The Press: The Common Touch

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1939. Then Albert L. Cole, publisher of Popular Science, came on as full-time general business manager. He had been advising Wallace for seven years, and had put over the Digest on the newsstands. Now, he blueprinted the plan for worldwide expansion. In World War II, as a cheerful miniature of the home front, the Digest was so eagerly bought by soldiers that circulation jumped from under 4,000,000 to more than 9,000,000. With the blessings and assistance of the Federal Government on priorities, paper, etc., Cole expanded the overseas editions, which began with the British (1938) and the Spanish-language (1940). The foreign Digests broke the long-standing rule against running ads; they took them to bring the price of the magazine down to within reach of its foreign readers.

Barclay Acheson, who had joined the Digest in 1935 after making a name in foreign-relief work, runs the international editions. The foreign editors can publish only articles already run in the domestic Digest, although they can dig back as far as they like (the Japanese edition recently ran Dale Carnegie's 14-year-old How to Win Friends and Influence People). If the overseas editors think a piece isn't suitable for their country they can leave it out (e.g., in Italy, an article on birth control; in Sweden, where it is old-hat, an article on social security). But occasionally Chappaqua will order an article run anyway. When the Italian editor rejected a piece on fence-painting because Italians don't paint their own fences, Chappaqua reversed him, saying, "Well, they could start."

A big problem is translating U.S. idiom. Maurice Chevalier, hired by the Paris editor to translate Billy Rose's Broadwayese, turned "It was a cinch bet" into "C'élait du nougat" (It was candy). Another less gifted translator turned "guts" into "gizzard." "How," asked one bewildered translator, "can you expect a Frenchman to understand that 'lower the boom' means unleash heavy fire—or does it?"

Organized Chaos. The Digest still operates in what one senior editor calls "organized chaos." Says another staffer: "It's the most disorganized magazine in the world. Wally started this little magazine with his wife, hoping to make $5,000 a year, with both of them working like hell. Then—bang, look at it now! It grew up disorganized, and they said, 'Let's not change it, it might break the spell. If the black canary is hanging upside down, let him stay.'"

Nobody can draw an exact chart of command, because there isn't any. Wallace is the top boss, but there are many other bosses. One Rover may report—i.e., take his article ideas—to Ken Payne, another to Dashiell, while others (e.g., William Hard, Stanley High) report directly to Wallace. Senior Editor George Grant and his staff handle the reading of some 300 magazines, pick likely stories, and do the preliminary cutting. But any one of the top editors may "spot" and "cut" an article on his own.

All the articles are sent along through their line of offices, called Murderers' Row, where any one of them may take another whack at the stories, and Wallace, "the best cutter of us all," may whack them still more. Senior Editors Marc Rose and Bill Hard Jr. take turns at dummying up a