When Abbott Shalom Pepper founded Trumpet, the Collier’s s-like magazine whose demise is chronicled by Theodore H. White in his The View From the Fortieth Floor (Sloane, $4.95), he acted on the theory that “one man plus the truth makes a majority.” Disdaining the customer survey and the audience poll, old man Pepper let his truths (his enemies called them prejudices) flow uninhibitedly into his pages. He hated trusts, railways and municipal corruption (like old Samuel S. McClure who, in McClure’s Magazine, gave Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker their heads). He was for the progressive income tax (bad ’cess to his crabbed but vital old soul). He loved fine foods and cats, he opposed smoking, and he demanded that all speeders be flogged. Many of his readers thought he was crazy, but they subscribed to his publications, which included, besides Trumpet, an old household reliable called Gentlewoman.
Mr. White picks up the story of Pepper’s magazines as they are going downhill under the indifferent guidance of lawyers who represent heirs who are only interested in dividends. His general theme—that when institutions become “other-directed,” depending on Mr. Gallup to tell them what their convictions and missions should be, they are on the way out— is perhaps the most vital theme which he could have selected for a novel. Not one of the great publishing empires in the U.S. was brought into being or sustained in prime vigor by men who had to be told what to think, or what the public wanted. George Horace Lorimer cared more for propagating the doctrine of self-reliance than he did for kowtowing to popular tastes in the old Saturday Evening Post. McClure was always going off on crusades, first to sell good authors like Kipling to a wide audience, then to expose rottenness in business and politics. Henry Luce, a minister’s son, thought it his duty to bring synthesized information to everybody. Whatever one may think of the ideas and ideals of the old press tycoons, they were men, not eunuchs.
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