The Press: The Common Touch

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Plus or Minus? What is the journalistic reckoning on Wallace?

Numerous sins, of commission and omission, have been charged against him. Doctors have criticized him for leaping too hastily into print with Paul de Kruif's overenthusiastic articles about short-lived "wonder" cures.* The Digest has offset that criticism lately by getting its medical articles printed in medical journals first. On broader questions, like politics, Wallace thinks of himself as "left of center"; he says most people are middle-of-the-roaders. But most middle-readers would consider him well right of center. Not a deep or profound thinker, Wallace sometimes originates and runs glib, superficial articles on U.S. and world problems which other top editors would wastebasket. He thinks the Democrats' "Big Government" is dangerous, but admits he would probably be critical of the Government no matter which party was in power. In the main, his political outlook seems to be colored by a nostalgic yearning for the less complicated days of his boyhood, when every man could become his own master without help or hindrance from the Government.

Wallace tries to make the Digest simple enough for almost anybody to understand. But in making reading painless, he sometimes oversimplifies complex questions to the point of absurdity. The average man shouldn't think the subject of inflation is complicated, said the Digest recently. "The core of the matter is within the grasp of anyone who can balance a checkbook or play bridge." The dangers 'in this kind of primer-reading, as Harvard's Howard Mumford Jones points out, is that "children get to thinking that everything should have the same order of clarity. When they come up against something that is difficult they don't know what to do."

No one can measure the influence the Digest has had on its readers, but it has certainly been considerable. It has also had a marked influence on other U.S. magazines—and, through them, on U.S. education. Thanks largely to the Digest's successful example, nonfiction articles now play a dominant role in U.S. magazines. Thus Wallace has lured many people to read about serious topics, and in this sense, has helped raise the reading level of America.

He may even succeed in getting more Americans to read books—in abridged form. Recently he started publishing quarterly books, each consisting of four or five outstanding books, predominantly fiction, condensed into a single volume. The last one sold 460,000 copies, much greater than the usual sale of a Book-of-the-Month-Club book.

In the long run, Wallace's greatest contribution to the nation may be found in the cumulative effect of his overseas editions. Invariably, his readership surveys show that articles which U.S. readers like rate equally high with readers everywhere. The Digest's articles—depicting the innate decency, kindness and simple virtues of ordinary Americans, the triumphs of a George Carver or a Helen Keller—have probably done more than all the Government propagandists combined to allay the fears, prejudices and misconceptions of the U.S. in other lands. As one French Digest fan said last week: "We have discovered that Americans are just like other people."

Insofar as they are "just like