist revolution.’21 It was, its subsequent editor W.J. Leaper wrote, the ‘chief propaganda medium of the Movement.’22 All of its contents acted as propaganda, whether reports on current affairs from a fascist perspective, explorations of fascist policy, fawning articles about Mosley, or ‘the Leader’, exaggerated accounts of fascist activities, or attack pieces on Jews, communists or the political establishment (the ‘Old Gang’ in fascist terminology).23 From 1933–7 it appeared weekly; in January 1938 it moved to being a monthly newspaper. Its price varied between one and two pence, depending on the number of pages.24 Its editorial arrangements were also often in a state of flux; Janet Elizabeth Dack notes that internal BUF struggles led to many changes of editor.25 The paper had at least seven editors over six years, some of whom took the helm more than once.26 For all the tumultuous circumstances of its production, The Blackshirt was fairly traditional in appearance: its front page featured several different stories organised in columns, around a central, single photograph illustrating the lead story. It featured some advertising, typically for fascist meetings, publications or events, although there were some exceptions, such as adverts for insurance, razors and Watney’s beer. It was briefly available in newsagents, before being banned by WH Smith in August 1934.27 Following the ban, it was mainly sold via subscription and direct sales in branches, at meetings, or on the street. Both the ban, and the newspaper’s often extreme contents, meant that its primary readership was BUF members and ‘the converted’.28

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For the BUF leadership, however, a paper which only spoke to the already converted was not enough. In late 1935, the BUF announced the launch of a new weekly newspaper with mass appeal. For three months, The Blackshirt was full of articles, editorials and letters discussing the new paper’s proposed contents, intended readership, circulation figures and sales techniques.29 At the heart of the campaign was a November 1935 competition for party members to choose the paper’s name; the following month Leaper announced the winning title as Action. For Leaper, the name best represented the ‘determination of our Movement to act rapidly in the solution of the economic and political problems of our country’.30 Crucially, in recalling the failed Action, the new paper would embody the ‘Fascist spirit’. ‘The Fascist cannot be beaten or kept under,’ wrote Leaper. ‘We glory in turning the reverse into triumph, and so deliberately we choose the name “Action.”’31 The difference between 1931 and 1936, Leaper claimed, was that the first Action did not have the Fascist movement behind it; the new paper would succeed because of the tireless ‘zeal’ and ‘sacrifice’ of its members.32 This direct appeal to members was typical of BUF rhetoric. During this period, The Blackshirt repeatedly stated that Action’s success lay in its readers’ hands. ‘Members and supporters of the Movement are taking a keen interest in the production, rightly feeling that it is their own paper’, claimed an unsigned January 1936 article. ‘It is a great venture upon which we are embarking, but together we can and will succeed.’33 This piece, and others like it, represented a call to arms, one which placed BUF members at the centre of a noble struggle. This strategy was an extension of wider BUF philosophy, in which members were expected to devote time each week to party activities, especially selling newspapers. Martin Pugh describes how members were given a ‘free uniform provided they undertook to devote a minimum of two nights a week to the BUF and to sell a quota of Action and the Blackshirt.’34 In 1936, the ‘Action Press Uniform’ was introduced as a reward for those who sold enough copies of the newspaper.35 For Phillip M. Coupland, the Action Press Uniform ‘amplified the identification of the BUF as a “foreign” and “military” force . . . for many observers, it shouted “Nazi.”’36 It is significant that this ‘amplification’ was specifically associated with those who sold Action. Gottlieb notes that, in ‘the eyes of the Blackshirts themselves, selling the newspapers on the streets was an act of courage’.37 Newspapers were sold at meetings and rallies, but also on High Streets and outside factory gates and cinemas on a Saturday night.38 These encounters could be fraught: anti-fascist groups viewed the selling of such newspapers as ‘an act of incitement’.39 Fascists viewed the act in similar terms: in March 1936 The Blackshirt and Action’s new editor John Beckett described The Blackshirt as a ‘weapon’ for use in the ‘BATTLE OF THE STREETS’.40 Across the country, Blackshirts were cautioned or arrested while selling BUF newspapers. In September 1936, a Blackshirt selling Action in London ‘attracted a hostile crowd when he shouted “Down with the Jews”’; he was arrested, charged and cautioned.41 In June 1939, a woman ‘was bound over for twelve months by Stratford Justices for shouting anti-Semitic slogans whilst selling Action in front of a Jewish grocer’s shop’.42 By appealing to members for help with publicity, and by sharing so much information about the new paper’s editorial policy, The Blackshirt made its readers feel like valued insiders. Michael A. Spurr describes how The Blackshirt created a sense of community among the dispersed BUF membership, fostering ‘a sense of internal unity

 ‘The Greater Britain of Fascism’ 131 and common experience’.43 Indeed, one article described BUF members as the ‘inner ring’, who will continue to read The Blackshirt, as opposed to the ‘huge outer ring at which “Action” will be aimed.’44 This distinction between the readers of The Blackshirt and Action is crucial. Action was explicitly aimed at those for whom The Blackshirt was too extreme: As we have previously explained, with ‘Action’ we are aiming to interest the mass electorate. ‘The Blackshirt’ will always be there to appeal to the more politically minded section of our population and to all those who want to know what Fascists are thinking and doing. But to attain power ‘legally and constitutionally’ – to use the words the Leader has impressed upon us all so often – we have to produce a paper of an entirely new appeal . . . We do not expect to please everybody, but we expect to please quite a lot of people who have hitherto felt that ‘The Blackshirt’ was too ‘strong meat’ for them.45

In contrast to The Blackshirt, which was ‘stuffed with political propaganda all the way through’, Action was ‘conceived differently. While all our articles will be written from the Fascist point of view, they will not be blatant propaganda.’46 The Blackshirt’s editor observed that the ‘millions whom we want simply will not read a political paper; so we must give them a paper which has its full quota of “popular” reading.’47 This ‘popular reading’ consisted of the types of columns and features one might expect in a tabloid newspaper or mass-market magazine. They included book, film and stage reviews, a woman’s page, called ‘A Woman’s Outlook’, edited by BUF member Anne Brock-Griggs, a sports page and short stories, alongside columns, comment pieces and current affairs. Unlike in The Blackshirt, there was no mention of fascism in the paper’s masthead. The weekly trail for Mosley’s column at the bottom of the front page revealed the paper’s political affiliation (Figure 7.1), but it was not made explicit that Action was published by the BUF. At first, photographs of Mosley or Blackshirts were rarely featured on the front cover; this changed from summer 1936 and particularly into the autumn, when the BUF announced candidates for the forthcoming election.48 In its early issues, however, Action appeared designed to indoctrinate its readers by stealth.

Photography and/as propaganda in Action These editorial aims and intended readership are central to our understanding of Action’s use of photography, typography and graphic design. The Blackshirt looked like a serious newspaper, describing itself in its masthead as having the ‘largest circulation among political weeklies’. Action, on the other hand, sought to appeal to the ‘general, non-politically-minded, public’.49 Its front pages were almost always political, covering domestic issues such as poverty and unemployment, and international affairs, especially relations with Italy and Germany, but Action used photography to present its stories in a more dynamic manner than a more traditional political weekly. The front page of its second issue (28 February 1936) used photography to present an unconventional take on an issue gripping the nation: the second Italo–Ethiopian war. Under the

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Figure 7.1 Front page, Action, no. 2, 28 February 1936. Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham. © Friends of Oswald Mosley (FOM), reproduced by permission.

heading ‘WHAT £7,000,000 WOULD BUY’ were arranged a series of black-and-white photographs demonstrating what an estimated £7 million ‘wasted’ on Italian sanctions could buy (Figure 7.1), from ‘Milk for children suffering from malnutrition’ to ‘A year’s work for 28,000 men now unemployed’.50 Together, the images present something of a British fascist checklist: they indicate the BUF’s support for agriculture, shipbuilding, infrastructure projects, the military, healthcare and the unemployed. By presenting the issues as a series of photographs, as opposed to a formal manifesto, however, the page somehow loses its (party) political edge. The photographs – especially those of smiling children holding up milk bottles and a long, desolate line of the unemployed – make an emotional appeal. The complex political context of sanctions and war is irrelevant: readers did not need to understand the international situation to grasp the key message that millions were being wasted ‘at a time when Britain needs every financial resource for vital internal development’.51 In this second issue, we begin to see the key themes which emerge in Action’s front pages. First, photographs are used to create the impression of veracity: at the top of the page, a small photograph shows an Evening Standard sandwich board with the front page ‘ABYSSINIA WAR COSTS US £7,000,000’. By including the photograph, Action cites its sources, demonstrating that its reporting is accurate. Second, its front pages, and the issues as a whole, present themselves as exploring the issues behind the headlines. Daily newspapers like the Standard reported on the news; Action would reveal the truth behind the news. Indeed, during this period the final page of each issue was dedicated to a column called ‘BEHIND THE NEWS’. Finally, the front page’s

 ‘The Greater Britain of Fascism’ 133 form and content constructs an image of the BUF as the ‘Modern Movement’. Here, the photographs are overlaid in an unconventional manner which marks out the newspaper as different from traditional political weeklies. The photograph of children has a square cut out of it at the bottom: this appears to be a stylistic choice to emphasise the paper’s commitment to geometric angularity. The typefaces are modern, from the bold, blocky, sans-serif custom logo, to the use of Beton for the headlines and captions. Appearing from 1929, this slab-serif typeface connoted modernity. These design choices are echoed in the bottom-right photograph of a modernist school building, used as an example of the types of building that £7 million could buy to ‘take the place of derelict institutions and slums’, as well as the arresting top-right photograph of planes taken from a cockpit.52 Such images would have ensured that Action was visually striking, even when viewed from a distance. Like Tthe Blackshirt, Action was sold by street sellers, but it was also sold in newsagents, at least before it was banned in late 1936 and again in 1937.53 With its bold use of modern photography and typefaces, the newspaper would have caught the eye both on the news-stands and on the street. Even more crucially, Action’s format of a simple message encapsulated by a single headline, and expressed via photography, quickly communicated the BUF’s propaganda message. Using this format, they could disseminate their propaganda even among those who didn’t read the newspaper itself. The propaganda strategies established in the second issue continued across Action’s early issues. The ninth issue’s front page (16 April 1936), for instance, used photography to create a simple binary distinction between the political elite and the populace (Figure 7.2). Using a sequence of photographs from multiple settings, it contrasts the experience of politicians on holiday with that of their constituents. In the top image, we see tourists enjoying the waves at Biarritz; this scene is contrasted with an inset image of children playing in a grubby urban street. The caption reads: ‘For some the sun-flooded beach at Biarritz . . . for others only the noisome slum.’54 The caption is hardly needed: the title ‘Masses and Ministers’ and the juxtaposition of the images tells the story clearly enough. Remarkably, an almost identical symbolic pairing appeared in the 2 September 1931 issue of the French weekly news magazine VU, which contrasted a picture of the ‘great ones’ enjoying the beach at an elite French resort with one of Parisian children (the ‘little ones’) sunbathing in a city park.55 In Action, this social critique takes on a more explicitly political dimension: the front page includes decontextualised images of politicians on holiday, including David Lloyd George asleep. It is propaganda, but the use of photographs lends an impression of veracity to the BUF’s claims. Underneath, a skyline for a profile of Oswald Mosley, entitled ‘A STUDY IN CONSISTENCY’, sets up the issue’s key point: the ‘Old Gang’ act in their own interests, but Mosley is a politician apart. Inside, the profile by Alexander Raven Thomson, BUF Director of Policy and later editor of Action (1939–40), contrasts Mosley with the political establishment. Unlike the photographs of Lloyd George et al. at rest on the cover, the three photographs of Mosley depict him as vigorous and principled: one in army uniform, one in Blackshirt uniform, and one speaking at Durham Miner’s Gala, arm outstretched to drive home a point. Raven Thomson’s prose reiterates the impression created by the photographs. Readers will have enjoyed Mosley’s ‘powerful’ articles for Action, argues Thomson: they ‘will have appreciated the

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Figure 7.2  Front page, Action, no. 9, 16 April 1936. Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham. © FOM.

simple, direct, but forceful style in which they have been written, so different from the pompous, platitudinous phrases of the elder politicians’.56 Mosley’s columns for Action – and, indeed, the paper as a whole – were not afraid to speak ‘the truth’. Throughout this period, Action presented itself as the lone voice of truth. ‘“Action” tells the truth in a moderate and informed manner,’ an editorial in the third issue proclaimed. ‘The facts we give and the arguments we use are not answered by our opponents. They are merely suppressed.’57 This rhetorical strategy was shared with other right-leaning newspapers, such as Lady Lucy Houston’s Saturday Review, published with the slogan ‘The Only Paper that Dares to Tell You The Truth’.58 Action did not carry a manifesto, but an editorial in its first issue gave readers a sense of what to expect from the new periodical: It will not be required of us that we should attempt to find a mellow style or strike a reassuring note. This is no time either for belles lettres or for the Utopian politics of the flaneur. Those who dislike bitter reading will find only too many journals anxious to dose them with sweet-tasting palliatives. The only remedy in which we have faith is the surgery which will cut from Britain the cancer of her decay.59

The piece has no byline, but its disdain for the political establishment and the intellectual elite was characteristic of the BUF’s position since the failure of the New

 ‘The Greater Britain of Fascism’ 135 Party. Gottlieb describes the movement’s rhetorical distaste for British modernism and the ‘diseased morality of the “Bloomsbury bacilli”’;60 for E.F. Randall, writing in The Blackshirt, modern art and literature were the ‘product of neurotic post-war minds, sickened by long incarceration in dim cities’.61 This imagery of disease and sickness – as opposed to ‘healthy’ or ‘vital’ art and culture – can be found in all fascisms: as Roger Griffin argues, the Nazi impulse to ‘cleanse’ art of its ‘degenerate elements’ was accompanied by efforts to foster ‘aesthetic forms deemed to be life-asserting’. This ‘terrifying logic’ of ‘destroy to build’ extended beyond art and culture: it underpinned both Nazi ‘sterilization, eugenics and euthanasia campaigns’ and the ‘cult of athleticism and physical health.’62 We can see this fascist logic of ‘destroy to build’ in Action’s first editorial. The ‘palliatives’ offered by the utopian flaneur or the decadent belles lettrist must be abandoned in favour of direct intervention: the radical ‘surgery’ of fascist revolution. The editorial thus serves a dual purpose: to articulate fascist ideology and BUF policy, but also to distinguish the relaunched Action from its Bloomsburyite predecessor. Photomontage, in particular, was used to make opinions seem like facts. The term photomontage is complex and contested; I use it here in its broadest sense, as defined by Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón, as a ‘medium of material and photographic recombination that trades on the frisson of incongruity – an aesthetics of disagreement that can range from subtle cognitive unease to outright violent conflict.’63 As Kriebel and Zervigón note, the same is also true of photocollage, but I prefer the term photomontage here because of its political associations. David Evans shows how photomontage emerged in the 1920s in Central and Eastern Europe, usually associated with the Soviet Union and Communist groups; in the 1930s, however, the ‘monopoly came to an end, with Right and Left using photomontage to both define and appeal to the people.’64 In her in-depth study of the use of photomontage in Germany in 1932, Kriebel reaches a similar conclusion, arguing that photomontage was regarded as the primary ‘pictorial means of mass agitation’ by both the right, in the Nazi illustrated weekly Illustrierter Beobachter (IB), and the left, in the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ).65 Action’s use of photomontage (Figures 7.3–7.5) was never as sophisticated as the AIZ or even the more ‘amateurish’ IB, but it utilised the technique to achieve similar aims.66 I am not suggesting here that Action’s front pages were directly inspired by the IB’s 1932 photomontages: I have found no evidence to support this claim. Rather, I seek to use Kriebel’s analysis of the IB to show how both titles used the form of the illustrated periodical, and in particular photomontage, to communicate their fascist propaganda. Kriebel describes how Nazi photomontage ‘sought to pass itself off as an illusion of “the real”, utilising the principle of juxtaposition to “fix” a photograph, making it represent what one wants it to rather than what it actually does.’67 Action made similar use of a rudimentary form of photomontage in its 1936 front page (Figure 7.3), in which photographs of Oliver Stanley and Ernest Brown, former and present Ministers of Labour, were pasted on top of photographs of slums and the unemployed. Under the headline ‘NEEDLESS MISERY FOR AN IMPERIAL RACE’, the montage creates an immediate causal link between poverty and the government ministers. Placed directly over a photograph of the unemployed, Stanley and Brown look like they are trampling on the men’s heads. Their casual stride and the jaunty angle of the walking stick suggests

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Figure 7.3  Front page, Action, no. 22, 16 July 1936. Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham. © FOM.

an ease at odds with the suffering depicted on the rest of the cover. The photomontage might not have been sophisticated, but it quickly communicates a simple – and emotive – message. As Kriebel argues, the very amateurishness of some Nazi photomontages helped to establish the form as a ‘popular’ or ‘mass art’: ‘Combining medium with message, these pictures declare that photomontage, like Hitler, is a form of popular expression. The form of photomontage seeks to persuade and manipulate as much as its content.’68 Photomontage was, in short, the perfect medium for the BUF’s populist message. It does not matter that the photographs in Figure 7.3 had been obviously manipulated to create the message: this artifice is in fact highlighted by the white line running around the central figures. The photomontage is instead used to depict a deeper ‘truth’, one which could not be captured in a single image. Photomontage was used sparingly in Action, with only a handful of photomontaged covers across its lifespan, presumably used to create a particular splash on the newsstands. One of its most striking covers was ‘THE RETURN OF MANHOOD’ (9 July 1936) (Figure 7.4), which juxtaposes images of death and conflict from the First World War with photographs of contemporary youths exercising and marching in an unnamed European country. Superimposed on top is an arresting photograph of a discusthrower, arms outstretched diagonally across the page. Released just weeks before the start of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, the photomontage and its caption might not have mentioned Germany, but it acted as a piece of Nazi – and therefore BUF – propaganda. Although initially inspired by Mussolini and Italian fascism, by 1936 the BUF were turning towards Germany and National Socialism.69 Both the montage’s title

 ‘The Greater Britain of Fascism’ 137

Figure 7.4  Front page, Action, no. 21, 9 July 1936. Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham. © FOM.

and its caption referred to an earlier Action front cover, that of 12 March 1936 (Issue 4), entitled ‘PEACE WITH GERMANY’. Published at the height of the diplomatic crisis over German remilitarisation, the cover sought to reassure readers that ‘GERMANY WILL NEVER BREAK THE PEACE OF EUROPE’.70 Underneath, a photograph of Nazi soldiers is captioned as the ‘glorious manhood of the new Germany’.71 We see this same promise of peace and the visual and textual celebration of white, Aryan ‘manhood’ in the 9 July 1936 cover. ‘To-day youth turns its back upon the tragedies and blunders of the past,’ reads the caption; above, geometric rows of young people dressed in white are positioned with their backs to a photograph of black-clad, gas-masked men.72 The photomontage thus combines several messages into one single argument: Germany, and its fascist youth, lead the way towards a ‘Future of Peace and Sanity’.73 The medium is a crucial part of this photomontage’s message: the modern, dynamic form of photomontage was the perfect vehicle to promote the health, strength and vigour of ‘the new Germany’. Throughout the remainder of 1936 and into 1937, photomontages were used to project an image of fascist strength. In one front cover (7 November 1936) (Figure 7.5), an enormous illustration of a silhouetted Blackshirt is pasted on top of views of the Houses of Parliament to herald the coming fascist dominance. At the top right, a boxed headline trails a seven-page article entitled ‘TRUTH ABOUT THE JEWS’. Any pretence that this is not a BUF newspaper is gone. Inside, the editor John Beckett announces that BUF candidates would be standing in 100 constituencies at the next election.74 Elsewhere, montages are built around photographs of large crowds and Blackshirt

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Figure 7.5  Front pages, Action, no. 38, 7 November 1936; Action, no. 40, 21 November 1936. Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham. © FOM.

rallies (17 October 1936); in two separate instances, the same photograph of Mosley speaking at a rally, arm outstretched, is pasted on top of a collection of photographs of marching Blackshirts (21 November 1936; 9 January 1937) (Figure 7.5). Following the ‘disastrous results’ for BUF candidates in the March 1937 London County Council elections, Beckett was expelled from the party, alongside other highranking officials.75 He was replaced by the journalist and aviation enthusiast Geoffrey Dorman, who edited the paper for most of April 1937 to April 1939. Under Dorman’s editorship, the photographic front covers were gradually phased out. Photomontages continued to appear, although sporadically, throughout 1937; they were largely eschewed in favour of two or three large photographs, or themed collections of photographs in the style of Figure 7.1.76 In December 1937, the cover was redesigned to emphasise text over images. Photographs were finally phased out and columns introduced in February 1938 until the paper folded in 1940, when Mosley, Raven Thomson and leading BUF personnel were interned under Defence Regulation 18B.77 Action’s photographic front covers may have been short-lived, but they offer an important insight into how periodicals were used by the BUF to disseminate their ideology among the ‘mass electorate’. Modern photography and typography were used to connote modernity, to communicate complex ideas quickly and simply, and to create an impression of truth and authenticity. Photomontage, in particular, created causal links between unrelated images which played into the popular distrust of politicians and prevailing forms of xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Crucially for a publication sold both in newsagents (at least at first) and by street sellers, the photographic front pages were visually striking. The bold covers – and indeed the papers as a whole –

 ‘The Greater Britain of Fascism’ 139 played an important role as ‘prop and vehicle’ in what Gottlieb calls the ‘recognisably fascist performance of street politics’.78 While their attempt at mass indoctrination failed, many of the BUF’s propaganda techniques are horribly prescient. Action is perhaps most unnerving in its early issues, when the strategy appears to have been one of slow and covert indoctrination, rather than the expression of explicitly anti-Semitic or fascist ideology. They sought to appeal to the ‘non-politically-minded public’ by exploiting their fears and providing misinformation.79 The BUF’s strategies and politics are reprehensible, but they need further examination if we are to understand the role that illustrated periodicals have played – and can indeed still play – in far-right propaganda. This research was funded by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. Thank you to the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham and the Friends of Oswald Mosley for granting me permission to reproduce images of Action. A version of this chapter was presented at the Future States conference in 2020: I am grateful to the organisers Tim Satterthwaite and Andrew Thacker, as well as conference participants, for their helpful feedback.

Notes 1 ‘“Action” In Two Weeks’, Blackshirt, 146, 7 February 1936, 5. 2 ‘“Action” on February 21. New Paper to be on Sale Throughout The Country. Popular Appeal to Reading Public’, Blackshirt 144 (24 January 1936): 2. 3 For circulation figures for Action and The Blackshirt, see Francis Beckett, Fascist in the Family: The Tragedy of John Beckett, M.P. (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2017), 208 and Janet Elizabeth Dack, ‘In From the Cold? British Fascism and the Mainstream Press 1925–39’ (PhD diss., Teesside University, 2010), 16–17. 4 This quotation, taken from the ‘Code of British Union of Fascists’, was printed in a box labelled ‘Our England’, in Action, 2, 28 February 1936, 2. 5 Sir Oswald Mosley, ‘On to Fascist Revolution’, Blackshirt 1 (February 1933): 1, 4. On Mosley and the depiction of the BUF as the ‘Modern Movement’, see Julie V. Gottlieb and Thomas Linehan, ‘Introduction: Culture and the British Far Right’, in The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the Far Right in Britain, ed. Julie V. Gottlieb and Thomas Linehan (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 3; Julie V. Gottlieb, ‘Britain’s New Fascist Men: The Aestheticization of Brutality in British Fascist Propaganda’, in The Culture of Fascism, 90; and Julie Gottlieb, ‘The Marketing of Megalomania: Celebrity, Consumption and the Development of Political Technology in the British Union of Fascists’, Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 1 (January 2006): 53–5. 6 Sir Oswald Mosley, ‘A World Re-Born Under Fascism’, Daily Mail, 1 May 1933, 12, OMN/B/3/2, Oswald Mosley Papers: Nicholas Mosley Deposit, Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, UK. 7 The editors of Action were, in chronological order, John Beckett (early 1936–March 1937), Geoffrey Dorman (March/April 1937–February 1938), A. K. Chesterton (February–March 1938?), Geoffrey Dorman (April 1938–April 1939), Alexander Raven Thomson (April 1939–June 1940).

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8 See, for instance, Blyth Crawford, Florence Keen, and Guillermo Suarez-Tangil, ‘Memes, Radicalisation, and the Promotion of Violence on Chan Sites’, Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 15, no. 1 (2021): 982–91. 9 The term ‘object of knowledge’ is Franco Moretti’s: for its use in modern periodical studies, see Patrick Collier, ‘What is Modern Periodical Studies?’, Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 6, no. 2 (2015): 100–1. 10 In addition to the sources already cited, see Julie Gottlieb, ‘Women’s Print Media, Fascism, and the Far Right in Britain Between the Wars’, in Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918–1939: The Interwar Period, ed. Catherine Clay and Maria DiCenzo (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 450–62. 11 Gottlieb, ‘The Marketing of Megalomania’, 41. British Online Archives, a subscriptionbased service, gives access to nearly complete runs of all the BUF periodicals, with the exception of Fascist Quarterly and the British Union Quarterly. Both the University of Birmingham and the University of Sheffield hold physical collections of BUF newspapers. 12 Patrick Collier, “Imperial/Modernist Forms in the Illustrated London News”, Modernism/Modernity 19, no. 3 (September 2012): 489. 13 See Matthew Worley, ‘What Was the New Party? Sir Oswald Mosley and Associated Responses to the “Crisis”, 1931–1932’, History 92, no. 305 (January 2007): 39–63. 14 Gottlieb, ‘The Marketing of Megalomania’, 38. 15 Matthew Worley, Oswald Mosley and the New Party (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 9. 16 Harold Nicolson, quoted in Worley, Oswald Mosley and the New Party, 140. 17 Worley, Oswald Mosley and the New Party, 165. 18 Ibid., 170. 19 Gottlieb also identifies the short-lived cyclostyled Woman Fascist, news sheet of the BUF’s Women’s Section (1933–34): see Gottlieb, ‘Women’s Print Media, Fascism’, 450. 20 ‘“Action” On February 21’, 2. 21 Mosley, ‘On to Fascist Revolution’, 4. 22 ‘Ourselves’, Blackshirt, 97, 1 March 1935, 4. 23 For more on the ‘Old Gang’ and fascist terminology, see Robert Benewick, The Fascist Movement in Britain (London: Allen Lane, 1972), 136. 24 The Blackshirt’s initial four pages were expanded to twelve after it incorporated the Fascist Week in June 1934; its price also increased from one to two pence. The following year it was reduced to eight pages and was priced again at a penny. 25 Dack, ‘In From the Cold?’, 16. Dack provides a useful overview of Tthe Blackshirt’s editorial arrangements, but her chronology is slightly wrong: Rex Tremlett did not succeed W. J. Leaper as editor of The Blackshirt; Leaper occupied the chair after Tremlett left the BUF in summer 1934. 26 Dates for each editorship are unclear: the following is my best estimate based on (often contradictory) primary and secondary materials. Early editors include Captain Charles Lewis and Rex Tremlett, who resigned in summer 1934 after a public split with Mosley, and possibly A. K. Chesterton. W. J. Leaper took over sometime in early 1935; John Beckett in early 1936 before being dismissed in March 1937. Geoffrey Dorman was editor from April to July 1937, before resuming the role again from March to April 1938. From July 1937 to January 1938 Dorman acted as deputy editor to A. K. Chesterton. The Blackshirt’s final editor was Michael Goulding from August 1938.

 ‘The Greater Britain of Fascism’ 141 27 ‘“Blackshirt” Banned By Newsagents’, Blackshirt, 67, 3 August 1934, 1. 28 Gottlieb, ‘Women’s Print Media, Fascism’, 458. 29 See, for instance, ‘“Action” On February 21’, 2 and ‘Nearer to “Action”’, The Blackshirt, 145, 31 January 1936, 5. Members were bombarded with advertising for Action, alongside cartoons, competitions and a ‘Publicity Week’ (10–15 February 1936) featuring dances, concerts and bazaars: see adverts in Blackshirt, 146, 7 February 1936, 6. ‘A New Paper For Fascism. Publication Early in the New Year’, Blackshirt, 132, 1 November 1935, 5; ‘The New Paper’, Blackshirt, 133, 8 November 1935, 5. 30 W. J. Leaper, ‘Get Ready for “Action”’, Blackshirt, 137, 6 December 1935, 1. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid.. ‘Zeal’ and ‘sacrifice’ were keywords used to describe members’ contributions to the fascist cause: see ‘“Action” On February 21’, 2; ‘Nearer to “Action”’, 5; ‘“Action” Next Week’, Blackshirt, 147, 14 February 1936, 5. 33 ‘“Action” On February 21’, 2. 34 Martin Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (London: Pimlico, 2006), 223. 35 Phillip M. Coupland, ‘The Black Shirt in Britain: The Meanings and Functions of Political Uniform’, in The Culture of Fascism, 110; Sean Ryan Webb, ‘Battling the Status Quo: The Discourse of the British Union of Fascists, 1932–1940’ (MA thesis, Oklahoma State University, 2007), 21–2. 36 Coupland, ‘The Black Shirt in Britain’, 107. 37 Gottlieb, ‘Women’s Print Media, Fascism’, 453. For a first-hand account of BUF members selling Action, see Louise Irvine, ‘The Birmingham School Teacher’, in Mosley’s Blackshirts: The Inside Story of British Union of Fascists, ed. Anonymous (London: Sanctuary Press, 1986), 46–50. 38 Gottlieb, ‘Women’s Print Media, Fascism’, 453–4; Andrew Martin Mitchell, ‘Fascism in East Anglia: The British Union of Fascists in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, 1933–1940: Volume 1’ (PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, 1999), 181. 39 Gottlieb, ‘Women’s Print Media, Fascism’, 454. 40 Beckett, ‘New and Enlarged “Blackshirt”’, 1. 41 Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’, 226. 42 Mitchell, ‘Fascism in East Anglia’, 273. 43 Michael A. Spurr, ‘“Living the Blackshirt Life”: Culture, Community and the British Union of Fascists, 1932–1940’, Contemporary European History 12, no. 3 (August 2003): 319–20. 44 ‘“Action” On February 21’, 2. 45 ‘“Action” in Two Weeks’, 5. 46 Ibid. 47 ‘“Action” On February 21’, Blackshirt, 2. It is not clear whether Leaper remained as editor in January 1936; John Beckett was in post by March 1936, but it is not certain when the transition took place. 48 The exception was the 26 March 1936 cover, ‘Is British Fascism Dead?’, which featured Photographs of Mosley speaking to large crowds at the Albert Hall. Images of Mosley and BUF supporters did not feature on the front page again until 23 July 1936. 49 ‘“Action” On February 21’, 2. 50 ‘What £7,000,000 Would Buy’, Action, 2, 28 February 1936, 1. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid.

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53 After an article attacking Woolworths in Action’s 5 December 1936 issue (E. D. Hart, ‘Chain Store Dictatorship. Woolworths – Huge Profits – Low Wages’, Action 42 (5 December 1935): 11, many newsagents refused to sell Action. In an editorial the following week, Beckett claimed that the ban had increased sales via subscription and in sympathetic newsagents (‘“Action” Banned’, Action, 43, 12 December 1936, 8). Action continued to be carried by some outlets until the Executive Committee of the National Association of Wholesale Agents ‘refused to handle copies’ in November 1937: see Nigel Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain, 2nd ed. (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge: 2017), 65. 54 ‘Masses And Ministers’, Action, 9, 16 April 1936, 1. 55 ‘Le dos à mer et la face au soleil’ (Backs to the sea and fronts in sunshine), VU, 2 September 1931, 2140–1. This page spread is reproduced and discussed in Tim Satterthwaite, Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 251–3. 56 Alexander Raven Thomson, ‘Oswald Mosley: A Study in Consistency’, Action 9 (16 April 1936): 9. 57 ‘Ourselves to You’, Action, 3, 6 March 1936, 8. 58 See, for example, the Saturday Review 157, no. 4085, 10 February 1934, 1. Houston and her paper had been early Mosley supporters: indeed, Houston published an article by Mosley in the 10 February 1934 issue entitled ‘Our Policy—Britain First!’ (154). Her relationship with Mosley ended, however, when The Blackshirt made disparaging remarks about the Saturday Review. See Teresa Crompton, ‘Flirting with fascism: Lady Houston and Oswald Mosley’, The History Press, https://www​.thehistorypress​ .co​.uk​/articles​/flirting​-with​-fascism​-lady​-houston​-and​-oswald​-mosley/ (accessed 15 February 2022). 59 ‘Searchlight over Britain’, Action, 1, 21 February 1936, 8. 60 Gottlieb, ‘Britain’s New Fascist Men’, 93–4. 61 E. D. Randall, ‘Fascism and Culture: True Place of Creative Genius’, Blackshirt, 48, 23 March 1934, 1. 62 Roger Griffin, ‘Review: Nazi Art: Romantic Twilight or (Post)modernist Dawn?’, Oxford Art Journal 18, no. 2 (1995): 104. 63 Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón, ‘Is Photomontage Over? A Special Issue of History of Photography’, History of Photography 43, no. 2 (2019): 120. 64 David Evans, ‘Cut and Paste’, History of Photography 43, no. 2 (2019): 162. 65 Sabine Kriebel, ‘Photomontage in the Year 1932: John Heartfield and the National Socialists’, Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 1 (2008): 106, 125–7. 66 Kriebel describes how the IB’s ‘photomontages developed from an amateurish art-forthe-people to a sophisticated visual artillery’, in part because of the competition from Heartfield’s covers for AIZ. See Kriebel, ‘Photomontage in the Year 1932’, 105. 67 Ibid., 116. 68 Ibid., 112. 69 Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’, 130–1. 70 ‘Peace with Germany’, Action, 4, 12 March 1936, 1. 71 Ibid.. 72 ‘The Return of Manhood’, Action, 21, 9 July 1936, 1. 73 Ibid. 74 John Beckett, ‘The Making of History. 100 British Union Candidates—The Vanguard of a Mighty Army’, Action, 38, 7 November 1936, 9. 75 Beckett, Fascist in the Family, 220–1.

 ‘The Greater Britain of Fascism’ 143 76 Three photomontages appeared during Dorman’s editorship: 15 May 1937, 28 August 1937 and 4 September 1937. 77 Robert Benewick, Political Violence and Public Order: A Study of British Fascism (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1969), 294. 78 Gottlieb, ‘Women’s Print Media, Fascism’, 453. 79 ‘“Action” On February 21’, 2.

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Part III

Transnational modernities Culture and lifestyle magazines in Canada and Australia

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8

Memories and Promises Australian Modernism and National Identities in Home During the 1930s Melissa Miles and Geraldine Fela

Introduction Writing in The Home Easter Pictorial in 1928, the Australian poet, novelist and children’s writer, Jean Curlewis, described Sydney evocatively as a ‘city in transition. Not quite one thing nor yet the other. . . . All memories and promises.’1 Curlewis’s lengthy essay aimed to capture the spirit of this growing city, addressing initially its history of white settlement and colonial expansion before describing a contemporary city of sunshine and leisure grappling with the hopes and uncertainties of the ‘machine age’. To Curlewis, modern Sydney ‘is rather like a stage in which the curtain has inadvertently gone up while the scene shifters were in the middle of their work . . . bits of Scene 1 – “An Old-Fashioned Seaport’ stand side by side with the lofty properties of “Transformation Scene – The Palace of the Future”’.2 As these comments suggest, modernity in interwar Sydney involved both reimagining Australia’s colonial past and looking forward to the ‘promises’ of the twentieth century. In contrast to popular European conceptions of modernity as a sense of the new displacing the old, Australian experiences of modernity often reflected a sense of anticipation of the new rather than a radical shift. The design magazine Home traded on this sense of anticipation. Home has been described by cultural historians as a key site for ‘conservative’ or ‘feminine’ modernisms, characterised by the magazine’s promotion of modern fashion, art and design, and suspicion of abstract and avant-garde art.3 However, Home was also a forum in which writers and artists responded to the uncertainties of Australian modern identities in the interwar period. In Home, cultural forms of modernism were enmeshed with the larger conditions of modernity and the challenge of reconciling them with settlercolonial national identities. Despite the presence of Indigenous societies for over 60,000 years, in the 1930s the nation was understood by many white Australians as in its infancy. The Australian federation, which saw the six separate self-governing British colonies brought together as the Commonwealth of Australia, had occurred just three

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decades earlier in 1901. In the wake of the Great Depression, which hit Australia in 1929, national identities were both widely discussed and hotly contested; tensions over the ongoing impacts of settler-colonialism and the place of contemporary Australia in the British Empire pervaded a variety of political and cultural events. This chapter focuses on two issues of Home in which these tensions manifest in approaches to the modern that involved looking both forwards and back: the April 1932 issue featuring the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the March 1938 issue covering public sesquicentenary celebrations. Importantly, these issues indicate how Curlewis’s notion of Sydney’s modernity as ‘all memories and promises’ found form not only in the magazine’s visual and textual content, but in its layout and structure. This chapter consequently builds on a tradition in magazine studies that approaches magazines as cultural resources that provide insight into their historical and social contexts.4 Scholars associated with this tradition, including Carolyn Kitch and Matthew Schneirov, typically focus on the content of magazines and consider how magazines not only mirror society and culture but actively shape them.5 Extending this emphasis on content and context, this chapter also considers what magazines do not show us, and how Home’s images and texts may sit uncomfortably within its somewhat fragmented and layered structure.

Home: ‘A standard of its own’ Home was first published by Art in Australia Ltd in 1920. This Sydney-based book and magazine publishing company was formed by Sydney Ure Smith, Charles Lloyd Jones and Brunton Stevens, who came together to publish the magazine Art in Australia, launched in 1916. From the start, director and art editor Ure Smith set Home apart from international competitors. In the very first issue of Home, Ure Smith describes how international magazines lacked relevance in Australia and were consequently read with ‘the abstract interest . . . bestowed upon a well-illustrated book of fairytales or Arctic exploration’. In contrast, he declares, Home ‘will adopt a standard of its own, living solely for Australian needs and omitting everything which, by reason of distance or circumstances, is not of immediate and practical interest in Australia’.6 Home was distributed nationally and included urban and regional content, yet Sydney was its base. Using the best design and production values, Home aimed to create ‘a standard of taste’ by positioning itself as ‘the authority on what is best’ in architecture, fashion, interior design, art and society.7 In his History of Magazine Publishing in Australia, published in 1947, Frank Greenop describes how Ure Smith’s unapologetic emphasis on taste and quality was reflected in the presentation of Home: ‘there was a crispness and a certainty about every phase of its presentation, and that presentation was appropriate to its subject matter.’8 Printed in 12 x 9 inch format and on heavy paper, it was initially published quarterly and moved to monthly publication during the mid1920s. Although Fairfax and Sons acquired Home in 1934 and published it until 1942, Ure Smith continued to contribute as one of its editors until he reluctantly cut his links with the publication in December 1938.9

 Memories and Promises 149 The abundance of photographs, illustrations and colour reproductions was a key attraction of Home. The editors commissioned some of Australia’s leading photographers, artists and designers – and occasionally their international contemporaries – to create images that celebrated Australian beauty and design. Reviewing Home for the Evening News in 1924, George Galway linked this emphasis on the visual with the increasing pace of modern life: ‘Pictures on every page! Surely that is sufficient recommendation for any magazines seeking popularity in this feverish age, when so many want to read as they run.’10 Images have remained central to the appeal of this magazine for historians of Australian modern art and design.11 However, the confident vision that cultural historians have found in Home obscures its role in propagating more conflicted aspects of modern Australian identities in the 1930s.

Bridging the historical and the modern Marking the opening of an icon of Australian metropolitan modernity, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the April 1932 issue framed Sydney as a site for the reimagination of national identities. The bridge construction not only kept hundreds of workers employed during the Depression, it became a potent symbol of social unity, modernisation and urban development. Writing for The Australian Worker just prior to the March 1932 opening event, Rev. A. Rivett emphasised the symbolic value of the bridge: ‘It is really a revelation of human nature in its inherent growth and progress . . . The Bridge unites what was once divided, it stands for oneness, unity, completion.’12 The cultural investment in the bridge grew exponentially during its eight-and-a-halfyear construction (1923–32). As the pylons were erected and the great arc began to take shape, the bridge became the subject of some of Australia’s best-known modernist paintings, such as Grace Cossington Smith’s The Bridge in-curve, 1930. The play of sunlight, shadow and steel, and the sweeping curve of the bridge design, also provided opportunities for visual experimentation for Australian photographer Harold Cazneaux and the British photographer E. O. Hoppé, whose bridge images were featured in Home, among many others.13 Ure Smith capitalised on the excitement by publishing three commemorative books on the bridge in 1930, 1931 and 1932, featuring photographs by Cazneaux and illustrations by other notable Australian artists including Will Ashton and J. J. Hilder.14 Advertised in Home, these books also indicate the interrelationships between Art in Australia Ltd’s book and magazine interests. By the time the April 1932 issue of Home was published, its readers were well primed to view the bridge as far more than just a major piece of urban infrastructure. In this issue, the bridge was figured as a symbol of aesthetic modernism, an icon of metropolitan nationalism and a stage for enacting settler-colonial relations with the British Empire. These elements are brought together in Fred Leist’s cover design (Figure 8.1). Home’s covers were diverse in style, subject matter, medium and artistic authorship. Leist’s contribution used the bold, flat colour associated with 1930s printmaking to offer a stylised take on the opening celebrations and accompanying historical pageant. British explorer Captain James Cook and his men stand proprietorially beneath the towering bridge as coloured streamers fly around them. Meanwhile, women in bathing

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Figure 8.1  Fred Leist, cover of Home, April 1932.

costumes gesture to the bridge from their party boat, signalling the life of freedom and leisure enjoyed by contemporary Sydney-siders. Almost obscured by the shadows of Cook and his men is a nude Aboriginal person sitting in profile and staring impassively into the distance. This conflation of different historical contexts and cultural references was evident more broadly in national culture during this period. Writing about the literary Jindyworobaks movement of the 1930s, historian Dan Tout argues that the project of national cultural construction was ‘conditioned by a triangular system of relationships involving settler, metropolitan and Indigenous agencies.’ Tout proposes that this system was the product of ‘settlers’ ambiguous and ambivalent’ place in relation to the colonised lands they occupied and the British Empire with which they identified.15 In an attempt to forge a sense of connection to the land, some cultural practitioners of the 1930s pursued a process of ‘indigenisation’ in which they appropriated ‘a decontextualized, abstracted essence of indigeneity’.16 Home and Art in Australia contributed to this process in their promotion of Australian modern art and design. One of Australia’s most well-known modernist painters, Margaret Preston, advocated in these magazines for the use of Aboriginal culture to create an ‘Australian spirit’ in modern art and design.17 To curator, writer, artist and activist, Djon Mundine, Preston’s paintings problematically presented a ‘veneer of Aboriginality, an adoption of Aboriginal forms and motifs displaced from their context and meanings, both physical and spiritual’.18 At this time, Aboriginal people were making important contributions to public life, had organised systems of healthcare, and led advancement leagues advocating for

 Memories and Promises 151 those suffering as a result of colonial violence and displacement. However, in Leist’s cover, as in other aspects of settler-colonial art, design and literature, the active place of Aboriginal people in modern cities, along with the implications of colonisation, were disavowed. While Leist’s cover visualises the triangular relationship between settler-colonial, modern metropolitan and Indigenous-inspired imagery popular during the 1930s, these relationships are complicated inside the magazine by additional shifts between temporal, conceptual and geographic contexts. The eight pages of photographs of the opening of the bridge begin with a double-page spread juxtaposing a photograph of leisure-craft massing on the harbour with a photograph of the enormous crowd crossing the bridge for the first time. Home’s bridge coverage is then linked to international urban and photographic modernism via a large reproduction of Edward Steichen’s photograph of Washington Bridge (Figure 8.2). This full-page image aligns the work of Australian bridge photographers to this leading American modernist, and the caption describing how the image was taken from Vanity Fair, ‘America’s leading magazine of modern life,’ associates Home with this major international magazine brand.19 The following double-page spread, titled ‘Arches of Triumph’, frames the bridge simultaneously as a triumph of modern engineering and settler-colonialism. Photographs by Cazneaux, Reg Johnson and Theo Purcell capture moments in the pageant’s narrative of progress, told through a series of decorative floats depicting the arrival of Captain Cook on the tall ship Endeavour, Captain Phillip and his colonial officers standing to attention above seated painted Aboriginal men clutching spears,

Figure 8.2  Pages from Home, April 1932, 24–7.

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the growth of the wool industry, and a float representing the foundation of university education. Subsequent photographs feature floats celebrating contemporary symbols of national identity, including surf lifesavers, and spectacular scenes of the harbour at night illuminated by floodlights and fireworks. By selecting photographs with the bridge pylons and enormous steel arch visible in the background, the editors link the bridge to the pageant’s triumphalist national narrative. Home’s structure and layout further integrated these settler-colonial imaginings into day-to-day aspects of modern life. Regular features of the magazine were interspersed throughout the extended bridge coverage. Social pages, advertisements for furniture, travel and beauty products, letters to the editor, celebrity portraits, a biography in an ongoing series on ‘Pioneer Families of Australia’, and an article about British responses to tensions between Japan and China preceded and interrupted the bridge coverage while connecting the spectacle to colonial history, international politics and quotidian middle-class culture, taste and values. In general, Home touched lightly on national and state politics, and its bridge coverage was no different. The March issue hinted at some political rumblings in a short ‘contributed comment’ from ‘R.R.’, which anticipated the opening of the bridge by NSW Premier Jack Lang ‘with permission of the New Guard’, and offered a warning of the potential spate of burglaries that may take place across empty suburban streets as crowds flocked to the city.20 The killjoy contributor’s reference to the New Guard granting ‘permission’ to the Premier refers to a current controversy surrounding the bridge opening. Members of the New Guard – then a proto-fascist organisation described by its supporters as the ‘defender of the Crown, Empire and all things Christian, British and decent’21 – took issue with Lang’s decision to open the bridge himself rather than extend the honour to the King or Governor General. Lang’s decision was seen as an extension of his commitment to ‘Australian self-government’ and a direct challenge to the notion that Australia and Australian society was, and ought to continue to be, loyal to Britain.22 Controversially, Lang had already refused to bow to Bank of England pressure to adopt a ‘deflationary policy’ of ‘sound finance’ during the Depression.23 Lang’s public opposition to Sir Otto Niemeyer, the Bank of England’s representative who visited Australia in 1930 to ‘inspect Australian finances’,24 was visualised in Home that year in caricatures by Labor Daily cartoonist George Finey of Lang and Niemeyer facing off over a double page.25 The economic austerity that Niemeyer demanded, and was accepted by the federal Labor government, was intolerable to Lang.26 Instead, the ‘Lang Plan’ called for economic stimulation and job creation through, among other measures, extensive public works including the Harbour Bridge construction. Perhaps most controversially, the Lang ministry suspended interest payments on debts to overseas British bondholders.27 In this context, Lang’s intention to open the bridge himself reflected a defiant vision of confident, independent nationhood. For The New Guard, this rebuke to the ‘imperial connection’ was a step too far.28 On the day of the Bridge opening, Captain Frank De Groot – a member of The New Guard, respected member of Sydney society, antiques dealer and veteran of the First World War – rode on his horse past the gathered dignitaries and cut the ceremonial ribbon with a sword before Premier Lang could reach it.29 As historian Gerald Lefergy observes, the bridge

 Memories and Promises 153 opening thereby became an expression of opposing visions of Australian nationhood: one symbolised by Lang’s espousal of ‘Things Australians strive for’ and the other remaining loyal to Britain.30 Despite extensive media coverage of De Groot’s sensational act and subsequent arrest, surprisingly there is no mention of these events in the April issue of Home. However, the following issue featured portraits of De Groot and his wife taken by Cazneaux and promoted this ‘full page study’ on the magazine’s cover. After describing De Groot’s notorious intervention without reference to his politics, the caption declared him ‘Australia’s most famous man of the moment’.31 Interestingly, Home had a long-standing relationship with De Groot, who regularly advertised his furniture shop in the magazine throughout the 1920s. Although his furniture business was mentioned when De Groot again featured in January 1933 in Home’s regular ‘Men of the Month’ section, the political motivation for his infamous act was, once more, overlooked.32 De Groot’s pro-Britain stand may have been at odds with Ure Smith’s promotion of a distinctly Australian art and design. However, Home’s commitment to national content did not extend to nationalist politics. When the magazine did feature political views, they were often diverse. In New Year messages published in Home’s January 1932 issue, soon to be Prime Minister Joseph Lyons asserted that Australians should strengthen their ‘inheritance’ as part of the British Empire, while the Chairman of the Herald and Weekly Times, Theodore Fink, argued Australians should abandon their ‘slavish worship of out-worn concepts’ and pursue a ‘national point of view’.33 Home was not in the business of reconciling competing political positions. Rather, it helped readers to become comfortable with the more troubling aspects of nationhood, such as those associated with The New Guard, and embed them in middle-class life. This process was facilitated by the way disparate content and perspectives were dispersed over each issue. As Home’s layout and structure encouraged readers to flip through the magazine’s pages, back and forth through diverse historical, geopolitical and contemporary content, readers could negotiate often-divergent ‘memories and promises’ of modernity in their own way and at their own pace..34

The sesquicentenary: A structure not an event The implications of this aspect of Home for settler-colonial and Indigenous modernisms are evident in the March 1938 coverage of ‘Anniversary Day’ (now known as Australia Day) on 26 January. The 1938 celebrations of this annual national day marked 150 years since the arrival of Captain Arthur Phillip and the raising of the Union Jack at Port Jackson (now Sydney) in 1788. Home’s cover designed by Douglas Annand (Figure 8.3) positions contemporary Sydney in a mythological space between an ancient past and dense, urban future. A gum leaf forms the central motif, surrounded by vast rippling waters and blue skies symbolising the island nation and its native flora. The leaf casts an arched shadow on the sea, alluding to the Sydney Harbour Bridge and anticipating a Sydney to come. The unattributed photomontage of a modern metropolis superimposed on the centre of the leaf gives the dream-like cover an

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Figure 8.3  Douglas Annand, cover of Home, March 1938.

element of realism. There is no sign of the First People who belong to, occupy and care for the land. Here, the metropolis has seemingly been developed from nothing. Inside the magazine, this sense of looking forward and back simultaneously is reinforced in the selection, style and layout of images. Coverage of the Anniversary Day celebrations begins on page 22, after an extended series of social pages and advertisements for travel, cars, fashion and beauty goods that affirm the magazine’s interest in contemporary middle-class taste and aspiration. The first Anniversary Day photograph is an image of anticipation (Figure 8.4). Celebrated Australian modernist Max Dupain trains his lens on the crowd gathering in the morning light, readying to witness the ‘March to Nationhood’ procession. Photographing from a high vantage point, Dupain allows the flat, narrow laneway to dominate the composition. The oblique, downward view recalls the work of Bauhaus photographer Lázsló MoholyNagy, with which Dupain was familiar through his consumption of European photography magazines, including Das Deutsche Lichtbild.35 Elongated morning shadows and the strong diagonal lines of the building and footpath heighten the graphic qualities of the photograph. Published as a full-page image, this photograph emphasises modern photographic aesthetics as much as it captures a moment, and contrasts with photographs found later in the magazine that document the procession and crowd of onlookers in a more direct documentary style. The juxtaposition of Dupain’s contemporary urban photograph with Geoff Powell’s two photographs of the re-enactment of the landing of Arthur Phillip at Port Jackson (Figure 8.4) brings a settler-colonial vision of Sydney’s past into dialogue with the

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Figure 8.4  ‘Anniversary Day’ images, Home, March 1938, 22–3.

present. The nineteen-year-old Powell was Dupain’s apprentice at the time, and similarly embraced modernist photographic experimentation. Traces of this experimentation are evident in his photographs of ‘Captain Phillip’ and his men disembarking their ship. Powell’s position in the ship’s crow’s nest allowed him to use the lines created by the ship’s mast, rigging, gunwale and the white trim on the military uniforms, to give the composition a contemporary graphic quality, despite the historically themed content.36 The conflation of historical and contemporary visions is dramatised again later in the magazine. Another Powell photograph of the departing rowboats is published alongside a photograph by Laurence LeGuay of their harbourside landing, surrounded by contemporary high-rise buildings and film crews documenting the action (Figure 8.5). Similarly, although the ‘March to Nationhood’ procession through the city was structured around historically themed floats depicting the arrival of British colonisers, agricultural and industrial growth, Home’s coverage stepped back from this historical narrative to focus on the contemporary crowds experiencing the celebrations in the city. The official celebration, and its positioning of Phillip’s arrival as the origin of contemporary Australia, were being challenged elsewhere in the city. As crowds gathered to watch the procession, around 100 Aboriginal people assembled inside the Australian Hall in Elizabeth Street to attend the ‘Day of Mourning’ conference. This event was organised by prominent figures Jack Patten, Bill Ferguson and Pearl Gibbs under the auspices of the newly formed Aborigines Progressive Association (APA), and has since become widely recognised as a key moment in the history of Aboriginal activism.37 The proceedings and speeches were published in The Abo Call – a short-lived but groundbreaking monthly newspaper edited by Patten and published

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Figure 8.5  Page spread from Home, March 1938, 28–9.

between April and September 1938 to give a public voice to Aboriginal people. Patten’s Presidential speech directly addressed the grief and anger that many Aboriginal people felt as white Australia celebrated their dispossession: ‘On this day the white people are rejoicing, but we, as Aborigines, have no reason to rejoice on Australia’s 150th birthday . . . This land belonged to our forefathers 150 years ago, but today we are pushed further and further into the background.’ Patten went on to assert: ‘We do not wish to be left behind in Australia’s march to progress. We ask for full citizenship rights.’38 While organising their event, the APA also heard about twenty-five Aboriginal men who were detained nearby in preparation for the historical re-enactment covered in Home. The men were brought to Sydney from the Menindee mission in western New South Wales and nearby Brewarrina by the Anniversary Day organisers.39 Some of the men were to be placed on the ‘Aborigines float’ for the procession, while others were compelled to participate in the re-enactment of Phillip’s landing by taking part in a ‘corroboree’, hiding in retreat and then ‘making friends’ with their colonisers – events that did not happen in 1788.40 Gay Breyley describes how the organisers coerced the Barkindji and other Aboriginal men onto trucks with the threat of losing their food rations, and once they were in Sydney ‘housed’ them, under lock and key, in the Redfern police barracks. Ferguson tried to arrange a visit to the men and deliver a message encouraging them to boycott the performance, but visitors to the barracks were banned.41 Newspaper reports of the parade and re-enactment, describing the Aboriginal men as appearing ‘uncomfortable about it all’ and ‘a little morose’, indicate both the coercion involved in the performance and their resistance to fully complying with the morbid spectacle.42 Although the Day of Mourning was covered in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Bulletin, there is no mention of it in Home.43 Nor is

 Memories and Promises 157 there reference to Aboriginal participants in the re-enactment. Denying them a place in its vision of modern Sydney, Home relegated Aboriginal Australians to the past and reimagined Australia’s future as one created by and for white Australians. A striking example of this selective framing of the ‘memories and promises’ of the nation in this issue of Home is Marjorie Barnard’s fictional text ‘A Mask of Australia for Inaudible Voices’. Barnard’s text is written as a conversation between the ‘voice of the continent’, a chorus of flora and fauna, and the ‘Black man’ representing Indigenous society. Indigenous society is presented as nomadic yet culturally static and unsophisticated: It is day and I am hungry I shall go out and hunt wallabies or whatever I can spear . . . Tomorrow it will be the same and the next day . . . When the time comes we will leave this place and make a new camp. We shall travel with the season so that we may eat.44

Here, the text reflects a sentiment that Patrick Wolfe identifies as typical of settlercolonial discourse: the representation of ‘natives’ as ‘unsettled, nomadic, rootless’.45 Wolfe notes that the ‘reproach of nomadism renders the native removable’, undermining any claim to their land.46 In Barnard’s ‘Mask of Australia,’ not only are Aboriginal people ‘removable’, they are futureless victims of modern life. The fictional conversation ends when the man’s ‘future’ tells him: ‘White men will come from over the sea . . . the white man will sing your swan song’.47 The illustrated page header offers comparable messaging, showing an Aboriginal person sleeping under a banksia tree, unaware of the rising sun signalling the dawn of a new era. Together, the text and image illustrate what Sarah Maddison identifies as a common form of ‘identity violence’ in which Aboriginality is only deemed ‘authentic’ when it exists outside of settler modernities.48 The notion of ‘traditional’ Aboriginality is used to position those who do not fit ‘the dominant settler-colonial image of the so-called “real” Aboriginal people . . . remote dwelling, spear carrying’, as part of the prehistory of Australian modernity rather than its present or future.49 Home was far from unique in its failure to grapple with the lives and experiences of Aboriginal people in 1930s Australia. Writing about interracial relations and frontier violence in the Northern Territory in his book Capricornia, first published on Anniversary Day in 1938, Xavier Herbert lamented: ‘Do you know that if you dare write a word on the subject to a paper or a magazine you get your work almost chucked back at you?’.50 Lynette Russell similarly observes, in her analysis of Walkabout, that central to this popular magazine’s rendering of Aboriginal Australia was the removal of Aboriginal people ‘from all historical narratives but one; a teleological argument that they were the last of the noble savages’.51 As Glen Ross puts it, Walkabout’s ‘narration of the nation’ in the 1930s was underpinned by the idea that Aboriginal people were ‘either to slip quietly into the black past or to be absorbed into the white future’.52 The distinction of Home was the way in which these narratives were normalised by being published alongside aspects of modern, white and middle-class domestic life. This process is advanced in Barnard’s second contribution to this issue. In ‘Prelude to History’, it is not the original inhabitants who shaped the land, but the new settlers

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who ‘learned the country’ and made it their own through their farming, mining and industry. Building on patterns of appropriation of Aboriginal material culture evident in white Australian art, design and literature in the 1930s, this essay works to place Australia’s roots in the ‘culture of the bush’ and connect it to contemporary industry and enterprise.53 The text accordingly reflects Wolfe’s observation that ‘Invasion is a structure not an event’, an ongoing process in which settler societies continuously attempt to dissolve Indigenous societies long after the ‘closure of the frontier’, to bolster and ‘erect a new colonial society’.54 Working in tandem with its textual and visual content, Home’s layout helped to perpetuate this structure by redefining and integrating it within contemporary middle-class experiences and cultures. It was common for Home to fragment and disperse individual articles and image series over multiple magazine sections. In this 1938 issue, the editors and designers fragmented nine articles, including the two by Barnard. The beginning of Barnard’s story of the ‘event’ of invasion is bookended by Dupain’s contemporary photograph of the floodlit harbour bridge and Powell’s historically themed photograph of Captain Phillip and his men readying to land. To complete Barnard’s essays, readers must flip through forty-four pages of other seemingly unconnected illustrations and articles on surfing and dating, fashion, interior design, and advertising. Among this content is a series of eight single-page images by Dupain dedicated to the British Empire Games, hosted by Sydney at this time. Dupain’s photographs all focus on individual white athletes in action: a diver soaring overhead, a long-jumper contorted mid-air, a hurdler with legs outstretched clearing a hurdle, and swimmers mid-stroke in the pool. Isobel Crombie has described Dupain’s broader interest in ‘vitalism’ and body culture in the 1930s, linking it to interwar values of ‘national fitness, revitalisation and eugenic potential’.55 Adding a new inflection on Barnard’s colonial narratives, Dupain’s photographs of athletes from England, Canada, South Africa, Wales and New Zealand link Australia to an Empire defined by whiteness, youth, strength, beauty and physical prowess.

Fragmentary narratives and picturing white Australia While it is possible to selectively isolate Dupain’s photographs or Barnard’s texts and interpret them as indicators of an exclusive narrative of white Australian progress, this emphasis on magazine content and narrative tells only part of the story. Barnard’s two contributions are also separated in the magazine by three double-page photographic spreads of crowds watching the ‘March to Nationhood’ parade. This series of images ends with a pair of photographs of the surf life-saving float, replete with bronzed, muscular Anglo-Australian surf lifesavers being led by a beautiful swim-suited blonde woman riding a giant mythological fish (Figure 8.6). In one sense, these photographs point to the contemporary popularity of surf lifesavers as symbols of national identity, youth and vitality – symbols that have since been criticised for their distinctly white, masculine biases.56 However, taken by Japanese-born photographer Ichiro Kagiyama, the photographs indicate some of the complications and contradictions of white Australia in Home.

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Figure 8.6  ‘The March to Nationhood’, Home, March 1938, 32–3.

Kagiyama was part of a small but thriving Japanese community living in Sydney during a period when immigration restrictions were used to reinforce Australia’s selfimage as a British outpost in the Asia-Pacific. The Immigration Restriction Act (1901) was a cornerstone of what was to become known as the ‘white Australia policy’. The Act limited the immigration of so-called ‘coloured races’ to Australia by requiring them to sit a convoluted dictation test in any European language.57 Restrictions on Japanese immigration were eased slightly in 1904 when Japanese merchants, tourists and students were allowed to enter the country for one year without being subject to the dictation test. Later changes to the law allowed Japanese people to stay in Australia for up to three years before reapplying for exemption from the dictation test. The exemptions supported the presence of Japanese trading firms in Sydney, which imported and exported some of the consumer goods that featured in Home, such as Japanese silks and Australian wool.58 Kagiyama was not a member of this merchant class, but by the mid-1930s had established a commercial photography studio in Sydney, with clients including Japanese merchants and consular officials, The Sydney Morning Herald and the Atlantic Union Oil Company. He worked regularly for Home between 1936 and 1940, with his initial contributions being framed explicitly with reference to his Japanese heritage.59 In contrast to Home’s other photographs of the Anniversary Day parade taken from a distance from high-rise buildings, Kagiyama’s camera angles position him among the action at street level. Kagiyama’s place within this celebration of white Australian nationalism is particularly striking in a context characterised by rising anti-Japanese sentiment and increasing geopolitical instability. The outbreak of the Second Sino– Japanese War in 1937, criticism of perceived Japanese aggression, and insecurity about

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Australia’s place in the Asia-Pacific, led to increasing public hostility towards Japan, including a call from the Australian Council of Trade Unions to boycott Japanese goods and impose an embargo on the export of iron to Japan.60 However, at a time when Home was propagating narratives of white Australian progress in its images and texts, Kagiyama’s image-making helped to position him as an active contributor to the magazine and photographer-entrepreneur. Kagiyama’s contributions thereby highlight the importance of considering the practice of magazine-making, alongside a magazine’s content, and acknowledging the points at which they may sit in tension. The value of magazines as sources for historical understanding extends well beyond their discrete articles and images. The somewhat disjointed structure of Home hints at the multiple modern identities that not only existed in different parts of the globe, but within Australian cities. By celebrating exclusive narratives of white Australian achievement alongside features and advertising for contemporary fashion, design, travel and local society, Home helped to integrate enduring colonial myths into modern middle-class lifestyles and aspirations. Importantly, aspects of urban modernity and settler-colonial identity did not always sit comfortably with one another in this magazine. Such points of disjunction between images and articles, content and practice, and between magazine issues, are critical for studies of modern magazines in settler-colonial contexts. Evident in the spaces between Home’s images and texts – and between its visions of the past and present – are allusions to more complex modernisms and anti-modernisms, including the problematic white Australian appropriation of Indigeneity, De Groot’s infamous protest in the name of empire, and the experiences of Kagiyama as a Japanese image-maker in ‘white Australia’. In Home, the uneasy relationships between urban settler-colonial modernities, middle-class domestic cultures and national identities could be lived, experienced and perpetuated without being reconciled. If invasion is a structure rather than an event, as Wolfe contends, the divergent content, fragmented format and notable exclusions from Home indicate some of the ways magazines functioned to normalise this structure of violence in white middle-class society.

Notes 1 Jean Curlewis, ‘Sydney’, Australia Beautiful – The Home Easter Pictorial Sydney Number, 15 March 1928, 18. 2 Ibid., 12. 3 Caroline Jordan, ‘Designing Women: Modernism in Art in Australia and The Home’, Art and Australia 31, no. 2 (1993): 200–7; Nancy Underhill, D. H., Making Australian Art 1916–49 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 165; Robert Holden, Cover Up: The Art of Magazine Covers in Australia (Sydney: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995), 26; Peter McNeil, ‘Decorating the Home’, Art and Australia 33, no. 2 (1995): 222–31. 4 Tim Holmes, ‘Mapping the Magazine: An Introduction’, Journalism Studies 8, no. 4 (2007): 515; Carolyn Kitch, ‘Theory and Methods of Analysis: Models for Understanding Magazines’, in The Routledge Handbook of Magazine Research, ed. David Abrahamson and Marcia R. Prior-Miller (New York: Routledge, 2015), 13–14.

 Memories and Promises 161 5 Carolyn Kitch, ‘Family Pictures: Constructing the “Typical” American in 1920s Magazines’, American Journalism 16, no. 4 (1999): 57–75; Matthew Schneirov, The Dream of a New Social Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 3. 6 Sydney Ure Smith, ‘The Home. How it Proposes to be of Service to You’, Home, February 1920, 3. 7 Sydney Ure Smith, ‘The Story of the Home’, Home, March 1930, 60d. 8 Frank Greenop, History of Magazine Publishing in Australia (Sydney: K.G. Murray, 1947), 242. 9 Underhill, Making Australian Art 1916–49, 165. 10 George Galway, ‘The Home’, Evening News, 18 June 1924, 6. 11 Jordan, ‘Designing Women’, 200–7; Holden, Cover Up; McNeil, ‘Decorating the Home’, 222–31. 12 Rev. A. Rivett, ‘The Message of the Bridge’, The Australian Worker, 16 March 1932, 14. 13 See Home, September 1928, 37–40; Home, 1 May 1930, cover and 20–4, 27–9; Home, 1 August 1930, 40–1; Home, February 1931, 31. 14 Harold Cazneaux, The Bridge Book (Sydney: Sydney Ure Smith for Art in Australia, 1930); The Second Bridge Book (Sydney: Sydney Ure Smith for Art in Australia, 1931); Sydney Bridge Celebrations, ed. Sydney Ure Smith and Leon Gellert (Sydney: Art in Australia Ltd, 1932). 15 Dan Tout, ‘Rex Ingamells and Ted Strehlow: Correspondences and Contradictions in Australian Settler Nationalism’, Journal of Australian Studies 44, no. 3 (2020): 270. 16 Ibid., 254–5. 17 Margaret Preston, ‘The Indigenous Art of Australia’, Art in Australia 3, no. 11 (1925): unpaginated; ‘Art for Crafts. Aboriginal Art Artfully Applied’, Home, December 1924, 31. 18 Djon Mundine, ‘Aboriginal Still Life 1940’, in Margaret Preston, ed. Deborah Edwards and Rose Peel (Sydney: Thames and Hudson, 2016), 208. 19 ‘Giant of the Hudson’, Home, April 1932, 25. 20 R. R., ‘A Bridge Problem’, Home, March 1932, 23. 21 Brian Wright, In the Name of Decent Citizens (Sydney: ABC Books, 2006), 41. 22 Andrew Moore, Francis De Groot: Irish Fascist, Australian Legend (Sydney: Federation Press, 2005), 52–3. 23 Neville Kirk, ‘“Australians for Australia”: The Right, the Labor Party and Contested Loyalties to Nation and Empire in Australia, 1917 to the Early 1930s’, Labour History, no. 91 (2006): 104. 24 Gerald Lefergy, ‘“Things Australians Strive For”: Jack Lang’s Landmark Speech at the Sydney Harbour Bridge’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 101, no. 1 (2015): 66. 25 ‘What They Think – Of Each Other’, Home, December 1930, 46–7. 26 John Manning Ward, ‘The Dismissal’, in Jack Lang, ed. Rasi Heather and Peter Spearritt (Neutral Bay: NSW: Hale & Iremonger & Labour History, 1977), 165–6. 27 Ibid., 165. 28 Lefergy, ‘“Things Australians Strive For”’, 61–78. 29 Wright, In the Name of Decent Citizens, 37–43. 30 Lefurgy, ‘“Things Australians Strive For”’, 68. 31 ‘Captain and Mrs F. E. De Groot’, Home, May 1932, 25. 32 ‘Men of the Month’, Home, January 1933, 52. 33 ‘A Prosperous New Year’, Home, January 1932, 23–6. 34 Curlewis, ‘Sydney’, 12.

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35 Helen Ennis, Max Dupain: Photographs (Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1992), 11. 36 For an account of the use of high vantage points and other recurring themes in modernist photography in European magazines see Tim Satterthwaite, Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 85–124. 37 John Maynard, ‘Vision, Voice and Influence: The Rise of the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association’, Australian Historical Studies 34, no. 121 (2003): 91–2. 38 J. T. Patten, ‘President’s Address’, The Australian Abo Call, April 1938, 2. 39 Jack Horner and Marcia Langton, ‘The Day of Mourning’, in Australians 1938, ed. Bill Gammage and Peter Spearitt (Broadway: Fairfax, Syme and Weldon, 1987), 29. 40 ‘Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries Meet’, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 January 1938, 11; ‘Landing of Governor Phillip – Triumphal March to Nationhood’, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 January 1938, 14. 41 Gay Breyley, ‘Fearing the Protector, Fearing the Protected: Indigenous and “National” Fears in Twentieth-century Australia’, Antipodes 23, no. 1 (2009): 45. 42 Ibid., 46. 43 ‘Aborigines “Day of Mourning” Emphatic Protests’, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 January 1938, 6; ‘A Day of Atonement’, The Bulletin, 9 February 1938, 13; ‘Day of Mourning – Aboriginal Viewpoint’, The Age, 27 January 1938, 17. 44 Marjorie Barnard, ‘A Mask of Australia for Inaudible Voices’, Home, March 1938, 26. 45 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 396. 46 Ibid. 47 Barnard, ‘A Mask of Australia’, 27. 48 Sarah Maddison, ‘Indigenous Identity, “Authenticity” and the Structural Violence of Settler Colonialism’, Identities 20, no. 3 (2013): 290–6. 49 Ibid., 293. 50 Xavier Herbert, Capricornia (1938; Pymble: HarperCollins, 2002), 95. 51 Lynette Russell, Savage Imaginings: Historical and Contemporary Constructions of Australian Aboriginalities (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2001), 25. 52 Glen Ross, ‘The Fantastic Face of the Continent: The Australian Geographical Walkabout Magazine’, Southern Review 32, no. 1 (1999): 28. 53 Marjorie Barnard, ‘Prelude to History’, Home, March 1938, 34–5, 69, 71. 54 Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism’, 388, 400. 55 Isobel Crombie, Body Culture: Max Dupain, Photography and Australian Culture, 1919–1939 (Mulgrave: Peleus Press, 2004), 71. 56 Elizabeth Ellison and Donna Lee Brien, ‘Writing the Australian Beach: Texts, Sites, Events and People’, in Writing the Australian Beach, ed. Elizabeth Ellison and Donna Lee Brien (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 4. 57 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 147–50. 58 Pam Oliver, ‘Japanese Relationships in White Australia’, History Australia 4, no. 1 (2007): 5.2. 59 Melissa Miles, ‘Through Japanese Eyes: Ichiro Kagiyama and Australian-Japanese relations in the 1920s and 1930s’, History of Photography 38, no. 4 (2014): 356–7. 60 Jon White, ‘The Port Kembla Pig Iron Strike of 1938’, Labour History, no. 37 (1979): 63–4.

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Seeing the World and One’s Place Within It Australian Quality Magazines and the Asia-Pacific in the 1920s and 1930s Susann Liebich and Victoria Kuttainen

In the 1920s and 1930s, the golden age of magazine publishing coincided with the height of sea travel and transport, both of which shaped and fuelled the popular imagination of a relatively newly federated Australia in ways that linked the developing nation to an increasingly connected, modernising world.1 In the antipodes, where, as David Carter has observed, ‘the absence of an established book publishing industry’ meant that periodicals played a ‘key role’ not only in publishing local content but also in ‘mediating for local readers the social and cultural transformations of modernity,’ a number of quality magazines emerged in this period.2 Australia’s The Home (1920–42) and MAN (1936–74) were not just new titles but ‘new kinds of magazines’ that contributed to a rich and varied print culture which benefitted from and celebrated the arrival of commercial art, as well as the new technologies of film and radio, and new modes of consumerism, particularly in the aspirational arenas of fashion, entertainment and travel.3 Advances in shipping technology rendering sea travel and cruising affordable to a larger proportion of the population accompanied technological developments in printing and image reproduction, making magazines like these perfect vehicles for conveying the newly interconnected modern world in spectacular form.4 The Home and MAN, and magazines like them, framed their content and addressed their readership in both national as well as outward-looking terms. With the proliferation of sea travel for both business and pleasure in the interwar period, the travel and shipping advertisements represented some of their most lucrative sources of revenue, further contributing to the way these magazines conveyed a sense of contracting space and time. Never before did places as far from each other as Brisbane, Melbourne, Madrid, Cairo, or even New Guinea and Fiji seem as close as they did to their Australian readers in the 1920s and 1930s. In this chapter, we offer a selected reading of two Australian magazines from the interwar period, which were part of a global print culture of glossy, quality illustrated magazines. In their focus on travel and international affairs, especially but not exclusively about the Asia-Pacific and South Pacific region, The Home and MAN, we argue, fashioned and represented a number

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of geographical imaginaries, and coached, courted and constructed their audiences in significant but also distinct ways that were at once quintessentially Australian and sophisticatedly cosmopolitan; national and global (Plate 5).5 The Home was launched in February 1920 by the Sydney commercial art and advertising pioneer Sydney Ure Smith, co-founder of Smith and Julius, Australia’s artiest advertising agency. As a periodical, it can be favourably compared to its wellknown contemporaries, the American cosmopolitan magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair, as well as the British Vogue, and in fact oftentimes it explicitly positioned itself as their Australian equivalent.6 Like these overseas magazines that influenced it and with which it competed in the tight Australian market, The Home addressed a largely female, upperand middle-class audience, keen to participate in a world of glamour, sophistication and cosmopolitanism, even if only in imaginative ways. Originally published as a quarterly, it appeared monthly from 1926, and sold for 2 shillings, reduced to 1 shilling 3 pence from 1931. Calling itself ‘Australia’s de luxe periodical of general interest,’7 print runs reached a modest 7,500 at its height (compared to an astonishing 126,000 copies the contemporary mass weekly the Mirror sold in 1928).8 Yet, its exclusiveness was part of its cachet, and the periodical formed a highly significant part of Australia’s interwar culture, especially in the ways it merged art with commerce. In close to 100 pages The Home presented a mix of advertising, fiction, verse, photos, local news, art reproductions and features covering themes such as the arts, theatre, music and literature, interior design, furniture, home décor and architecture, gardening, society news and commentary, travel and leisure, beauty and fashion. As a lavishly produced magazine, its excellence in typography and colour printing set the tone for Australian magazine publishing in this period. As John Docker has noted, in style as well as content, The Home represented ‘the summit of achievement in Australian journalism’ for its time.9 Many Australian authors found an outlet for their writing in The Home, including but not limited to Marjorie Barnard, E. J. Brady, Henrietta Drake-Brockman, Hilary Lofting, Myra Morris, Vance Palmer, Katherine Susannah Prichard and Jessie Urquhart. In general, the short stories in The Home covered a balance of settings: some fiction illuminated the pioneering past, such as Katherine Susannah Prichard’s ‘The Wild Oats of Han: A Series of Incidents in the Life of an Australian Child’ illustrated by Raymond McGrath.10 Just as many others tended to favour cosmopolitan and holiday settings, such as May MacFarlane’s ‘Babes in the Jungle’ illustrated by Adrian Feint, in which two sophisticated Australians meet in Florence,11 as well as MacFarlane’s ‘Pas de Seul’ set in Vienna and also illustrated by Adrian Feint,12 or ‘Craig’s Shadow,’ a romance by A. Connell set in Papua and again accompanied by Feint’s fine illustrations.13 Accordingly, The Home provided a platform for many Australian commercial artists who would later find fame – besides Adrian Feint, The Home called on the work of Douglas Annand, Dahl Collings, Frank Hinder, Walter Jardine, Frank (Frances) Payne, Thea Proctor, Hera Roberts, and others to illustrate the fiction as well as design the covers and lush travel advertisements.14 Well surpassing the look and feel of the twotone publications of the past, The Home was thus the first periodical in Australia to fully embrace what Ann Ardis has identified (in the American context) as the ‘hypervisual, multi-media formats’ that marked the modern magazine, quickly lending this

 Seeing the World and One’s Place Within It 165 periodical its reputation as a modern and sophisticated tastemaker.15 In part because it appealed to an upmarket segment of readers ‘comprising mostly well-to-do people’, The Home was remarkably international in its outlook and emphasised travel and mobility, even publishing dedicated travel numbers in October of each year from 1925 to 1931.16 In these as well as its regular issues, travelogues and travel writing mixed with highlights of particular Australian and overseas destinations, advice on shipping lines, other modes of transport and accommodation, and advertisements for cars and sea travel. The settings of The Home’s textual and visual features were extraordinarily diverse, and images of globes, bridges, and maps frequently appeared on its covers and in advertisements, signalling worldliness to its Australian readers. If The Home addressed a female readership, MAN was, at least in part, its male equivalent, catering to a distinctly different and masculine segment of the Australian print market, even as it was comparably lush, offering over 100 pages of high-gloss, high-quality paper filled with images and the latest typographic design. With journalist Frank Greenop as editor, MAN was established in December 1936 by adman Kenneth Murray who, through his work for Australia’s major magazine and book distributor Gordon & Gotch, identified a market for a periodical catering to a new urbane class of aspirational Australian men. The magazine featured advertisements for motor cars, accountancy services, Scotch and professional business attire peppered among ads for less expensive items like engine oil, shaving cream and lager – signalling a readership of clerks, mechanics, motor-enthusiasts, in addition to readers from an emerging professional-managerial class in Australia’s leading cities of Sydney and Melbourne. Full of cartoons, quips, articles and gags, as well as extensive features on men’s fashion and international politics and news, MAN boasted much higher print runs than The Home and reached a broader market segment. In April 1937 it claimed a print run of 14,000, which had grown to 40,000 by 1940.17 Remarkably, given the censorship regimes that tightly regulated the circulation of print matter at this time, it often included black-and-white photographic studies of nude women, as well as other erotic material including semi-clad women in sexually suggestive scenes, and risqué cartoons with desert islands and topless Polynesian belles as favourite subjects; since comparable material was restricted from import, the magazine was potentially able to demand the relatively expensive cover price of two shillings per issue, even though this may have been at the limit for some readers.18 Irreverent and playful, MAN was a modern man’s periodical—a ‘smart magazine’ influenced by its closest overseas competitor, Esquire, which pioneered the rakishly cheeky style for aspirational men who wished to be fashionable, up-to-date, and informed as well as entertained.19 At least in its first decade of publication, MAN was a genuine ‘gentleman’s magazine’, offering articles on international affairs, politics and travel, and including original fiction by Australian and international writers. Regular contributors to MAN during the interwar period included such Australian luminaries known as Ion Idriess, Frank Clune, Vance Palmer, E. V. Timms, Will Lawson, Jack Hides and George Farwell. Monthly fashion features and film reviews were penned by Phillip Lewis in the early years of the magazine, appearing alongside book reviews from Russell S. Clark (writing under the pseudonym Gilbert Anstruther). Sketches and cartoons were provided by Will Dyson, Jack Gibson, Ernest Robinson Hillier, Mollie Horseman, Hardtmuth

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Lahm, Carl Lyon, Emile Mercier, Joan Morrison, Mick Paul, Les Such and others. Many of these names were the most prominent and up-and-coming graphic artists of their generation, who were well connected not only in Australia but also often overseas. Additionally, renowned Australian modernist photographers such as Max Dupain and Laurence Le Guay offered the magazine their artistic photographs, many of which included nude studies.20 As such, MAN as well as The Home were invaluable sources of commercial work for many significant Australian writers and illustrators, at a time when few literary or visual artists could survive on their artistic output alone. In MAN, these elements indicated a wide spectrum of modern taste, and showcased the way a magazine might bring together features that would later appear oppositional and inconsonant: the surrealist camera art of the Parisian cabaret revues, and the commercial art of the Punch comic or American pinup, for instance.21 Anxieties about the changing status of women were filtered through the periodical’s sexualised fantasies, and MAN often linked the perceived aspirations of its readership to aspects of escape, which were also connected to mobility. MAN also assumed a readership with experiences of overseas travel, partly through service in the Great War. These recently expanded horizons for many Australian men accounted for the regular sections the magazine published on current affairs, world politics and travel, and other general-interest topics, also including genre fiction on espionage and adventure themes, alongside film and book reviews, particularly featuring middlebrow titles.

Travel and travel writing in The Home With its appeal to the upper-crust set of mainly female Australian readers who wished to feel connected to the world and up-to-date, The Home published regular travel writing and other articles by female authors. One prominent example, an extended feature that appeared in October 1926, is the commissioned travel writing by wellknown Australian modernist artist Margaret Preston, modelling to female readers how they, too, could explore new places, even if only imaginatively, and by doing so be modern like her. In her article entitled ‘There and back in three months. From Sydney to the East – With a Note on Expenses,’ Preston describes a ‘three month’s trip, travelling in ten steamers’ as affordable and transformative: ‘money well spent and health never better.’22 Preston and her travel companion, she writes, left ‘with a destination unknown, even to ourselves. All we had provided was a ticket each to Singapore, a cabin trunk, two suit cases, a rug or two, and the right to break our journey where we wished.’23 Conveying a sense of adventure and freedom attainable through travel for the modern woman, the article conducts readers through a tour of South-East and East Asia infused with an educational tone and focused on describing foreign cultures as ‘authentic’. From ports-of-call in Macassar, the Celebes, Bali, Den Pasar, Soerabaya, Batavia, Singapore, Malaya, Siam, Bangkok, Saigon, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Macao and Manila, Preston travels by boat, motorcar and on foot, and her record tells of ‘dancing girls’, ‘native musical instruments’, exotic markets, Chinese and Hindu temples, orchid gardens, Buddhist monuments and cultural festivals, and

 Seeing the World and One’s Place Within It 167 includes reflections on urban architecture or local customs. Preston describes these regions in largely positive terms, even if her own, and the West’s, perceived superiority is unmissable. In fact, this superiority helps convey the overall effect: the modern woman is in control. Noticeably, given her status as a modernist artist, Preston is keen to stress the ‘nativeness’ and authenticity of people and places she visits, emphasising ‘primitive’ ways of living, and admiring unspoilt landscapes and material culture of historical interest. ‘In Bali’, she observes for example, ‘the women go to the well to draw water, balancing the pots on their heads. The men spend their days cockfighting,’ while Bangkok, to her, is ‘fairyland’. Similarly, Preston judges Angkor as ‘superb, right in the jungle and unrestored except in details. The real thing – a magnificent town and temple now past.’24 While Preston is keen to construct a sense of the exotic in these places, she also astutely notes the influences of other countries, especially of Europe and America, and the legacies and persisting influences of European colonialism in the places she visits. As such, she paints a portrait of a world in which South-East and East-Asian places are part of global connectedness. For instance, ‘Saigon (we are now in Cochin China) is bright and French. Paris frocks can be had here free of duty’;25 Macao ‘is Portuguese, and a backwash of the East, full of gambling, opium and other things’, and ‘Manila is very American.’26 By doing so, Preston offers reference points to Australian readers that allow them to draw on their own understandings and assumptions about Europe and America as they make sense of Asian cultures. Despite her eagerness to embrace exotic foreign lands however, in the end she is clear which place she values most highly: approaching Australia’s west coast after three months of sightseeing in ‘the East,’ Preston writes, ‘and then almost the best part of the trip: the Albany Pass and the wonderful Whitsunday Passage’ in tropical Australia. This region of Australia, she notes, ‘is said to be more beautiful than the inland sea of Japan’.27 Indeed Preston writes of this place with a rhapsody which clearly conveys the way in which Australian landscapes equal and might even surpass the beauty of these other places she has visited on her cosmopolitan travels. Preston’s exemplary two-page travel article in the October 1926 issue encapsulates a recurring theme suffusing much of the content in The Home, which occurs across features as diverse as photo galleries, celebrity profiles, non-fiction travel features, and fashion or society pages. On the one hand, readers are invited to see the world and look out from Australian shores to cultures and places beyond. On the other hand, a sense of patriotic pride and cultural nationalism also emerges from these pages through the magazine’s travel writing,28 reviews of Australian art filled with pastoral scenes, discussions of country architecture,29 and in advertisements for expensive motorcars filled with appeals to urban readers to tour regional Australia.30 Both of these perspectives are squarely Eurocentric, not only in their modernising nationalism but also in their cosmopolitan outlook, which positions the Australian travel writer and armchair traveller as part of the modern world, comporting themselves through its more primitive destinations with the latest technology, including rail and steamer, the automobile, the camera and the modern magazine. This is further conveyed by the fact that the overseas trips covered often comprised an itinerary directed by portsof-call between London and Australia, such as the 1920 profile of touring English

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theatre actress Marie Tempest which featured her travels through Africa, India, and Arabia.31 That travel to foreign countries and places has a role to play in the formation of a sense of national – and even regional – identity is made explicit in another article, from October 1925: Travel is the most soul-inspiring amusement in the world: it is the one thing which produces in the person concerned a comfortable consciousness of the superiority of his own nationality, aspirations, morals, manners and method of living over and above those of all other peoples.32 The same article also comments, partly in a humorous tone, on the costs of travel, being realistic that seeing the world through travel was not affordable to every reader. In many ways then, The Home, with its explicit focus on travel and mobility framed as part of aspirational, middle-class culture, whether in advertisements, travel articles, book reviews, gossip notes or short fiction, offered readers ways to expand their horizons and develop a consciousness of their superiority even just through the vicarious experience of national and international travel. In its outward-looking fiction and non-fiction travel articles, The Home helped readers take up their positions as sophisticated moderns – rather than belated colonials – looking out onto the world through the windows of the photographs and articles in the magazine. Besides the focus on the Asia-Pacific region more broadly, and the continuing orientation to Britain and Europe as centres of the modern world, much of this outward gaze includes Australia’s near periphery in the South Pacific. In another article by Margaret Preston, from October 1928, she presents the New Hebrides [Vanuatu] and New Caledonia to readers as travel destinations within easy reach: New Caledonia being only four days’ steam travel from Sydney, and ‘the only place of quick access to Australians that has a foreign tongue as its national speech’. Again, Preston’s emphasis is on ‘native’ customs and authenticity, as she describes an ‘exhibition of native dancing and singing’ from ‘the Loyalty Island boys’, and local art practices such as wood carving. In the same issue several pages on, readers are treated to a photograph of an artefact Preston herself saw worthy of collection during this trip – an image she calls ‘a remarkable photographic study of a figure of simplified design, carved in wood with a knife and piece of glass by a Kanaka convict in Noumea’. Here, as in other issues, The Home draws on modern art – in particular modernist photography – to frame its construction of ‘historic’ and ‘native’ places, emphasising the juxtaposition between modernity and tradition through the object of its photography and through the artistic form. What is striking in such travelogues, where indigenous cultures of the Pacific are presented in exotic and romanticised ways, is that The Home never featured and rarely even mentioned Australia’s own Aboriginal and Torres Strait people and cultures, unlike magazines like Walkabout, for example, of the same period.33 Throughout the 1930s, the world continued to be represented in The Home’s pages, yet in different ways. In the second decade of the interwar period, more pages were dedicated to society notes and photographs at the expense of regular longer articles on architecture, design, or travel (although these topics continued to be a focus of the magazine). It is noticeable that articles and longer features on places beyond Australia were now almost exclusively about places in Britain and Europe, while the rest of the world, and especially Asia and the Pacific, were brought to readers’ attention through advertisements for cruises and shipping companies, and through the extensive society

 Seeing the World and One’s Place Within It 169 photographs and gossip notes of well-to-do travellers. While in the 1920s, the locations of shipping adverts often matched the magazine’s travelogues, now the destinations of advertised and actual travel extended and complemented the imaginary geographies of non-fiction articles. Travel writing in the 1930s featured fashion in Paris, theatre and society news from the magazine’s ‘London correspondent’ J. H. Cochran, and increasingly looked to the United States, showcasing interior design in New York or film news from Hollywood.34 In contrast, advertisements for sea travel tended to highlight England and Europe, as well as stops along the way, but also continued to praise travel across the Asia-Pacific as glamorous and instructive leisure, for instance to ‘see Java . . . The Garden of the East’ with Burns, Philp & Co., or embark on ‘Pleasure Cruises’ across the near Pacific with P & O, or one could go one better, and cover it all ‘From the seven hills of San Francisco to the seven million people of New York – Across America to England’ via Matson Line, a tour that took in North America en route to the imperial motherland, sometimes referred to as ‘Home, Plus Everything’.35 Reinforcing this Pacific gaze were photo sections of actual travellers, variously entitled ‘Orient Photographs’, ‘Orient Arrivals and Departures’, or ‘Eastern Travellers.’36 Significantly, by the mid-to-late 1930s, articles in The Home about places in Australia began to feature more prominently than those about travel destinations elsewhere, with recommendations about skiing in Victoria, a long-running series on ‘Australian pioneer families’ (beginning in January 1930), descriptions of Australia’s tropical north, and frequent articles showcasing Australia’s urban centres being representative examples.37 As suggested by other scholars in relation to literary culture in this period, a sense of solidifying ‘cultural nationalism’ can be observed in the magazine, even if this sentiment continued to include an international outlook.38

Imagined geographies and international affairs in MAN With its target readership of urban white-collar men less likely to travel than some of the upper-middle-class female readers of The Home, and where social aspiration was perhaps less intimately connected to notions of travel, MAN brought the world to its readers through its extensive section on international affairs. While such a feature might seem surprising in a magazine that was known for its light-hearted and often sexualised cartoons, the international affairs section in MAN presented informed and extensive commentary on geopolitics with a truly global focus. MAN understood a key segment of its readership to be returned servicemen whose understanding of the world had been broadened through overseas war service,39 and as such it was no coincidence that the author of this section was a highly decorated ex-serviceman and broadcaster, J. M. Prentice, whose military credentials were always listed under his name, noting he had been awarded the Belgian Croix de Guerre and appointed to the Ordre de la Couronne. In this way, the image of what Richard White has identified as ‘a sophisticated, modern and urbanized Australian male’ is secured through expanding readers’ acquaintance with world affairs.40

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Unsurprisingly, given MAN’s 1936 launch date, many of the topics covered in its International Affairs section concern Europe as the arena of serious geopolitical matters, reflecting the rise of Fascism and Nazism in Italy and Germany; and discuss how events in Europe are tied to the politics of countries in Asia – China and Japan, in particular. In March 1937, for example, the International Affairs section discusses the Civil War in Spain, Britain’s just-announced plans to spend the enormous sum of 400 million pounds in defence over the next five year (‘because Great Britain is convinced that war in Europe, and possibly elsewhere, is much nearer at hand than the public has been allowed to believe’), a scathing critique of politics in Germany, a report on the Pan-American conference in Buenos Aires, and a long comparison of Trotsky and Stalin.41 A subsequent issue in the same year again foresees imminent war in Europe, decrying Nazism and Fascism, and reports on events and escalating political situations in the Balkans, Turkey, China, France and Russia. In an insightful reflection on the purpose and nature of the ‘International Affairs’ section, its writer J. M. Prentice reasons that ‘there has been an increasing recognition given to the fact that no nation lives onto itself; transport and intercommunication have been speeded up to such an extent that Time and Space decease daily.’ Yet, as he also notes, ‘only by attempting to sort out the national tendencies are we able to compose the jig-saw puzzle that is the world to-day.’42 The idea that readers would be offered an opportunity to get a sense of their own, and Australia’s, place in the world through reading about international affairs was made explicit; crucial to the practice of identity formation and understanding one’s place in the world was also a notion of how ‘the world’ perceived Australia. In early 1939, MAN ran a series of original and exclusive essays by Winston Churchill (claiming ‘world original copyright’ for each of them). Churchill’s articles, presented as exclusive ‘scoops’, discussed British and US naval strategies vis-à-vis Japan’s growing naval presence in the Pacific, and opined on the question of world population and population distribution, particularly in relation to imperial claims by various global powers including Britain and the significance of migration to and from the Dominions.43 The editors of MAN were keen to stress that the views expressed were those of Churchill, not of the magazine, but they also explained that understanding ‘the place Australia occupies in the mind of the outside world’, and ‘the impression it has made’ as well as ‘what is expected of it’ are ‘important to Australia to-day, as she faces her dual task of being at the same time a well-founded nation and a strong unit of Empire.’44 While political news about Europe dominated the international affairs section, especially so after 1939, the Asia-Pacific region featured heavily throughout the rest of the magazine, especially in its ‘Australasiana’ section edited by Ion Idriess; this other content highlights that, as in The Home, this Asian-Pacific region had particular significance. On the one hand, the Pacific was explicitly portrayed as an area of influence and economic opportunity for Australia, the Pacific Islands in particular; and also of military threat, in the case of Japan.45 On the other hand, besides informing readers of political is or economic opportunities, MAN portrayed the area as a space for leisure and pleasure. For instance, in a three-page feature in 1939, Gordon Thomas, editor of the Rabaul Times, stresses the ‘importance of New Guinea as one of Australia’s first lines of defence, and a field for tropical commercial expansion.’46 Under Australian

 Seeing the World and One’s Place Within It 171 mandate since 1920, the former German colony offered opportunities for economic development and exploitation, whether in the form of plantations of ‘tropical products’, especially spices, tea, coffee and cotton, and other products currently imported to Australia, or through the even more lucrative mining of gold, which had recently been discovered. Equally significant, Thomas emphasises New Guinea as strategically vital for defending Australia in the north, given its close geographical proximity. For these reasons, the article concludes, it is ‘essential that Australia should hold to, and enforce, her claims upon that territory in any possible way.’47 If The Home constructed the Southeast and East Asia, as well as the Pacific Islands, as a cultural resource, focusing on traditions and artefacts that would promote an ethnographic modernist art, MAN projected fantasies of male adventure and leisure onto the region, portraying the area as ‘an Adventure Zone for white men’.48 This portrait of Oceania as a penetrable pleasure zone reinforced an older image of white, muscular masculinity described by Robert Dixon in Writing the Colonial Adventure.49 In MAN, readers were invited to imagine themselves as the kind of sportsman who might enjoy a spot of hiking in exotic destinations, or alpine climbing, game fishing or hunting in New Zealand.50 Similarly, exploration narratives set in Melanesia further served the magazine’s construction of modern, urban masculinity at home by allowing readers a fantasy space, just beyond the shores of Australia, populated by ‘wanderers on the new romantic frontiers of the South Seas and New Guinea’.51 The explorer Jack Hides, ‘New Guinea explorer’, is a favourite of MAN’s ‘Australasiana’ section, switching with ease between articles on Melanesia or the Torres Strait, the Australian outback and New Zealand, applying the genre of frontier romance and exploration in each instance. Such features constructed the region as a zone of wish-fulfilment where men could act out a fantasy of masculinity against a backdrop where, they imagined, frontier exploration and conquest still existed in the modern world.

Conclusion The Home and MAN offered their readers gendered geographical imaginaries. The Home offered its lady reader an illusion of being in charge of her own destiny, as an independent woman partaking of the offerings of the primitive world as an art object, as in Margaret Preston’s articles; MAN provided geopolitical scoops from Winston Churchill and fantasies of libidinal pleasure zones in Southeast Asia or the Pacific. In The Home, knowledge about the world – particularly about Europe, Britain and also the Asia-Pacific – was conveyed in the numerous travel articles and other non-fiction writing in the 1920s. By the 1930s this had partly changed, so that exotic and foreign destinations were now mostly visible in the advertisements for liners and in the gossip notes and society photos of upper-class women and their leisure exploits. Still, the notion of travel and of worldliness remained tied to social aspiration and attainment, and contributed to the formation of modern Australian female subjectivity. In a world in which women were making gains in the workplace and assumptions about gender norms were being challenged, particularly in Europe, while Australia’s place in the neighbouring Asia-Pacific region also appeared unstable or under threat, MAN

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reimagined this territory as a fantasy playground for the modern male reader, where masculine tension or anxieties could be resolved. Despite their differences in gendered address, what is visible in both Australian magazines is their attempt to combine the global, the national and the regional in their pages, and these aspects, rather than being contradictory, reinforced each other. By learning more about the world – whether through travel writing or articles on international affairs – readers were able to develop a sense of their own place in this world, and of Australia as a nation; to gain an international outlook and develop a sense of national identity. Significantly, the ‘global’ was, in The Home and MAN, an aspirational ideal, yet popular and mainstream print products were always also tinged with imperial sentiment. Empire and ties to the British imperial metropole suffused their pages, in reportage on political realities, in articles on theatre and art in Britain, and, more broadly, in the stress on cultural commonalities. Imperial sentiment, moreover, became increasingly apparent in the coverage of places in the near Pacific, where Australia saw itself as an imperial power, and where readers were invited to imagine themselves as culturally ‘superior’ in comparison to other Pacific cultures: Australia, in this ideal, would constitute the imperial centre of its Pacific world. In this way, in Australian magazines, imperial cultural ties and understandings of the reader’s implied position within imperial hierarchies and relationships coloured what it meant to be modern, and informed a sense of nationhood. In interwar Australia, this tier of periodical print culture – the ‘quality’ culture and leisure magazines – contributed significantly to notions of what it meant to be Australian, and to conceptions of the interconnectedness of the modern world. Nowhere in these magazines was Australia constructed as a colonial outpost; in fact, Australians were represented as being at home in the world, and taking their place as modern, global citizens alongside their most sophisticated cosmopolitan counterparts. As glossy aspirational monthly magazines, The Home and MAN brought the world to their readers in the content of their pages, and in their style of publication. Travelogues about far-away places, fashion or theatre notes from the centres of high culture, reports on international current affairs, advertisements for island cruises and shipping lines, and gossip notes and society photographs of artists, writers, travellers and the social elite, constructed international visions for readers, who could imaginatively participate in such global cultures of travel and mobility. In addition, both magazines represented Australian versions of similar publications elsewhere, and participated in a global print culture of modern, illustrated periodicals, that offered their readers a slice of consumerism, sophistication and fashionable aspiration.

Notes 1 Federation occurred in 1901, drawing the six British colonies of the Australian continent together to become the Commonwealth of Australia. 2 David Carter, ‘The Conditions of Fame: Literary Celebrity in Australia Between the Wars’, Journal of Modern Literature 39, no. 1 (2015): 170–87, 171. 3 Ibid., 180.

 Seeing the World and One’s Place Within It 173 4 Victoria Kuttainen, ‘Illustrating Mobility: Networks of Visual Print Culture and the Periodical Contexts of Modern Australian Writing’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 17, no. 2 (2017): 1–16, 7. 5 For an extended version of this argument, see Victoria Kuttainen, Susann Liebich, and Sarah Galletly, The Transported Imagination: Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity (Amherst and New York: Cambria, 2018). 6 In an advertisement headed ‘Why You Should be a Permanent Subscriber to The Home’ in May 1928, the magazine openly advertised that it put an Australian signature on cosmopolitanism, boasting that the periodical was ‘Australian without being Orstrilyan’. It also tied its remit to tastefully aspirational consumer culture: ‘Its editorial staff takes pride in presenting to you the exclusive things in life in an exclusive way’. Most significantly, it noted that ‘[t]he beautiful illustrations’ and ‘high standard of the text’ bear ‘witness to the fact that the Island Continent is forging ahead . . . Home is like a cross between Vogue and the Saturday Evening Post, but with an individuality of its own’, The Home, May 1938, 12a. On Vanity Fair and similar magazines, see Faye Hammill and Karen Leick, ‘Modernism and the Quality Magazines: Vanity Fair (1914–36); American Mercury (1924–81); New Yorker (1925–); Esquire (1933–)’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 176–96. 7 The Home, January 1926, 13. 8 Nancy Underhill, Making Australian Art, 1916–49: Sydney Ure Smith, Patron and Publisher (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991), 200. 9 John Docker, ‘Feminism, Modernism, and Orientalism in The Home in the 1920s’, in Journalism: Print, Politics and Popular Culture, ed. Ann Curthoys and Julianne Schultz (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999), 117–30, 118. 10 The Home, July 1926, 16–17. 11 The Home, January 1933, 40, 61. 12 The Home, May 1933, 42, 65. 13 The Home, December 1936, 46, 47, 72. 14 These artists, as Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum has noted, contributed such excellence in interwar Australian commercial design that ‘early ‘Home’ magazine covers are still considered the epitome design publishing excellence in Australia today’ (The Home Magazine with Artwork by Adrian Feint 2021, Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences, https://ma​.as​/158923 (accessed 4 April 2022)). 15 Ann Ardis, ‘Towards a Theory of Periodical Studies’, in “What is a Journal? Toward a Theory of Periodical Studies Roundtable”. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association, Boston, 3–6 January 2013, 1, https://seeeps​ .princeton​.edu​/wp​-content​/uploads​/sites​/243​/2015​/03​/mla2013​_ardis​.pdf. 16 George Patterson, advertising manager of The Home, qtd. in Mary Mackay, ‘Almost Dancing: Thea Proctor and the Modern Woman’, in Wallflowers and Witches: Women and Culture in Australia 1910–40, ed. Maryanne Dever (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1991), 26–38, 31. 17 Richard White, ‘The Importance of Being Man’, in Australian Popular Culture, ed. Peter Spearritt and David Walker (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1979), 145–68, 147. 18 See Nicole Moore, The Censor’s Library: Uncovering the Lost History of Australia’s Banned Books (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2012); see also ‘Surrealism to Pulp: The Limits of the Literary and Australian Customs’, in Censorship and the Limits

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of the Literary: A Global View, ed. Nicole Moore (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015); and ‘Banned in Australia: Federal Book Censorship, 1900–1973’, in AustLit (St. Lucia: The University of Queensland, 2002), https://www​.austlit​.edu​.au​/austlit​/page​ /5960610. See Faye Hammill and Karen Leick, ‘Modernism and the Quality Magazines’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 2: North America, 1894–1960, edited by P. Brooker and A. Thacker, 176–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012; and George H. Douglas, The Smart Magazines: 50 Years of Literary Revelry and High Jinks at Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Life, Esquire, and The Smart Set (Hamden: Archon Books, 1991). Greg Ray, ‘K. G. Murray’, in A Companion to the Australian Media, ed. Bridget Griffen-Foley (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2014), 230–1, 253. Victoria Kuttainen, ‘A Lost Australian Story: Man in the 1930s’, LINQ 36, no. 1 (2009): 161–80. The Home, October 1926, 92. Ibid., 31. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 92. Ibid. See for example, ‘The Adelaide Hills’, in The Home, September 1920, 48. See for example, ‘Glimpses of Some Bush Bungalows’, in The Home, September 1920, 38–9, 41. See as just two of many examples ‘The Chandler Six’ Which Advertises LongDistances Trips the Automobile Can Endure, Including “Sydney to Brisbane”’, The Home, September 1920, 71 or the Dodge Brothers’, ‘Touring Car’, The Home, October 1924, 2. The Home, September 1920, 8, 42. Maskee, ‘Round the World in Eighty Ways’, The Home, October 1925, 64. Mitchell Rolls, ‘Reading Walkabout in the 1930s’, Australian Studies 2 (2010): 1–16; Mitchell Rolls and Anna Johnston, Travelling Home, Walkabout Magazine and MidTwentieth-Century Australia (London: Anthem Press, 2016). See, for instance The Home, November 1937, 25 and The Home, February 1938, 21. Examples are The Home, February 1938, 1; July 1934, back cover; October 1935, 5; October 1935, 14. See for instance, The Home, October 1932, 58; January 1936. See J. McShamus, ‘Ski Australia First’, The Home, October 1931, 40; ‘Melbourne. City of Celebrations’, The Home, October 1934, 26–7; Freda Barrimore, ‘Let’s Buy a Queensland Tropic Isle’, The Home, January 1933, 31–3, 54–5; and A. J. Brown, ‘The Sydney Circular Quay Railway’, The Home, June 1936, 52–4. Margaret Preston’s 3-page illustrated ‘Nothing but the East’, The Home, January 1935, 42–3, 78, detailing her journey through modern-day northern Vietnam and the Chinese province of Yunnan, and her also illustrated article on ‘Peiping and the Great Wall’, February 1935, 28–9, 75 stand out as exceptions. Examples include the ‘Australian Capital Cities Number’ in October 1937, or travel articles like ‘The Bush Walk’, The Home, January 1935, 36, 37; 42. A similar argument about literature in this period expressing both sentiments of cultural nationalism and internationalism is made by Melissa Cooper, ‘“A Masterpiece of Camouflage”: Modernism and Interwar Australia’, Modernist Cultures 15, no. 3 (2020): 316–40.

 Seeing the World and One’s Place Within It 175 39 Richard White, ‘The Soldier as Tourist: The Australian Experience of the Great War’, War & Society 5, no. 1 (1987): 63–77. 40 White, ‘The Importance of Being Man’, 149. 41 MAN, February 1937, 9–20, 10. 42 MAN, September 1937, 9. 43 ‘Challenge in the Pacific’, MAN, January 1939, 23–4; ‘Peopling the Wide, Open Spaces’, MAN, March 1939, 23–4 and April 1939, 23–4. Further articles by Winston Churchill published that year were ‘The Future of Invention’, MAN, May 1939, 35; and ‘By the People for the People’, MAN, June 1939, 60–1. 44 Editorial note, MAN, March 1939, 24. 45 For context see Steven Roger Fischer, A History of the Pacific Islands (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 175–86; Stuart Ward, ‘Security: Defending Australia’s Empire’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire. Australia’s Empire, ed. Deryck M. Schreuder and Stuart Ward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 232–58, 242–8. 46 Gordon Thomas, ‘Don’t Give New Guinea Back!’, MAN, April 1939, 19. 47 Thomas, ‘Don’t Give New Guinea Back!’, 21. 48 Alison Broinowski makes this point about Asia, but it is equally applicable to the Pacific. Alison Broinowski, The Yellow Lady: Austrian Impressions of Asia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992), 38. 49 Robert Dixon, Writing the Colonial Adventure. Race, Gender and Nation in AngloAustralian Popular Fiction, 1875–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 50 Allan Brennan, ‘Where Heights and Heavens Meet’, MAN, July 1938, 92–3; ‘Angles of River-Angling’, MAN, September 1938, 92; ‘Wapiti-Hunt’, MAN, February 1939, 92–3. 51 White, ‘The Importance of Being Man’, 147.

10

To be or Not to be Modern The Paradox of Modernity in the French-Canadian Magazine La Revue moderne During the 1930s Adrien Rannaud

In his essay ‘La modernité au Québec’, Yvan Lamonde points out that modernity is a key-word to understand the Quebecois public field and media culture during the Great Depression. Based on a thorough analysis he writes that in the 1930s, ‘Quebec faces a choice: joining or refusing modernity’.1 In fact, this time period constitutes a combination of social and cultural changes linked to the economic crash and the renewal of nationalist discourses; it is also a key moment for the emergence of a field of mass production, and of new ways of consuming and appreciating cultural practices, in Quebec as in the rest of Canada. Notably, the development of new technologies and mediatised forms accelerated the circulation of information. It also reconfigured the range and access to entertainment, especially to women’s audiences which had been growing since the turn of the century. In the meantime, we can observe the rising of a middlebrow culture, defined by central ideas such as self-improvement, compromise and sophistication, but also by a strong relationship with the Quebecois identity. As Faye Hammill and Michelle Smith argue in Magazines, Travel and Middlebrow Culture: ‘in a Canadian context, “middlebrow” takes on a particular resonance through its entanglement with cultural nationalism, and with the debates over modernism and cosmopolitanism in the middle decades on the twentieth century’.2 In the specific context of the Francophone province of Quebec, this relationship between middlebrow culture and nationalism is strongly reinforced, based on the regeneration of Catholic and nationalist prescriptions within the province. In that perspective, the influx of American cultural products and imaginaries and their modernist signification represented a threat that had to be countered. In the 1930s, Canadian magazines played a key role in navigating between new social and cultural practices and the traditionalist claims of conservative and Catholic institutions and networks. Present in large numbers since the ‘roaring twenties’ in Canada, they constituted for a certain intelligentsia in Quebec primary evidence of an immoral, modern and American threat.3 At the same time, magazines reflected middlebrow desires for sophistication, leisure and learning through literature, columns

 To be or Not to be Modern 177 and features. If some writers and journalists saw the magazine as a potential medium to progress their professional careers and become famous among a substantial female and middle-class readership, others pursued a more high-minded agenda of bringing a moral and political respectability to this kind of periodical. One of them, Jules-Ernest Larivière, took the role of literary director of Mon Magazine (1926–32), to promote French-Canadian identity and more conventional religious and social values. In a 1930 writing contest for college students, he invited readers to contribute to a national movement by submitting short stories on patriotic and moral topics. Associated with Americanness in the collective imagination, the magazine was thus reconfigured as a strategic tool for the promotion of nationalism and traditionalism. In this essay based on my extensive research on the history of magazines in the first half of the twentieth century,4 I focus on a mainstream monthly periodical of the time, titled La Revue moderne (1919–60). Created in 1919, this title, I will argue, attempted to shape a complex modernity during the 1930s, by circulating new ideas on consumerism and what we call middlebrow culture, but also by criticising social progress and renewing traditional ideologies. La Revue moderne was both significant and unique in its negotiation of a moderate place in the Quebecois media field in the 1930s, as we will see in a brief presentation of the magazine. The essay then focuses on two series of texts and images: first, the construction of ‘La Maison moderne’, a project from 1936 in which the magazine sought to promote economic recovery; second, the ‘Courrier du mois’ column, authored by Marjolaine, which ran from 1929 to 1938.

La Revue moderne: a short history La Revue moderne was launched in 1919 by one of the first and most known female journalists of her time, Madeleine (Anne-Marie Gleason Huguenin). In the 1900s and 1910s, she was the editor of the women’s page ‘Le Royaume des femmes’ for the daily newspaper La Patrie. Following the end of the First World War, Madeleine left La Patrie, with the stated intention of supporting and promoting French-Canadian intellectual, literary and artistic life. La Revue moderne was created to achieve this goal: Madeleine, in the first issue, described her ideal of a periodical which could play both a channelling role between the Quebecois intelligentsia and the audience, and represent a metaphoric salon for women’s readership. In the editorial intitled ‘S’unir pour grandir’ (‘Unite to grow’), she invited readers to welcome La Revue moderne as an instrument for national peace and cultural awakening: ‘La Revue moderne will successfully confirm the value of our poets and prose writers . . . It has to replace the extravagant magazines in our homes, which teach bad taste and distort our women’s and girls’ mentality’.5 In the same issue, Madeleine introduced the women’s page, ‘Femina’, as follows: For several years, I have been dreaming of a small and intimate “Salon” where I would offer the opportunity to share our ideas, our desires, our ambitions, our dreams too. . . . Today, I give you this space made of intimacy and trust, and I am

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sure you will join me, comprehensive and sincere as you are, to spend recreation and relaxation time together.6

Madeleine followed the example of Parisian magazines like La Vie Heureuse and Femina,7 navigating between her intellectual persona – which was, at that time, quite exceptional for a woman in Quebec – and the need to address women’s cultural interests. However, after a few controversies during which the periodical played the role of intellectual magazine, especially about French language and literature in Canada,8 La Revue moderne became more like other women’s magazines of the 1920s. More precisely, fashion coverage, travel articles and advertising intentionally addressed a middle-class female audience, whilst Madeleine eventually targeted more explicitly a female readership in her own chronicles and editorials. After several disputes within the editorial board, resulting in Madeleine’s definitive departure from the magazine, the historian and intellectual Jean Bruchési took over the management of La Revue moderne in 1930. Bruchési was more assertive than Madeleine: he denounced both American journalistic productions and the collective indifference of French-Canadian intellectuals towards the idea of a local periodical. Literature was at the heart of his preoccupations, but, because of the Depression, it was above all the national effort that concerned the young editor-in-chief. He writes in 1930: ‘We have many causes to support, many causes to defend: the cause of art, the cause of literature, the cause of our economic expansion, and the cause of solidarity, which is more essential than ever if we want French Canadians to survive.’9 Bruchési based his leadership on the principle of this ‘survival’, and militated in favour of francisation; that is, the maintenance and expansion of French culture and language in North America. Under his direction and that of subsequent editorial teams (Bruchési left the magazine in 1935), the 1930s Revue moderne tended to become an ‘instrument of francisation’, as its editor-in-chief said. However, this project could not overcome the influence of ‘American magazines’ that proliferated in French-speaking Canada and established the rules of a hegemonic and commercial media. While half of the articles, posts and columns in Revue moderne were written by a proudly nationalist French-Canadian editorial team, the other half – mainly addressed to women – were taken from North American periodicals. This includes the American Delineator, from which La Revue moderne took Celia Caroline Cole’s columns and several articles on decoration, cooking and fashion. François Ricard describes the Revue as ‘two magazines in one’: one intellectual and politically committed, the other oriented towards female consumers.10 This approach was also, as Hammill and Smith describe, a typically middlebrow ethos during the 1930s.11 At the centre of this ethos, a certain idea of modernity was being played out in the magazine. The title of the periodical already reflects this editorial and ideological imperative, but what does modernity mean in Quebec? And how could a magazine be a flagship of national modernity? The two short case studies that follow capture some of the complexity and ambiguity of La Revue moderne’s modern ideals. Before moving on to the analysis, a word about the magazine design and its insertion into Francophone Canada culture. Hammill and Smith are right to say that La Revue moderne ‘exhibits both marked shifts and strong continuities over the

 To be or Not to be Modern 179 period of its publication, from November 1919 until June 1960’.12 More specifically, in the 1930s, La Revue moderne was characterised by an important homogeneity at the level of its design and its circulation, due to the stability of the management team, but also to a historical context which saw Quebecois magazines entering into a phase of sustainability and globalisation. While many magazines disappeared under the effect of the economic crisis, especially between 1931 and 1933 which constitute the low point of the recession in Quebec, a few of them managed to survive and adapt to the radical changes in magazine culture. They adopted a more regular organisation of their size (both La Revue moderne and La Revue Populaire, its closest competitor, adopted a 10- x 14-inch format) and of their content, consequently aligning themselves with American and Anglophone Canadian magazines. The development of new media, including sound film and radio, played a pivotal role in the rise of middlebrow illustrated periodicals. For instance, in 1935 and 1936, La Revue moderne appears to have been the first magazine to hire a journalist, Louise Gilbert-Sauvage, to cover Hollywood news and celebrity culture on the US west coast – a move that exemplifies the tension, in the magazine, between the fear of ‘Americanisation’ and the interest in new cultural forms.13 The concession to Hollywood allowed a former intellectual magazine like La Revue moderne to reach a wider audience, as monthly circulation figures show. In 1933, monthly circulation was listed as 13,800; by the end of the decade, this number had more than doubled, rising to 36,400 in 1939 (Figure 10.1). The reading that follows, of ‘La Maison moderne’ and of Marjolaine’s antimodern rhetoric, will allow us to explore how the magazine, while pursuing both ideological and commercial goals, took part in

Figure 10.1  La Revue moderne, January 1934, front cover.

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the creation of a cultural national middlebrow space while maintaining its legitimacy and popularity in the periodical marketplace.

La Maison moderne: a suburban modernity In the September 1936 issue, La Revue moderne announced the arrival of ‘La Maison moderne’ (the Modern House). Canada’s development of new model housing reflects similar initiatives in the UK and America: London’s Ideal Home exhibitions, for example, began in 1908. The initiative was a concrete response to the government’s New Housing Policy, inaugurated, in 1935, by the Canadian Prime Minister, Richard B. Bennett. The Dominion Housing Act was passed to finance the construction of nearly five thousand units on the basis of loans totalling $20 million. The Canadian government sought to guarantee access to housing for the middle classes and, in that way, to revitalise the national economy. In addition, and in order to promote its new policy, the government organised a competition among architects. The intense attention La Revue moderne paid to the Dominion Housing Act distinguishes it from other French-Canadian periodicals. In 1936, the magazine included several articles enthusiastically discussing the federal policy. In the meantime, the new administrator, Louis-H. Duclos, hired the architect Henri-Sicotte Labelle to imagine what could be the perfect house in Montreal. Labelle provided two plans with two different styles: the ultramodern house, and the modernised traditional house. A referendum allowed readers to choose their preferred style. Unsurprisingly – we will see below that the editorial board suggested this decision ahead of the voting time period – the modernised traditional house won the vote, and construction began in the summer of 1936. During this time, La Revue moderne generated public interest, by publishing pictures of the construction site and by organising an architecture competition for children. In September 1936, the magazine published a ‘commemorative issue’, in which there was a photograph of the house, information on the public ceremony for the opening, and a remarkable number of advertisements for all the companies that contributed to the success of the project (Figure 10.2). The house was located in the chic, upper-class Outremont district of Montreal. However, La Revue moderne focused on the middle-class’s purchasing power, framing a narrative in which modernity, nationalism and middlebrow culture were intertwined: the coverage of ‘La Maison moderne’ was part of a promotional discourse in which the figure of the reader played a decisive role. The magazine’s director, Duclos, made subscribers witnesses and actors in the construction of the house: ‘With the promise of once again pleasing its distinguished readers, La Revue moderne is carrying out another initiative this month by presenting a section of “La Maison moderne”’.14 We can recognise the deployment of a semantics of sophistication that tended to confer an exceptionality to the readers, especially women readers: as stated on the cover, the ‘commemorative issue’ was ‘dedicated to the gracious Canadian housewife’. It shows that, even in a mediatised Francophone and Catholic field like Quebec, women were still considered consumers-in-chiefs, as described by Helen DamonMoore in Magazines for the Millions.15 In broad terms, La Revue moderne sold the

 To be or Not to be Modern 181

Figure 10.2  Cover of La Revue moderne, May 1936, announcing the competition for ‘La Maison moderne’.

idea of suburbia, and the suburban middlebrow dream, through different forms of storytelling. Each article emphasised the ideal elements of the suburbs, such as the combination of simplicity and comfort, the appeal of a green environment located only a few steps from downtown Montreal, and the centrality of the housewife within this new twentieth-century utopia (Figure 10.3). Above all, the magazine’s 1936 journalism recurrently stressed the fundamental idea of modernity: ‘If we examine the plan itself, it is very nice, with a modern note’.16 ‘Why wouldn’t La Revue moderne contribute to this development by building an ultramodern home that will enshrine a new genre and style? . . . When visiting the house, you will not fail to admire the thousand and one wonders of the most modern home in Montreal and the suburbs’.17 ‘A house can’t be modern without electricity’.18

However, modernity did not have a fixed meaning within the magazine. On the one hand, it referred to the positive idea of progress. On the other hand, it was associated with an artistic excess seen as not appropriate to French Canada. When he presented the two plans of the Maison moderne, the magazine’s director, Duclos, was cautious, even critical of what he called ‘the unpleasant excess of outrageous modernism’.19 La Revue moderne sought to strike a balance between the innovative and the traditional,

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Figure 10.3  ‘The modern house and its builders’, La Revue moderne, September 1936.

or, to put it in the words of the magazine itself, between the ‘modernised’ and the ‘classical’.20 While the modern ideal was centred on visions of suburban life, it also had a nationalist dimension. In June 1936, the director of L’École du Meuble de Montréal, Jean-Marie Gauvreau, gave an interview in which he praised the project: ‘La Maison moderne’ would encourage French Canadians to buy furniture made with local wood, and would serve what he calls a ‘good Canadianism’.21 In short, acceptable modernity was the precondition for the reactivation of a Canadian ‘us’ that would, in turn, promote economic recovery.

‘Fighting the revolting modernist propaganda’: Marjolaine’s ‘Courrier du mois’ (1929–38) Let us leave the cover and opening pages of the magazine, to dive into the last pages. Since its launch in 1919, the magazine had been home to a popular column written, during the 1920s, by the director herself. As discussed earlier in this chapter, Madeleine desired to create a petit salon for her female readers, in which she would play a central role, giving advice and setting the tone for a mediated community of women. From 1919 to 1929, she was in charge of the ‘Courrier’ column: she answered readers’ letters on diverse subjects, from literature to politics, beauty tips and personal relationships.

 To be or Not to be Modern 183 In 1929, it was another female author who took charge of the ‘Courrier du mois’ column: Marjolaine (Justa Leclerc). At the turn of the decade, Marjolaine was a widely published journalist in Quebec, and a great provider of short stories for children and families. Following the departure of Madeleine from the newspaper La Patrie in 1919, she began editing the women’s page ‘Le Royaume des femmes’, continuing until 1925. In a text in which Madeleine later paid homage to her colleague, it says that ‘Marjolaine always lived in almost absolute solitude. She was not acquainted with society, which gave her more time for work, reading and study.’22 This judgement provides insight into Marjolaine’s stern style, which appears clearly in the ‘Courrier du mois’ column between 1929 and 1938. Like Madeleine, Marjolaine evokes an ideal of friendship between the columnist and her readers. But the salon appears more like a confessional, where everything is seen through the lens of Marjolaine’s Catholic faith. She frequently invites her readers to be inspired by the model of Santa Monica, the patron saint of Christian mothers. Moreover, she considers her correspondents’ misfortunes as what she calls ‘trials of the Good Lord’ that require trust in the ‘Divine Force’.23 This was a significant change in the ‘Courrier du mois’: if Madeleine was at the same time severe and funny, playful and benevolent with her correspondents, Marjolaine’s tone was resolutely serious. A similar shift appears in relation to modernity. While Madeleine promoted modernism in literature and art, Marjolaine was a standard-bearer of antimodernism. This ideological change reflected the influence of the director Jean Bruchési, whose editorship saw the magazine resist the valorisation of modernity throughout the 1930s. For her part, Marjolaine declared war on what she called the ‘modern genre’: To write beautiful and good things, to make people love life as precious, to help them become better people, to sow goodness, confidence, courage, love, is to fight against the odious modern propaganda that likes to disseminate all the evils of humanity, to point out all its defects, to say the least, to bring all the scandals to light, and to arouse evil by flattering the passions. What a pity!24

To this end, correspondents’ concerns became material for critiques of modernity. Marjolaine’s column valorised the family and the idea of a Quebec society based on respect for traditions: for her, modernity was the cause of disintegration of the family model. In 1934, she writes: ‘You have seen how modern influences distort minds and create an unfortunate mentality. When mothers are subjected to this and abandon themselves, it is the foundation of the home that crumbles, it is the sweet intimacy of the family that suffers.’25 Such a discursive and ideological refocusing tended to downplay other subjects that were at the heart of Madeleine’s column in the 1920s. On one hand, practical advice diminished during the 1930s; literary mentoring was also less of a feature than under the magazine’s founder. Far from encouraging women’s literary careers, Marjolaine suggested that her correspondents should consider writing as a ‘distraction’ that must not ‘steal’ from other duties. On the other hand, Marjolaine wrote to her correspondents about the beauty of time passing and the return of the seasons. This cyclical representation of time was not unusual: it can be found among other female authors of the time,26 including Marjolaine herself, and particularly in

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collections of short texts published in Quebec. In the ‘Courrier du mois’ column, the representation of the seasonal round described an ideal of permanence, in service of a traditionalist vision of French-Canadian society. Marjolaine’s answers to female readers, and ‘La Maison moderne’, are two sides of a coin showing the ambivalent status of modernity in Quebecois culture. Similar to other periodicals like La Revue Populaire (1908–63), Le Samedi (1889–1963) and Radiomonde (1939–85) in Quebec – titles which are still awaiting close attention from historians – and other Canadian magazines, La Revue moderne helped to negotiate the complexities of Canada’s emerging twentieth-century national identity. Middlebrow culture, with its continued emphasis on traditional femininity, constructed its ideals of acceptable modernity and nationhood via the medium of magazines.

Notes 1 Yvan Lamonde, La modernité au Québec, T. 1: 1929–1939 (Montréal, Québec: Fides, 2011), 11. All translations in this chapter are my own. 2 Faye Hammill and Michelle Smith, Magazines, Travel and Middlebrow Culture: Canadian Periodicals in English and French, 1925–1960 (Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 2015), 14. 3 See Adrien Rannaud, ‘Présences (anti)américaines, nationalisme et culture moyenne dans les magazines de l’entre-deux-guerres au Québec’, Belphégor. Littératures populaires et culture médiatique 19, no. 2 (2021), https://journals​.openedition​.org​/ belphegor​/4207. 4 This chapter takes up and condenses several of the analyses proposed in Adrien Rannaud, La Révolution du Magazine au Québec: Poétique Historique de La Revue moderne, 1919–1960 (Montréal, Québec: Nota bene, 2021). 5 Madeleine, ‘S’Unir pour Grandir’, La Revue moderne 1, no. 1 (November 1919): 9. 6 Madeleine, ‘Femina’, La Revue moderne 1, no. 1 (November 1919): 29. 7 On these two periodicals, see Rachel Mesch, Having It All in the Belle Époque: How French Women’s Magazines Invented the Modern Woman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 8 See Annette Hayward, La Querelle du Régionalisme au Québec (1904–1931). Vers l’Autonomisation de la Littérature Québécoise (Ottawa: Nordir, 2006). 9 Jean Bruchési, ‘Les 11 Ans de La Revue moderne’, La Revue moderne 12, no. 1 (November 1930): 5. 10 François Ricard, ‘La Revue moderne: Deux Revues en Une’, Littératures, no. 7 (1991): 77–84. 11 Hammill and Smith, Magazines, Travel and Middlebrow Culture. 12 Ibid., 98. For the authors’ discussion on page design and size, see 98–101. 13 Gilbert-Sauvage eventually joined La Revue Populaire, Le Film and Le Samedi in 1936, working for these three magazines until the early 1960s. 14 Louis-H. Duclos, ‘L’Actualité à travers le Monde’, La Revue moderne 17, no. 9 (July 1936): 5. 15 Helen Damon-Moore, Magazines for the Millions: Gender and Commerce in the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, 1880–1910 (Albany and New York: State University of New York Press, 1994).

 To be or Not to be Modern 185 16 Anonymous, ‘Influence Artistique dans l’Ameublement’, La Revue moderne 17, no. 8 (June 1936): 25. 17 Anonymous, ‘La Maison Moderne et ses Artisans’, La Revue moderne 17, no. 11 (September 1936): 21–2. 18 Anonymous, ‘L’Électricité Permet à la Maison Moderne d’Être Moderne . . .’, La Revue moderne 17, no. 11 (September 1936): 23. 19 Duclos, ‘L’Actualité à travers le Monde’, 5. 20 Deborah Sugg Ryan notices the same aspect in her research on British interwar suburban homes and consumers’ tastes: Deborah Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, 1918–1939: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). 21 Anonymous, ‘Influence Artistique dans l’Ameublement’, 25. 22 Madeleine, Portraits de femmes (Montréal, Québec: no editor, 1938), 188. My translation. 23 See for instance answers to ‘Rachel’ and ‘Confiante’ in the edition of November 1931 and March 1932. 24 Marjolaine, ‘Le Courrier du Mois’, La Revue moderne 16, no. 11 (September 1935): 47. 25 Marjolaine, ‘Le Courrier du Mois’, La Revue moderne 16, no. 1 (November 1934): 44. 26 See Adrien Rannaud, De l’Amour et de l’Audace : Femmes et Roman au Québec dans les Années 1930 (Montréal, Québec: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2018).

11

Magazine Digest, Canadian Invader? Jaleen Grove

Criticising the ‘invasion’ of Canada by United States periodicals in 1951, an influential Canadian government report (Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences, commonly known as the Massey Commission), declared that ‘The Canadian periodical cannot in its turn invade the American market’ because Canadian periodicals contained too much Canadian-specific subject matter for Americans to appreciate.1 The Commission leveraged this widely agreedupon conventional wisdom to argue for better protection and support of Canadian publishing and cultural industries. The cultural-nationalist attitude of the Commission’s authors was shared by the Magazine Publishers Association of Canada (MPAC), who argued Canadian publishers deserved tariffs and other protections because mass media promoted national unity.2 In practice, this meant promoting middle-class Anglocentric cultural norms, since the dominant culture of the MPAC agitators and the middle-class, English-speaking public was British-Canadian. Promoted as true Canadian experiences and values, these norms privileged the wealthier classes in whom advertisers were most interested, and diminished ethnic and racial minorities’ presence in mid-century mass-market magazines.3 The economic hardships of the Canadian media, the potential loss of cultural unity, and the shaping of a normative Canadian identity were asserted many times by industry and academia alike. Although this intellectual tradition’s vogue has now largely passed, its historical dominance may be why media historians overlooked one title in particular: Magazine Digest.4 It was, in the words of ex-employee Beatrice Fischer (née Shapiro) in interviews with the author, ‘the thinking man’s Reader’s Digest.’5 Started in Toronto in 1930 and ending in New York in the 1950s, its international content and targeting of an American audience contradicted protectionist and cultural-nationalist narratives. According to the Commission’s logic, it could not be truly Canadian because it had too much foreign content, making it an invader in Canada. The periodical contained unique translations and original journalism by Canadians, but this went unnoticed. Magazine historian Theodore Peterson incorrectly called it ‘a grab bag of miscellany’ from American sources;6 and Fraser Sutherland baselessly claimed that in the United States it became ‘an organ of several ultra-conservative groups’.7 Meanwhile, Library of Congress classified all digests as ‘Derivative Works’,

 Magazine Digest, Canadian Invader? 187 an inaccurate image Magazine Digest haplessly exacerbated by physically resembling Reader’s Digest (Figure 11.1). Its 1949 move to New York City, coupled with its lack of overtly patriotic Canadian content and its assumed unoriginality, would have confirmed cultural-nationalist suspicions that it had been essentially foreign all along.

Figure 11.1 Cover designs changed every few years, often copying Reader’s Digest. Collection of Robarts Library, University of Toronto. Photographs by the author.

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Figure 11.2  Masthead for vol. 32, no. 2, February 1946, showing editors and international offices. Author collection.

Regardless, its reach included politicians, who cited it at least 17 times in Canadian House of Commons debates; the Canadian military which distributed copies to troops;8 and The Toronto Daily Star which reprinted Magazine Digest content in a regular column for ten years. Furthermore, Magazine Digest accomplished the ‘impossible’: it invaded the United States. Legal counsel claimed in 1944 that 112,000 copies were printed per month (for comparison, leading Canadian general-interest magazine, Maclean’s, circulated 284,825 in 1945).9 But this figure, if true, probably only referred to Canada. From early on it sold outside of Canada, and soon five of every six Digests were sold in the United States, where it thrived for twenty years.10 US court records reveal that a distributor handled at least 223,609 issues in the mid-1930s; in 1945 The Jewish News referred to 300,000; and that same year an academic reported circulation of 1,250,000.11 By 1946 it was being distributed on every continent, with many foreign editors stationed abroad (Figure 11.2). While cultural nationalism helped to differentiate Canada from the United States and led to the establishment of institutions that have given Canadian arts and artists a measure of independence from corporate American interests, these accomplishments and associated discourses have distorted the perception of alternative propositions like that of Magazine Digest. In politics and in cultural criticism, where nationalists ignored or attacked continentalism (the intertwining of Canadians’ and Americans’ ethnic, business and cultural lives, and the belief that this unity strengthened Canada) and painted those with American ties as un-Canadian, the Canadian populace insisted upon growing those ties.12 Some

 Magazine Digest, Canadian Invader? 189 opined that inward-looking cultural nationalism would foment parochialism.13 Acknowledging a cosmopolitan-minded Canadian citizenry who regarded themselves as something more than narrowly conceived patriots allows Magazine Digest to be ‘Canadian’ in this alternative sense.

Publisher and editor Wilfully inscrutable, Magazine Digest did not print any editorial column, and its editorial position must now be inferred from its curation of content and the cultural milieu from which its publisher, Murray Simmons, and many staff members emerged. That milieu was Jewish, but according to Fischer, ‘it was not a Jewish magazine’. Rather, she described it as ‘intellectual’. Its subject matter was general, and it presented a Christian face (perhaps this is why historians of Jewish Canadian publishing likewise omit it). Nevertheless, the staff effectively ventriloquised Jewish perspectives through their editorial choices, as we shall see. It appears that, in response to the turbulent, highly anti-Semitic interwar period, one of Magazine Digest’s aims was to promote a safer society for all oppressed peoples, globally. A continentalist and transnational outlook was attractive to Simmons, and to Jewish employees and readers, because the rhetoric of nationalism in any country endangered Jews, while that of cultural nationalism sidelined Jewish experience. At that time, Canadian Jews were increasingly interested in Zionism, which also diminished the attraction of nationalism.14 All this, plus New York City’s status as a cultural lodestone for Toronto Jews,15 and Simmons’s own significant American ties (described below), meant he could unapologetically shrug off the cultural nationalism that cloaked mainstream Canadian periodicals. With Canadians in the 1920s already reading American magazines more than Canadian ones by a rate of eight to one, and embracing a joint popular culture,16 Simmons simply worked with what was plainly in practice. Pragmatically, there was also the financial necessity of tapping the enormous American market rather than the impossibly small Canadian one alone. Consequently, a presumed American reader was directly hailed in a regular humour section titled ‘Young America’, and given images of the American flag and Statue of Liberty on some covers. Courting Americans ensured the existence of the magazine for Canadians. Simmons, who in 1922 anglicised his original surname of Simonski, singlehandedly directed Magazine Digest and personally approved its content.17 Specifically, his unarticulated editorial direction was reflective of the interfaith activity and socialjustice stance of Reform Judaism. His relations had long been active in Canada’s first Reform Temple in Hamilton, Ontario and in Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple, which officially adopted American Reform methods when he was about thirty years old.18 The Reform movement’s American connections, Simmons’s maternal grandparents’ nineteenth-century emigration from New York, and his brother’s and sister’s moves to Philadelphia and back to New York City, respectively, rendered the border a point of connection and opportunity rather than one of division and difference for him. Census data reveals that teenaged Murray moved to Philadelphia for six years where a brother

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(Samuel, a printer) employed him as a salesman.19 In a radio broadcast, Simmons boasted: I’ve had printer’s ink in my blood all my life . . . By the time I was 16, I had some of the biggest advertising and printing accounts in Philadelphia . . . I went [back] to Toronto when I was 19 and organized a national woman’s magazine. The profits paid for a plant big enough to print this and several other magazines.20

The woman’s magazine was Everywoman’s World, ‘For the Canadian Woman who Thinks and Acts,’ which he and another brother (Isidore) launched in 1913. It achieved a circulation of 70,000 in its first year, and they imported a rotary press to increase volume and bring down production costs.21 By 1916 they were printing more than 130,000 copies and employing numerous women.22 In 1914 Everywoman’s World ran an article, ‘The Ascendancy of Womanhood’ by Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf of the largest Reform congregation in the United States, situated in Philadelphia (possibly Simmons attended it and knew him) – a surprising item considering the magazine aimed at a presumed Christian Canadian readership.23 It spoke of women’s emancipation in terms of social progress, compared the status of women in several cultures, and argued that the basis for women’s equality was given in the Old Testament and Jewish teachings. This may have influenced Simmons’s openness to female talent. Everywoman’s World, which ended in 1923, was a rehearsal for Magazine Digest in that it ran unabashedly feminist articles and employed female writers and editors. This magazine’s precarious status, as a standard slick illustrated title that was very much a vehicle for advertising, must have also informed Simmons’s decision to eschew advertising in Magazine Digest and finance it by subscription and news-stand sales instead, rather than cater to the whims of advertising clients and compete for them against other publishers.

Production and distribution In 1930 Simmons was editor of a publication of the B’nai Brith lodge, an organisation concerned with combatting antisemitism.24 That same year, he secured space in a building that also housed the Canadian offices of Oxford University Press; Doubleday, Doran and Gundy Limited; and Farrar and Rinehart.25 Despite the onset of the Depression, he launched Magazine Digest with a run of 1,500.26 It was well-timed, for people who could no longer afford multiple subscriptions but still wanted variety. From 1931 to 1935, he benefitted competition-wise from a new tariff on American magazines,27 while hard times provided a supply of cheap labour.28 Because the nearby University of Toronto had no official quota to keep out Jews, Simmons had his pick of excellent scholars.29 For instance, he gave Sidney Katz, who later became a well-known investigative journalist for Maclean’s, his first job upon graduation.30 Beatrice Fischer began her career at Magazine Digest circa 1942 as a junior editor at $12.50 a week. According to her, half of the workforce of about 25 was Jewish. They

 Magazine Digest, Canadian Invader? 191 maintained a rigorous, cooperative work ethic where ‘everybody did everything’, and the environment was argumentative yet playful. A surviving joke memo, for example, lists contents for a spoof titled Death-Digest that includes ‘Murder Your Mother and Relax’ from Fingerprint Weekly and ‘Blood – Better Than Cow’s Milk’ from Vampire’s Digest.31 That Simmons employed women in substantial roles was highly unusual, in that Jewish women were not then encouraged to pursue careers, and women in general were dissuaded from taking positions when so many men were unemployed.32 In the 1940s, his hiring may have also reflected men being away at war and the bottom line: Fischer, who considered Simmons very stingy, acerbically noted most women were told they were interns and paid poorly. Since it was one of the only places ‘smart girls’ could get jobs, however, ‘It didn’t matter how little we were paid because we were proud to be there,’ she said. Nevertheless, coming from the large periodical Saturday Night, feminist journalist Anne Fromer became Managing Editor despite being ‘expensive’, Fischer remembered, because ‘she persuaded Simmons to invest in her’.33 The 1930s and 1940s were the most oppressive years for Jews in Canada.34 Many fields, such as nursing, architecture, and engineering were closed to Jews, as were club memberships and real estate.35 Publishing was controlled by establishment AngloCanadians. A landmark study reported that in 1931, 0.08 percent of employed Toronto Jews were authors, editors, and journalists, versus 0.23 percent of ‘all-origin’ people working in those professions.36 An anti-Semitic employment policy existed at Maclean’s in the 1940s, and likely at other publishers too.37 Magazine Digest therefore provided an indispensable opportunity for those who could not otherwise enter literary and media professions. In 1933 Magazine Digest was handled by Mutual Magazine Distribution Inc., which was run by Martin Goodman and Louis Horace Silberkleit (who, like Simmons, were both also of Jewish descent), and financed by George R. Shade.38 These men also published and distributed comic books, pulp magazines and pornography, and were known for exploiting loopholes to protect assets.39 When Mutual went bankrupt, the hard-nosed Simmons demanded a premium in addition to monies owed, and fought a tough legal battle.40 Following this, Magazine Digest was handled by Fawcett Distributing Corporation, a handler of lowbrow periodicals with whom Simmons must have negotiated well since Magazine Digest kept its subscriptions model even though Fawcett discouraged the practice as a rule.41 It is unlikely any other middlebrow Canadian publisher could have aligned with the likes of Mutual, because of differences in nationality, class, religion, ethnicity and scruples. With these strange bedfellows Simmons gained a continental audience, while Mutual and Fawcett diversified their pulpy offerings with Simmons’s more respectable fare. Coupled with readerships gained by partnering with newspaper subscriptions,42 Simmons was freed from the need to run advertising. This assured his complete editorial and business control, something that hamstrung other Canadian publishers who had to compete with Americans for advertisers. Simmons did embrace aggressive marketing and promotional stunts, even co-producing a song-writing contest with NBC.43 After he ran an original article on

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women in media that included the NBC radio host Maggi McNellis, she had Simmons visit on her show.44 The relationship with NBC continued, with Magazine Digest giving an award to their non-partisan public service show ‘Our Foreign Policy’ in 1946.45 Also that year, an NBC producer in Toronto acquired world-wide rights to Magazine Digest content.46

Content Magazine Digest consistently addressed a white, middle-class American audience, and therefore to casual observers it appeared undifferentiated among mass magazines. But whilst the politically conservative Reader’s Digest surreptitiously planted stories to later reprint, so as to appear to be merely echoing common opinion rather than fomenting prejudice, Magazine Digest provided liberal fare and frank medical and ethics articles that got it banned in Ireland for indecency.47 Dozens of source magazines were combed: in one month Edith Fowke, just one of several ‘readers’, sleuthed out 137 articles for consideration by editors.48 Until 1940 the magazine ran an unrivalled amount of international material. Living up to its slogan, ‘The cream of the world’s best magazines and books’, European sources made up half the contents in the 1930s thanks to bilingual staff members (refugees or from immigrant families) with the requisite knowledge to select appropriate articles, the ability to correspond with the copyright holders in their respective languages, and the expertise to translate texts. International reportage gave Magazine Digest a unique journalistic purpose that was significant given critics felt Canadian newspapers lacked depth and variety due to monopoly ownership and overreliance on American news agency content.49 Twice a year, indices were published; in Vol. 29, No. 1, July 1944, the largest subject headings were ‘Biography’, ‘Democracy’, ‘Industry and Invention’, ‘International Affairs’, ‘Health’, ‘Medicine’, ‘Peace and Postwar’, ‘Political Science’, ‘Science’ and ‘Sociology’. Although at the onset of the war Magazine Digest had patriotically trumpeted English fortitude and superiority,50 in 1946 an American scholar recommended Magazine Digest to American high schools because it was: A digest which has [not] yielded to the temptation to skim the publishing world for substantiation of particular partisan viewpoints. Fresh, wholesome and cosmopolitan . . . with a sensitivity to the significance of news. . . . there is no predominance of either Canadian or British interests. . . . The tone is generally liberal, but it is a liberality which is analytical and discriminating.51

In the 1940s, staff writers and freelancers provided original articles too, probably because of the wartime difficulty of obtaining European material (which nearly disappeared from its pages). A few per issue became normal: Sidney Katz on the emerging state of Israel; Jack M. Stenbuck on the re-education of German POWs and so on.52 In 1946 someone scooped a telephone interview with Eva Perón of Argentina,

 Magazine Digest, Canadian Invader? 193 who did not speak English.53 Writers worked hard to compile unique essays from multiple well-vetted sources. Simmons laid out fourteen guidelines, including: 2. No verbiage of the original article must be used. 5. Other sources may be sought and quoted in support. 8. Inferences may be drawn by Magazine Digest writers . . . [they] may editorialize. 9. Articles . . . [may] thus come up with features that all other digests must miss because of their circumscribed and limited condensing technique . . . 11. . . . some biographical material about the author should be injected 54

News and think-pieces were never allowed to dominate, however. ‘Potpourri’, the jokes and human-interest section that Fischer edited, was a regular feature that kept the magazine fun.

Jewish voices Amid the plethora of subjects, interfaith understanding and social justice – tenets of American and Canadian Reform Judaism55 – constituted Magazine Digest’s core editorial mission. Rabbi Solomon Jacobs, whose student Simmons had been as a boy,56 promoted six key foci at Holy Blossom Temple: 1. The absolute equality of the Jewish religion with any other 2. The brotherhood of all men 3. Social justice 4. Help to suffering Jews overseas 5. Developing social services in Toronto 6. Opening the gates of Canada to immigrants57 The next rabbi, American immigrant Barnett R. Brickner, added a seventh point of supporting Zionism.58 Numerous Magazine Digest articles sustained each of these seven goals. Holy Blossom was powerful due to the prosperity of its congregation and its ability to speak to the Protestant establishment.59 Jacobs, Brickner and successor Rabbi Ferdinand Isserman, who came from Philadelphia, battled prejudice as visible spokesmen, sought interfaith understanding, and preached also to Christian congregations.60 In Isserman’s words, ‘The two religions are not rivals; rather they should be partners – partners in building God’s kingdom on earth. The first step to tolerance is mutual respect and understanding’.61 Isserman was succeeded by Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath of Chicago, who with the United Church minister Claris E. Silcox formed a Committee on Jewish-Gentile Relations,62 and the Canadian Conference of Christians and Jews (now renamed the Canadian Centre for Diversity) in 1947, to confront anti-Semitism. Interfaith, social justice, and Zionist efforts continued after 1943 under Rabbi Abraham Feinberg.63

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Figure 11.3  Uncredited colour advertisement depicting a generic middle-class Christian family as subscribers, December 1947. Author collection.

While not an organ of Holy Blossom, Magazine Digest delivered this messaging. Christmas was always acknowledged, and in 1947 a full-colour page advertising the magazine as a gift pictured a stereotypical North American family with Christmas tree (Figure 11.3). Essays by prominent Christian writers promoted universal values – the Pope asking for the races to be ‘brought into harmony’ for example.64 An excerpt of Sholem Asch’s The Nazarene depicted Jesus interceding in Nazi Germany, in the guise of a rabbi.65 Reports on Russian and German political developments, and articles of explicitly Jewish interest or discussing racial and ethnic prejudice, were common from 1930–50. Magazine Digest refrained, however, from making a special heading for Judaica in its biannual indices, instead having one for ‘Races’ (1938–46) that listed an average of about 14 articles per year (about the same as for ‘Women’), only some of which were Jewish-specific. Notably, there appeared testimonies of Holocaust survivors in 1938 and 1939, which was significant because media coverage of Nazi atrocities before 1942 was muted in both the mainstream and Jewish press, where the response of Canadian Jewish leaders has been adjudged markedly lacking.66 In 1945, additional explicit testimonials directly taken from ex-prisoners by Magazine Digest staff appeared (Figure 11.4).67 In a particularly daring move, in 1942 and 1943 Magazine Digest reprinted Nazi propaganda for the purpose of discrediting it and raising awareness. An unsigned editorial comment in a call-out panel pointed out the article’s flaws in logic and stated: ‘The article exemplifies the complete confusion existing today in the German mind,

 Magazine Digest, Canadian Invader? 195

Figure 11.4  First page of Holocaust survivor testimony gathered by Magazine Digest staff, vol. 30, no. 3, March 1945. Author collection.

faced as it is with the alliance of all powers opposing its poisonous philosophy. It is German propaganda pure and simple and should be read as such’ [italics in original].68 Murray Simmons claimed circulation in Nazi Germany was at one point 4,500 per month; if so, he was performing a remarkable service.69 Unfortunately, the Canadian government didn’t recognise Simmons’s efforts and prevented Magazine Digest

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from acquiring more propaganda when it prohibited Canadians’ acquisition of Nazi periodicals, without any exceptions for academic or journalistic purposes.70 Therefore, when Fischer mentioned she was taking a trip to New York, Simmons asked her to pick up specific European magazines without informing her that these were banned titles that she was effectively smuggling. When Holocaust refugee Oscar Cahén became art director in 1944, he gave Magazine Digest gently modernist cover art and interior cartoons. The September 1945 cover symbolically depicted the delivery of American food to European refugees (Plate 6), a reference to the Canadian Jewish Congress’ 1944–5 campaign to save the surviving Jews of Europe,71 as well as the work of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), on which the magazine had reported.72 Also complementing this effort was a hard-hitting graphic narrative illustrated by Cahén and written by ‘The Editors’, titled with the New Testament quote ‘Suffer Little Children’ to appeal to Christian readers. It unflinchingly depicted the rape, starvation, and other abuses afflicting Europe’s orphans and begged the reader to intervene (Figure 11.5).73 Magazine Digest’s most openly political effort, this amplified the lobbying of the Government of Canada by the CJC and UNRRA to support the admittance of ‘displaced persons’. But the government did not respond. Using the Christmas 1946 number as a Trojan horse, Simmons ran a pointed essay by his rabbi, Abraham Feinberg, near the back of the magazine.74 ‘Jew to Christian – A Heart to Heart Talk’ was no feel-good plea for brotherhood: ‘Perhaps you want me to be silent, since “aggressiveness” may merely arouse more hostility. Should a Jew shrink from speaking the truth because Christians might penalize him with anti-Semitism? . . . anti-Semitism is your problem. You yearn for the triumph of Christianity, don’t you?’ Feinberg jabbed. Reporting the loss of his kin in the Holocaust, he continued: I must remind you that my people could have been saved by “Christian” countries. Take Canada, for example. Refugee admissions to that Dominion from 1931 to 1941 were such a tiny trickle that the decade’s end saw a lower percentage of Jews there than at its beginning. The record of the United States, in proportion to its numbers, has not been better. During that period, 6,000,000 Jews perished . . . Hitler decreed this unparalleled slaughter – but with the German people’s collusion and with the American people’s knowledge.75

Feinberg then built a case for why Christians should support a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and advanced his goal to convey ‘an understanding, from within, of a Jew’s plight’, as he put it.76

Ignominious end In 1944 and 1945, competitors such as Reader’s Scope, Pageant, and This Month encroached on Magazine Digest’s market.77 Simmons was also caught flagrantly exceeding his wartime paper quota. He initially lied about it and was fined a hefty

 Magazine Digest, Canadian Invader? 197

Figure 11.5  Oscar Cahén and Editors, ‘Suffer the Children,’ vol. 30, no. 6, June 1945, 61–8. Author collection.

$10,000 as a deterrent to others.78 In August 1945, Simmons announced that the magazine would soon go to 192 pages and include a 32-page picture section in colour.79 The need to include a rotogravure section was, he determined, necessary for successfully competing against Reader’s Digest as well as new pictorial titles, but he was unable to secure rotogravure press time.80 Squibs in business law reportage

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indicate there was also an issue involving the Wartime Labour Relations regulators and the Magazine Employees Guild, at the same time as the Printers Guild Ltd. brought a case, but unfortunately the details of these have not been discovered.81 Then in 1948 Reader’s Digest began split-run production, increasing competition in Canada.82 In early 1949, Simmons abruptly announced he was moving the editorial office to New York, saying that the magazine was American in content and needed an American editorial board (despite his twenty-year success), although it would remain, he claimed, a Canadian company.83 The Foreign Exchange Control Board, however, alleged he had sneaked his assets over the border and was about to fire all Canadian staff except for one bookkeeper who would keep up the pretence of it being a Canadian company.84 In New York, Simmons poached Andrew Hecht from Reader’s Digest to be the new Executive Editor, and then sold out entirely by January 1950 to Archer St. John, a publisher of pulps and comics.85 St. John passed it to Robert W. Farrell (real name Isidore Katz), another comics publisher, by 1952.86 Soon Magazine Digest lost its sophisticated edge, with more titillating stories appearing. Few libraries hold issues after 1953, reflecting a drop in quality. It passed in 1954 to Allen B. Hardy and then George Shute was involved by 1955 – both men were yet more comics, pulps and pornography producers. Magazine Digest was renamed Picture Digest and given salacious covers.87 That ended in 1957 – the same year Simmons died in Toronto.88

Canadian rogue Having a cultural identity, as Murray Simmons and countless others did, that transcended the American border was an aspect of being Canadian as much as the more sanctified relationships with Britain and France. To be an ‘invader,’ the entity must originate from outside – but Jews and Magazine Digest were already inside both the United States and Canada. The magazine was therefore more of a rogue than an invader. By 1931, Jewish Canadians were a numerous minority comprising 7 percent of the population,89 so Jewish cultural input was important. But in the 1930s and 1940s, their voice had to be muted so that it would not put the magazine’s Jewish origins in the forefront. Accordingly, Feinberg’s polemic was buried in a bevy of diverting articles (‘I Saw Franco’s Officers Lead the New Republican Arm’, ‘After Divorce— What?’, ‘Vegetable Milk is Better Than Cow’s Milk’, and so on), ensuring it would not overwhelm Magazine Digest’s general palatability. Maintaining a low profile was in keeping with how the Jewish community of pre-war Toronto generally dealt with anti-Semitism, where it was felt that constant complaint or electing a Jew to office would merely backfire.90 It was better to allow others to speak instead, such as the Pope encouraging race harmony. Magazine Digest cultivated the idea of a better and more just society for a large section of immigrants who were shut out of fitting occupations and true citizenship, so that they could eventually unapologetically demand equal participation in cultural affairs. Ultimately, Magazine Digest’s standard mixture of light and serious fare laced

 Magazine Digest, Canadian Invader? 199 with Christian references and quotidian anecdotes made a space for journalists who happened to be Jewish or female to contribute to mass culture, where the periodical’s continentalism and transnationalism permitted them a scope of influence unmatched by the self-consciously national magazines. Indeed, although the magazine itself never gained credit for its contribution to the Canadian cultural mosaic, it enabled many of its employees to later pursue careers in cultural fields in which they challenged anglophone Canada’s inward-looking print culture and cultural-nationalist hegemony, anticipating Canada’s postwar role in the United Nations and the nation’s latetwentieth-century embrace of multiculturalism.91

Acknowledgements Parts of this chapter appeared in Devil’s Artisan: A Journal of the Printing Arts, #87 (Fall/Winter 2020). I would like to thank Steven Rowe, Ken Quattro, Will Straw, David Saunders, Bill Gladstone, and Ivan Kocmarek for generously sharing their knowledge. I am also indebted to Sagal Dirshe of the Toronto Reference Library for locating some sources. Paula Draper provided indispensable peer review of the original article.

Notes 1 Canada, ‘The Forces of Geography’, Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences. Report (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1951), 13–17. The report cites B. K. Sandwell, Special Study, ‘Present Day Influences on Canadian Society’, 16–17. 2 Mary Vipond, ‘Canadian Nationalism and the Plight of Canadian Magazines in the 1920s’, Canadian Historical Review 58 (March 1977): 43–63; Stephen Azzi, ‘Magazines and the Canadian Dream: The Struggle to Protect Canadian Periodicals 1955–1965’, International Journal 54, no. 3 (Summer, 1999): 502–23. 3 Mary Vipond, The Mass Media in Canada (Toronto: James Lorimar, 1989); L. B. Kuffert, A Great Duty: Canadian Responses to Modern Life and Mass Culture, 1939– 1967 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). 4 Michael D. Behiels and Reginald C. Stuart, ‘Introduction: Forging a New American Continent; Transnational Theories and Studies’, in Transnationalism: Canada-United States History into the Twenty-First Century, ed. Michael D. Behiels and Reginald C. Stuart (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 3–8. 5 Beatrice Shapiro Fischer, recorded interviews and unrecorded conversations with the author, Toronto, 2013–2016. All subsequent references to Fischer are derived from these meetings. 6 Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), 308. 7 Fraser Sutherland, Monthly Epic: A History of Canadian magazines 1789–1989 (Markham, Ontario: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1989), 121.

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8 ‘Auxiliary Services’, in WLM King Papers, Memoranda and Notes, 1940–1950, MG 26 J 4, vol. 258, C173888–C175058, C173968. Library and Archives Canada. 9 ‘Digest Clipped on Paper Use’, Maple Leaf, 6 February 1945, 6; Donna Braggins, ‘Maclean’s: The Accidental Nationalist’, Master’s thesis, York University, 2008, 5. 10 ‘Magazine Office Moved to U.S.’, Globe and Mail, 24 February 1949, 5. 11 ‘Magazine Digest Publishing Co. v. Shade et al., Appellants’, Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, 330 Pa. 487 (Pa. 1938) 199 A. 190, 9 May 1938; ‘About People’, The Jewish News, 16 March 1945, 2; Laura Katherine Martin, Magazines for School Libraries (H.W. Wilson Company, 1946), 74. 12 Jaleen Grove, ‘A Cultural Trade? Canadian Magazine Illustration at Home and in the United States, 1880–1960’, Ph.D. diss., Stony Brook University, 2014. 13 Vipond, ‘Canadian Nationalism and the Plight of Magazines’, 52–3. 14 Tulchinsky, ‘Canadian Jewish Experience’, 26–8; Michael Brown, ‘Zionism in the Pre-State Years: The Canadian Response’, in From Immigration to Integration: The Canadian Jewish Experience: A Millennium Edition, ed. Ruth Klein and Frank Dimant (Montreal and Kingston: Institute for International Affairs, B’Nai Brith Canada, 2001), 128–9. 15 Stephen A. Speisman, The Jews of Toronto: A History to 1937 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Lt., 1979), 236; Mervin Butovsky, quoted in ‘Jewish Culture and Canadian Culture’, in The Canadian Jewish Mosaic, ed. M. Weinfeld, William Shaffir, and I. Cotler (Rexdale: John Wiley and Sons Canada Ltd, 1981), 321, 332. 16 Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 110–13; Robert Bothwell, Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Reginald C. Stuart, ‘Borders and Brows: Mass Culture and National Identity in North America since 1900’, in Transnationalism: Canada-United States History into the Twenty-First Century, ed. Michael D. Behiels and Reginald C. Stuart (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 47–60. 17 ‘Declaration: Official Return of Birth’, Province of Ontario, Dominion of Canada, filed 28 November 1922; Anne Fromer, ‘Memo to Mr. Simmons’, typescript, 8 April 1948. Edith Fowke fonds, CA ACU SPC F0101, File FL0070, File FL0071 - Magazine Digest, 664.99.21.7.1. University of Calgary Library Special Collections and Archives. All following citations of the Fowke fonds refer to this. 18 ‘Jewish Leader Passes, Aged 87’, Globe. 1947 clipping in Toronto Reference Library scrapbook; Irving Abella, ‘A Brief History of Holy Blossom Temple’s First 150 Years’, pdf, Holy Blossom Temple. 19 U.S. Census Bureau, ‘Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910—Population’, Philadelphia City, Supervisor’s District No. 1, Enumeration District No, 1192, Sheet 11. 20 Simmons in conversation with McNellis, NBC. 21 ‘Twixt Us & You’, Everywoman’s World, February 1914, 38. 22 ‘Notable Doings of Some Canadian Publishers’, Printer and Publisher 25, no. 4, Dominion Printing Ink and Color Co., Limited (April 1916): 24. 23 Joseph Krauskopf, ‘The Ascendancy of Womanhood’, Everywoman’s World, February 1914, 9. 24 ‘B’nai Brith Toronto Lodge was founded 1919’, Bill Gladstone Genealogy, 21 February 2012, http://www​.billgladstone​.ca​/bnai​-brith​-toronto​-lodge​-was​-founded​-1919/; ‘B’Nai Brith Makes Presentation’, Canadian Jewish Review, 21 November 1930, 22. 25 Toronto Centennial City Directory, Volume LIX (Might Directories Ltd., 1934), 2126. 26 Simmons in conversation with McNellis, NBC.

 Magazine Digest, Canadian Invader? 201 27 Vipond, ‘Canadian Nationalism and the Plight of Magazines’, 59. 28 Allan Levine, Seeking the Fabled City: The Canadian Jewish Experience (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2018), 184. 29 W. P. J. Millar, ‘“We Wanted Our Children Should have it Better”: Jewish Medical Students at the University of Toronto, 1910–51’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada 11, no. 1 (2000): 110–13. 30 ‘Deaths: Katz, Sidney’, Globe and Mail, 22 September 2007, S9. 31 ‘Death-Digest’, undated typescript circa 1946, Fowke fonds. 32 Rachel Schlesinger, ‘Changing Roles of Jewish Woman’, in Canadian Jewry Today: Who’s Who in Canadian Jewry, ed. Edmond Y. Lipsitz (Downsview: JESL Educational Products, 1989), 60–70. 33 ‘In Memoriam: Fromer, Anne (Himel)’, Globe and Mail, 1 December 1988, D10. 34 Richard Menkis, ‘Antisemitism in the Evolving Nation: From New France to 1950’, in From Immigration to Integration: The Canadian Jewish Experience, ed. Ruth Klein and Frank Dimant (Toronto: Institute for International Affairs, B’nai Brith Canada: Malcolm Lester, 2001), 47–9. 35 Menkis, ‘Antisemitism in the Evolving Nation’, 47–8; Jack Lipinsky, ‘In Search of Unity: Antisemitism, Zionism, and the Canadian Jewish Congress to 1945’, in Canada’s Jews: in Time, Space and Spirit, ed. Ira Robinson (Brighton: Academic Studies, 2013), 77; Speisman, ‘Antisemitism in Ontario’, 113–33. 36 Louis Rosenberg, Table #123, in Louis Rosenberg and M. Weinfeld, Canada’s Jews: A Social and Economic Study of Jews in Canada in the 1930s (Toronto: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 191. 37 Pierre Berton, quoted in Levine, Seeking the Fabled City, 217. 38 Blake Bell and Michael J. Vassallo, The Secret History of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby and the Moonlighting Artists at Martin Goodman’s Empire (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013), 17–18, 293, 290. 39 Ibid. 40 ‘Magazine Digest Publishing Co. v. Shade et al., Appellants’, Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, 330 Pa. 487 (Pa. 1938) 199 A. 190, 9 May 1938. 41 Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 98–9, 267–8. 42 ‘Here’s Your Choice Reading at New Low Prices: This Newspaper, 1 Yr., And Any Magazine Listed’, advertisement, Holley Standard, 12 March 1942, 3. 43 ‘Contest’, Saratogian, 4 March 1944, 3. 44 Jessyca Russell, ‘Women Editors of Ether Magazines’, Magazine Digest, Vol. 31, No. 3, September 1945, 86–9; Simmons in conversation with McNellis, NBC. 45 ‘Program of the Week’, Sunday Star, 17 February 1946, C10. 46 ‘Simpson’s Radio Column’, Globe and Mail, 5 February 1946, 11. 47 Lisa Ubelaker Andrade, ‘Connected in Print: Selecciones del Reader’s Digest, U.S. Cultural Relations, and the Construction of a Global Middle Class’, Palabra Clave 22, no. 4 (October 2019): 11–12; ‘Eire Gov’t Bans British, American Publications’, The Advocate, 21 June 1947, 2; J. V. McAree, ‘Critics Aroused by Amazing Digest’, Globe and Mail, 27 March 1944, 6. 48 ‘Reports’, typescripts, November 1946, Fowke fonds. 49 Minko Sotiron, From Politics to Profit: The Commercialization of Canadian Daily Newspapers, 1890–1920 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997); Canada, ‘The Press and Periodical Literature’, Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences. Report. Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1951.

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50 For example, ‘The Death Struggle’, from The Nineteenth Century and After (London), inside cover; and Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘“Why Britain Will Survive” originally titled “English Traits” 1856’, Magazine Digest, Vol. 23, No. 1, July 1941, 27–32. 51 Martin, Magazines for School Libraries, 80, 146–7. 52 Sidney Katz, ‘The Coming Empire of Israel’, Magazine Digest, Vol. 21, No. 3, September 1940, 54–8; Jessyca Russell, ‘Dancing Master to Crippled Veterans’, Magazine Digest, Vol. 30, No. 5, May 1945, 45; Jack M. Stenbuck, ‘German War Prisoners for Democratic Leadership’, Magazine Digest, Vol. 31, No. 6, December 1945, 66–72. 53 Transcript and interviewer’s notes, Fowke fonds. 54 Murray Simmons, ‘Formula for Review Article Treatment’, typescript circa 1946. Fowke fonds. 55 Richard Menkis, ‘Reform Judaism in Canada’, in Robinson, Canada’s Jews, 300; Dow Marmur, On Being a Jew: A Reform Perspective (Toronto: Holy Blossom Temple, 1994). 56 ‘Engagements’, Globe, 19 November 1918, 4; ‘In Loving Memory of Rabbi Solomon Jacobs Dedicated by the Pupils of Holy Blossom Religious School During his Ministry’, dedication booklet (Holy Blossom Temple, 1938), 42, http://www​ .billgladstone​.ca​/lists​-of​-holy​-blossom​-members​-donors​-pupils​-1937​-38/. 57 Heinz Warschauer, The Story of Holy Blossom Temple (Holy Blossom Temple, 1956), 257. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid; Abella, ‘Holy Blossom Temple’s First 150 Years’; Speisman, The Jews of Toronto, 189–91, 211–15. 60 Ibid., 252–3, 258–60; Speisman, Jews of Toronto; ‘Rabbi Solomon Jacobs Criticizes Yacht Club Prejudice’, Globe, 14 April 1911, page unknown. 61 Ferdinand Isserman, ‘Shall Rabbi and Minister Exchange Pulpits?’ Canadian Jewish Chronicle, 27 November 1925. 62 Stuart E. Rosenberg, The Jewish Community in Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970), 164, 172; Eric Walberg, The Canada-Israel Nexus (Atlanta: Clarity Press, Inc., 2017); see fn 135; Ruth A. Frager, ‘Communities and Conflicts: East European Jewish Immigrants in Ontario and Quebec From the Late 1800s Through the 1930s’, in Robinson, Canada’s Jews, 72. 63 Abella, ‘Holy Blossom Temple’s First 150 Years.’ 64 Pope Pius X, ‘A World Order in the Spirit of Christmas’, Magazine Digest, Vol. 29, No. 6, December 1944, 129. 65 Sholem Asch, ‘Christ in the Ghetto’, Magazine Digest, Vol. 28, No. 2 February 1944, 8–12. 66 Verax, ‘The Doom of Austrian Jewry’, originally printed in The Contemporary Review, June 1938; Magazine Digest, Vol. 17, No. 2, August 1938, 67–70; Stefan Lorant, ‘Notes From a Concentration Camp’, originally printed in I Was Hitler’s Prisoner (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1939); Magazine Digest, April 1939, 31–2; Franklin Bialystok, Delayed Impact: The Holocaust and the Jewish Canadian Community (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 23–30. 67 ‘We Went Through the Nazi Murder Mill’, Magazine Digest, Vol. 30, No. 3, March 1945, 52–60. 68 A. E. Johann, ‘America Can’t Rule the World’, originally printed in Signal [Berlin], October 1942; Magazine Digest, Vol. 26, No. 5, May 1943, 53–6. See also ‘Germany

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69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

Must Rule the French Empire’, originally printed in Das Reich; Magazine Digest, Vol. 24, No. 5, May 1942, 29–32. Murray Simmons in conversation with Maggi McNellis, ‘V-J Day NBC Coverage: Maggi’s Private Wire’, National Broadcasting Corporation, 14 August 1945, 08:30– 12:50 minutes. The Paley Center for Media Archives, New York. ‘Refusal of Wartime Information Board to Furnish German Press Articles to the “Magazine Digest” for Purposes of Anti-Nazi Propaganda - Protests re.’, Library and Archives Canada, file reference RG36-31, volume/box number 14, file number 8–15. Bialystok, Delayed Impact, 26, 42–67. F. K. Hoebler, ‘How We Are Helping Europe’s Uprooted Millions Back Home’, Magazine Digest, Vol. 30, No. 6, June 1945, 14–17. Oscar Cahén and The Editors, ‘Suffer Little Children’, Magazine Digest, Vol. 30, No. 6, June 1945, 61–8. Abraham Feinberg, ‘Jew to Christian—A Heart to Heart Talk’, Magazine Digest Vol. 33, No. 6, December 1946: 92–7. Ibid., 92. I do not personally agree with Feinberg’s position. Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 338, 344–5. ‘Paper Law Violation Brings $10,000 Fine’, Buffalo Courier-Express, 3 December 1944, 4A; ‘Exceeded Paper Quota, Magazine Fined $10,000’, Globe and Mail, 4 December 1944, 4; ‘Digest Clipped on Paper Use’, Maple Leaf, 6 February 1945, 6. Simmons in conversation with McNellis, NBC. Anne Fromer, ‘Memo . . . Regarding the Inauguration of a Rotogravure Section’, 3 October 1946. Fowke fonds. Library and Archives Canada, ‘Wartime Labour Relations Regulations, P.C. 1003, and Re Magazine Digest Publishing Company Limited, Toronto, Ont., and Magazines Employees Guild (C.C.L.)’, file number 7-55-397, vol. 1792; ‘Osgoode Hall’, Globe and Mail, 22 February 1947, 8. Mary Vipond, ‘Major Trends in Canada’s Print Mass Media’, in History of the Book in Canada, vol. 3, ed. Carole Gerson and Jacques Michon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 244. Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 337; ‘Magazine Office Moved to U.S.’, Globe and Mail, 24 February 1949, 5. ‘Memo re Magazine Digest Publishing Company Ltd.’, typescript, Fowke fonds. Walter Winchell, ‘Gossip of the Nation’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 13 September 1949, 25; ‘Magazine Digest is Sold’, New York Times, 11 January 1950, 18. David Saunders, ‘Robert W. Farrell’, Field Guide to Wild American Pulp Artists, https:// www​.pulpartists​.com​/Farrell​.html. David Saunders, ‘Martin Goodman’, Field Guide to Wild American Pulp Artists, https://www​.pulpartists​.com​/Goodman​.html. A company in Söborg, Denmark issued Neue Magazine Digest International Edition with pornographic covers, but whether it had any connection to the New York circle is unknown. Frager, ‘Communities and Conflicts’, 53. Frager cites numerous sources for this figure. Speisman, Jews of Toronto, 245–58, 322–3; Speisman, ‘Antisemitism in Ontario’, 118. Jaleen Grove, ‘Recuperating Magazine Digest: Jewish Identity and Cultural Nationalism in Canadian Publishing’, The Devil’s Artisan: A Journal of the Printing Arts 87 (Fall/Winter 2020): 45–64.

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Part IV

Future states Chinese, Soviet Turkic and Mexican magazines

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12

Global Magazine Culture and Modern Chinese Identities Michel Hockx and Liying Sun

The history of modern Chinese-language magazines conventionally starts in the first half of the nineteenth century, with periodical publications by western missionaries such as Robert Morrison (1782–1834), William Milne (1785–1822), and Karl Gützlaff (1803–51). These early magazines, aimed mainly at spreading the gospel, used traditional Chinese woodblock printing. In the decades that followed, a range of modern printing techniques was introduced into China both by missionaries and by private entrepreneurs, laying the foundation for a booming local print culture industry that developed especially in the city of Shanghai.1 Among the western businessmen active in Shanghai, the most successful was the Briton Ernest Major (1841–1908). He founded what would become the longest-lasting Chinese-language newspaper of the pre-Communist era, the Shenbao 申報 (sometimes known in English as Shun Pao or as Shanghai News), which was published daily from 1872–1949. Major also invested in founding a lithographic printing workshop known as Dianshizhai, which published China’s first high-quality illustrated magazine, the Dianshizhai Huabao 點石齋畫報 (Dianshizhai Pictorial). Published from 1884–98, the intricate illustrations in the Dianshizhai Pictorial, and their written captions and commentary, introduced its readers to scenes from all over the world, as well as to local Shanghai news and events.2 By the late 1890s, as the last imperial dynasty (the Qing dynasty) started to disintegrate, magazines became the medium of choice for Chinese intellectuals who were intent on political, social and cultural reform. The paradigm for reform-minded, accessible magazine publication was shaped by Liang Qichao 梁啓超 (1873–1929). Liang is also credited with being the first Chinese person to launch a Chinese-language magazine: the influential Shiwu bao 時務報 (English title: The Chinese Progress), published three times per month from 1896–8. The turn of the century also witnessed the publication of the first Chinese magazines by and for women. The first known women’s magazine was Nü xuebao 女學報 (English title: Chinese Girl’s Progress), edited by Xue Shaohui 薛紹徽 (1866–1911) and published in Shanghai in 1898.3 Private and commercial magazine publishing continued to develop rapidly during the final decade of the Qing dynasty, which was overthrown in 1911 in favour of a Republic.

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Although unstable and at times quite divided, the Republican government was generally successful in promoting public education and public libraries, leading to a significant rise in literacy, especially among women, and providing a further boost for the rapidly developing print industry. Throughout the Republican period (usually dated 1911–49), major publishing houses, virtually all based in Shanghai, produced school textbooks and other educational material as their core business. In the wake of those developments, magazine culture flourished, driven both by a demand for entertainment and by ongoing intellectual fermentation related to the question of reform. Both these drivers of magazine culture had a strong international component: entertainment genres and materials, especially visual materials such as photographs, circulated globally; reform-related debates engaged widely and freely with global, especially western, discourses and theories. Many Chinese magazines of this period had Western-language titles printed on their cover alongside the Chinese titles: mostly English, French, or German. Almost all of them contained content translated or reproduced from western and Japanese sources. While Chinese women were becoming increasingly literate and were increasingly participating in public life, the print culture that surrounded them often catered to a male gaze that desired to view images of women. As Joan Judge has shown, there was considerable anxiety in the 1910s about the extent to which it was proper for ‘Republican ladies’ to have their photographs printed in magazines.4 In China at that time, as in other countries, there was also anxiety about the increased circulation of photographs and other visual materials featuring nudity and eroticism, leading to various censorship measures.5 In 1914, Shanghai saw the founding of a remarkable literary journal that addressed all these themes and anxieties. Its title was Meiyu 眉語, which we translate as ‘Eyebrow Talk’. In this essay we provide a description of the style and content of the magazine, and look into the reasons why it was considered transgressive and eventually banned. We also look at later magazines edited by the same individuals, in which they further developed a distinctive, libertine modern identity.

Eyebrow Talk (1914-16) The first issue of Eyebrow Talk appeared in Shanghai on 17 November 1914. The journal’s manifesto states its intention to be a literary magazine by women and for women – the first literary magazine to do so in Chinese history. The text explains the name of the journal by comparing the thin arch of an eyebrow (presumably a lady’s eyebrow) to the thin arch of the new moon on the first day of each lunar month – announcing that a new issue will appear on the first day of every lunar month. Traditionally, however, ‘eyebrow talk’ also refers to the exchange of flirtatious glances between men and women. Right from the start, the editors of Eyebrow Talk combined the promotion of women’s writing with highlighting male-female (physical) interaction, while also, as we shall see, catering to the male gaze and exploring erotic culture.

 Global Magazine Culture and Modern Chinese Identities 209 A total number of eighteen issues of the journal appeared. Although there are no official circulation statistics, the fact that the first six issues went through more than one print run seems to show strong initial popularity. The inaugural issue had a total of four print runs, the first three coming out within the space of a single month: the editors claimed that the first two print runs had sold a total of 5,000 copies, which would suggest a regular initial print run of around 2,500 copies – modest, but apparently enough to sustain continued publication. In comparison, some of the most popular fiction journals, such as Libailiu 禮拜六 (English title: The Saturday), are rumoured to have had print runs of 20,000–30,000 copies around the same time.6 Individual issues of Eyebrow Talk were priced at 4 jiao (4 ‘dimes’, i.e. 40 ‘cents’), which was the normal price for monthly illustrated magazines at the time. This price was roughly equal to the daily wage of an unskilled worker in Shanghai at the time, while it would have been about five percent of the daily income of a doctor or lawyer on a starting salary.7 Adding to that the low levels of literacy among workers, it seems fair to assume that magazines like Eyebrow Talk found their readership exclusively among urban professionals and the upper classes. The final issue of Eyebrow Talk was dated 4 April 1916. Apparently, back issues of the journal remained in circulation after that date, since, five months later, in September 1916, the sale and reproduction of the magazine were banned by order of the Ministry of the Interior, acting on advice from the Ministry of Education. That Ministry in turn had acted on the advice of the Popular Education Research Association (tongsu jiaoyu yanjiuhui 通俗教育研究會), a committee established by the Ministry of Education to supervise and control the distribution of popular literature (fiction, drama and records of public speeches). As pointed out by Paul Bailey, the discussions at the regular meetings of the association (the minutes of which are still available) focused especially on the fight against ‘sexual corruption’. Bailey writes: Many of the books listed by the popular education research association in 1916 as “inferior” and deserving to be banned concerned stories of sexual adventures. In 1915 the Education Ministry had already proscribed a number of books whose titles included Free Marriage, A History of Love in the Republic, Women Students, A Recent Account of the True Face of Womanhood, Strange Stories of Conspiracies between Men and Women, and Songs of Beautiful Women of Leisure. Although there were references to other kinds of reprehensible literature . . ., for the most part criticism was levelled at material that was considered pornographic, lewd or obscene. In 1919 the association recommended that the Education Ministry ban the sale of three kinds of “harmful novel” – those describing the “public world of sex, the secret and corrupt (heimu) world of the family, and the intimate adventures of women students.”8

The frequent mentioning of the word ‘women’ in this passage jumps out. Clearly, state concerns about sexual corruption were not gender-neutral. As such, Eyebrow Talk’s emphasis on women must have made it instantly suspicious. The Popular Education Research Association was not a formal censorship committee. Its core task was to survey the market for popular literature and publish

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recommendations about suitable reading material that could be acquired by public libraries. Public libraries had been established in major cities around the country by that time and the Ministry of Education was concerned about setting appropriate standards for their collections. It was the task of the Popular Education Research Association to help set those standards. They would recommend works they considered superior in terms of style, content and moral outlook, and warn against works considered deficient. As noted earlier, they were especially wary of work of a sexual nature, and in cases where they considered a work to be in violation of obscenity legislation, they would pass on the material to the Ministry of the Interior, which had the power to issue nationwide bans. In the five years of its existence, it recommended a handful of books for banning, but it only ever helped to ban one magazine: Eyebrow Talk. The Popular Education Research Association had divided itself into three groups, dealing respectively with fiction, drama and speeches, these being the three main genres of vernacular-language publishing. The section dealing with fiction was initially chaired by an employee of the Department of Education named Zhou Shuren 周樹人 (1881–1936), who would later become modern China’s most canonical progressive writer, under the pseudonym Lu Xun 魯迅. Because of Lu Xun’s later fame and status, a wealth of material documenting his involvement with the Popular Education Research Association, including minutes of all its meetings, has been preserved. However, because of Lu Xun’s involvement, for a very long time it was simply assumed that the Association’s judgement on Eyebrow Talk must have been correct, and that it must have been a reprehensible publication. Consequently, after Eyebrow Talk was banned, it took almost a century before scholars in China rediscovered the magazine and started reading it again. Scholars outside China, with the exception of the present authors, have also paid scant attention to it, despite its significance in the history of early modern Chinese women’s literature and magazine culture.

Women’s writing and women’s bodies The emphasis on women in Eyebrow Talk went well beyond its title and manifesto. First and foremost, its editor-in-chief was female. Her name was Gao Jianhua 高劍華 and her dates of birth and death are unknown. She grew up in the city of Hangzhou, a traditional cultural centre not far from Shanghai, was educated at Beijing Women’s Normal College, and returned to Hangzhou in the summer of 1914, where she married her cousin Xu Xiaotian 許嘯天 (1886–1948), who had apparently been her childhood sweetheart. Xu had been an active revolutionary during the last years of the Qing Empire, and a member of the Restoration Society (guangfu hui 光復會), an anti-Qing revolutionary society active 1904−07, with the female revolutionary Qiu Jin 秋瑾 (1875−1907) its most famous member. Both Gao and Xu are described as having been close to Qiu Jin, and both joined the Restoration Society again when it was briefly revived in the 1940s. By all accounts, Gao Jianhua and Xu Xiaotian were a close couple, and as we shall see they were involved in many publishing ventures.

 Global Magazine Culture and Modern Chinese Identities 211 The first issue of Eyebrow Talk lists Gao Jianhua as editor-in-chief, and three other women as editors: Ma Simei 馬嗣梅, Gu Renchai 顧紉茝, and Liang Guiqin 梁桂琴. Later issues printed pictures of other women editors, up to a total of nine. Xu Xiaotian and one other man (Wu Jianlu 吳劍鹿) were identified as ‘assistant editors’. The contents of the journal were devoted entirely to literary expression, mainly in the form of fiction (short stories and serialised novels), but also including poetry, drama and various types of prose. Although Eyebrow Talk was by no means the first modern women’s magazine, nor the first modern magazine with a female editor, it was, to the best of our knowledge, the first Chinese literary magazine edited by a woman and featuring women’s writing, with at least ten different female authors contributing works of fiction.9 But what makes Eyebrow Talk really stand out among early modern Chinese literary journals is its interest in nudity. Anyone who is familiar with the general style of Chinese literary journals of the 1910s cannot but be somewhat shocked, or surprised, when encountering the cover of the first issue of the journal, which features a woman with one exposed breast (Plate 7). The depiction and description of nudity, whether for artistic, commercial, or other purposes, was an emerging topic of debate in urban China in the mid-1910s, largely as a result of influences from western culture and the impact of similar debates in Japan in the 1890s.10 Although western artists started to exhibit nude paintings as early as 1895 in Shanghai, the earliest Chinese artist to draw nude models is assumed to have been Li Shutong 李叔同in 1914.11 The earliest commercial advertisement image featuring a nude is considered to have been painted by Zheng Mantuo 鄭曼陀 in 1915.12 Both men are closely linked with the founding of Eyebrow Talk. Li Shutong wrote the price-list for Gao Jianhua’s calligraphy, which was featured as an advertisement in the early issues of Eyebrow Talk. And it was Zheng Mantuo who created the nude cover image for the first issue. Despite the emerging elite interest in nudes, these images were far from uncontroversial throughout the 1910s, especially in contexts where they might be shown to wider audiences, such as at exhibitions or, in this case, in public libraries.13 The decision to feature nudity in Eyebrow Talk shows that the editors were aiming at more than just leisure or entertainment. Nude and semi-nude images appear on the covers of five of the first 6 issues. In a later issue, they also placed an announcement asking readers to send in ‘famous paintings’ (minghua 名畫) on three different themes – fashion, love and nudity – offering 10–50 yuan in cash per picture.14 On the occasion of the magazine’s first anniversary, the editors offered to reward new subscribers with an ‘enticing and elegantly beautiful’ large calendar poster, ‘two feet long and over one foot wide,’ depicting a ‘naked beauty’ (luoti meiren 裸體美人).15 It is clear that editors considered the inclusion of nude images as a selling point for the journal. Like other journals at the time, Eyebrow Talk opened each issue with several pages of images and photographs. In the first issue, Gao Jianhua included two photographs of western women dressed in tight-fitting, semi-transparent outfits that clearly showed their curves and created the impression of nudity. Based on the style of the pictures, the props displayed, the clothing, the hairstyles and the photo studio seals, the images are readily recognisable as so-called ‘French postcards’ (or ‘erotic postcards’). These were

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Figure 12.1  ‘French postcard’ reproduced in Eyebrow Talk, no. 12 (October 1915). Shanghai Library holding. Photograph by Liying Sun.

produced in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and were widely circulating around the world and avidly collected (Figure 12.1).16 In addition to promoting the artistic and erotic display of nudity in her role as editor, Gao Jianhua also reflected on the concept of nudity in her own writing. The fourth issue of Eyebrow Talk opens with a story by Gao Jianhua herself, entitled ‘The Words of the Naked Beauty’. In this story, Gao experiments with new connotations of nudity. As far as we know, this story is the first-ever literary work commenting on nudity written by a Chinese female author, heralding the emergence of a new treatment of (female) nudity in modern Chinese literature. The story starts out with a lengthy description of a ‘remarkable beauty’ (qi meiren 奇美人) named Meixian 眉仙 (literally ‘Eyebrow Fairy’). As the daughter of a famous recluse, her home schooling has been impeccable. She is fond of the hermit lifestyle and roaming through nature. All those who see her are struck by her resemblance to ‘the western statue of the Goddess of Liberty’ 西洋雕刻之自由女神. In contrast, her cousin Xiajing 霞婧 (literally ‘Radiant Beauty’), who is just as beautiful, is much more skilful with make-up and jewellery. When Meixian’s father is on his deathbed, he tells his daughter that she is too ‘innocent’ to live in the mundane world and instructs her to look after the house and only allow herself to be betrothed to a man who is ‘handsome and lighthearted as well as a great scholar’. He adds a final warning: ‘Wealth will kill you.’ Meixian lives in solitude for a while but gradually starts to get bored, at which point her cousin, who has since married into an imperial prince’s household, comes to visit. Attracted by Xiajing’s wealth, Meixian becomes envious. Gradually her character

 Global Magazine Culture and Modern Chinese Identities 213 changes and she begins to long for luxury and riches. After Xiajing has returned to the palace, Meixian decides to visit her. She is excited by the luxurious palace life, with its dazzling splendour and excessive ceremonial. One day, the imperial concubines go on an outing and Meixian wanders away from the group, only to suddenly find herself in a mysterious, idyllic place, where she encounters a naked woman. The story ends with a brief dialogue between Meixian and the naked beauty, in which the latter persuades her to restore her ‘perfect purity’ by casting off all adornments.17 Gao Jianhua’s decision to give her protagonist the name ‘Eyebrow Fairy’ can hardly have been accidental and must constitute an intertextual reference to Eyebrow Talk. As an innocent girl lost in decadent society, Meixian is moved by her meeting with the ‘naked beauty’ and follows her in order to restore her own purity. Nudity is presented as a return to one’s true self, and as the opposite of hypocrisy and wantonness. Female nudity is not presented as a signifier of sexual seduction but of purity, simplicity and honesty. In contrast, clothing and jewellery become tools to cover up depravity and to fake morality. Gao Jianhua’s arrangement of images in Eyebrow Talk and her redefinition of nudity in ‘The Words of the Naked Beauty’ constitute a unique intervention by a female editor into an ongoing cultural discourse about nudity, as well as a clear transgression of the male-dominated moral conventions of mainstream society. The images printed in the magazine provided a visual foundation for Gao Jianhua’s literary imagination, inspiring her to give nudity a new significance. Conversely, these images can serve as important footnotes to Gao’s story about the naked beauty. This is an example of the interplay of images and texts in Eyebrow Talk: cover images inspire stories, which in turn help to redefine or reinterpret the images.18 In light of the above description of the editorial strategies of Eyebrow Talk, it is perhaps not surprising that when the magazine was eventually banned in 1916, for reasons of propagating obscenity and immorality, the censors emphasised that they objected not just to the nude images, but rather to the entire textual and visual layout of the magazine. From their morally conservative perspective, the censors recognised that this was not a publication that occasionally published a naughty picture or two, but rather the result of a coherent editorial strategy, aimed at spreading libertine values which they considered unacceptable. As mentioned above, the stigma created by the obscenity charge led to this magazine receiving no academic attention whatsoever for nearly a century, until it was rediscovered by scholars of early modern Chinese women’s fiction. A further complicating factor is that during its lifespan, Eyebrow Talk already started to tone down some of its content, specifically by replacing its most outspoken covers with more modest ones in later print runs (Figure 12.2). The result is that researchers studying this magazine are not necessarily all looking at the same set of material and anyone who judges the magazine by its cover might fail to notice the transgressiveness, depending on which print run they are looking at.

Red Leaves (19303) A year after the banning of Eyebrow Talk, Gao Jianhua briefly edited another women’s literature journal entitled Guisheng 閨聲 (Voices from the Women’s Quarters), of

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Figure 12.2  ‘Cleansed’ front cover of Eyebrow Talk, no. 1 (fourth print run, April 1915). Stanford Library holding. Scan provided by Stanford Library.

which only one issue appeared. Throughout the 1920s, she and Xu Xiaotian seem to have focused more on book projects. In July 1930, they resumed their journal editing activities when they came out with a weekly called Hongye 紅葉 (Red Leaves), this time listing Xu Xiaotian as main editor. In September 1931, they also began publishing a monthly with the same title. The monthly folded a year later, after eight issues, but the weekly lasted until 1933, publishing a total of 123 issues of eight pages each. Bi-monthly collections of the weekly, under separate cover and table of contents, were also sold. As was the case with Eyebrow Talk, the title Red Leaves also has connotations of expressing affection and longing, going back to a Tang dynasty story about a palace lady who writes a poem on an autumn leaf, which when found floating down a stream wins her the love of her future husband.19 Compared to Eyebrow Talk, the Red Leaves weeklies and monthlies were not so shocking or unconventional. Nudity, especially the dissemination of images of western nudes, had become much more widely accepted in print culture by the 1930s.20 In terms of textual content, Red Leaves focused more than Eyebrow Talk on shorter texts, with relatively little fiction and much more short prose, including a regular column for love letters and another for ‘common knowledge’, the latter demonstrating, ironically, a strong interest in popular education. However, the main selling point of Red Leaves Weekly, as stated in advertisements, was its layout. The most unique element of this were the front pages carrying high-quality photographs of celebrities and debutantes, printed on coated paper (tongbanzhi 銅版紙), and pasted onto the cover. Some originals of the weekly have survived with such photographs still intact, others have not (Figures 12.3 and 12.4). Presumably they became collector’s

 Global Magazine Culture and Modern Chinese Identities 215

Figure 12.3  Front page of Red Leaves Weekly, no. 54 (1931) with photograph pasted onto it. Fudan Library holding. Photograph by Michel Hockx.

items and were often removed by readers before they ended up in libraries.21 Another element of interest with regard to the layout of the weekly is that, apart from photographs and other images in the opening pages, which were common in most journals, it also featured small drawings (again often of female nudes) as headers for specific sections or contributions inside the journal. Otherwise, the design of the journal pages featured what seems like a modernist element, with simple straight lines used for decorative purposes, and a trademark bright red image of a single leaf appearing on the front cover. In comparison to Red Leaves Weekly, the Monthly featured more abstract design on the cover, including the use of an abstracted font for the title characters. The trademark red leaf was often integrated into the cover design, whereas it also appeared on its own on the back cover of each issue. Only one of the eight issues featured a photograph of a woman on the cover. Nevertheless, photographs and other images formed a large part of the monthly’s contents. They were to be found mainly in the opening pages of each issue, often in the form of collages of juxtaposed images of women, including Chinese celebrities, western nudes, and often Gao Jianhua herself. Each issue of the monthly featured a separate table of contents for images and illustrations, and one for texts. The first issue opens with a rare tinted colour photograph, depicting a semi-nude woman striking a pose, her body half covered by tinted red leaves, with the caption bearing the poetic line ‘wanting to entrust her heart’s affairs to the red leaves’ (yu jiang xinshi ji hongye 欲將心事寄紅葉). On the following two pages there are four images of women, including one nude and one photograph of Gao Jianhua taken by

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Figure 12.4  Front page of the same issue of Red Leaves Weekly with photograph removed. Scan from Shanghai Library online database.

Xu Xiaotian himself. And on the page following that there is an extensive collage of pictures displaying ‘Xu Xiaotian’s summer life’, showing Xu relaxing in a chair and in a swimming pool, while adding various photographs of women presumably present at the same resort. The textual content of the monthly was as much a collage as the visual content, with the table of contents of the first issue subdivided into the following categories: treatises, short reviews, lectures, ‘common knowledge’, autobiography, random jottings, serialised novels, short stories, vignettes, poetry, love letters and book reviews. As was the case with the weekly, Xu Xiaotian and Gao Jianhua contributed frequently themselves, Xu mainly with prose and fiction, and Gao with poetry, short prose and calligraphy. Most issues also carried advertisements stating Gao Jianhua’s payment rates for providing calligraphy on request. Red Leaves (and Eyebrow Talk before it) seems the product of a fairly libertine community of urbanites whose lifestyle and tastes were distinctly modern, or who at the very least were confident and unperturbed in blending traditional and modern tastes. If some of their cultural preferences, for instance in the realms of poetry and calligraphy, were conservative, they were simultaneously very modern in their outlook on education, with a number of contributions to the Red Leaves journals heaping scorn on the Confucian tradition of learning, and arguing in favour of popularising modern education.

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Beauty of the Age (1934) The most remarkable publication by Xu and Gao is the 1934 journal Shidai zhi mei 时代之美 (Beauty of the Age). Only two issues appeared and are kept in the Shanghai Library, which has now made them available through its online digital journals collection. The issues are in fact not dated. The year 1934 is given in the Shanghai Library online journal catalogue, with no further indication of the month of publication. Beauty of the Age is a vintage Xu/Gao journal and in many ways reminiscent of Eyebrow Talk. The contents of the journal are devoted almost entirely to things to do with women, and the texts are interspersed by large numbers of photographs of women, with much emphasis on nudes as well as representations of ‘healthy bodies’, e.g. of women engaged in sports or physical exercise. Of all four journals discussed in this chapter, Beauty of the Age is the most ‘visual’ and features the most photography. Harking back to the idea that nudity equals purity and dress represents adornment and vanity, as first expressed in Gao Jianhua’s story ‘The Words of the Nude Beauty’ of 1914, the first issue of Beauty of the Age opens with a full-length photograph of a fully nude western woman. The text around the photograph criticises moralist rejection of nudity and states that ‘only with a healthy and beautiful physique can one have a healthy and beautiful spirit; only with a pure body can one have a pure soul’ (Figure 12.5).22 The first issue also contains a reference to (and illustrative photographs of)

Figure 12.5  Nude image with surrounding text, from Beauty of the Age, no. 1 (1934). Shanghai Library holding. Photograph by Liying Sun.

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the nudist movement, which the article claims originated in Germany, then became fashionable in Hong Kong, and had now spread to Shanghai.23 Gao Jianhua herself is prominently present in Beauty of the Age. Not only does she appear in a number of photographs (always fully dressed), but she is also the author of a long article entitled ‘Stick Out Your Powdered Necks’, a diatribe against the perceived materialism and shallowness of modern Chinese women. Gao chastises young Chinese women for wasting time trying to seduce men who can offer them material wellbeing, only to find out later in life that they are unable to stand on their own feet. Gao compares Chinese women unfavourably to women from other countries: Japanese women may often be seen as ‘slaves’ to their husbands, but in fact they have all enjoyed good educations; German women may have been deluded by the militarists, but at least they are capable of supporting an ideology; Soviet women have won the same rights and status as men. In contrast, Gao states, decades of investment in women’s education in China have not brought about any fundamental change in mentality.24 The interplay between the actual text of Gao’s article and the editorial layout of the pages is worth attention. Almost one-third of the first page of the article is taken up by a reproduction of a beautiful calligraphy by Gao Jianhua of the two characters for the word ‘woman’ (nüren 女人). Underneath it is a short note in the editorial voice, explaining that Gao Jianhua’s calligraphy has been famous in cultural circles for two decades; that she herself is a woman and has contributed an article discussing women’s issues, and that she therefore offered a calligraphy of the word ‘woman’. The short introduction ends by stating what the editorial voice claims is Gao Jianhua’s personal motto: ‘If a man does not give a woman a penny, only then is there hope for that woman.’25 On the following pages, the article is illustrated with numerous photographs of young Chinese women posing for the camera, with occasionally a sarcastic caption commenting on their appearance, such as this caption that accompanies three photographs of girls in a leaning pose: ‘These young ladies are leaning and quietly waiting, waiting for their good fortune to arrive. However, good fortune is something you have to go out and get on your own strength. You cannot just wait for someone to hand it to you.’26 The text of Gao’s article spends a lot of time criticising young girls’ habits of dressing up to look seductive, strategically exposing various parts of their body trying to win material gain ‘with the help of their nipples and thighs’.27 Although Gao herself does not link this point directly to any argument about nudity or physical health, other contributors to the issue make the point that Chinese women’s bodies would appear frail, pale, and sickly if the dress and make-up were removed. A horizontal reading of this whole issue of Beauty of the Age can bring out the editorial intention, which resides in the conscious juxtaposing of texts and images in order to achieve a specific effect. In this case, the effect is to create a direct connection between the advancement of women’s education and the publication of images of women’s bodies, especially nude bodies, while integrating the kind of pretty pictures of celebrities and debutantes that were so prominent in Red Leaves as negative examples of unnatural adornment, and the calligraphy of Gao Jianhua as an example not only of artistic achievement, but also as a measure of her ability to achieve personal success and financial independence.

 Global Magazine Culture and Modern Chinese Identities 219 The double focus on women as a subject of sociological interest and as an object of appreciation, which we also found in Eyebrow Talk, is highlighted again in Beauty of the Age. Again, this is done mainly through editorial strategy, but this time without strong reliance on the genre of fiction.

Conclusion The four journals discussed in this chapter give an indication of the editorial couple’s range of interests. Obviously, their overriding interest was in everything to do with women, and with male-female relations in modern society. They must have been aware of the shock value of their editorial agency in 1914, and they must have been aware of the potential commercial value of it in 1934 – although Beauty of the Age and Red Leaves Monthly were short-lived and Red Leaves Weekly sold at a price of 2 fen (cents) per issue, so most likely did not make a huge profit. It is also clear that they were photography enthusiasts and that they liked being photographed as well, and that they had no inhibitions about making themselves and their relationship an object of representation in their own journals. They revelled in working with the new print media and there is a clear playfulness to much of their magazine work, but at the same time, especially in Eyebrow Talk, their work is not devoid of a serious message and a serious interest in Chinese women’s lives. When they were not editing magazines, the couple were involved in various other cultural and educational activities. Although more research about their life in the 1920s is necessary, it seems that during that decade, Xu Xiaotian was employed by the publisher Qunxue she (Sociology House), which had a nationwide network for distributing textbooks. Together, Gao and Xu edited and co-authored a range of books for the Sociology House and other publishers, many of them educational works introducing topics such as ‘health and hygiene’, ‘sex and marriage’, ‘social interaction and entertainment’, and so on. Xu Xiaotian also gained fame as a popular novelist, especially for his semi-autobiographical adventure novel Minguo chunqiu yanyi 民國春秋演義 (Romance of the Founding of the Republic), which described his involvement in the Republican revolution. Whereas his fame as a fiction writer is probably the main reason why he is habitually referred to as an author of ‘popular literature’, it is worth mentioning that he also produced a steady stream of annotated editions and vernacular translations of classical texts, including the Book of Odes and the Daodejing (‘Tao Te Ching’), many of which are still in use and consulted by scholars nowadays. Gao Jianhua has become best known for her Hongxiu tianxiang shi congshu 紅袖添香室叢書 (Collectanea from the Fragrant Red Sleeves Studio), which came out with the Sociology House Qunxue she in five volumes in 1936, and contained a wealth of texts dealing with the lives of Chinese women through the ages. In the ‘Introduction’ to her collectanea, Gao Jianhua sums up the attitude that she and her husband had throughout those two tumultuous decades. They always believed that, no matter how serious one’s aims and ambitions in life, there should always also be room for ‘enjoyment’ (xiangle 享樂).28 Some might consider this to be contradictory, but for the two of them, it always made sense. This is indeed one of the

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strongest impressions one gets from looking at these journals and other materials: that Gao Jianhua, Xu Xiaotian and their associates were completely at ease with their stance and their lifestyle, no matter how unusual or contradictory parts of it may appear to us today. At a time when magazine culture in China was booming, they found their niche, and their modern identity, by bridging the divide between the opposite poles of ‘reform’ and ‘entertainment’ that structured the literary field of the time. The style applied by Gao Jianhua and Xu Xiaotian in their journals merged elements of popular education with middlebrow entertainment, with high-brow art, and with a hint of erotic transgression, helping to introduce an element of playful libertinism into modern Chinese culture that still appears to have problems escaping from conventional negative labels, despite the fact that most of the labels applied are clearly reductive or inappropriate. A focus on their editorial activities and their work for publishers and for schools, in addition to a study of their own writings, can help provide more insight into their position and that of others in their circle within the modern Chinese cultural field.

Notes 1 For an overview of the early history of modern Chinese printing, see Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005). 2 For digital copies of the Dianshizhai Pictorial, with scholarly commentary, see http:// visualizingcultures​.mit​.edu​/dianshizhai​/dsz​_essay01​.html. See also Xiaoqing Ye, The Dianshizhai Pictorial: Shanghai Urban Life, 1884–1898 (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, the University of Michigan, 2003). For Major and Shenbao, see Rudolf G. Wagner, ‘The Early Chinese Newspapers and the Chinese Public Sphere’, European Journal of East Asian Studies 1, no. 1 (2001): 1–33. 3 Cf. Nanxiu Qian, Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China: Xue Shaohui and the Era of Reform (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 4 Joan Judge, Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press, Asia: Local Studies/Global Themes 30 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 49–76. 5 This global anxiety is most clearly represented in the international ‘Agreement for the Suppression of the Circulation of Obscene Publications’ of 1910, and other subsequent treaties. See https://web​.archive​.org​/web​/20150907000915​/https:/​/treaties​.un​.org​/ pages​/ViewDetails​.aspx​?src​=TREATY​&mtdsg​_no​=VIII​-6​&chapter​=8​&lang​=en. 6 E. Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early TwentiethCentury Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 253. 7 Xiaoqun Xu, Chinese Professionals and the Republican State: The Rise of Professional Associations in Shanghai, 1912–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 56–61. 8 Paul J. Bailey, Reform the People: Changing Attitudes Towards Popular Education in Early Twentieth-Century China (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 189.

 Global Magazine Culture and Modern Chinese Identities 221 9 Early modern Chinese print culture demonstrated such a strong interest in anything to do with women that it was not uncommon for male writers to submit manuscripts under female names, hoping this would improve their chances of getting published. One cannot therefore automatically assume that all contributions published under female-sounding names were indeed written by women. However, the Taiwanese scholar Jin-Chu Huang has verified the identity of at least ten women who contributed work to Eyebrow Talk. Jin-Chu Huang, ‘Constituting the Female Subject: Romantic Fiction by Women Authors in Eyebrow Talk’, in Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Long Twentieth Century: A Space of Their Own?, ed. Michel Hockx, Joan Judge, and Barbara Mittler, trans. Michel Hockx and Wei-hsin Lin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 141–57. 10 For the genealogy and semantic constitution of the concept of luoti 裸體 (nude, naked, unclothed) in Republican China, see Liying Sun, ‘Body Un/Dis-Covered: Luoti, Editorial Agency and Transcultural Production in Chinese Pictorials (1925– 1933)’ (PhD diss., Heidelberg University, 2014), 30–107. 11 A nude oil painting was exhibited at the Central Hotel in Shanghai in November 1895, see The North China Herald, 29 November 1895, 888. For a general discussion of the introduction of nude painting into modern China, see Julia F. Andrews, ‘Art and the Cosmopolitan Culture of 1920s Shanghai: Liu Haisu and the Nude Model Controversy’, Chungguksa Yongu – Journal of Chinese Historical Researches 35 (2005): 336. 12 Ellen Johnston Laing, Selling Happiness: Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in Early-Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 118–19. 13 As Andrews, ‘Art and the Cosmopolitan Culture of 1920s Shanghai’, shows, various 1910s exhibitions showing nudes were met with social disapproval. 14 Meiyu 5, inside back cover. 15 Although the offer is to new subscribers starting from Issue no. 13, this announcement appears in several later issues. In the 2006 reprint it is found in the opening pages of no. 14. In the spare original set held at the Shanghai Library it appears in the back of no. 17. For the (Japanese) origin of the term ‘luoti meiren’ and its significance in early debates about nudity, see Sun, ‘Body Un/Dis-Covered’, 63–73. 16 Cf. Sun Liying, ‘An Exotic Self? Tracing Cultural Flows of Western Nudes in Pei-yang Pictorial News (1926–1933)’, in Transcultural Turbulences: Towards a Multi-Sited Reading of Image Flows, ed. Christiane Brosius and Roland Wenzlhuemer (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 2011), 271–300. 17 Gao Jianhua, ‘Luoti meiren yu’ 裸體美人語 (The Words of the Naked Beauty), Meiyu 1, no. 4 (1915): 5–6. 18 For a much more detailed discussion of the contents, style, and censorship of Eyebrow Talk, see Liying Sun and Michel Hockx, ‘Dangerous Fiction and Obscene Images: Textual-Visual Interplay in the Banned Magazine Meiyu and Lu Xun’s Role as Censor’, PRISM: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 16, no. 1 (2019): 33–61. 19 Cf. Ling Chung, ‘Red Leaf: Women Poets from the First Century B.C. to the Tenth Century A.D.’, in Classical Chinese Literature: An Anthology of Translations, ed. John Minford and Joseph S. M. Lau (New York and Hong Kong: Columbia University Press & The Chinese University Press, 2000), 956–7. 20 See, for instance, Liying, ‘An Exotic Self?’ 21 We consulted original copies of the Red Leaves Weekly in the library of Fudan University in Shanghai.

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22 Shidai zhi mei 1 (1934): A-2. 23 ‘Luoti yundong’ 裸體運動 (The Nudist Movement), Shidai zhi mei 1 (1934): A-58. 24 Gao Jianhua, ‘Shenchang le nimen de fenjing’ 伸長了你們的粉頸 (Stick Out Your Powdered Necks), Shidai zhi mei 1 (1934): A-7–A-14. 25 Ibid., A-14. 26 Shidai zhi mei 1 (1934): A-10. 27 Shidai zhi mei 1 (1934): A-9–A-10. 28 Gao Jianhua, ‘Hongxiu tianxiang shi congshu xu’ 紅袖添香室叢書序 (A Preface to the Collectanea from the Fragrant Red Sleeves Studio), 1.

13

Photographic Portraits of Leaders of the 1911 Revolution The Promise of Historical Rupture in the Chinese Republican Press Giulia Pra Floriani

Introduction In 1912, the newly established Republic of China was envisioned in images of a charismatic leader, strong soldiers, and modern technologies, expressive of the unifying ideals of nationalism. How and against what was this vision of the modern Chinese nation constructed? Modern societies tend to promote clear-cut distinctions between positive and negative, good and bad, new and old, modern and traditional:1 the Chinese Revolutionary press and propaganda in the 1900s and 1910s presented the world in just such polarised terms to prescribe a radical rupture with the past and a projection towards the future. In this essay, I will look at portraits of political leaders produced immediately after the Revolution. I focus specifically on the nationalist narrative as conveyed in the pages of the revolutionary illustrated The True Record 真相畫報 (1912–13), a pioneer in the use of photography and a marker of a pivotal moment in the history of the press in China. This chapter argues that portraits of revolutionary leaders, prominently Sun Yat-sen 孫中山 (1866–1925), crystallised a set of binary contrasts characteristic of modern nationalist narratives. Sun Yat-sen, Yuan Shikai (袁世凱 1859–1916) and their allies did not exclusively cause the abdication of the Qing court, but at the same time they created a system of visual propaganda, historiography and narration of national memory that celebrated the revolution and transformed it into a discrete historical event. This move was necessary because, unlike the Emperor, Republican leaders were not guaranteed legitimacy through the mandate of heaven. Therefore, they had to convince their subjects, now citizens, of their legitimacy via argumentative texts and densely constructed images.

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The True Record At the beginning of the twentieth century, China had suffered from two Opium Wars (1839–42, and 1856–60), the violent suppression of the Boxer rebellion (1900–1901), and the establishment of semi-colonial areas on the coast. The Qing court, the dynasty of Manchu descent that ruled China until 1912, was increasingly challenged by internal corruption and external threats, as well as by groups of reformers and revolutionaries trained abroad or in newly established modern schools, who, respectively, advocated for the formation of a constitutional monarchy and an independent republic. This chapter focuses on the illustrated magazine The True Record issued by the second group, the Republican Revolutionaries. Specifically, its editors were artists of the Lingnan School of Painting (Lingnan Huapai 嶺南畫派) affiliated with the Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmenghui 同盟會) and with the political leader Sun Yat-sen. The editor-in-chief was Gao Qifeng 高奇峰 (1889–1933, often appearing as Gao Weng 高嵡); other contributors were Qifeng’s brother Gao Jianfu 高剑父 (1879–1951), and Chen Shuren 陈树人 (1884–1948). The three artists were born in the Guangdong province, trained locally in ink painting, studied abroad in Japan, and became committed to the political stances of the Revolutionary Alliance. The True Record was one of a myriad of illustrated magazines that emerged in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.2 It was printed in black ink on thin acid paper (surviving copies have now significantly yellowed); lavishly coloured images were printed in half-tone on expensive thick pages on the front and back cover, and occasionally in the body of the magazine. The covers were often reproductions of political paintings in ink and watercolour by artists of the Lingnan School, with subjects such as lions, tigers and eagles, inspired by modern Japanese painting. The magazine, slightly smaller than an A4 paper sheet (19.5 × 27.1 cm), was a richly illustrated magazine with fifty to eighty pages in length; it ran for seventeen issues between June 1912 and April 1913. The True Record was printed by the Shanghai Shangwen Press (Shangwen yinshuguan 上文印書館).3 The Shanghai-based True Record Society (Zhenxiang Huabao she 真相畫報社) and the Canton-based Zhonghua Photography Team Office (Zhonghua xiezhendui shiwusuo 中華寫真隊事務所) were responsible for the distribution of the magazine to big bookshops in all Chinese provinces. The affiliation with Sun Yat-sen probably granted sponsorship to the journal, which was interrupted in 1913 due, in part, to Yuan Shikai’s increasing strict press censorship. The content of the magazine ranged from political essays and literary pieces, to news photographs, art reproductions and satirical cartoons. Its most radical innovation lay in its widespread use of photography.4 Unlike expensive collotype-based artreproduction collections such as the Shenzhou Guoguangji 神州國光集, The True Record provided access to textual and visual information at a more affordable price, albeit at lower quality: an annual subscription cost seven dayang, and one individual copy cost a quarter dayang, excluding mailing expenses.5 As is clear from its eloquent title, The True Record aimed to become ‘the journal that reveals the truth in the Republic, the only journal that each citizen of the Republic of China must read.’6 Between the various terms used in Chinese-language to indicate

 Photographic Portraits of Leaders of the 1911 Revolution 225 photography (攝影 sheying, 照片 zhaopian, etc.) the revolutionaries chose the term ‘xiezhen’ 寫真 (transcription of truth), which stressed the ability of photography to transparently display reality.7 By framing photography in this narrative of truth, The True Record promised to reveal a layer of reality that had been censored by the Qing, the imperialist powers, and all the enemies of the revolution. Yet, we must not think of the Chinese context as isolated from international discourses; in fact, the belief in the objective power of photography was a global trend during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and is not particular to this period of Chinese history.8 The main aim of the magazine echoed the three principles of the people theorised by Sun Yatsen: the magazine proposed to ‘survey the politics of the Republic, survey the status of people’s vitality, favour the introduction of socialism, and access world knowledge’.9 Journals work as prisms that make visible the articulated everyday of the early Republican period.10 This chapter applies two of the methodologies proposed by Michel Hockx, Joan Judge and Barbara Mittler, to study the periodical press: namely integrated and situated reading.11 An integrated reading of the magazines places them within the wider field of other similar magazines. That is to say, journals are understood ‘not as discrete works but as part of a larger constellation of publications.’12 Images extracted from The True Record, then, are read together with examples in other contemporary periodicals. A situated approach takes into account a range of materials beyond the genre of magazines to include other sources. In particular, I introduce one original photographic print and one lithographic poster that help reconnect this illustrated journal with artefacts and visual materials located outside The True Record. The departure point of my analysis of Republican portraits is a response to Peter’s Burke proposal to ‘study a series of portraits over the long term and so to note changes in the manner of representing the same kinds of people.’13 I suggest that Republican leader Sun Yat-sen, and the photojournalists affiliated with him, used visual configurations of the Cantonese revolutionary to communicate information about his role in society and his mode of governance. To demonstrate the novelty of Sun Yat-sen’s visual configuration in the revolutionary press, I will compare his images with portraits of the Empress Dowager Cixi 慈禧 (1835–1908) and images of Yuan Shikai, all from the same decade and yet ideologically and iconographically very distant.

Chinese history and popular support in portraits of Sun Yat-sen Sun Yat-sen travelled back to China from the US immediately after the 1911 revolution. The True Record published a series of photographs of the revolutionary leader as he paid his ‘respects at the Ming Tomb’ upon his arrival in Nanjing (Figure 13.1).14 At the centre of the image, Sun walks towards the camera, surrounded by Republican soldiers and flags. In other photographs made on the occasion, the leader poses with a portrait of the Ming dynasty founder Zhu Yuanzhang 朱元璋 (1328–98). Why would Sun pay a visit to the tombs of an imperial dynasty of the past, when the country urgently needed his coordination to transition from monarchy to republic?

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Figure 13.1  The True Record 7 (1912), n.p. [7].

The article that accompanies the image suggests that, similarly to Zhu Yuanzhang, who had restored the country to the Chinese from the hands of the Mongolians who were the rulers of the Yuan Dynasty for over one hundred years, Sun had fought to dethrone the foreign race who ruled over China (the Manchu).15 Furthermore, Sun and Zhu shared modest origins, and ‘raised a revolution started in the south-east of China and succeeded in taking possession of the whole Chinese Empire’.16 The article suggests that, as the Ming dynasty founder was a common man who managed to wrest imperial power from the hands of a foreign ethnic group (the Mongolians), Sun Yat-sen and the revolution he led had been able to overthrow the Manchu dynasty, returning power to the ‘real’ Chinese people. The text, then, embeds the photographs and the ritual visit to the tomb in the racist and nationalist context of the revolution, where the perceived enemy was primarily the ethnic Manchu. One incarnation of the ongoing project to construct a new imagery for the Chinese Republican nation, the article stresses the idea of a continuity with a supposedly ‘true Chinese’ history (the history of the Han ethnic group) that had been interrupted by the invasion of the Manchu. The connection between the Republican Revolution and the founding of the Ming dynasty is stressed both in the location elected by Sun, the Ming tombs and by the racial connection to the Ming dynasty founder Zhu Yuanzhang. Photography becomes here an attempt to mobilise the Chinese people and persuade them of the rightness of the revolutionary cause, drawing on their sense of belonging to an ideal entity, an imagined national identity that preceded the Manchu invasion.17 In other words, Sun used the ritual visit to the tomb to crystallise the racial and

 Photographic Portraits of Leaders of the 1911 Revolution 227 historical connection of the Republic of China to the Han rulers of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), and to renew the hate against the Manchu emperors of the Qing dynasty, who had ruled China since 1644. To gain a better understanding of the racist statement Sun made with the wide distribution of his photographs in the Ming tombs, it is useful to observe the striking contrast between the ways the revolutionary press represented Sun, and the mode of display the Manchu rulers adopted for their increasingly public, although still controlled, visual appearances. Court portraits of Qing rulers and decision-makers before the nineteenth century were not intended for public display; rather, they were confined within the walls of the Forbidden City. In the eighteenth century, for example, court painters produced numerous portraits of Emperor Qianlong and his consorts, which were kept in the Imperial palace. Empress Dowager Cixi was one of the first Qing rulers who, at the dawn of the twentieth century, allowed her portrait to be circulated in the public sphere.18 Cixi enabled two foreign painters to make her portrait, and asked Yu Xunling 裕勳齡 (1874–1943) to photograph her in a variety of celebratory images and Buddhist tableaux vivants.19 She exhibited the resulting works in international exhibitions, and distributed the photos as cartes de visite during visits of foreigners to the court, and as postcards and press illustrations in popular visual culture. Cixi gifted one of her representative portraits to Alice Roosevelt in 1905 following an audience at the Summer Palace held by Emperor Guangxu 光緒 (1871–1908) and Cixi for members of the Taft Mission to Asia (Figure 13.2). The portrait shows her in frontal view surrounded by auspicious and Buddhist elements. These include the overarching banner with an inscription wishing 10,000 years of longevity, two piles of apples at Cixi’s sides, and the peacock on the background screen. The portrait, set in the domestic and inaccessible place of the court residences, focuses on the single sovereign to celebrate her monarchic power. Cixi’s image shows that members of the royal family were portrayed for a privileged audience but were also partially accessible to a wider public by the early twentieth century. Yet, the rulers did not themselves access public spaces or expose themselves to public view; the portraits of Cixi show her in the Summer Palace, often alone, in an exquisite dress with floral decorations, against a plain background or screen. The compositional format mimics painted royal portraits of the Qing family, and therefore suggests the subject’s royalty; the image does not attempt a legitimisation of the ruler, who stands confident in her leading position due to her dynastic status. Rather, the portrait is an honorary object celebrating Cixi’s greatness. The image does not communicate her interaction with the empire’s subjects, because the Empress Dowager’s power did not need to rely on their approval. In contrast to images of Qing rulers who inhabited a domestic, private sphere, where the sitter was the exclusive focus of attention, images of public discussions and open assemblies held by the Revolutionary Alliance embody a new form of performative politics, where the Chinese political leader comes into direct contact with the people. Photojournalistic images of public places such as assembly halls, squares and even railway stations became tools of Republican propaganda, establishing a striking contrast with the stiff images of Qing rulers. One image of this kind depicts Sun Yat-sen lecturing on socialism at the China Great Theatre (Zhonghua daxiyuan 中華大戲園)

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Figure 13.2  Yu Xunling 裕勳齡, Cixi, Empress Dowager of China. Gelatin silver print, 23 x 17 cm. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives.

in Shanghai (Figure 13.3).20 Sun stands on a stage, captured in profile. Numerous other figures are visible, although unrecognisable, on the theatre’s seats, which in turn are overarched by two sets of flags. The image signifies a new idea of open political discussion, the role of the charismatic leader, and an international outlook. Compared to Cixi’s portrait, the focus has here shifted from the leader herself to the relation between the leader and his fellow citizens. Unlike Cixi, Sun’s political success relied on the financial and political support of his compatriots, which is effectively expressed by the presence of a massive audience listening to his talk. The photograph exemplifies the kind of imagery, simultaneously reporting on current events and celebrating the Republican leader, that appeared in the Revolutionary Alliance publication The True Record. The project of a Chinese Republic envisioned in images of the charismatic leader, and imbued with an overarching anti-Manchu racist nationalism, was translated from photojournalism to colourful propaganda pictures.21 One iconic poster of Sun Yat-sen from the series ‘Battles for the Liberation of the Republic of China’ visually conveys this nationalism, its associations with the ideal of a strong Republican army, and the technological improvements introduced by rapid modernisation (Figure 13.4). The military strength of the revolutionary movement is apparent in the protagonists’ military uniforms, although in fact only Yuan Shikai could rely on an efficient and wellorganised army. Three different kinds of nationalist flags surmount the scene.22 The railway station assumes a multiple role: it stands for the public nature of Sun’s persona, as opposed to the Qing rulers’ reclusive confinement and distance from the people, and

 Photographic Portraits of Leaders of the 1911 Revolution 229

Figure 13.3  Lecture on Socialism by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, The True Record 9 (1912): n.p [5].

for Sun’s focus on the modernisation of China, specifically symbolised by new railway projects. Furthermore, Sun’s mobility in the image expresses something of the leader’s continuous engagement in worldwide travel to raise funds for the revolutionary cause, in contrast with the rather immobile figure of the Qing ruler confined to the court’s palaces. The images of Sun Yat-sen in the Ming tombs, in public assemblies, and in the railway station diverge from Cixi’s portrait not only in terms of the message they convey about the leader’s relation to the people and their means of legitimisation, but also in their function. Whereas portraits of Qing rulers were executed for private view, the photographs of Sun Yat-sen respond to a new trend, photojournalism, which aims to capture a unique political momentum, and to represent the space for political discussion made accessible in the Republic. Furthermore, such representations of the leader in public places were produced specifically for publication in the press. Although attention to the instantaneous quality of photojournalism appears as an a priori feature of photography to the contemporary reader, we should not forget that at the beginning of the twentieth century the advanced photographic and printing technologies that allowed for the rapid production and dissemination of photographs were recent innovations. Before considering how the visual rupture between the Qing Empire and the modern Republican leader was reflected in the illustrated press, we can make some distinctions among the media we have introduced. The True Record used photography as a mean of journalism, to witness ‘true facts’, aiming to provoke an emotional reaction

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Figure 13.4  President Sun Yat-sen leaves Shanghai railway station, Zhonghua Minguo Guangfu zhanshitu 中華民國光復戰事圖 (Battles won by the Republic of China), 35.6 x 53.3 cm, 1912.

with a didactic purpose.23 Colour lithographs conceived in the same revolutionary mindset provided a different visual experience: the black contour lines of lithographic prints translated the image from journalism to visual entertainment. Bright colours and written colophons provided the prints with an accentuated aesthetic quality, which related to the experience of looking at paintings rather than the idea of scientific witness invoked by photography. Graphic images, furthermore, offered the advantage of allowing easy manipulation to modify the visual information, for example with the addition of nationalist flags, the elimination of unwanted details, and the moving around of subjects according to their hierarchic position. A comparison between photographs in the illustrated press and propaganda posters provides clues to the cross-media exchange processes shaping the visual culture of early-twentieth-century China – in images which, due to their fragility and perceived lack of value, have largely been lost.

Friends and enemies How did the Revolutionary press exploit the visual rupture between the obsolete Qing and the modern Republican? In the following section, I analyse shifts in the representation of the ambiguous figure of Yuan Shikai, first supported and then

 Photographic Portraits of Leaders of the 1911 Revolution 231 opposed by the Nationalist Party 國民黨–the successor to the Revolutionary Alliance – to illustrate the tactical use of his portraits in Qing or military robes, depending on the message the Republican press intended to transmit. Historically, the Republican revolution in China overthrew a millenary imperial system. However, the years before and after the revolution saw a series of fragmented events that made China neither a monarchy nor a fully formed republic. The revolution had been preceded by a series of other revolts in the first decade of the twentieth century, and was followed by a period of political chaos. Powerful figures who decided the fate of the revolution were not necessarily engaged promoters of the Republic: the military leader of the Beiyang army, Yuan Shikai, for example, played a key role in the mediation between the Empire and the Republicans, and allowed for the peaceful abdication of the Qing. He became president in 1912, assassinated Nationalist Party leader Song Jiaoren 宋敎仁 (1882–1913) in 1913, and proclaimed himself Emperor of a new dynasty in 1916. A dark period of conflict between powerful landlords broke out after his death, during which Republican institutions lost their power. Until 1924, the Emperor and his family still resided in the Forbidden City. In short, negotiations and ambiguities between the Imperial and Republican systems preceded and survived the 1911 revolution, and numerous continuities in terms of power and social networks continued throughout the 1910s. It was the task of Republican propaganda to counter this evidence of continuity with the myth of the Republican revolution as a radical rupture with the past. The True Record and other Republican publications employed images to support the idea of radical rupture. New ideal identities were allotted to the citizens of the Republic of China through elements such as clothes, hats and gestures, which both men and women should assume in order to fulfil their roles as new citizens of the modern nation – elements like the military suit and the western-looking clothing in the figures that accompany this chapter.24 Revolutionaries, in particular, promoted the cutting off of queues, the pigtails characteristic of Manchu men, and the use of military uniforms and modern European clothing rather than Qing official attire.25 Although such boundaries between traditional and modern dressing were not clearcut in everyday life, it became important as an identity marker at a representative and prescriptive level in the press.26 Military attire and western dresses marked the political identity of revolutionary leaders. Sun Yat-sen, who had studied in Hawaii and Hong Kong before becoming leader of the Revolutionary Alliance, always appeared in public in military uniform with a long overcoat or in a western-style elegant suit (Figures 13.1, 13.3 and 13.4). Similarly, Yuan Shikai dressed in military uniform when he was performing the role of President of the Republic. Due to Yuan Shikai’s key role in finalising the abdication of the last Emperor, Pu Yi, Sun Yat-sen had agreed to elect him Provisional President in February 1912, effectively transferring the capital from Nanjing to Beijing. During the short period between Yuan’s appointment and the assassination of Nationalist leader Song Jiaoren, for roughly one year, Sun Yat-sen and his party supported Yuan Shikai, and the Republican media portrayed him as the legitimate President of China. One colourful page in the didactic illustrated Children’s Educational Images, features a widely reproduced graphic of the leader in military uniform (Figure 13.5).27 The page

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Figure 13.5  Miyu 謎語 [riddles], Ertong jiaoyu hua 儿童教育画 (Children’s educational images) 31 (1 July 1913) (reprint September 1922), n.p. [5].

includes information about Yuan’s presidency within a four-part composition aimed at explaining to children the appropriate use of classifiers in Chinese language through playful riddles. Just as one could ‘keep a tiger once’ (一隻) in a lifetime, a flower would open once (一次) a month, and a knife would cut a row at once (一段), a nation only has one (一個) president, namely Yuan Shikai. The medal pinned to Yuan’s chest in the portrait, composed of two superimposed stars, with eighteen tips representing the eighteen Han-populated provinces (Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet and Xinjiang excluded), indicates his political affiliation with the revolution.28 In 1912 to 1913, then, Republican propaganda declared Yuan Shikai a legitimate president and represented him with all the appropriate paraphernalia. Yet, the situation radically changed when, on 20 March 1913, the Nationalist Party candidate supported by Sun Yat-sen, Song Jiaoren, was shot leaving Shanghai railway station, on a journey to Beijing to become the Nationalist representative. Song died two days later in hospital; his assassination created a scandal in Chinese-politics that was widely reported in the press, and deepened the hatred between different political factions. Yuan Shikai was accused of Song’s assassination, because Song was the main threat to Yuan’s accession to power. Voices accusing Yuan and his affiliates gained prominence in the revolutionary-affiliated press. The True Record responded to Song Jiaoren’s murder Yuan Shikai by publishing photographs of the Song Jiaoren’s assassins,29 along with a portrait of Yuan in Qing robes and hat (Figure 13.6). Rather than a photograph of Yuan as a military leader, like the portrait in Children’s Educational Images (Figure 13.5),30 the Gao brothers had

 Photographic Portraits of Leaders of the 1911 Revolution 233

Figure 13.6  Mousha Song Jiaoren xiansheng zhi guanxi zhe 謀殺宋教仁先生之關繋著 (People related to the murder of Song Jiaoren), The True Record 17 (1913), n.p. [7].

selected an image of Yuan as a functionary in the service of the Imperial regime, the prime enemies of the revolution. In sharp contrast, Song Jiaoren himself appeared in a striking post-mortem portrait in an elegant black smoking suit, a top hat, and leather shoes (Figure 13.7). Seated in a white armchair, only his closed eyes reveal that Song is dead, in this professionally staged studio photograph, enriched with pieces of scenography such as the top hat and side table.31 The contrast between the visual representations of Yuan and Song provides a clue as to why The True Record was closed. By implicitly accusing Yuan Shikai of Song Jiaoren’s death, the Gao brothers condemned The True Record to a premature end. Other revolutionary publications were shut down in the same period when, after the failure of the second revolution in July 1913, the flight of Sun Yat-sen to Japan in August, and the consequently increased power of Yuan Shikai, Yuan’s image in the Republican media had shifted from that of a masterful mediator to that of an oppressor. Clothing in times of political crisis can be used to define political sides, or to provoke satirical critique. As exemplified in Song’s post-mortem portrait, modern, westernstyle clothing in early-twentieth-century China served as a visual embodiment of Republican values, whilst Qing robes were interpreted as symbols of the backward Empire. A cartoon in Minquan huabao 民權畫報 [Citizens’ Rights Illustrated] plays on this symbolism (Figure 13.8): the drawing shows Republicans dressed in westernised military and civilian clothing while viewing their Empire-era reflections in the mirror. In the cartoon, the clothing becomes a device to express doubts on the conversion of Imperial officers to Republican principles: despite dressing up like Republicans, a

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Figure 13.7  Post-mortem photograph of Song Jiaoren, The True Record 17 (1913), n.p. [3]. 

Figure 13.8  Cartoon from Minquan huabao 民權畫報 (Citizens’ Rights Illustrated), 12, 1912, n.p [1].  

 Photographic Portraits of Leaders of the 1911 Revolution 235 ‘mirror able to see one’s ghost’ reveals the officials’ true essence.32 It is worth noting that the Chinese character jing 镜 can be used both to describe the mirror and the camera lens: both, at this particular historical juncture, represented the political imperative of revealing the ‘truth’.

Conclusion A close reading of leader portraits included in The True Record, and political leaders’ portraits of the same period, shows that the revolutionaries’ visual and semantic strategies relied on a vocabulary of dualistic terms that characterised contemporary visions of the modern nation. Whereas revolutionaries envisioned Qing officials as corrupt and old-fashioned, they portrayed themselves as modern and progressive. The modernist narrative of national emancipation, promoted by the new leaders of the Republic of China, was combined with a discourse of racial rupture in which the Manchu-ethnic Qing figured as illegitimate invaders, while the Han ethnic group led by Sun Yat-sen were the rightful rulers of China. Images published in the popular press provide insight into the construction of this ideal of the modern Chinese nation. Photographs and graphics published at the outbreak of the 1911 Republican Revolution invoke a narrative of historical rupture that is still prevalent in propaganda and in historical writing on this period. The pivotal year 1912 marks a mythic moment of transition between traditional China and modern China, captured in the pages of the popular illustrated press.

Notes 1 Bruno Latour, We have Never been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 10, and 140–1. 2 Chen Pingyuan estimates that between 1877 and 1919 in China there were at least 120 pictorials. See Chen Pingyuan, 陈平原 Zuo tu you shi yu xixuedongjian: wanqing huabao yanjiu 左图右史与西学东渐—晚清画报研究 (Image on the left and history on the right and western learning: research on illustrated magazines of the late Qing) (Beijing: Sanlian Shudian, 2018), 15. 3 Zhenxiang huabao 真相畫報 (The True Record) 3 (1912): n.p. [68]. Photography did not appear in the press published in China before 1904–6, and became widespread only around the 1910s with the import of photozincography. Before the 1910s, images were sold as separate publications in lithographic prints, engravings, or ‘original’ photographic prints. Hu Zhichuan 胡志川 and Ma Yunceng 马云增 eds, Zhongguo sheying shi 中国摄影史 (The History of Chinese Photography) (Beijing: Zhongguo sheying chubanshe, 1987), 54–5; Rudolf G. Wagner, ed. Joining the Global Public: Word, Image, and City in Early Chinese Newspapers, 1870–1910 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 112; Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004), 59–66. 4 Besides the illustrated Shijie 世界 (Le Monde), published by Chinese students overseas in Paris, and scattered photographs appearing in the dogfang zazhi 東方雜誌 (The

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6 7

8 9 10

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eastern miscellany), and nüzi shijie 女子世界 (The world of women) in the first years of the 1900s, it is starting from 1912 that photography acquired a more consistent presence in The Eastern Miscellany and The True Record. See Hu, and Ma, ‘The History of Chinese Photography’, 85–7. Waara’s discussion of The True Record makes comparisons with the Young Companion 良友, and categories the magazine as the forerunner of the ‘hybrid’ magazine of the 1920s and 1930s. Carol Lynne Waara, ‘Arts and Life: Public and Private Culture in Chinese Art Periodicals, 1912–1937’ (PhD. diss., University of Michigan, 1994), 141–90. Cheng-hua Wang, ‘New Printing Technology and Heritage Preservation: Collotype Reproduction of Antiquities in Modern China, circa 1908–1917’, in The Role of Japan in Modern Chinese Art, ed. Joshua Fogel A. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 273–373. See also 劉宇珍 Liu Yu-Jen, 照相複製年代裡的中國美術：《神州國光集》的複製態度與文化表述 (Chinese Art in the Age of Photographic Reproduction: The Art Periodical ‘Shenzhou Guoguangji’), Taida Journal of Art History, 35 (2013): 185–258. An annual subscription to The True Record costed seven yuan for 36 issues that were to be distributed three times per month over one year (though the effective distribution was scattered). The True Record 1 (1912): n.p. [51]. The True Record 1 (1912): n.p. [2] Regarding the variety of terms used to identify photography and their semiotic nuances see Yi Gu, ‘What’s in a Name? Photography and the Reinvention of Visual Truth in China, 1840–1911’, The Art Bulletin 95 (2013): 120–38; and Oliver Moore, Photography in China: Science, Commerce, and Communication (London and New York: Routledge, 2022), 52–82. For a detailed analysis of the historical background of ‘objectivity’ as a parameter of knowledge in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010). The True Record 1 (1912): n.p. [2]. Joan Judge, Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 5. See also Michel Hockx, Joan Judge, and Barbara Mittler, eds, Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Long Twentieth Century: A Space of their Own? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 1–18. Hockx, Judge, and Mittler eds., Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Long Twentieth Century. Ibid., 19. Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 28. The True Record 7 (1912): n.p. [7]. The True Record, no. 7 (1912): n.p. [6]. Ibid. I borrow the term ‘Imagined’ from Benedict Anderson’s research on the nation. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 2006). For a discussion on the use of the term in the Chinese context see Bryna Goodman, ‘Networks of News: Power, Language and Transnational Dimensions of the Chinese press, 1850–1949’, in ‘Transnationalism and the Chinese Press’, ed. Bryna Goodman. Special issue, China Review 4, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 1–10.

 Photographic Portraits of Leaders of the 1911 Revolution 237 18 Cheng-Hua Wang, ‘‘Going Public’: Portraits of the Empress Dowager Cixi, Circa 1904’, Nan Nü 14 (2012): 119–76. 19 Li Yuhang, ‘Rethinking Empress Dowager Cixi through the Production of Art’, Nan Nü 14 (2012): 1–20. 20 The True Record 9 (1912): n.p [6]. 21 The poster series Zhonghua Minguo Guangfu zhanshitu 中華民國光復戰事圖 (Battles for the Liberation of the Republic of China) was issued by the Commercial Press in Shanghai in 1912. The image is a cross-media experiment derived from a photograph that was circulated in the press. One original gelatin silver print is preserved in the Francis E. Stafford Collection at the Hoover Institution. 22 These include the five-striped national flag of the Republic of China, composed by five horizontal stripes in red, yellow, blue, white, and black, referring to the five major nationalities in China: Han, Manchu, Mongol, Hui, and Tibetan; the banner of the Wuchang revolutionaries; and Sun Yat-sen’s shining sun flag. 23 Although early photographic portraits produced both in commercial studios and at court appear in local pictorial traditions such as ancestral portraits, photographs as objects were seldom considered independent artworks. See Wu Hung, ‘Inventing a “Chinese” Portrait Style in Early Photography’, in Brush and Shutter: Early Photography in China, ed. Jefferey W. Cody and Frances Terpak (Los Angeles: The Getty research institute, 2011), 69–89. 24 See Henrietta Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911–1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 25 Wu Hung, ‘Birth of the Self and the Nation: Cutting the Queue’, in Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), 85–123. 26 Ellen Johnston Laing has studied the changes in the clothing habits of Republican women. Ellen Johnston Laing, ‘Visual Evidence for the Evolution of “Politically Correct” Dress for Women in Early Twentieth Century Shanghai’, Nan Nü 5, no. 1 (2003): 69–114; See also Louise Edwards, Citizens of Beauty: Drawing Democratic Dreams in Republican China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020). 27 Ertong jiaoyu hua 儿童教育画 (Children’s educational images) 31 (1 July 1913, reprint September 1922), n.p. [5]. 28 The shape is derived from the banner of the Wuchang uprising. See Esa K. Leung, Brian K. F. Lam, Osmond S. H. Chan, N. G. Man-kin, and Carol S. W. Lao, Road to China’s 1911 Revolution (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Museum of History, 2011), 81, 87, and 119. 29 Mousha Song Jiaoren xiansheng zhi guanxizhe 謀殺宋教仁先生之關係者 (People involved in the murder of Song Jiaoren), The True Record 17 (1913): n.p. [7]. 30 Yuan Shikai officially assumed the role of President in October 1913. 31 For a thorough introduction on early portrait photography in photo studios in China and Japan see Luke Gartlan and Roberta Wue, eds, Portraiture and Early Studio Photography in China and Japan (New York: Routledge, 2017). Gu Zheng has provided a detailed study of the circulation of Song Jiaoren’s post-mortem photographs in his lecture ‘The body as a Means for Political Mobilization: Portrait Photo between Journalism and Propaganda and Minli Bao’s coverage of the assassination of Song Jiaoren’ (Heidelberg University, CATS, Institute of East Asian Art History, 11 July 2019). 32 A similar satirical use of the mirror appears on the cover of The True Record, no. 17 (1913). In the cover, a man wearing a cylinder hat looks at his Qing-clothed reflection.

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Publishing the Nation Periodicals and Nation-Building in Soviet Turkic Communities, 1921–37 Michael Erdman

Can a magazine create a language? Can one publish a nation into existence? In the history of Soviet nationalities policy, answers to these questions are complex. After the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917, Soviet authorities implemented an ideologically driven policy on national determination. Grounded in decades of often acrimonious debate, it outlined clear criteria for being awarded the title of nation, only one of which addresses the self-conceptualisation of the collectivity itself. In many regions, this process went hand in hand with massive literacy drives. Over the course of the 1920s, millions of people were taught to read a language – their national language, according to the dictates of Stalinist ideology.1 This drive was accomplished so rapidly, and on such a shoestring, that the most versatile and ephemeral of printed matter played a crucial role. Magazines saved the day. In this essay, I explore the role of periodicals in nation-formation among Soviet Turkic intellectuals between 1920 and 1934. I posit that magazines in particular were an important tool of agitprop, aimed at refashioning individual and group identities among the largest linguistic component of Muslim Soviet citizens. Intellectuals, politicians and activists alike used them to argue for their vision of the new Turkic Homo Sovieticus. That these competing ideas were publicly available in print is proof of the competitive and dynamic sphere of identity politics during this period. Whether any of these visions were accepted and assimilated by their readership is a matter for another time, and another paper. The Turkic linguistic space is a wide and diverse one, which is why I start off with a look at its composition in the Soviet context. From this, I proceed to the history of literacy campaigns in the region, and in Turkic periodicals, including an explanation of Turkic diglossia. As a half step into the main body of the paper, I take stock of the specific Turkic periodicals studied, before an in-depth investigation of three specific aspects of these printed objects. First, I demonstrate that language, and particularly writing, was used to emphasise intra-Turkic differences and make tangible the need for separate national languages. Next, I move to the important role that photography

 Publishing the Nation 239 played in defining the boundaries of nations, classes and citizenship. Finally, I look at how authors and editors utilised textual content to establish hierarchies of linked belonging, tying together the local, national and Soviet, to the exclusion of a panTurkic identity. What might this ‘Turkic’ identity have included? That bit of counterfactual history requires some background, that can be provided comfortably with an overview of the Turkic linguistic space.

Linguistic expanses The easiest means of defining a Turkic space is by language. This is also the most useful definition for a study of written expressions of Turkic nationhood. The Turkic linguistic family is a heuristic established by nineteenth-century linguists that currently includes dozens of lects, classified as either languages or dialects.2 These speech communities are indigenous to a wide swathe of Eurasia, from the Balkans in the west to Eastern Turkestan in the east, and from the northern reaches of the Urals and Siberia down to central Iran. Apart from the linguistic similarities, there are few other uniform characteristics of identity uniting the entire linguistic space. While most Turkic speakers currently practise Islam, there are significant historical and contemporary Christian, Jewish and Animist communities. Turkic peoples have been under the suzerainty and sovereignty of various empires and nation-states, but they have likely not been united in a single polity for quite some time, if ever.3 And the old conception that Turk and Persian served to separate nomadic from sedentary peoples has long been proven to be a highly reductionist, if not offensive, characterisation.4 As Boeschoten succinctly explains,5 however, one particular political and historical factor does help to create a coherent subgroup of Turkic speakers. The genesis and stabilisation of Soviet hegemony created a clearly defined collectivity of Turkic peoples who experienced common social, economic, cultural and political processes. Many of these peoples were subject to Russian imperial power prior to the October Revolution. The earliest Turkic states to be incorporated into Muscovy were the Volga Khanates of Kazan (1552), Astrakhan (1556) and Siberia (1598). The last of the independent Turkic states to be incorporated into the Russian Empire was the Khoqand Emirate in 1876.6 As a result, by the late nineteenth century, the Russian Empire counted among its subjects Turkic peoples in the Caucasus, the Urals, the Volga Region, Central Asia, the Steppe, Siberia and the Far East. They benefitted, as did their co-subjects, from the February Revolution of 1905, and were quickly swept up in the seismic shifts brought about by the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917.

Political and cultural changes On the eve of the Russian Revolution, Turkic peoples’ socio-cultural situations in the Russian Empire were exceptionally diverse. Integration into the state had been a component of Russian imperial policy since the time of Catherine the Great, but

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the success of this policy varied widely. There were well-connected Tatar nobility;7 nomadic Turkic polities with considerable administrative and cultural autonomy in the Far East;8 and everything in between. Rates of literacy, industrialisation, population density and income also varied widely. For this study, however, two different aspects of Turkic diversity across Soviet Eurasia are particularly important: linguistic and educational. Nineteenth-century Turkic-speaking communities experienced significant diglossia. Across Eurasia, two distinct literary languages were used. In the Ottoman Empire, Crimea and the Caucasus, Ottoman Turkish, an Oghuz language, was the most common means of written expression. While no codified standard existed for Ottoman Turkish, it was heavily influenced by the culture of the imperial court in Istanbul.9 Related to this was the Azerbaijani literary language, which was common in northwestern Iran and the Caucasus.10 Similarly, a Turkmen literary tradition also formed, the best-known representative of which is the eighteenth-century poet Magtymguly Pyragy.11 Regional inflections of these idioms are well documented, but these pale in comparison to the divergence between spoken Oghuz dialects and the written sources, according to the evidence available. Further north and east, the situation was less cohesive. Chagatai, a Karluk language influenced considerably by the literary practice of Alisher Navoiy, was the most common.12 Other written systems of communication, however, did exist, finding currency in specific locations: Tatarstan in the north and East Turkestan/Dzungaria/ Alti Shahr/Xinjiang in the east being the two most common poles of divergent practice. Despite their differences, the various traditions clearly had an impact on one another. For this reason, ‘Türki’ is used as a catch-all for the Eastern Turkic linguistic potpourri.13 Crucially, these languages, frequently influenced by Persian as well as Mongolian, Russian and Chinese, differed from the mass of spoken Turkic lects from the Volga to the Pacific. In some contexts, writers might make a conscious choice to employ a literary language to express themselves. As such, both Ottoman and Türki are an expression of an active ascription to a literary culture and, perhaps, cultural identity. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, some Turkic authors wrote in both literary and vernacular languages, depending on their topics and their audiences.14 The decision to switch between them was clearly not a random one, even if the exact motivation of each author is not immediately apparent. Of course, texts are written to be read, which brings us to literacy. How literate Turkic societies were at the start of the Soviet period, and just what counted as literacy, are topics of great debate. Standard Soviet narratives took literacy to mean the ability of the individual to read a text themselves, and painted pre-Revolutionary Turkic societies as highly lacking in this respect. Some scholars continue to espouse this approach.15 This definition ignores the fact that later actors – particularly those advocating educational campaigns or policies – had an incentive to downplay the efficacy of pre-Soviet education. Frank, in particular, exposes this bias with copious first-hand accounts of widespread literacy within indigenous educational institutions.16 Other scholars, especially those of Turkic manuscript traditions, have taken a more nuanced approach. They place less emphasis on individual capabilities, stressing

 Publishing the Nation 241 instead the myriad ways in which texts would be relayed over geographical areas. Sometimes, this took the form of a person reading a work on their own. Other times, it implied that a text was read aloud or performed for an audience.17 In reviewing the magazines below, therefore, it is important to remember that even the definition of audiences and their capabilities is far from ideologically neutral.

Publishing histories It is was against this political, economic and educational backdrop that periodical publishing took hold. I divide this history into five distinct temporal groupings of magazines. The number of stages differs from place to place, but there is sufficient overlap for this periodisation to be meaningful. The first tranche of items is from the pre1905 period, prior to the relaxation of official restrictions on the press and expression. The most notable example of journalism during this time is Tercuman (Translator), the newspaper published by the Crimean Tatar Ismail Gasprinskii. Gasprinskii was a keen advocate of the Europeanisation of education, as well as the creation of a Turkic lingua franca based on Oghuz dialects.18 Gasprinskii spanned various cultural and intellectual movements, including the Jadidists with their aspirations for educational reform.19 Beyond this, Gasprinskii clearly sought to cooperate with imperial authorities, ensuring that Tercuman would act as a conduit for Russian state interactions with Muslim Turkic subjects.20 As Vera Tolz has shown, this idea of unity through diversity was adopted and encouraged by more than a few Russian and Indigenous scholars of the late-Russian Empire.21 The second period begins with the 1905 Revolution, and the introduction of new freedoms and rights for Russian imperial subjects. With the loosening of state control over the press and expression, a myriad of periodicals appeared in Turkic languages, both literary and vernacular.22 In Tatarstan, the renowned Islamic scholar Rizaeddin Fakhreddinov edited two newspapers: Vaqyt (1906), and Shura (1908–17), both sponsored by the Rameev family.23 Further south, the Kazakh-language periodicals Ayqap and Qazaq appeared in 1911–15 and 1913–18 respectively.24 A similar story can be told in Azerbaijan, with newspapers such as the bilingual Nicat (1910–11?). Finally, a view on the development of journalism in the Russian Empire’s only self-proclaimed colony, Central Asia,25 is provided in the form of the newspaper Oyna (1913–15). The year 1917 brought two revolutions, one in February and another in October. In the South Caucasus, this eventually led to political elites declaring independence (1918). Among the Kazakhs and the Bashkirs, an attempt at self-determination was met with silence from the international community. Elsewhere, anti-Bolshevik White forces held onto power, allowing for trajectories that were still quasi-Imperial, but not Socialist. And, finally, some communities came under Soviet control rapidly, ensuring their rapid integration into the apparatus of Soviet publishing and power. Azerbaijan falls into the first category, and it is from the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan that we have such periodicals as Övraq-i nǝfisǝ (1919). Kazakh regions and Bashkortostan are an example of the second category. I am not aware of any Kazakh or Bashkir periodicals from the time of their bid for independence. The third grouping is

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reflected in publishing histories from Crimea, which produced one periodical included in this study: Yeşil Ada (1920). The remaining regions of the putative Soviet Turkic space fall into category four, which bleeds directly into the next stage of development. The Russian Civil War (1917–22) created immense disruption in political, social, cultural, and economic life across the former Russian Empire. While hostilities largely ceased in 1922, in many Turkic-majority regions the general turn to reconstruction and the establishment of Soviet hegemony began in 1921. For this reason, I have placed the bounds of stage 3 between 1921 and 1937, the start of the Great Terror. By 1921, the Turkic regions (except Tuva and Turkic communities in Lithuania) were formally under Soviet control, and the production of periodicals began to follow a more uniform pattern. Many of these were directly impacted by the Lenin-era New Economic Plan, which allowed a modicum of free enterprise on a small scale,26 as well as a period of literary and cultural avant-gardism.27 As these magazines form the basis of my study, I will leave their enumeration to the next section. The final period covers the post-1937 era. The period after the Great Terror involves a considerable amount of diversity. In a different study, focused on a topic other than the role and impact of periodicals on the enunciation of nations and nationalities, it would likely be broken down. For the current chapter, however, its heterogeneity does not impact my conclusions below. Stalin set the list of nations present in the Soviet Union, by fiat, in 1937.28 The Great Terror resulted in many of the actors involved in the second, third and fourth periods being summarily executed.29 The dice that were cast in the late 1930s have proven to be remarkably durable and impactful upon national divisions since then, even if the Second World War prompted considerable changes in the content and importance of the concept of the nation in the Soviet Union.

Pieces of the puzzle This study rests upon a sizeable collection of Turkic periodicals from the first two decades of Soviet rule. By no means, however, do these works reflect the totality of Turkic periodicals from this time. As the Curator of Turkish and Turkic Collections at the British Library, I am fortunate to have access to one of the best collections of early Soviet Turkic periodicals outside of the former Soviet Union. Nonetheless, the collection lacks many items that would help to paint a more complete picture of this heady time, especially in regions such as Tuva, Chuvashia, Bashkortostan, the North Caucasus and the Far East. It is easiest to divide up the works in question by their cities of publication. Borders and languages changed throughout the 1920s, but the publication locations do provide us with some clues as to the national and linguistic content of the various magazines. These include: Aqmescid (Asri Müslümanlık, İleri, Yangi Çolpan, Yeşil Ada), Ashgabat (Tyrkmen Medenijeti), Bakhchisaray (Oqu İşleri), Baku (İqtisadi Xəbərlər, Birlik, Fuqəra Füyüzatı, InqilaB və mədənijjət, Maarif İşçisi, Maarif vǝ Mǝdǝniyǝt, Nicat, Övraq-i Nǝfisǝ, Qızıl Qǝlǝm, Xalq Maarifi), Bukhara (Maorif va Madaniyat), Moscow (Temir Qazaq), Orenburg (Qyzyl Qazaqstan, Shura), Samarqand (Mehnat, Oyna),

 Publishing the Nation 243 Tashkent (Bilim Ochagi, Maorif va O’qutg’uvchu, Yangi Yo’l, Yer Yuzu), Qazan (Bezneng Yol, Mearif) and Ufa (Bashqort Aymaghy, Islam Majallasi). Some magazines aimed to bring their readers current events from around the world (Bezneng Yol, Nicat, Övraq-i Nǝfisǝ, Shura, Yangi Çolpan, Yer Yuzu). Others were showcases of contemporary literature and culture (Fuqəra Füyüzatı, Qızıl Qǝlǝm, Tyrkmen Medenijeti). A number of the publications were intended for particular fields, such as labour (Mehnat), women’s issues (Yangi Yo’l), Islam (Asri Müslümanlık, Islam Majallasi), linguistics (Bashqort Aymaghy) or, most commonly, pedagogy (Bilim Ochagi, Maarif İşçisi, Maorif va Madaniyat, Maorif va O’qutg’uvchu, Oqu İşleri). The remainder were often official mouthpieces, designed to inform the masses of decisions taken in their name by the state. Few of the runs found at the British Library are complete. Some of these magazines went on to publish past 1937. A full listing of their dates and publishers can be found at the end of the chapter. Nonetheless, what is on offer in London provides us with a snapshot for discussions of language, form and content, the first of which is our next topic.

Of language and nation Over the past century, scholars have offered up their own, often wildly divergent, definitions of both the nation and nationalism. In the current case, the matter is simple, thanks to the comprehensiveness of the Soviet state’s ideology. In 1913, at Lenin’s behest, Joseph Stalin authored Marxism and the National Question. By drawing upon Marxist theory, the work of the Austro-Socialists, and others, Stalin identified four necessary and sufficient conditions for a nation: common language; common territory; common economic life; and common cast of mind.30 Based on this definition, teams of specialists were employed by the Soviet state to determine which nations existed on the USSR’s territory. For those groupings that met only some, but not all, of these criteria, the state’s scholarly helpers made suggestions on how to bring languages, histories, economic structures, and consciousnesses into line with Bolshevik conceptions of nationhood in the Socialist era. They were armed with the ideological certainty that once all groups had reached national status, they would merge into one unified Soviet Socialist nation.31 Late-nineteenth-century Russian Orientalists were keen on encouraging loyalty to the state among minorities through government interventions in the development of national consciousnesses.32 Such suggestions found resonance with the Bolsheviks in the 1920s, who implemented similar ideas through a policy of korenizatsiia, or nativisation.33 The desire to create loyal cadres of Indigenous ideological workers and intellectuals was plainly obvious in the publishing industry of the 1920s. Magazines and newspapers in the languages of the Soviet Union’s Turkic citizens became a prime locus at which these two trajectories – ethnographic engineering and korenizatsiia – intersected. Indeed, it is here that we can see state and para-statal interventions in the categorisation and standardisation of Turkic languages.

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While a long tradition of Indigenous linguistic classification and reform does exist in the Turkic world, many pre-revolutionary actors were conservative in their approach to orthography. In particular, words of Arabic origin retained their original Arabic spelling without any indication of short vowels. In some instances, this lack of written short vowels was carried over into Turkic-origin words, in line with manuscript traditions across Eurasia. Something new appeared, however, in periodicals from Crimea and Azerbaijan during the immediate post-revolutionary period. In Yeşil Ada, Issue 3 (1920), for example, we see examples in which vowels are clearly marked by distinct graphemes in Turkic- and Arabic-origin words alike. The Arabic-origin ‘milletler’ ‫‘( میللەتیمیز‬our nation’), for example, has added vowel signs to reflect Crimean Tatar pronunciation.34 But this practice is applied haphazardly and unevenly throughout the issue. This is clearly an orthographic experiment, possibly intended to bridge the gap between oral and written literary cultures. The trend is nearly absent from the Azerbaijani Övraq-i Nǝfisǝ, in which earlier norms continue to be practised. The differences between the Crimean Tatar and Azerbaijani cases demonstrate that a tolerance for change, or a preference for conservatism, was far from uniform across the Turkic world. Given this, it should not be a surprise that the advent of Soviet hegemony did not result in immediate changes of orthography. Spelling was still a personal choice on the part of the authors. Some experimentation did occur, as can be seen in an article entitled ‘Alifbemiz sadǝlǝşdirǝlim’ (‘Let’s simplify our alphabet’), found in Xalq Maarifi in its first issue (1920). Changes to the spelling of primarily Turkic-origin words is far from routine, but does occur sporadically.35 These coexist with traditional spellings in the same articles, and in the rest of the publication, indicating that experimentation might have been exceptionally limited. It is clearly absent from issues of both Fuqəra Füyüzatı and Birlik. Change occurred more prominently to the east and the north. In Issues 2–3 of the publication Bilim Ochag’i (1923), from Uzbekistan, all vowels are marked, with the vowel i indicated by the lack of a symbol: ‫‘( تەرەققی‬development’); ‫‘( ئەدەبی‬literary’); ‫‘( حەرەکەتلەر‬movements’).36 The same is found in Qyzyl Qazaqstan, where a different set of graphemes are utilised, again, to mark the introduction of vowels in words previous unvocalised: ‫‘( مەملەکەت‬state’); ‫‘( ادابیاتی‬its literature’).37 Similar trends are found in magazines from Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. As the 1920s progressed, conservative approaches to orthography are largely restricted to two spaces. One is geographic, relating to Azerbaijan. Of all the Azerbaijani periodicals at hand, none demonstrates a consistent break from traditional spelling until the Union-wide adoption of Latinisation in 1927. The explanation for this, I believe, is relatively simple. Given the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic’s adoption of Latin as its official script in 1924, experimentation in Arabic script would have likely become unnecessary as an outlet for linguistic nationalisation. Another field of contention is religion. The two other examples of long-lasting conservative approaches to spelling are Asri Müslümanlık (Crimea) and Islam Majallasi (Tatarstan). Both magazines were linked to religious circles in the time prior to the state’s attack on Islam.38 The former was consistent in retaining traditional spellings for words of Arabic origin, but less so when it came to those of Persian and Turkic origin. The latter took a

 Publishing the Nation 245 more nuanced approach, marking vowels in Turkic lexemes and using Arabic spelling for Arabic-origin words. This is, admittedly, a long slog through the weeds of orthographic change and adaptation. But it serves to demonstrate how magazines helped lay the groundwork for the naturalisation of national languages. By altering the orthographic norms not only for Turkic but also Arabic- and Persian-origin words, authors and editors rendered vernacularisation optically, breaking connections to a continent-wide tradition and spurning pre-revolutionary attempts at unification. There is no doubt that morphosyntactic differences would result in divergent vernacular creations between Oghuz, Kipchak, and Karluk linguistic communities. But the publication of texts with phonetic differences in those linguistic markers of a common Turco–Islamic cultural space helped break the symbolic links between language, ethnicity and faith. Whereas pre-revolutionary publications from across Eurasia might have made use of the same lexeme ‫‘( ادبی‬literary’), by the mid-1920s we find it in four different forms: ‫ادبی‬ (Azerbaijan); ‫( ادەبی‬Crimea); ‫( ئەدەبی‬Uzbekistan and Tatarstan); and ‫( ادابی‬Kazakhstan). With the routinisation of editorial practices across the Soviet Union, these markers became clues to the purported nationality of a text. As Terry Martin has explored, a language’s ‘vocabulary, grammar, and script – symbolised national culture’.39 What is more, the primacy of phonetic principles in orthography foreshadowed Soviet authorities’ 1927 decision to unilaterally adopt the Latin alphabet for a broad swathe of languages. Latinisation had already occurred in Azerbaijan in 1924, although, as the periodicals examined here demonstrate, it was far from universally adopted. Considerable opposition to the move came from Tatar representatives at the 1926 First Baku Turkological Congress.40 As we can see from the foregoing discussion, Arabic script afforded plenty of opportunities for orthographic change and nationalisation on its own; some of these were purposefully adopted by reformers of the script.41 Indeed, Arabic and Latin both provided authors with tools to highlight vernacular differences in speech patterns while maintaining an illusion of similarity with other dialects and languages. In many ways, the periodicals employing the altered Arabic script represented an early imposition of the Stalinist mantra ‘national in form, socialist in content’, relying on a common cultural corpus expressed through a nationally inflected medium. Script was, of course, only one means of visualising national differences. Of equal, if not greater, value was imagery, frequently called into use in the state’s agitprop campaigns.

Visualising the nation Turkic manuscript tradition includes a strong vein of pictorial representation. It should therefore come as no surprise that imagery has long been a core component of Turkic magazine culture as well. As with manuscripts, one of the greatest hindrances to illustrated magazines is cost. The items in the British Library’s collections from the prerevolutionary period, as well as the independent or White period (in Azerbaijan and Crimea), show only a gradual uptake of lithographic or photographic reproduction.

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Figure 14.1  Header from the magazine Shura’s 13th issue (July 1914) featuring elements of European art and science as well as Islamic architecture.

Nicat and Oyna incorporated minimal imagery. The magazine Shura did not contain imagery, although lithographed text illumination of a European type can be found through the texts. The header of issue 13 (July 1914) (Figure 14.1) incorporates a sketch of skyline with minarets and domed buildings, while on the right-hand side there are scrolls, books and a globe. A painter’s board and brushes, musical instruments and architectural features appear on the left. The imagery invokes a fusion of Turco–Islamic tradition and Russo–European education and art. All of this is broadly in line with the ideology and political programme of the Jadids.42 The first considerable use of imagery appears in Övraq-i Nǝfisǝ. Here, it is largely lithographed sketches that illustrate the texts, although a few photographs make the cut as well. The sketches tend towards European models of representation and portray locations and people across time and space: al-Azhar Mosque and Mahmud Shah (Issue 3), for example. Photographs generally depict individuals, such as the portrait of the poet Kazim Kazimzadǝ (Issue 1) or the author Haşim Bǝy Vǝzirov (Issue 3). Famous people and places are on display, but these are not tied to notions of the nation. Many magazines in the immediate post-revolutionary or post-Soviet takeover period did not feature imagery. This might be the result of considerable supply restrictions and economic crisis.43 Content or focus may also have motivated a text-only policy, as in the case of religious periodicals (Asri Müslümanlık, Islam Majallasi) or those dedicated to official reporting (İqtisadi Xəbərlər, Maarif İşçisi). Qyzyl Qazaqstan did not have images, but it did include a pull-out map in the combined Issue 31–32–33. Most other magazines included either photographs or sketches. I will focus on the use of photography, as I believe this is more indicative of a broader story about representation and community. The earliest example of photographic imagery I have found comes from the Azerbaijani Fuqəra Füyüzatı. In Issue 2, a picture of a group of women accompanies the article ‘Yakın şarq qadınlığına’ (‘On Near Eastern Womanhood’). The women are identified as being the leaders and members of a workers’ committee, and their names and roles are provided below the image (Figure 14.2). These women are members of

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Figure 14.2  The Managing Committee of the Female Workers’ Club in Baku, with the names of members provided below, including the qualification of one as ‘the Turkish woman’.

both the Russian and Turkic communities in Baku, as evidenced by last names and the identifier ‘Türk qadını’ (‘Turkic woman’) placed midway down the list. They are seated and standing in two rows, confidently facing the photographer. The use of photography allows for personal identification of and with the women, who have been active in labour organisation, an undertaking clearly lauded by the editorial team at Fuqəra Füyüzatı.44 It provides readers with a clear image of the ideal members of the nation and their service to it. This photograph, and many like it, establishes a clear and direct line between those who read and those who could be read about. This personalisation is repeated in the images found in Issue 3 of the magazine. The article ‘Azərbaycan kommuna harəkatinin rəhbəri’ (‘Leaders of the Azerbaijani Commune Movement’) links a group shot of thirty-seven men identified as paraSoviet revolutionaries with an overview of European-inspired revolutionary dynamics in the country (Figure 14.3).45 By including the photograph of nameless Azerbaijani revolutionaries, the concept of the Socialist revolution is nativised and attached to the internal dynamics of the (soon-to-be nation-) state. It creates a direct and quasi-personal link between the Turkic readers of the magazine, their asserted national history (through the identifier of ‘Azerbaijani’), and the Eurocentric narrative of historical materialism. Qızıl Qǝlǝm demonstrates how this worked on a grander scale. Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union and its leader during these first formative years, died on 21 January 1924. The death of the Union’s first head dominated coverage for at

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Magazines and Modern Identities

Figure 14.3  The Leaders of the Azerbaijan Commune Movement, a group of unnamed revolutionaries identified as bringing European revolutionary dynamics to the Azerbaijani masses

least the first six months of the year, complete with imagery of Lenin at various stages of his life. Issue 4 (March 1924), for example, carried ‘Lenin vǝ yaqın şǝrq’ (‘Lenin and the Near East’) among other Lenin-themed pieces. A photograph shows Lenin reading at the Third Congress (presumably of the Comintern, 1921) (Figure 14.4), and an image on the next page shows the Headquarters of the Communist International.46 The imagery and content of the article help create a new ground of identity. They link Azerbaijani readers to the broader family of oppressed classes of the Near East. This sense of internationalism, personified by Lenin and edified by the Comintern, were important parts of the early Soviet authorities’ attempts at altering loyalties and building a sense of Socialist citizenship.47 The ability of readers to identify key components of such a sense of belonging (Lenin, Comintern Headquarters) was crucial to establishing what Benedict Anderson terms an ‘imagined community’ with other Soviet citizens, and with oppressed peoples outside of its borders.48 Magazines clearly used imagery to create visual connections along both national and supranational vectors of identification. Both streams of identification were present in Uzbek periodicals from this decade, such as Yer Yuzu. Yangi Yo’l, in addition, exemplifies the use of imagery as a means of linking readers to a third ground of identity. Yangi Yo’l, a women’s magazine rife with anti-traditionalist messages, established women as both an oppressed and a revolutionary group with the help of photography. Issue 8 (1927) of the magazine shows voters gathering outside of the People’s Theatre for an electoral campaign; a group

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Figure 14.4  Lenin reading a text at the Third Congress, likely of the Comintern, in 1921, featured in an article in Qizil Qǝlǝm just after his death in 1924.

portrait of the magazine’s female journalists (Figure 14.5); portraits of a (Russian?) female chemist, machine operator, laboratory technician, blacksmith, porter, machine gun operator, and seamstresses (part of the series ‘Women’s and girls’ service to global industry’); the progression of an infection on a woman’s arm; Inuit women and children in traditional education; female workers in Java; and an elderly Chinese woman, along with a diagram of a bound foot. Apart from the magazine’s eclectic content, these images speak volumes about the desire of Yangi Yo’l editors and authors to provide multiple contexts of identification for its female readership. Photographs helped create a sense of universal, supra-national womanhood, while at the same time logging documentary evidence of the advances of liberated Soviet, and especially Soviet Uzbek, women. Their purpose was to forge a new bond, uniting Uzbek women across socioeconomic lines and drawing them into the articulation and enunciation of the national identity.49 These dynamics played themselves out in numerous other periodicals from the period. These publications introduced readers into various communities, sometimes based on the four national characteristics outlined by Stalin in 1913, and sometimes based on socioeconomic structures. They encouraged audiences to know, visually and intellectually, their peers, and to be able to identify the characteristics of the nation and its vanguards. Authors and editors were not satisfied with simply describing the new socialist nations to their readers. They clearly desired not to leave much to the audience’s imaginations; it was much easier to make them tangible through the magic of realistic and manipulated photography.

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Figure 14.5  The female journalists behind the Uzbek women’s magazine Yangi Yo’l at a meeting in Tashkent’s Old City, likely in 1926.

Textual descriptions did have a role to play, however. All periodicals carried original pieces of writing by some of the period’s most prominent intellectuals. In the final section, I turn to their words, and their recourse to new national identifications.

Nation, in a word Whatever barriers cost, materiel and technical impediments might have posed to the reproduction of images, the same cannot be said of text. Many of the Turkic magazines in the British Library’s collections are wordy, as editors sourced pieces from local authors, in addition to translations from Russian or other European languages. This content, and particularly the titles used to introduce it, provides considerable information about shifting ideas on identity and belonging between the start of the century and the first decade of Soviet rule. The Türki newspaper Oyna provides an apt starting point. In the masthead of its 40th issue (24 June 1914), the newspaper proudly declares that it services the interests of the ‘Millat-i Islamiye’ (‘Islamic nation/millet’). Adeeb Khalid has written extensively about shifting and often amorphous ethno-religious identities in pre-Soviet Central Asia.50 It suffices here to point out that Oyna and its editorial board, headed by the well-known intellectual Behbudi, clearly enunciated a religiously themed ‘national’ community. The newspaper’s publication in Uzbek, Persian and Russian implies a

 Publishing the Nation 251 multilingual profile for the nation in question, at odds with the monolingual dictates of Stalinist nationalities policy. Similar dynamics can be seen in the newspaper Nicat, identified in its masthead as a ‘political, literary, and social Muslim newspaper’. In Shura, by contrast, ‘national’ in the sense of a grouping delineated by territory, descent and language was more current. An article in Issue 13 (1914) by Zeynetullah Nushirvan entitled ‘Milli tarihinden bir kisǝk’ (‘A piece from the national history’) makes clear that the author is speaking of a Turkic collectivity defined by its language and common political organisation, as well as its links to the Volga Bulgar state in the tenth century CE.51 Shura was, perhaps, agnostic on where the inter- and intra-group boundaries lie, as various pieces throughout 1913 and 1914 address historical and social phenomena among the ‘Kashgar’ Turks, the Kazakhs and the Bashkir. The examples from Shura demonstrate a willingness to make use of national signifiers, but not necessarily those which communities used for themselves. These start to appear more prominently in some of the intermediary stage periodicals from Crimea and Azerbaijan. In Yeşil Ada, for example, the article ‘Bizde ictima’i terbiye’ (‘Social education among us’) makes clear reference to ‘Kırım Tatarları’ or Crimean Tatars.52 The magazine was a proponent of national issues and a nationalist approach to the post-Imperial order,53 and this choice of auto-denomination cannot, therefore, be seen as merely coincidental. Övraq-i nǝfisǝ was less assertive in its use of a name for the nation, but made frequent reference to ‘Azerbaijani’ individuals and objects, placing the territorial identifier ‘Azǝrbaycan’ before words such as ‘ǝdiba’ (‘literati’) or ‘şu’ura’ (‘poets’).54 From the context, the word was evidently used to distinguish Turkic from Russian or Armenian. The use of ‘Azǝrbaycan’ to specify those working both on behalf of the state and those working in a Turkic language was established early in the post-1920 Azerbaijani periodical press. The periodical Birlik’s subtitle was ‘Azərbaycan istehlak cəmiyəti ittifaqının nəşr-i əfkarıdır’ (‘The publisher of the ideas of the Union of Azerbaijani Consumption Societies’). In the inaugural issue’s opening article, reference is made to ‘xalqımız’ (‘Our people’), but the language that this community speaks is clearly identified as ‘türkçǝ’ or Turkish, implying that territorial delimination was not sufficient to create a decisive rift with other Turkic communities.55 This formula is also found in Xalq Maarifi, Fuqəra Füyüzatı, Maarif vǝ Mǝdǝniyǝt and Qızıl Qǝlǝm. An article on linguistic Turkification in Maarif İşçisi (Issue 10, February 1926) authored by Şarqlı is an interesting case. Entitled ‘Türkləştirmek məsələsində cəmaatın və oxumuşların yolları’ (‘The paths of society and the learned in the issue of Turkification’), it shows repeated use of the term ‘Turkification’, implying a clear connection to an ethnic-cum-national community. At the same time, Şarqlı gradually introduces Azerbaijani-inflected renderings of words common to both Caucasian and Anatolian Oghuz Turkic languages.56 The previously pan-ethnic signifier ‘Turk’ or ‘Turkic’ takes on a new, geographically limited role. Official sanction for the creation of an ‘Azerbaijani’ nation did not come until the mid-1930s,57 but these articles helped lay the groundwork for it through the use of the word ‘Turk’ in publications such as these. It was the vehicle establishing a clear and bounded nation along Stalinist lines well before a more appropriate name had been selected.

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The situation in many other Turkic regions of the Soviet Union was much clearer, given a consistent and repeated use of ethnonyms to describe histories, cultures and territories. The Bashkir publication Bashqort Aymaghy carried articles about ‘Bashkir’ history in Issue 1 (1925) and about its history, language, dialectology and normative grammar in Issue 2 (1926). The second issue of the magazine also featured pieces on ‘Research on the literatures of Turkic nations’ and sources on the ‘early history of the Turkic people’ by Ghǝbdelǝkhǝt Fazly uly Vildanov.58 Together, they indicate the transference of Turkic identity to a supra-national level, with linguistic, historical and cultural characteristics marking out a distinct Bashkir nation. Similar dynamics can be discerned in the Crimean magazine İleri. The article ‘Tatarı sanayıga çekuv işi onun xususi meselelerine kulak asılmasına mecbur ete’ (‘The work of attracting Tatars to industry requires for their particular issues to be listened to’) identifies the (Crimean) Tatars as one of the ‘founding peoples of the [Crimean Autonomous] Republic’.59 The author, Bilal Çağar, uses both the concept of territorial indigeneity and a historically bound communal economic life, two of the four components of the Stalinist definition of the nation, to delimit the Crimean Tatars as a separate nation within the Turkic community. Uzbek magazines were also quick to pick up and make use of new national terminology. Consider an article by Abdulhamid Majidi in the magazine Maorif va O’qutg’uvchu that creates a new, chronological distinction in the nationalised literary corpus. In it, he identifies the nineteenth-century poet Miri as the ‘last renewer of Chagatai literature’. This is contrasted to the birth of Uzbek literature, implied to have occurred with the emergence of Soviet-sanctioned states in the 1920s.60 The literatures of the two languages are separate but linked through Chagatai literature’s influence on Uzbek. It also solidifies the Uzbek nation’s descent from the Chagatai cultural and geographic space to the exclusion of other Turkic groups. Such historical connections continued into the 1930s, particularly after Stalin’s rise to power and his efforts to solidify his grip on organs of the state. The Turkmen cultural and current affairs magazine Tyrkmen Medenijeti’s Issues 4–5 (1930) (Figure 14.6) is devoted almost entirely to articles on ‘national’ literature and literary criticism. The magazine’s articles are often titled with words such as milli (national), Tyrkmen (Turkmen), Tyrkmenistan (Turkmenistan), or biz (we), creating a clear nexus of semantic signifiers bounding the nation in terms of members, geographic space, institutions and ethics. This fever pitch subsided across the Soviet Union as the 1930s progressed. The Stalinist reaction to the campaign against Great Russian Chauvinism set in, and textual output took a uniform, Union-wide approach to culture, history and ideology. Most of this was directed by developments among Russian, rather than Turkic, elements.61 Perhaps there was no longer a need for self-conscious proclamations of national identity, as the mould had already set.

Conclusion In 1914, Lenin declared that the Tsarist Empire was a ‘Prison of Nations’. Tsarism was a clear other against which to measure the progressive nature of Bolshevik

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Figure 14.6  The cover of issues 4–5 of the magazine Tyrkmen Medenijeti (1930), featuring the use of the word ‘Türkmen’ alongside imagery of traditional and contemporary Turkmen life arranged in a Constructivist-inspired collage.

nationalities policy. Imperial restrictions and Russification programmes did make the expression of non-dominant ethnic or national cultures difficult at times, if not nearly impossible. But it is also evident that the nation was not the only means by which pre-Revolutionary minorities conceived of their collectivities. Despite this, Bolshevik policy focused considerably on the enunciation and development of the Socialist nation. Amorphous or porous agglomerations disintegrated, reemerging as rigidly defined national collectivities, a process made apparent through an interrogation of the Soviet Turkic periodical press. Among the most important means by which periodical authors and editors promoted national consciousness were orthographic experimentation, use of photography, and the liberal employment of nationally inflected nomenclatures in texts. They imbued Turkic nations-in-becoming with the four characteristics of the Stalinist nation: a distinct language, territory, common economic life and common cast of mind. Nationbuilding, through the periodical press, was a rhetorical process. Authors and editors, motivated by either conviction or fear, constructed arguments for the recognition of the nation, rather than describing the organic or spontaneous expression of national sentiment by their readers. In this sense, it is possible to claim that the Soviet Turkic periodicals of the 1920s and 30s published a nation into being. Whether those nations existed in the consciousnesses and emotional lives of their putative members is a question for a different study. What does merit our attention is the startling efficacy of the magazine in generalising, in a relatively short span of time, the definition and

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content of a concept with little purchase prior to the October Revolution. When it came to nation-building, it seems, one viable answer to the question ‘What is to be done?’ might have been the simple suggestion ‘publish a magazine.’

Periodicals in the British Library collections Asri Müslümanlık [Modern Muslimhood], Aq Meşçit [Simferopol’]: Nar. Upr. Rel. Del. Mus. Kr.S.S.R., 1923–27. Bashqort Aymaghy [Bashkir Type], Ufa: Bashknige Neshri, 1925–34. Bezneng Yol [Our Path], Kazan: Tatizdat, 1922–30? Bilim Ochag’i [Hearth of Knowledge], Tashkent: O’zbek Bilim Heyati, 1922–3? Birlik [Unity], Baku: [publisher not identified], 1921–5? Fuqəra Füyüzatı [Flood of the Poor], Baku: Inqilab Qomitesi, 1920–1. İleri [Forward], Aq Meşçit [Simferopol’]: Bütün İttifaq Qommunist Partiyasının Qırım Vilayet Qomitesi, 1926–30. İqtisadi Xǝbǝrlǝr [Economic News], Baku: Qizil Şarq Mətbəəsi, 1921–31. Islam Majallasi [Islam Magazine], Ufa: Kashafeddin Tardzhimani, 1924–7. Maarif İşçisi [Educational Worker], Baku: Azərbaycan Maarif İşçiləri və Həmkarlar İttifaqı, 1925–7? Maarif vǝ Mǝdǝniyǝt [Education and Civilisation], Baku: Xalq Maarif Komisyarlığı, 1923–7. [Superseded by Inqilab vǝ Mǝdǝniyǝt [Revolution and Civilisation] in 1928; currently published under the name Azǝrbaycan] Maorif va Madaniyat Majmuasi [Education and Civilisation Magazine], Bukhara: Bukhara Maarif Nazorati, 1923. Maorif va O’qutg’uvchu [Education and Teacher], Tashkent: O’zbekiston Xalq Maorif Komisarligi, 1925–31. Mearif [Education], Kazan: Tatarstan Meʼarīf Khalq Kamīsarīĭaty, 1918–. [Superseded by Bashlangynch Mäktäb [Elementary School] in 1936, Sovet Mäktäb [Soviet School] in 1938, and then Mägarif [Education] in 1990] Mehnat [Labour], Samarqand: Uzbek S.S.R. Narodnyĭ komissariat truda, 1926–7? Nicat [Salvation], Baku: Nicat Qiraatxanəsi, 1910–11. Oqu İşleri [Reading Matters], Aq Meşçit [Simferopol’]: Soiuz krymskotatarskikh pisateleĭ, 1925–9. Övraq-i Nǝfisǝ [Fine Papers], Baku: [publisher not identified], 1919. Oyna [Mirror], Samarqand: Makhmud Khwaja Behbudi, 1913–15. Qızıl Qǝlǝm [Red Pen], Baku: Azərbaycan proletar yazıçıları ‘Gənc qızıl qələmlər’ cəmiyyəti, 1924. Qyzyl Qazaqstan [Red Kazakhstan], Orenburg: Qazaqstan Memleket Baspa Khanasy, 1921–9. Shura [Coucil], Kazan: Vaqyt Nashriyati, 1908–18. Temir Qazaq [Iron Kazakh], Moscow: T︠s︡entral’noe Vostochnoe Isdatel’stvo, 1920–3. Tyrkmen Medenijeti [Turkmen Civilisation], Ashgabat: Tyrkmen Medeniyet Instituuть, 1927–37. Xalq Maarifi [The People’s Education], Baku: Xalq Maarif Komisyarlığı, 1920–7? Yangi Çolpan [New Shepherd], Aq Meşçit [Simferopol’]: Krymlito, 1923–4.

 Publishing the Nation 255 Yangi Yo’l [New Path], Tashkent: O’zbekiston Matba’a Ishlari Trestining Birinchi Son Bosmaxonasi, 1924–30? Yer Yuzu [The Face of the World], Tashkent: Qizil O’zbekiston gazetasining noshiri, 1925–31. Yeşil Ada [Green Island], Aq Meşçit [Simferopol’]: Millet, 1920.

Notes 1 Victoria Clement, Learning to Become Turkmen: Literacy, Language, and Power, 1914–2014, 2018, 37. 2 András Róna-Tas, An Introduction to Turkology (Szeged: Universitas Szegendensis de Attila József Nominata, 1991), 15–17. 3 Hendrik Boeschoten, ‘The Speakers of Turkic Languages’, in The Turkic Languages, ed. Lars Johanson and Évá Ágnes Csátó, Routledge Language Family Descriptions (London: Routledge, 1998), 3–14. 4 Alfrid K. Bustanov, Soviet Orientalism and the Creation of Central Asian Nations, Central Asian Studies Series 29 (New York: Routledge, 2015), 39–40; Maria Eva Subtelny, ‘The Symbiosis of Turk and Tajik’, in Central Asia in Historical Perspective, ed. Beatrice Forbes Manz, The John M. Olin Critical Issues Series (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 49–54. 5 Boeschoten, ‘The Speakers of Turkic Languages’, 3–4. 6 Peter Golden, ‘The Turkic Peoples: A Historical Sketch’, in The Turkic Languages, ed. Lars Johanson and Évá Ágnes Csátó, Routledge Language Family Descriptions (London: Routledge, 1998), 27–8. 7 James H. Meyer, Turks across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the RussianOttoman Borderlands, 1856–1914, First edition, Oxford Studies in Modern European History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 51–2. 8 I. V. Naumov and David Norman Collins, The History of Siberia, Routledge Studies in the History of Russia and Eastern Europe 6 (London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2006), 97–8. 9 Celia Kerslake, ‘Ottoman Turkish’, in The Turkic Languages, ed. Lars Johanson and Évá Ágnes Csátó, Routledge Language Family Descriptions (London: Routledge, 1998), 180–1. 10 Claus Schönig, ‘Azerbaijanian’, in The Turkic Languages, ed. Lars Johanson and Évá Ágnes Csátó, Routledge Language Family Descriptions (London: Routledge, 1998), 248. 11 Paul Michael Taylor, ‘Turkic Poetic Heritage as Symbol and Spectacle of Identity: Observations on Turkmenistan’s Year of Magtymguly Celebrations’, Nationalities Papers 45, no. 2 (March 2017): 323, https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/00905992​.2016​.1260536. 12 Hendrik Boeschoten and Marc Vandamme, ‘Chaghatay’, in The Turkic Languages, ed. Lars Johanson and Évá Ágnes Csátó, Routledge Language Family Descriptions (London: Routledge, 1998), 167. 13 Devin DeWeese, ‘Persian and Turkic from Kazan to Tobolsk: Literary Frontiers in Muslim Central Asia’, in The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere, ed. Abbas Amanat and Assef Ashraf, Iran Studies, vol. 18 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019), 132.D.

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14 Michael Erdman, ‘Saviour of the Nation, Patron of the Bourgeoisie: A Bonapartist Characterisation of the Coup of 12 September 1980’, SOAS Journal of Postgraduate Research 8 (2015): 131–2. 15 Allen J. Frank, ‘Turkmen Literacy and Turkmen Identity before the Soviets: The Ravnaq al-Islām in Its Literary and Social Context’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 63, no. 3 (13 April 2020): 286–7, https://doi​.org​/10​.1163​ /15685209​-12341511; Gulnar Nurbetova, Istoriia “Krasnogo Terrora” v Kazakhstane (20-30-e Gg. XX Veka) (Almaty: Kazakhskogo natsional’nogo pedagogicheskogo universiteta im. Abaia, 2003), 94; Clement, Learning to Become Turkmen, 9–10. 16 Frank, ‘Turkmen Literacy and Turkmen Identity before the Soviets’, 297–9. 17 Lars Johanson, Turkic, Cambridge Language Surveys (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 151–71. 18 İlber Ortaylı, ‘Reports and Considerations of Ismail Bey Gasprinskii in “Tercüman”’, Cahiers Du Monde Russe et Soviétique 32, no. 1 (1991): 45–6. 19 Michael Kemper, ‘From 1917 to 1937: The Muftī, the Turkologist, and Stalin’s Terror’, Die Welt Des Islams 57, no. 2 (23 June 2017): 164–5, https://doi​.org​/10​.1163​/15700607​ -00572p02. 20 Meyer, Turks across Empires, 27–8. 21 Vera Tolz, ‘Orientalism, Nationalism, and Ethnic Diversity in Late Imperial Russia’, The Historical Journal 48, no. 1 (March 2005): 10–11, https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/ S0018246X04004248. 22 Joseph Lenkart, ‘Russian Revolutions in Print: The Fate of the Ethnic Press’, Slavic Review 76, no. 3 (2017): 655–63, 656–7, https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/slr​.2017​.173. 23 Kemper, ‘From 1917 to 1937’, 168. 24 Steven Sabol, Russian Colonization and the Genesis of Kazak National Consciousness (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 5–6. 25 Tolz, ‘Orientalism, Nationalism, and Ethnic Diversity in Late Imperial Russia’, 136. 26 David Shneer, ‘Who Owns the Means of Cultural Production? The Soviet Yiddish Publishing Industry of the 1920s’, Book History 6 (2003): 208–9, https://doi​.org​/10​ .2307​/30227348. 27 John E. Bowlt et al., eds, The Russian Avant-Garde: Siberia and the East: [Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, 27 September 2013–19 January 2014] (Milano: Skira, 2013), 43–4. 28 Harun Yilmaz, ‘The Soviet Union and the Construction of Azerbaijani National Identity in the 1930s’, Iranian Studies 46, no. 4 (2013): 527, https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​ /00210862​.2013​.784521. 29 Arne Haugen, The Establishment of National Republics in Soviet Central Asia (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 218. 30 Iosif Stalin, ‘Marksizm i Natsional’niy Vopros’, January 1913. 31 Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union, Culture and Society after Socialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 7–8. 32 Tolz, ‘Orientalism, Nationalism, and Ethnic Diversity in Late Imperial Russia’, 139. 33 Ibid., 147–9. 34 ‘Yeşil Ada oquyucularına’, Yeşil Ada, 1920, 1. 35 G. Rǝşid, ‘Alifbemiz sadǝlǝşdirǝlim’, Xalq Maarifi: ictimaî, siyasî, ilmî, fənnî və tərbiyəvî məcmuədir, ayda bir dəfə tabʾ və nəşrediləcəktir, 1920, 1.

 Publishing the Nation 257 36 G. Zafari, ‘Chag’atay-O’zbek Xalq Tiyotrusi’, Bilim Ochag’i, 1923 1922, 62. 37 Münifzad Sabit, ‘Qazaq adabiyati ham ibrayi’, Qyzyl Qazaqstan, 1924, 66. 38 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (2017). (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 190–1, https:// www​.degruyter​.com​/doi​/book​/10​.7591​/9781501713323. 39 Ibid., 182. 40 Ibid., 186–90. 41 Clement, Learning to Become Turkmen, 48. 42 Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia, Comparative Studies on Muslim Societies 27 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 160–3. 43 Katerina Romanenko, ‘Photomontage for the Masses: The Soviet Periodical Press of the 1930s’, Design Issues 26, no. 1 (2010): 31. 44 Münifzadǝ Sabit, ‘Yakın şarq qadınlığına’, Fuqəra Füyüzatı, 1920, 4. 45 Akif Salvət, ‘Azərbaycan kommuna harəkatinin rəhbəri’, Fuqəra Füyüzatı, 1921, 19. 46 Zeynetullah Nushirvan, ‘Lenin vǝ yaqın şǝrq’, Qızıl qələm: Siyasi, İçtimai, İqtisadi, Tarixi, Ədəbi, İlmi, Fənni Şekilli Türkçə Məcmuadır, 1924, 4. 47 Khăsay Hăsan oghlu Văzirli, Azărbaĭjan Bolshevik mătbuaty Sovet ḣakimiĭĭătinin gălăbăsi ughrunda mu̇ barizădă (Baky: Azărbaĭjan dȯvlăt năshriĭĭaty, 1961), 112–13. 48 Benedict R. O’G Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Rev. ed. (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 6. 49 M. Kamp, The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling Under Communism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006) 107–10. 50 Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, 187–97. 51 Zeynetullah Nushirvan, ‘Milli tarihinden bir kisǝk’, Shura, 1914, 389–91. 52 H. Odabaş, ‘Bizde ictima’i terbiye’, Yeşil Ada, 1920, 27. 53 G. Z. IUksel’, Krymskotatarskaia pressa kontsa 1910-kh--nachala 1930-kh godov: organizatsionno-funktsional??nyi i ideino-soderzhatel??nyi aspekty : monografiia (Simferopol’: Krymuchpedgiz, 2014), 83. 54 ‘Azərbaycanın məşhur ədiblərindən’, Övraq-i Nǝfisǝ, 1919, 7. 55 ‘Baku, 15 Kanun-u ǝvvǝl 1921 sǝnǝ’, Birlik, 1921, 1. 56 Şarqlı, ‘Türkləştirmek məsələsində cəmaatın və oxumuşların yolları’, Maarif İşçisi, 1926, 42–5. 57 Harun Yilmaz, National Identities in Soviet Historiography: The Rise of Nations under Stalin, Central Asia Research Forum (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015). 58 Ghǝbdelǝkhǝt Fazly uly Vildanov, ‘Türk khalqtarynyng dunyagha burunghy dini qarashtary’, Bashqort Aĭmaghy, 1925. 59 Bilal Çağar, ‘Tatarı sanayıga çekuv işi onun xususi meselelerine kulak asılmasına mecbur ’té’, İleri: Ayda bir kere çıqar siyasi, ictima’i, ’ilmi ve edebi jurnaldır, 1926, 37. 60 Abdulhamid Majidi, ‘Shoir Miri’, Maorif va O’qutg’uchi Jurnali: Ayda bir topqir chiqariloturg’an ta’lim-tarbiyaviy, ijtimo’iy, ilmiy, fanniy va adabiy o’zbekcha, 1927, 34. 61 Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, 394.

15

Female Identities and Translocal Networks in Mexican Folkways Claudia Cedeño Báez

Despite the ephemeral nature of the magazine, its visual discourses can endure in the reader’s mind long after the unbound pages have crumbled into dust. These symbolic visualisations can generate a variety of meanings, such as those based around sex and race, or the conventions of gender performance. This chapter explores the importance of visuality in the social construction of identities in post-revolutionary Mexico. Through the pages of Mexican Folkways (1925–37), a bilingual magazine with a transnational circulation, we shall examine both the female identities presented and the constraints which determined women’s lives after the events of the Revolution. Mexican Folkways was the result of a translocal cultural alliance and thus manifest proof of the cross-cultural imagery forged by avant-garde artists and politicised intellectuals who together drew the course of Mexico’s struggle for its own identity in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. The magazine dedicated to exploring legends, festivals, art and archaeology was founded by Frances Toor, a Jewish anthropologist based in California who came to attend the Summer School of the National University in Mexico City in 1922. The Summer School courses at that time were aimed at foreigners in general, but particularly those from the United States and Canada. The courses offered students the opportunity to improve their Spanish language knowledge and to further acquaint themselves with Mexican history, manners and customs. Only a few years after her arrival, Frances Toor pursued the ambition of publishing a magazine dedicated to indigenous customs and mores. In her own words, she said ‘Mexican Folkways is an outgrowth of my great enthusiasm and delight in going among the Indians and studying their customs.’1 Captivated by Mexican Indigenous culture and its folk art, Toor undertook to counter the conception of Mexico as a land of violence, bandits and savages that prevailed in the United States; with her publication, she sought to make Mexico known from within during a period of strained relations, which arose out of the political conflicts between the two countries. During the convulsive decade of the Mexican Revolution, the United States, concerned for the future of its diverse commercial interests in Mexico, including investments in railways, oil wells, mines, banks and arable land, made understandable efforts to ensure that business continued unimpeded. Even when the revolutionary

 Female Identities and Translocal Networks in Mexican Folkways 259 conflict died down, the relationship between the two nations remained strained, given that Article 27 of the new 1917 Constitution changed the paradigm of land ownership. The state claimed dominion over both the soil and subsoil of Mexico, a measure which foreign investors, having no concern for Mexico’s national interest, received with hostility. Political caricatures, satirical cartoons in newspapers, Hollywood films and other cultural products of the United States covered the revolutionary conflict. The imagery emanating from the north characterised the Mexicans as violent, filthy and savage bandits, or else as the stereotypical ‘lazy native’. Static and moving images fused with the distinct imaginaries found on each side of the border as ‘“representations” of a reality out there, beyond the image’.2 These visual images not only informed the reader of the events taking place, but also modelled the image of their southern neighbour, thus shaping public opinion and throwing the power relations between the two countries into high relief. In short, when it came to portrayals of Mexico, the paternalistic political style of the United States was seen in its full hegemonic effect. This negative perception of Mexico did not stop US citizens from journeying south.3 Some of them travelled to the bordering country after being lured by the postrevolutionary metamorphosis, the ancient culture and the flourishing mural art; others as a means to dodge the draft or simply to search for adventure. Throughout the 1920s, brothers Carleton and Ralph Beals, photographers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, Anita Brenner, Franz Boas, John Dewey, Katherine Anne Porter, Alma Reed, Frances Toor, among others, for different reasons and by different means, arrived from the United States and provisionally joined the cosmopolitan circle of artists, intellectuals and exiles who lived in Mexico. Joining forces with colleagues and friends, Frances Toor launched a bilingual magazine, published in English and Spanish, that became an important vehicle for communication and a forum for transnational collaboration. Mexican Folkways dealt with various aspects of popular culture such as ‘corridos’,4 dances, games, traditional medicine, rural education, literature, oral tradition, arts and news. Its staff included Jean Charlot and, in turn, Diego Rivera as art editors, and it counted on the exceptional collaborations of Manuel Gamio, Moisés Sáenz, Salvador Novo, Gerardo Murillo (‘Dr. Atl’), Miguel Covarrubias, Carlos Mérida, Adolfo Best Maugard, Robert Redfield, Carleton Beals, Edward Weston, Esperanza Velázquez Bringas, Concha Michel, Elsie Clews Parsons, Tina Modotti and Anita Brenner, with Toor herself as editor. The magazine came to prominence in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. During this auspicious decade, known as the ‘Mexican Renaissance’,5 revolutionary ideals, indigenist ideologies, workers’ movements and politicised art prevailed. After a decade of armed struggle, the pacification process began, which in turn precipitated Mexico’s reconstruction. To quell the armed uprisings and consolidate the emerging state, the ‘Revolutionary-Reconstructive Governments’6 backed the promotion of ‘a popular culture, which would give to these minorities of such undeniable physical presence elements of identity that will confirm their belonging to the nation’.7 To bring Mexicans together around the post-revolutionary project and to facilitate the ongoing processes of social reorganisation and modernisation, a new identity was created. In this way, Mexico became a crucible in which new histories, values and traditions

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were formed that in turn gave birth to an autochthonous identity that challenged the dominant cultural influence of Europe, above all the French influence that prevailed during the Porfiriato.8 The official discourse around the triumph of the Revolution was aimed at providing a national identity which would twist the various heterogeneous strands of Mexico into a single unifying thread, which would in turn reconcile the different struggles into one great aspiration. To this end, government-sponsored initiatives highlighted the diversity of Mexican society in order to facilitate its unification and, in consequence, its governability. Subordinating art and literature to the interests of the state, a historical memory was created which aligned the politics of the regime with the triumph of the Revolution. Art, education and culture were instrumentalised for the purposes of propaganda, whether local or international. Campaigns of mass education were undertaken, knowledge was disseminated in books and magazines, and cultural initiatives which accorded with the national political project were supported. Art, particularly mural painting, was subsidised, popular art forms were reclaimed and the study of folklore was promoted, all with the objective of cementing national identity and unity.9

Mexican Folkways Mexican Folkways sprang up in the midst of a new era of patriotic fervour and enthusiasm for vanguard magazines, a moment in which the periodical press was being converted into a strategic tool for disseminating ideology and propaganda. Toor’s magazine belongs to the wave of publications responsible for creating the symbolic and depiction systems that gave sense to post-revolutionary identity and reality – a reality still under construction by the post-revolutionary government in collaboration with a translocal intellectual elite, who created an eclectic vision formed of ‘the glorious Mexican past and popular arts, as well as of classical European culture’.10 Immersed in Mexican intellectual elite circles and an advocate of the revolutionary transformation movement, Frances Toor hoped her texts on popular culture and Mexican art would evoke empathy and interest among her fellow US citizens. As one magazine review said, ‘the publication, by its quaintness and sympathy with the Mexican natives does much to obliterate the rancid smell of oil which has lately accompanied our notions of Mexico gained from our own periodicals which treat of political matters’.11 Toor edited her magazine from 1925 to 1937; the long-running title spanned a total of thirty-five issues, the highs and lows of its success reflected in its varying periodicity. At its inception, it was published once every two months, from Issue 1 (June–July 1935) until Issue 4 of Volume 3 (August–September 1927). From Issue 1 of Volume 4 (January–March 1928) until Issue 2 of Volume 8 (April–June 1933) it was published on a quarterly basis, although with a gap in 1931 due to a financial crisis. The publication concluded with three special editions, published in November 1934, August 1935 and July 1937.

 Female Identities and Translocal Networks in Mexican Folkways 261 In terms of format, the first six issues comprised thirty-two pages, including advertisements. From Issue 7 onwards, the number of pages dedicated to illustrations was increased, bringing the total number of pages to over fifty.12 The bilingual publication, aimed at both the Mexican and US markets, cost 40 centavos in Mexico and 25 cents in the United States (and the rest of the world). The price increased to one Mexican peso and 50 cents in the final regular offerings. The front cover of every issue displayed a print by Jean Charlot or Diego Rivera, using one or two colours of ink on a coloured background (Plate 8); the simpler illustrations inside the magazine, on the other hand, were monochrome with a few exceptions in the latest issues.

The international familia Frances Toor (1882–1956), born in Riga, Latvia, emigrated to the United States with her mother and sisters to join her father in 1888, following the path of many other Jewish families who settled in upstate New York. Frances studied anthropology at the University of California and in 1922 moved to Mexico to enrol in the Summer School of the Universidad Nacional (known to English-speakers today as the National Autonomous University of Mexico). The summer courses, publicised in Mexican Folkways from the earliest issues, included classes on Mexico and Latin America, anthropology, teaching methods, Spanish language, and Spanish, Mexican and Latin American literature. The subjects were complemented by excursions to places of interest, accompanied by expert university guides. In due time, the Summer School became more than just a teaching centre, with the Dominican intellectual Pedro Henríquez Ureña making it ‘a gathering place for intellectuals to learn about and debate postrevolutionary cultural transformation. Those involved in the school aspired to change perceptions among both foreigners and Mexicans. Courses and field trips concentrated on the social transformation and cultural rediscovery of the country.’13 The spirit of the Summer School had a great effect on the US anthropologist, to the point that it eventually manifested in the form of an illustrated magazine, which served as a forum for students and academics of both Mexico and the United States. As a sympathiser with the movement for revolutionary transformation, Toor aspired for her texts on popular culture and Mexican art to arouse empathy and curiosity in her compatriots. Toor’s couple in Mexico City, Joseph L. Weinberger, served as a delegate of B’nai B’rith, an organisation which provided assistance to Jewish immigrants getting established in the country.14 It was in this way that the paths of Toor and Brenner crossed. The parents of Anita Brenner had emigrated as separate individuals from Latvia to Chicago. As a married couple, they moved to El Paso, Texas, and afterwards to Aguascalientes, Mexico. When the Revolution broke out, the Brenner family felt obliged to leave the country, as US meddling in the Mexican conflict stoked anti-US sentiments which would have created difficulties for the family. The Brenners established themselves once again in Texas and Anita began her university studies; however, she did not fit in with her local Jewish community nor with the prevailing Catholic culture that surrounded her. In consequence, Anita returned to Mexico in

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August 1923 to register at the Universidad Nacional. Naturally, those tasked with welcoming her were Joseph L. Weinberger and his wife, and from that point ‘Frances took Anita to the YMHA (Young Men’s Hebrew Association) for tea. [Her neighbour] Carleton [Beals] took her dancing to the Salon México, and they all went to Sanborns (the House of Tiles)’.15 Soon Anita was mixing socially with the intellectual and artistic elite of Mexico – Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Jean Charlot, Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Carlos Mérida – sharing with them coffees, parties, ideas and, most importantly, projects. For her part, the Italian Assunta Adelaide Luigia Modotti Mondini (1896–1942), later known as Tina, left her home city of Udine in order to reunite with her father, who, like many Italians, had emigrated to San Francisco in search of the American Dream. In the United States, Tina met the French-Canadian Roubaix de l’Abrie Richey (‘Robo’), a novice painter and writer. After getting married, the two moved to Los Angeles, where Tina tried her luck as an actress and won a few roles in silent films. During this period, she divided her time between cinematographic work and modelling, posing for different painters and photographers, among them, Edward Weston, with whom she would later become romantically involved. The bohemian circle frequented by Tina and Robo included various Mexican artists, among them, the writer Ricardo Gómez Robelo and the painter Xavier Guerrero, both of whom expressed their enthusiasm for the cultural revival that was taking place in Mexico. Invited by Gómez Robelo, the recently appointed head of the Department of Fine Arts, Robo travelled to Mexico alone at the end of 1921. In a letter sent to Edward Weston, Tina’s husband described the marvels of the vibrant Mexican capital: ‘I must say, in terms of what is being done here, that this is an artist’s paradise. This place intensifies colour and overflows with character and life. Here it is possible to see more material in a single afternoon than can be found in an entire lifetime in the United States.’16 After only two months of residing in the country, Robo died of smallpox. Faced with the need for a new start, Tina abandoned her unproductive Hollywood career and moved to Mexico with Edward Weston, her partner and mentor. At the end of 1922 Tina took her first steps in photography, first as a model and then as Weston’s assistant, although it wasn’t long before she herself was positioned on the other side of the lens. Over the years of their partnership, the photographs of Modotti and Weston graced such publications as the plastic arts magazine Forma (1926–8), the Stridentist17 magazines Irradiador (1923) and Horizonte (1926–7) and Anita Brenner’s book Idols Behind Altars (1929). After three years of collaboration, Weston returned to California, and Tina set out on her own.18 It was on her own that she produced the series of photographs for Germán List Arzubide’s unpublished book El canto de los hombres and collaborated with the periodical El Machete.

Women in Mexico The foregoing paragraphs dedicated to Toor, Brenner and Modotti, seek to highlight their migratory backgrounds, the respective motives for their residence in Mexico, how

 Female Identities and Translocal Networks in Mexican Folkways 263

Figure 15.1  José Guadalupe Posada, ‘Adelita,’ Mexican Folkways, July–September, 1928, 146. Collection of the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, Berlin.

they made their way into the international heart of the so-called Mexican Renaissance, and, above all, creative praxis among women. They had arrived in Mexico soon after the flames of the revolutionary struggle had been extinguished, and even though the Adelitas had very recently served on the battlefield (Figure 15.1), the presence of women in public life was still sparse and selective. Despite the revolutionary stimulus and the consequent epistemological renewal, feminism in Mexico did not gather the same strength as other social struggles. It came to be regarded in Mexico as ‘a cultural phenomenon comparable to the foxtrot, the jazz band and the cinema; in short, a disconcerting symptom of modernity’.19 In the revolutionary government’s effort to catch up to the ‘civilised’ world, women’s rights were of secondary importance. The journalist Carleton Beals, also a contributor to Mexican Folkways, described in his first book, Mexico: An Interpretation, the situation faced by Mexican women at the dawn of the 1920s:20 The privileges, although both men and women are very “loose” according to our lights, are all on the side of the men who are commonly philanderers. The looseness of the marriage tie, the traditional infidelity of the husband, the lack of economic security for the women, make the latter exceedingly subordinate. And worst of all, tradition has it that the Mexican woman shall not work. While lower-class women are bred to hard toil, their work is not of a nature that will provide a living in case of separation from the husband. If a woman belongs to

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the middle or upper classes, she has no means whatsoever of self-support. Her education in French, embroidery, and the piano stands her in poor stead. Ordinarily the Mexican girl marries at seventeen or eighteen. [. . .] After marriage a woman’s life is even more limited. She can scarcely speak to another man unless she is in the company of her husband. Oftentimes she is not permitted to go on the streets alone.21

Beals’s brief interpretation of the gender and class conventions of Mexican women contains only some of the many possibilities for a woman in the post-revolutionary period: the inventory of legends, festivals, art and archaeology of Mexican Folkways comprises simultaneously a catalogue of different female archetypes. The magazine itself was only brought to reality thanks to female figures such as the editor, the anthropologist, the writer and the photographer, that is to say, women who made use of the word, practised a profession, travelled, undertook projects and mingled freely with their male counterparts at a time when ordinary Mexican women could scarcely go on the streets alone. Seen from this perspective, Toor, Brenner and Modotti can be acknowledged as revolutionary women because they played an active role in the rediscovery of Mexican culture but above all because they actively constructed their own identity. Indeed, these three women, who arrived and integrated into Mexican society, adopting the culture, language and way of life, resolutely challenged the Mexican patriarchal order. Their social position, their status as foreigners, and their location in the urban epicentre allowed them to subvert the norms of conduct dictated by a Catholic, conservative and sexist society.22 The anthropologist Frances Toor carved out her own space for self-expression: a publisher’s imprint and a magazine, where she exercised the roles of translator, stenographer, writer, photographer and lecturer. To these skills she added her talent for networking with renowned academics, artists, intellectuals and civil servants. Without doubt the exceptional selection of collaborators gave weight to the reputation of her projects. Paca, or Panchita,23 as her Mexican friends affectionally called her, is now recognised for her books, magazines and travel guides which interpreted the language and culture of Mexico for an English-speaking audience. In turn, Frances was a model for Anita, the US anthropologist being a woman with whom she could identify both personally and professionally given that both had a common history: Jewish roots, a family with a migratory past, an expatriate status and a love of Mexico. Anita Brenner’s collaboration in Mexican Folkways was fleeting, her dual nationality facilitating her offerings as an interpreter, translator, journalist and researcher. Following in Toor’s footsteps, at the end of 1927 Brenner returned to the United States to study anthropology and to begin her career in writing and publishing.24 Before leaving for the University of Columbia, Brenner commissioned 400 photographs for a catalogue of Mexican art from the Modotti–Weston duo; the images captured between 1926 and 1927 contributed to the aesthetic renewal of Mexican photography. When Weston and his female disciple arrived in the ‘artist’s paradise’ in 1923, the full aesthetic possibilities of photography remained unrealised. Photography was considered a technique of automated, mechanical reproduction: to add aesthetic value to the image their pictorialist peers would enhance black-and-white images

 Female Identities and Translocal Networks in Mexican Folkways 265 with colours and textures, in such a way as to transform photographs into handcrafted creations which were closer to drawing or painting.25 The newcomers from the United States brought with them cameras, instruments and a new way of seeing influenced by the aesthetic of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a tendency which encouraged an objective visual language and the exact reproduction of forms. The use of extreme close-ups, the decontextualisation of objects, the daring choice of framing, the sharpness of the focus and the perception of the object in terms of structure made the Modotti–Weston duo a guiding light for advanced Mexican photographers.26 Works such as ‘Workers’ Parade’ (1926), ‘An Aztec Baby’ (1926), ‘Worker loading bananas’ (1927) and ‘Tehuantepec Woman’ (1929), photographs with sharp focus, oblique angles, bold chiaroscuros, and an objective style brought ordinary people to the forefront.27 Soon the pictorialist school, at that time still in vogue, began to lose ground to the photographic avant-garde. Edward Weston ended his Mexican adventure and returned to the United States. As for Modotti, she kept the studio, stayed in the profession and positioned herself as the photographer of the Mexican Renaissance. To mark the occasion of Modotti’s first solo exhibition, held in the newly autonomous Universidad Nacional, Toor reviewed her work and gave her a platform in Mexican Folkways to publish the manifesto ‘On Photography’. Modotti, who in addition to experience had gained authority in the medium, used this text to argue for the principle of ‘honest photography’, which is to say: ‘without distortions or manipulations. The majority of photographers still seek “artistic” effects, imitating other mediums of graphic expression. The result is a hybrid product that does not succeed in giving their work the most valuable characteristic it should have – photographic quality’.28 In the light of this ‘new way of seeing’, the photographic style that Modotti established in Mexico prioritised the documentation of objects over the will to create art. Modotti’s ‘honest photography’ had the endorsement of the intellectual elite, Martí Casanovas, Ramón Alva de la Canal, Germán List Arzubide, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, Anita Brenner and Frances Toor were only some of the intellectuals who supported the aesthetic renewal championed by the Italian artist. In addition to photographs showcasing Modotti’s aesthetic approach, Mexican Folkways sought to bear witness to Mexican women in general. The magazine reproduced numerous illustrations of indigenous people – native Mexicans, as Toor insisted, represented two-thirds of the population, living in the remnants of their ancient civilisations.29 However, indigenous women had been dealt a much more challenging hand, because as well as having to overcome the barriers of class and race they were further marginalised by their gender. Since the colonial epoch, prior to the classist society of the Porfiriato, power and privilege were closely related to racial identification. In the hierarchies of caste, race and finally of class, these socially attributed identities made up the ‘basic categories of power relations and [served] as a foundation for a culture of racism and ethnicism’.30 The racial identities of indio (indigenous), mestizo (mixed race), or criollo (European descendant) were the starting point which determined a person’s capacities for action, accumulation of property and exercise of power. Rendered invisible in the Mexican society of Porfirio Díaz and revalued by the revolutionary government, the indio was finally portrayed as an icon of the

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autochthonous and a symbol of collective identity. Whether in paintings, drawings, or engravings by outstanding artists, in Modotti’s photographs, or in the photographs for the anthropological record, indigenous women were represented as immersed in a pristine state of nature and impassive to change. The profuse images displayed by Mexican Folkways include a tehuana, a woman wearing a richly embroidered dress, and a neatly adorned gourd on her head. The jicalpextle, employed for carrying food or flowers, compels the woman to hold the graceful upright posture shot by Modotti (Figure 15.2). The Aztec mother, also pictured by Modotti, wears a distinctive rebozo draped over her shoulders and poses with her little daughter in her arms avoiding looking at the camera. Another image, the result of an anthropological commission, documents the difficult and unique hairstyle of the women of Yalalag, their hair combed with strands of wool and vegetable oil (Figure 15.3). Another photograph illustrates the recent foundation of a Centre for Indigenous Education: the image presents a group of female rural students clothed in regional dress shyly posing, as indisputable proof of the benefits of the educational campaigns undertaken by the revolutionary government. A stylised sketch depicts female fruit vendors, a group of women wearing dresses adorned with flowers and carrying baskets brimming with exotic fruits on their heads. A further drawing shows a woman making dough on a metate, a grinding tool made of volcanic stone traditionally used by women to grind grains or spices (Figure 15.4). In each of the images published by Mexican Folkways, the indigenous woman alludes to and resides in the past; she does not participate in modernity, but is limited to the

Figure 15.2  Tina Modotti, ‘Tehuantepec Woman,’ Mexican Folkways, October–December, 1929, 197. Collection of the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, Berlin.

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Figure 15.3  ‘Women from Yalalag, Oaxaca,’ Mexican Folkways, August, 1935, 29. Collection of the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, Berlin.

role of spectator who preserves her style of dress, her dances, her festivals, her beliefs, as well as the typical roles assigned to her gender and class: hard work, maternity and an idealised contact with nature. Unlike her fellow citizens, the indigenous woman is not an active agent but rather an object of study, or of the government programmes that promise to ‘incorporate her into modern life’. Even though the magazine ‘played an important role in the formation of the new Mexican attitude toward the Indian’31 and contributed to the recognition of ethnic pluralism, the visuality of the indigenous woman reproduces her in varying combinations as poor, passive, servile or exotic. Without belonging to the stable of magazines subsidised by the state, Mexican Folkways reaffirmed the paternalistic attitude of the revolutionary government and of the cultural elite who took it upon themselves to study, interpret and, above all, to civilise the indigenous woman. Her self-expression in art, craftwork and customs were praised, but in over a decade of circulation no page of Mexican Folkways challenged the fixity of these racial and social identities; on the contrary, without explicitly stating this intention, the magazine reaffirmed the visual characteristics attributed to indigenous women, employing a familiar stock of signifiers which set them apart as a people, not least from the Mexican elites who depicted them. The criticism traditionally made against indigenism is equally valid in this case: Mexican Folkways was part of a reflexive worldview ‘in which the criollos [and mestizos] expressed a national ideology in which the indios did not play any role nor had anything to say.’32 Artists were essential to creating the new national identity – Mexican Folkways’ editorial team, as we have noted, comprised Mexico’s leading intellectual and artistic

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Figure 15.4  Roberto Castellanos, untitled illustration, Mexican Folkways, January–March, 1928, 29. Collection of the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, Berlin.

figures, including its second art director, Diego Rivera, who was widely acclaimed as the leader of the Mexican Mural Movement. The latest photographic techniques, and the perspectives of foreign artists, also played a decisive role in shaping new identities, as Rivera himself admitted: the camera and the manipulations of the photographic workroom are a TECHNIQUE, just as oil, pencil or watercolor, and above all persists the expression of the human personality which makes use of it. Tina Modotti . . . has done marvels in sensibility on a plane, perhaps, more abstract, more aerial, even more intellectual, as is natural for an Italian temperament. Her work flowers perfectly in Mexico and harmonizes exactly with our passion.33

The ‘pelona’ Though its focus was on the customs and mores of indigenous people, Mexican Folkways could not escape the cosmopolitan influence and modernising policies of the time. While the indigenous woman remained, in its pages, as unmoved as the stones of Chichen Itza, the drive towards modernisation and economic recovery created a contrasting female archetype, the so-called pelona or flapper, a woman

 Female Identities and Translocal Networks in Mexican Folkways 269 broadly distinguished by her ‘masculine haircut, uncorsetted waist and short skirts’.34 In Mexico, the appellative of pelonas alluded to the non-conforming shortness of their hair, but in the Anglosphere they were known as flappers, ‘a reference to their loose, relatively short dresses which supposedly flapped in the wind’.35 This feminine ideal reached Mexico via the ‘silent films imported from Europe and the United States, newspaper and periodical advertisements, movies, cartoons, comic books, illustrations in textbooks and advice manuals, fashion magazines, matchbook covers, burlesque theatre and other public spectacles, and both the women’s pages and the sports sections of the newspapers,’36 and for that reason, this archetype was only accessible to urban women of the emerging middle or upper classes who could afford the new consumer goods, at least initially. This new female figure broke the mould by altering the attire and customs of the Porfirian woman. High necks, long sleeves and flared skirts that brushed the floor went out of fashion. The slim waist cinched by the corset ceased to be a beauty ideal. And some of the rigorous norms that kept women out of public space were subverted. The pelonas or flappers were distinguished not only by the radical shift in the mode of dress, but they also embodied the modern woman, who thrived in urban, electrified surroundings, travelled by tram, went shopping, used household appliances, had a fashionable haircut – a bob or a garçonne style – wore make-up and smoked: these, at least, were the attitudes promoted by the commercial propaganda found at the beginning and the end of Mexican Folkways. This transformation of the feminine ideal was, however, contradictory and incomplete: the long hair and long dresses disappeared, but the female role remained confined to the domestic sphere. Advertisements promoted the archetype of the ‘lady of the house’ (Figure 15.5); that is, a married woman who cooks, washes, irons, looks after the children and serves her husband with the help of the recent innovations in domestic technology (Figure 15.6). Such commercial images assured the continuity of the traditional attitudes reserved for women. In the commercial imaginary, women took part in the technologisation and industrialisation of society, but only as a consumer. For over a decade Mexican Folkways assumed the task of interpreting and disseminating the essence of lo mexicano. The magazine projected an autochthonous identity cemented to the legacy of an idealised past – the popular usages, customs and traditions still being practised, while creating space for the aspirations for modernity and national progress. The identity fabricated by the Mexican elite, in collaboration with the international intelligentsia, gave meaning to the government programmes and promoted a new sense of order, and shifted attention from violence and instability towards the vision of a symbolically cohesive entity. An entity in which everyone – women and men, poor and rich, indigenous or ‘people of reason’ (as the indigenous referred to white people) – was a Mexican. The utopian and picturesque characterisation of post-revolutionary Mexico was disseminated principally by means of periodicals and artistic images, the visual referents in circulation satisfying the search for identity which characterised the Mexican Renaissance. Nevertheless, beneath this apparent national cohesion the inequalities of gender, race and class prevailed.

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Figure 15.5  Advertisement for a household appliance shop, Mexican Folkways, October– December, 1928, 192. Collection of the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, Berlin.

Figure 15.6 Advertisement by Compañía Mexicana de Luz y Fuerza Motriz, Mexican Folkways, April–June, 1933, 107. Collection of the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, Berlin.

 Female Identities and Translocal Networks in Mexican Folkways 271 Mexican Folkways, a magazine dedicated to legends, festivals, art and archaeology, stands out for its shared praxis among women and for interrupting masculine discourse, but it remained at the margins of the intellectual sphere, with the conventions which restricted female agency remaining firmly in place. Mexico’s indigenous women were not incorporated into the promised ‘modern life’ nor had a voice in the spaces of enunciation. The so-called ‘modern women’ were confined to the sphere of consumption and domesticity. An examination of the three archetypal depictions of early-twentieth-century Mexican womanhood – revolutionary, indigenous and modern – gives a fuller account of the complex and ambivalent agency of women in the negotiation and imposition of gender, and of their participation as subjects or objects in the history of the Mexican Renaissance.

Notes 1 Frances Toor, ‘Editor’s Foreword’, Mexican Folkways, June–July 1925, 3. 2 Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 22. 3 Careful readers may notice that the term ‘American’ to mean ‘of the United States’, as typically used in the Anglosphere, has been deliberately avoided in this text to honour the affirmation ‘el gentilicio americano nos pertenece a todos, a los del norte y a los del sur’ (the demonym ‘American’ belongs to all of us, those of the north and those of the south). In concordance with Miguel Rojas Mix, Los cien nombres de América. Eso que descubrió Colón (Santiago: Pehuén, 2018), 24. 4 Corridos translates literally as ‘events of time’. 5 Mexican Renaissance, the working title of the unpublished book by Anita Brenner and Jean Charlot, would become the term par excellence to describe the role of art and artists during the post-revolutionary period. The term was chosen to honour the parallels between the work of the muralist movement and the frescoes of the high point of Italian art history, the latter a source of inspiration for the Mexican school. 6 Frances Toor, ‘Mexican Folkways’, Mexican Folkways, October–December 1932, 205. 7 Carlos Monsiváis, ‘Notas sobre el Estado, la cultura nacional y las culturas populares en México’, Cuadernos políticos 30 (October–December 1981): 33–52. 8 The period corresponding to the dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz who governed almost continuously from 1876 to 1911. 9 On the post-revolutionary government’s initiatives, Frances Toor asserted: ‘Thousands of socialised rural schools have been established in districts where schools had never before existed. And whereas formerly only tourists appreciated the marvelous handicraft productions of the Indians, the Government itself is now encouraging handicrafts, together with folk music and every other popular artistic manifestation.’ Toor, ‘Mexican Folkways’, 206. 10 Leticia López Orozco, ‘The Revolution, Vanguard Artists and Mural Painting’, Third Text 28, no. 3 (2014): 260. 11 Gladys A. Reichard, review of Mexican Folkways in The Journal of American Folklore 40, no. 156 (April–June, 1927): 212. 12 Margarito Sandoval Pérez, Arte y folklore en ‘Mexican Folkways’ (Ciudad de México: UNAM, Inst. de Investigaciones Estéticas, 1998), 30.

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13 Rick A. López, Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the State after the Revolution (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 102. 14 Ibid., 101. 15 Susannah Joel Glusker, Anita Brenner: A Mind of Her Own (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 33. At the start of the 1920s, in the building of what had been the Jockey Club under Porfirio Díaz, the Californian immigrants Frank and Walter Sanborn established the Sanborns Casa de los Azulejos, a fashionable restaurant rendezvous for politicians, journalists, artists and businessmen. 16 Letter from Roubaix de l’Abrie Richey to Edward Weston, 23 December 1921, Tucson, Center for Creative Photography, Edward Weston Archive. See Rebeca Monroy, ‘Los objetos del deseo: Edward Weston en México’, Historias. Revista de la Dirección de Estudios Históricos 32 (April–September 1994): 79–86. 17 Estridentismo was the first Mexican avant-garde movement, initiated by the poet Manuel Maples Arce with the launch of the mural sheet Actual No. 1 in December 1921. The Stridentist movement shared members with the Mexican muralist movement. 18 Frances Toor, ‘Exposición de Fotografías de Tina Modotti’, Mexican Folkways, October–November 1929, 192. 19 Elissa Rashkin, La aventura estridentista (México: fce – Universidad Veracruzana – Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2014), 216. 20 After an eventful journey, Beals arrived in Mexico in 1918. 21 Carleton Beals, Mexico: An interpretation (New York: B.W. Huebsch, Inc., 1923), 189–92. 22 Anita Brenner was born in Aguascalientes, Mexico. Despite this, the Mexican government wanted to award her the Orden del Águila Azteca (Order of the Aztec Eagle), the highest distinction granted to a foreigner for services to the nation or to humanity. Brenner rejected the prize on the grounds of not being foreign. 23 Diminutives of Francisca, her name in Spanish. 24 In New York Brenner published the books Idols Behind Altars (1929), Your Mexican Holiday (1932) and The Wind that Swept Mexico (1943), and on returning to her native land founded her own magazine, Mexico/This Month (1955–1972). 25 Rubén Gallo, Máquinas de vanguardia (México: Sexto Piso - conaculta, 2014), 53. 26 Mariana Figarella, ‘Fotografía moderna: la primacía del objeto’, Alquimia, May– August 1998, 35–8. 27 Other outstanding examples can be seen in Forma, ¡30-30! Órgano de los pintores de México, and the covers for New Masses. 28 Tina Modotti, ‘On Photography’, Mexican Folkways, October–November 1929, 196–7. 29 Frances Toor estimated the indigenous population to be ‘about ten million, at least two-thirds of the population, living in the remnants of their ancient civilizations. It is ten million that President Calles has promised to incorporate into modern life.’ Toor, ‘Editor’s Foreword’, Mexican Folkways, June–July, 1925, 3. 30 Aníbal Quijano, Cuestiones y horizontes. De la dependencia histórico-estructural a la colonialidad/descolonialidad del poder (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2014), 757. 31 Toor, ‘Mexican Folkways’, Mexican Folkways, October–December, 1932, 205. 32 Walter Mignolo, La idea de América Latina: la herida colonial y la opción decolonial, Biblioteca Iberoamericana de pensamiento (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2007), 124. 33 Diego Rivera, ‘Edward Weston and Tina Modotti’, Mexican Folkways, April–May, 1926, 16–17. 34 Rashkin, La aventura estridentista, 216.

 Female Identities and Translocal Networks in Mexican Folkways 273 35 Anne Rubenstein, ‘The War on Las Pelonas: Modern Women and Their Enemies, Mexico City, 1924’, in Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico, ed. Vaughan Mary Kay, Cano Gabriela, and Olcott Jocelyn H. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 57–8. 36 Ibid., 59.

Afterword Faye Hammill

British Vogue’s cover for October 2022 featured the actor Timothée Chalamet. Alone. According to editor Edward Enninful, Chalamet was chosen as the first solo male cover star in the magazine’s 106-year history because he ‘is modern man incarnate, as an actor and as a person’.1 His modernity, it seems, has to do with refusals of conventional masculinity and of fixed national identity. In the cover portrait he wears a pearl choker, as many Vogue models have done before him, and the photo shoot incorporates womenswear. Enninful observes that Chalamet ‘dismantles old-fashioned notions of masculinity as a matter of course’.2 The feature article focuses on Chalamet as a global citizen: American with a French father, bilingual and much-travelled.3 I started to think about the meanings of Vogue’s presentation of Chalamet after reading Richard Junger’s essay in this book about changing depictions of ‘the young man of today’ on American magazine covers in past eras. While I was still reflecting on it, the next issue of Vogue appeared. British Vogue’s cover for November 2022 featured nobody. It was a blank, a block of purple. This time, though, the visual stunt was not a new move but an evocation of tradition. Vogue’s cover for 5 February 1936 was a purple blank in tribute to the late George V; in March 1952 the death of George VI was marked in the same way. Yet the three covers are not identical. The overlaid white text is a form of editorial art (text as image) which can be used to trace Vogue’s changing self-presentation. In 1936, the word ‘Vogue’ slants upwards, in a script font with an enormous curving ‘V’. This was one of several attention-grabbing logotypes which the designers experimented with in the 1930s. In 1952, the magazine’s name is written in a stark, blocky sans-serif font anchored to the top edge. A couple of years later, in a drastic shift, Vogue customised an elegant French serif typeface (‘Didot’) for a new logotype which has been used ever since across the international family of editions. The 2022 cover is the only one of the three to give the name and dates of the monarch who has died. Evidently, it could no longer be assumed that audiences would instantly recognise the significance of royal purple. The Vogue brand launched in the United States in 1892. At that period – as the subtitle of this book indicates – the rise of the mass-circulation illustrated magazine coincided with the inauguration of modernism. By the 1920s modernism was becoming mainstream and British Vogue celebrated a set of writers and artists – among them, Virginia Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and the Sitwells – whom it saw as ‘upholders of English cultural endowment’.4 Their heartlands were in Bloomsbury. One Vogue columnist, admiring yet puzzled, described ‘that scintillating trinity, Edith, Osbert

 Afterword 275 and Sacheverell Sitwell, whose poems are sharp as icicles, jagged as tinfoil, unexpected as flamingos in Bond Street or pearls in a dinner oyster’.5 The Sitwells represent the extreme limit of Vogue’s tolerance for modern experiment; at the same time, they are emblematic of its privileged and patriotic social milieu. Indeed, whom do we find commenting on the crowning of George V in Vogue’s coronation issue in April 1937? None other than Sacheverell Sitwell. In Vogue – then as now – nationalist discourse alternates with globalised or international modernity. We see this same alternation when reading across the titles explored in Magazines and Modern Identity. Vogue’s multiple instantiations – with editions produced from Poland to the Philippines – perfectly demonstrate that dynamic between national cultures and the normative influence of an Americanised global culture which is the primary focus of this book. Yet Vogue plays it safe: its internal tensions are contained within a highly commercialised print product, while a relentlessly banal prose style counteracts the occasionally subversive visual images. By contrast, many of the magazines analysed in this volume were located in financially or politically precarious areas of the print marketplace. Some took ideological risks: the Rizzoli periodicals, for instance, clashed with the regime of fascist Italy as Maria Antonella Pelizarri outlines. Others exhibited fractures resulting from contrary cultural and economic pressures. For example, the French-Canadian La Revue moderne, as Adrien Rannaud explains, was simultaneously an intellectual monthly committed to the maintenance of francophone culture in North America and a consumer-oriented women’s magazine which often reproduced content from popular US titles. When I teach my course on ‘Modern Periodicals’, I take to the first meeting a pile of print magazines in languages other than English. I ask the students what they can deduce about the genre, target audience and market positioning of each periodical simply from visual cues and material aspects. I am surprised every time by the extent to which we can ‘read’ the magazine as print product even without being able to read its textual content. In future, I will draw on Magazines and Modern Identity as I talk with the students and as I pursue my own research on the embedding of mainstream monthlies into national or international print ecologies. The methodological innovation that characterises the book will be especially valuable. It is fascinating to see these deeper explorations of the methods we learned about at the stimulating ‘Future States’ Nearly Carbon Neutral Conference in 2020, where early versions of some of the chapters were presented. For instance, Guilia Pra Floriani demonstrates how a situated and an integrated reading of a periodical can be worked out in tandem: she places The True Record, from revolutionary China, into relationship first with other periodicals of a similar type and second with ‘artefacts and visual materials located outside The True Record’. Patrick Rössler’s approach is inspiring in its combination of breadth and theoretical power. Most of us limit ourselves to one type of magazine whereas he looks across the range of genres which made up interwar Germany’s illustrated press. The concept of the ‘small archive’, developed by German literary and digital humanities scholars is surely going to be crucial for our future explorations of the forms of knowledge production that happen in magazines. And the ‘iconic turn’ which Rössler identifies in the culture of the Weimar Republic is also happening in modern periodical studies: all the essays in Magazines and Modern Identity are highly

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attentive to visual idioms and to their political power. So, I’m still thinking about the meanings of that purple blank.

Notes 1 Edward Enniful, ‘Timothée Chalamet Is British Vogue’s First Solo Male Cover Star’, Vogue (London), October 2022, 45. 2 Ibid., 48. 3 Giles Hattersley, ‘The Chalamet Effect: Timothée Talks Fate, Fashion and Being an Old Soul’, Vogue (London), September 2022, 182–97. 4 Jane Garrity, ‘Selling Culture to the “Civilized”: Bloomsbury, British Vogue, and the Marketing of National Identity’, Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 33. 5 ‘Seen on the Stage’, Vogue (London), early October 1923, 31.

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Index Abo Call  155–6 action  13, 127–39 1931 weekly  128 antisemitism  137–9 BUF publications  129 circulation  127 Italian fascism  136 launch  130–1 photography  131–5 photomontage  135–8 pro-Nazism  136–9 society and economics  131–3 street selling  130 typography  133 AIZ. See Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung Amann, Max  72 American Legion Magazine  51 Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ)  11, 69, 71–2, 81, 84–7, 135 Arena  9, 19–33 Christian Science  19, 29 economics  24 feminism, women’s suffrage  26–8 health and medicine  31–2 ideology  21–2, 33 politics  20 Populism  19, 22–4, 26–8 readership  21 social reform  29 technological modernity  22, 29, 32 Argosy  42 Art in Australia  150 Arthur’s Home Magazine  40 Arts et métiers graphiques  10, 112, 122 Atlantic Monthly  30, 38–9, 41 bauhaus (magazine)  67 Baumeister, Willi  67 Beals, Carleton  263–4 Beaton, Cecil  6 Beauty of the Age  217–19

Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ)  69, 80, 84–5, 99 Berliner Leben  64 BIZ. See Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung Blackshirt  127–31 Bodoni (typeface)  95 Bottai, Giuseppe  108 Brandt, Albert (publisher, Arena)  30 Brenner, Anita  259, 261, 264 British Union of Fascists (BUF)  127 ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody  48 Century  30 Chaplin, Charlie  86 Christian Advocate  40 Cine-Convegno  103 Cinema Illustrazione  99 Cixi, Empress Dowager. See The True Record Cocteau, Jean  6 Collier’s  10, 46–50 Comoedia  98, 103 Conan Doyle, Arthur  2 Condé Nast  1, 5 Crowninshield, Frank (Vanity Fair)  5 Daily Mail  127 Das Deutsche Lichtbild  154 Das Illustrierte Blatt  70 das neue frankfurt  67 Der Junggeselle  64 Der Knüppel  81, 88 Der Querschnitt  65–7 Der Rote Stern  88–91 Der wahre Jacob  75, 81 Dexel, Walter (die form)  68 Dianshizhai Huabao  207 Die Dame  62–4 Die Ehe  64 die form  68 die neue linie  73 die neue stadt  67

 Index 295 Die Neue Welt  80–4 Die Rote Fahne  88 Die Woche  71, 80 Dixon, Maynard (Sunset)  48 Dunton, W. Herbert (Munsey’s)  48 Enninful, Edward (Vogue)  274 Eulenspiegel  75, 81 Everybody’s Magazine  51 Eyebrow Talk  12, 208–13 circulation  209 eroticism  209–13 Family Magazine  39 Film und Foto exhibition  70 Flagg, James Montgomery (US illustrator)  48 Fliegende Blätter  81 Flower, Benjamin O. See Arena Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper  39 Freude und Arbeit  73 Gao Jianhua. See Eyebrow Talk Gebrauchsgraphik  68 George Newnes. See Strand Gerbi, Antonello  103–4 Gleichschaltung  59, 71–3 Goebbels, Joseph  72 Gramsci, Antonio  8 Harper’s Bazaar  42 Harper’s Magazine  9, 30, 40, 42, 46 Harper’s Weekly  39, 41, 48 Heartfield, John (AIZ)  69, 72, 85, 91 Home  12, 147–60 Aboriginal peoples  155–7 circulation  164 colonialism  149–53, 157 editorial character  163–5 internationalism  165 photography  149, 154, 158–60 publishing history  148 travel writing  166–9 Ich und die Großstadt  64 iconic turn  61 Il Risorgimento Grafico  95, 97 Il Secolo Illustrato  98–9, 105–7 Il Secolo XX  96, 98–9

Illustrated London News  3, 9 Illustrierte Frauen-Zeitung  62 Illustrierte Reichsbanner Zeitung. See Illustrierte Republikanische Zeitung Illustrierte Republikanische Zeitung (IRZ)  81, 91–2 Illustrierter Beobachter (IB)  70–1, 135 Internationale Arbeiter Hilfe. See USSR in Construction Istituto Luce  102 James, Henry  41 Kagiyama, Ichiro  158–60 Kisch, Erwin Egon  86 Kladderadatsch  81 korenizatsiia (nativisation, USSR)  243 Korff, Kurt (Die Dame, BIZ)  63, 99 Kracauer, Siegfried  107 La Donna  98 La Gazette du bon ton  116 La Revue moderne  12, 176–84 antimodernism (‘Courrier du mois’)  182–4 circulation  179 history of  177–80 modernism  177, 180–2 La Rivista Illustrata  96 Ladies’ Home Journal  31 Le Jardin des modes  115 Leslie’s Illustrated  43, 48 Leyendecker, Frank  48 Leyendecker, Joseph C.  46–51 Life  51 L’Illustration  111 L’Illustrazione  99 Literary Digest  49 Lorant, Stefan  70 L’Ordine Nuovo  8 L’URSS en construction. See USSR in Construction Madeleine (Anne-Marie Gleason Huguenin)  177–8 Magazine Digest  12, 186–99 antisemitism  190–1 editorial identity  189–90, 198–9 feminism  190

296 Judaism  193–4 Murray Simmons (editor)  189–91 Nazism, Holocaust  194–6 production and distribution  196–8 readership  188 Zionism  189, 196 MAN  12, 163–72 circulation  165 editorial identity  163–4 eroticism  165 imperialism  172 masculinity  171 politics  169–71 readership  165, 169 Manchester Guardian  8 Margadonna, Ettore Maria  103–6 Match l’Intran  111 McClure’s  9–10, 20, 30–1, 49 Meiyu. See Eyebrow Talk Mexican Folkways  258–71 editorial identity  260–1 expatriate contributors  261–2 Mexican Renaissance  259–60 Mexican women  262–8 pelonas (‘flappers’)  268–71 Minquan huabao (Citizens’ Rights Illustrated)  233 Modotti, Tina  259, 262, 264–6, 268 Mosley, Oswald  128, 138 Münchner Illustrierte Presse  69–70 Munkacsi, Martin  70 Munsey’s  9–10, 48 Münzenberg, Willi (AIZ)  81, 84–7 Mussolini, Benito  97 Nast, Thomas  48 National Police Gazette  44 New Typography  59, 67–8, 74, 113–14, 118, 123 New Vision  59, 68–70, 113 New Woman  62 New York Evangelist  38 New York Times  46 New York Tribune  9 North American Review  30, 42 Novella  98 Nü xuebao  207

Index Oyna  250 pelona (‘flapper’)  268–71 Penfield, Edward  42, 46, 49 photo agencies  101 Piccola  99 Printers’ Ink  21 Puck  42, 45, 51 Pyle, Howard  48 radio  3–4 Red Cross Magazine  51 Red Leaves  12, 213–16 Reed, Gideon F. T. See Arena, readership Remington, Frederick  46 Rim, Carlo  99 Rizzoli (publishing house)  95–108 art directors  103 cinema magazines  104–6 Rizzoli, Angelo  13 Rockwell, Norman  49, 51 Roosevelt, Theodore  43, 45 Salomon, Erich  70 Salomon, Louis  82 Saturday Evening Post  46–7, 49–51 Schriftleitergesetz (Editor’s Law)  71 Scribner’s  1, 9, 46–7, 50 Shenbao  207 Sherlock Holmes  2 Shidai zhi mei. See Beauty of the Age Shiwu bao  207 Shura  251 Sichel und Hammer  84, 87 Signal  73–4 Simplicissimus  59, 81 Sinclair, Upton  86 Smith, Ure (Home)  148–9 Social Darwinism  44 Social-politische Blätter  81 Song Jiaoren  231 Southern Mercury  27 Sowjet-Russland im Bild. See USSR in Construction Spanish–American War  43, 45–6 Spencerianism. See Social Darwinism Steichen, Edward  6 Stern  73 Strand  1–3, 10

 Index 297 Sun Yat-sen. See The True Record Sunset  48 Sur  11 Tercuman  241 Times  8 Toor, Frances (Mexican Folkways)  259–61, 264 Transition  11 Trier, Walter  63 The True Record  224–35 Tschichold, Jan (The New Typography)  10, 67, 113, 118 Twain, Mark  41 Typographische Mitteilungen  67 Tyrkmen Medenijeti  252 UHU  64–5 Ullstein (publishing house)  62–7 USSR in Construction  84, 121 Vanity Fair  1, 5–6, 40, 151 Vogel, Lucien  111, 113 Vogue  63, 274

Vogue (French edition)  115–16 Volk und Zeit  80, 88 Volks-Illustrierte  85. See also Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung Vox, Maximilien  121–2 VU  1, 14, 111–23 aviation  117 circulation  111 photography  114 politics  111 typography  117–20 Weimar era body culture  64 magazine culture  59 Weston, Edward  259, 262, 264–5 Woman’s Magazine  47 Wyeth, N. C.  49 Xu Xiaotian. See Eyebrow Talk Zeitschriften-Information (Nazi era bulletin)  71

Plate 1  Cover of Sunset magazine, United States, July 1904

 

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Plate 2  A bitter foretaste of the disaster to come: cover of Eulenspiegel, no. 2, February 1931, special issue ‘Das dritte Reich’. Illustrator: Charles Girod

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Plate 3  The cover page of IRZ no. 24, 15 June 1929, shows the great hopes of the IRZ’s creators: ‘During the breakfast break’ three workers sit together, eat, drink – and read the IRZ. Author collection

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Plate 4 R. Corte-Enna, ‘La “carta da visita” del delinquente,’ Il Secolo Illustrato, n.49, 3 December 1932, 1. Archivio Rizzoli. RCS Mediagroup

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Plate 5  The Home vol. 9 no. 10 (1 October 1928), cover design by Hera Roberts and Adrian Feint. Copyright: https://trove​.nla​.gov​.au/

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Plate 6  Oscar Cahén, cover, Magazine Digest, September 1945. The illustration instructed Americans to send relief to European displaced persons. Author collection

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Plate 7  Front cover of Meiyu 眉語 (Eyebrow Talk) no. 1, Nov 1914  

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Plate 8  Front cover of Mexican Folkways, November 1934. © Collection of the IberoAmerikanisches Institut, Berlin

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