DEATH OF THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

Venerable Institution

When the Saturday Evening Post ceased publication with the 8 February 1969 issue, one of the most venerable institutions of American magazine publishing fell victim to the changing media landscape of the post-World War II era.

Middle-class America

The Saturday Evening Post claimed ancestry from the 1729 founding by Benjamin Franklin of the Pennsylvania Gazette. The Saturday Evening Post was, for almost sixty years, the most successful general-interest weekly magazine in the United States. The magazine had first reached its position as a magazine leader under the editorship of George Horace Lorimer, who held that post from 1899 until 1937. During Lorimer's tenure the Saturday Evening Post published fiction by Harold Frederic, Ring Lardner, Jack London, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Stephen Crane, Thomas Wolfe, James Branch Cabell, P. G. Wodehouse, Rudyard Kipling, William Dean Howells, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The mix of quality fiction, good reporting, and nonjingoistic Americanism made the Saturday Evening Post into the widely recognized voice of middle-class America. President Franklin Roosevelt was said to read the Saturday Evening Post when he wanted to find out what the middle class was thinking. In 1952 circulation was 4.2 million readers for the five-cent magazine.

Decline of the Mass-market Magazine

But the 1950s were the high-water mark for the mass-market magazines. As more televisions were sold and more and more television stations went on the air with broadcasts, the nature of American entertainment changed radically. Mass-market magazines fought television by trying to increase circulation, but this in turn raised the price of ads for companies who might advertise. In the mid 1950s the advertising base for the Saturday Evening Post was reduced when a full-page ad cost forty thousand dollars. By the end of the 1950s the Curtis Publishing Company, which owned the Ladies' Home Journal, Holiday, and American Home in addition to the Saturday Evening Post, had severe financial problems despite the fact that circulation and ad revenue at its magazine holdings were at all-time highs.

Last Try. From 1960 through 1963 Curtis was losing great amounts of money. The board of directors, which included no members with any hands-on magazine experience, was unsure of what to do. In 1964, reacting to the demands of the staff, the board hired William A. Emerson as editor of the Saturday Evening Post. He would be its last. His introduction as editor made clear the plight of the magazine:

My name is William A. Emerson, Jr. I am the new editor of the Saturday Evening Post. I stand before you perfectly equipped to be the editor of the Post because the "A" in my name stands for Appomattox. My family have been losers for generations.

Old Vision

Yet economics was not the only problem at the Saturday Evening Post. Its optimistic picture of a self-confident America was at odds with the changing tenor of the times. The Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle, and the cold war all combined to make the Norman Rockwell view of the United States—Rockwell painted Saturday Evening Post covers—seem a bit naive. Technology and a changing society and world had made a great institution dispensable.

MAGAZINE LIFE

Willie Morris's recollections of when he was hired to be an editor at Harper's magazine in 1963 give a glimpse of the New York magazine world as its old ways were dying and the new ways were yet to emerge.

Then abruptly, he [Harper's editor in chief John Fischer] asked:

"How would you like to come to work at

Harpers's?"

"To do what?"

"To be an editor. You'Ve had some sturdy editorial experience, youVe been around the country, your writing is adequate and sometimes better than adequate. We can't pay much, but if you're fool enough to want to live in New York, it'll get you by."

"How much?" I asked.

"$115 a week to start, and more if you work out."

$115 a week! I had been making more than that on the Texas Observer, and New York was rumored to be the most expensive city in Christendom. I said this, diplomatically, adding that I had a wife, and a young son who ate enough to keep three doberman-pinchers in good health.

Fischer relented, went up to $125, and said he would give me a thousand dollars to help me get settled in the city. "And if you don't like it," he said, "try it a month or so, and you can leave with no hard feelings."

"When do I start?," I asked.

"As soon as you want. Find an apartment first if you wish." He paused, waving goodbye to a publisher. "There's only one other problem, and that's space. I don't know where the hell we're going to put you. Every inch of space is taken up in the office. We'll just have to move you around until there's a permanent place." For some reason I thought he might be joking until I started to work several days later. I worked in a hallway, in an alcove, and one week in a kind of a large linen closet, carrying my manuscripts from place to place. But even the linen closet turned out to have better acreage than the re-porters had at the New York Times.

Source:

Willie Morris, North Toward Home (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1967).

Sources:

"Death of an Institution," Newsweek, 73 (20 January 1969): 52-53;

Michael M. Mooney, "The Death of the Post," Atlantic Monthly, 224
(November 1969): 70-76;

David Schanche, "We Call on the Saturday Evening Post—For the
Last Time," Esquire, 72 (November 1969): 40-60.