This week marks the anniversary of the first issue of Reader’s Digest—for the unacquainted, there’s a great overview of the history of the magazine in this week’s Literary History newsletter. I got curious and decided to reread this first issue, available on the Internet Archive.
The format of the magazine feels immediately recognizable—the summarizing and bullet-pointing of longer ideas and articles seems to be a technique media is constantly reinventing. The articles themselves are an extremely mixed bag. Some have aged horribly, in terms of both content and expression—there’s a use of the verb “pump” in one piece that I still haven’t quite made sense of. But perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of these pieces feel like they could run today with a few words replaced. On the lighter side, a lot of our obsessions and hang-ups stay the same, but there’s also a darker thread of continuity connecting this vision of 1922 to today. Below, I have digested the digest for the modern reader:
“Remarkable Remarks”
The first piece is a collection of witticisms, and the first one—which is the very first line in the whole magazine!—is a weird crack about women’s weight. Not off to a great start.
In fact, there’s a lot of dated, casual misogyny here, but also some lines that feel especially current:
J. OGDEN ARMOUR—The hard thing is to overcome riches and be human.
This opening piece captures the entire experience of reading this first issue: the most shockingly dated sentence coming a paragraph away from something that is startlingly contemporary.
“How to Keep Young Mentally”
Alexander Graham Bell’s tips on staying spry. This sort of aspirational lifestyle stuff never goes out of style, but his entire pitch is to stay curious and humble: timely and timeless.
“Prison Facts”
American prisons have always been incredibly horrifying.
“The Story of the Premature Peace Report”
In journalism parlance, this might be called a tick-tock, taking us through the chronology of how one American journalist got a jump on news of the armistice that ended WWI. The technology that undergirds this whole story I found to be especially fascinating; media and journalism has always been aided and limited by the speed of tech, and this is a very striking example.
“Untying the Apron Strings”
This one has a section talking about how boys (and just boys) need to be allowed to climb so that later in life they can handle sitting in a balcony seat at a theatre. That section then ends with the boggling line, “A billion-dollar baby, when a full grown boy, stepped out in the street alone for the first time, and was instantly struck and killed by a car.” Okay, good to know.
“What Do You Know?”
I’ve been reading Erik Baker’s excellent new Make Your Own Job, and it’s perhaps priming me to see strains of American business logics everywhere in this issue—there seem to be a lot!
Already, less than 20 pages in, we’ve met a few titans of industry and fussed over if the boys are being raised right enough to become good workers. This survey of Thomas Edison’s executive hiring practices starts with the fact that he only wants employees with good memories, a step in the drive to automatize the worker, consistent from Fordism to the replace-‘em-all-with-AI logic of today.
And of course the nut of this piece is none other than the tired, pervasive “kids these days” gripe: “In the good old days when a student had to be right practically all the time or take a caning and occupy a position of general disgrace, the school and college produced far better results.” The businessmen always feel that their employees are too coddled.
“Whatever is New for Women is Wrong”
This survey of outraged responses to women gaining more rights, autonomy, and opportunities is a little too stripped of conclusion or opinion, which leaves the door open to a bad faith reading. The summary doesn’t make a firm enough point, though it does imply that the hysteria about women being “out of place” isn’t to be taken especially seriously: “But today, as in 1700, the home and marriage and the child and female delicacy are still in imminent danger, and, as in every decade, ‘are endangered as never before.’”
But the issue with these summaries, that this piece is especially guilty of, is that they’re maybe cutting too close to the bone—I wonder if Edna Kenton, the suffragist who wrote the original piece, put a finer point on her critique in the original.
“The Difficulty of Being Unsuspected”
The “I don’t want to be perceived” meme has some deep roots.
“’Rich as Croesus’”
Ogling at the wealth of a sixth century king isn’t so fun when the dollar amounts are way smaller than the sums of money hoarded by our current oligarchs. This piece refers to Croesus—a guy so rich that they made up a phrase about it—as only a “millionaire”! The idea of a billionaire wasn’t even conceivable!
I don’t want to end up on a list so I’ll just say: this sort of thing makes a guy really start thinkin’.
“Watch Your Dog and Be Wise!”
At the risk of alienating readers, I have to admit that I’m not a dog person. So much to say, this article makes clear that people have always weirdly anthropomorphized dogs.
“Henry Ford, Dreamer and Worker”
More business guy worship, this time listening reverently at the knee of a man who at the moment this issue came out, was publishing reams of antisemitic conspiracy that was being translated and republished in Germany—it caught the eye of some folks over there, to say the least. Bigoted businessmen who self-fund platforms for their hate speech are always popular in America, unfortunately.
What stood out to me in this article though are Ford’s assertions that electricity is the future and we should keep coal in the ground, and his big idea to reform government:
Supreme court judges should be paid as much as the President. Make them so independent that you can get the best men, and then get them to give the best in them.
This, in a way, is exactly what happened and it delivered a government that I think Ford would quite like.
“Love—Luxury or Necessity?”
A nice antidote to the previous piece, making the case for love. I’m sure this was only intended as a description of romantic love in the narrowest, most normative sense, but it has some lessons that we might today read as calls to solidarity:
– “Love is not so much a matter of luck as a matter of learning.”
– “The reason why love is regarded as a luxury and not as a necessity is that people apply to it the criterion of expense.”
– “The false idea that strength of character and force of will are based on sterility of the affections and aridity of the emotions still stubbornly prevails.”
“Time Telling—Past, Present and Future”
It really is wild to think about much we take for granted that we will always know what time it is, and how rare that is in history.
“The Philippines Inside, Out”
After a brief interlude, we’re back to the bad stuff.
Starting with a wildly defensive sentence about American imperialism—“For twenty-two years the United States has been peacefully administering the Islands more liberally than any other foreign power has ever administered its colonial possessions.”—this article trails off into an infantilizing argument for why the Philippines is not ready for independence. It even includes an imagined fight between the colonizers and colonized, casting Filipinos as shouting, petulant children and America as “the slightly exasperated parent.” Nasty, racist stuff. It reminds me of the stomach-churning, paternalistic ways people talk today about Palestinians.
“What Kind of a Husband are You?”
I was hoping this was going to be a quiz, and I could finally find out how I rate, but no such luck. This one is dated and reductive, but nicely calls out the hypocrisy of male expectations.
“The Future of Poison Gas”
The smoke has barely cleared from WWI at this point, and already we’re back to the war-mongering. This survey of gas weapon technology from the Chief of Chemical Warfare Service claims that making “warfare more universal and more scientific makes for permanent peace by making war intolerable.” Shocking from America’s head of military poison gases.
“Useful Points in Judging People”
A salesman’s guide to sorting everyone you meet. Check it out if you want to find out which business temperament you are: mental, social, aesthetic, or physical. I think I’m a social sun, physical moon, and aesthetic rising.
“Progress In Science”
1922’s latest scientific breakthroughs include new, long-distance phone cables, aerial photographs helping to sell real estate, manipulated oranges that retain their color longer, and the invention of the lie detector.
A thought experiment: if you could go back in time and undo one of these inventions, which one would you erase from the timeline to do the most good?
“The Firefly’s Light”
If there’s one article I’d recommend from this first issue, it’s probably this one. Fireflies rock.
“Wanted—Motives for Motherhood”
This genre of adolescent essay, that sentimentally and breathlessly defends what we now would label as conservative family values, has always been around. This piece also makes clear that the trumpeting of marriage and a large family as proper, normal, and essential to “the very existence of the Nation” has always come across as hollow and thinly reasoned.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson
An article about an Arctic explorer includes the boggling prediction that reindeer meat will likely replace beef.
Over 100 years later, we’re probably running out of time to ever taste reindeer meat.
“Today”
Op-ed writers never change. These snapshots from a syndicated 1922 column include the conclusions that “people don’t know what’s good for them,” “technology is crazy,” and “we’re all going to live forever.”
“Can We Have a Beautiful Human Race?”
If you read this headline and thought “uh oh,” you’re right.
“Advice From a President’s Physician”
The sort of good, logical health advice that also seems too time-consuming and expensive to be reasonable for the average person.
“Research and Everyday Life”
Onward and upward with food science! Towards the end, there’s some speculation about where research might go next, which includes a question that I still have: “What is the ideal container?”
Have we answered this one yet?
“A Peasant on a Painted Train”
An anecdotal view into a Russia just emerging from the post-revolutionary Civil War. The writer travels by train with then head of Soviet Russia, Mikhail Kalinin, and sees hunger everywhere, as well as devotion to the new government.
It’s interesting to see such an early vision of the Soviet Union aimed at a Western audience, before WWII and the Cold War. It’s a small thing, but the Soviet political system is spelled “Cummunist” here—very strange to imagine an America where there wasn’t even yet a standardized spelling for this new economic system.
“To Bore or Not to Bore”
Something intended to be light and amusing about dealing with boring people is immediately derailed for the modern reader by the repeated use of the phrase “being pumped into.” I think it’s supposed to mean being overwhelmed in conversation by tedious conversation, but lines like “to sit still and be pumped into is never an exhilarating process,” just doesn’t land the same way to the modern ear.
“Is the State too Vulgar?”
Another essay that could easily be transposed to today: pearl-clutching at the indecency, lewdness, and vulgarity of contemporary entertainment never goes out of style, nor does the chiding of viewer who should know better—“Box-office figures point unmistakably to the public being the culprit.”
“Hart of The World”
And that scolding is quickly followed by a short excerpt worrying that people will start mimicking what they see on movie screens. The badness we might pick up from the movies include wild non-American gesticulations, fancier courtships, and “lovemaking is going to have its renaissance from now on since the movies came into our lives.”
“Printing and Its Early Vicissitudes”
This seems to be the “what effect is media having on us” section of the magazine—again, a very recognizable fixation.
This brisk survey of printing ends with laments over the “encumbered… libraries with much rubbish, much stupidity, much useless information,” “licentious novels,” and the spread via books of “the formulas for explosives and asphyxiating gases.” Some of these phrasings feel almost identical to the ways people talk about TikTok corrupting the youth.
“Northward the Course of Empire”
We’re back to Vilhjalmur Stefansson? This is the first I’m hearing of this guy, so I went searching for more information. He seemed to be a bit of a celebrity explorer, despite some pretty big screw-ups.
This article is very much of a piece with the other articles in this issue that discuss foreign places: other parts of the world are to be pitied or conquered. Stefansson’s notes on the Arctic are very transactional; he comes across as an explorer in a conquering, imperialist mode who sees everything through the lens of possession, national security, or extraction.
And again he’s fixated on reindeer meat. Did Stefansson have some kind of financial stake in reindeer ranching? Was he some kind of 1920s meat influencer?
“Advertising and Health”
New York City’s Health Commissioner makes the case that advertising has been universally good for people’s health. This reads like a more boring version of something you’d hear Don Draper boozily preach. The piece is a thorough list of the wonderful products that have been marketed to Americans, all of which have made us healthier.
It’s an amazingly credulous piece that only at the absolute last moment concedes that advertising might not always been on the level:
Time was when worthy publications permitted the advertisement of nostrums which conferred no benefit whatsoever and which even, in some cases, did positive injury. The service, however, rendered to the public health has far outweighed that past disservice.
And lo, advertising never deceived us ever again.
“Don’t Growl—Kick”
Finally, issue one ends with a piece about how complaining is a constructive force in the world. As a self-described hater, this speaks to me. And I love that this article is mostly drawing on examples from NYC—I salute all the generations of whining New Yorkers who came before me.
But the last line here only seems to have gotten sharper and more true:
Americans suffer silently, in the belief that an individual stands no chance of being heard by a corporation.
Here this is meant almost whimsically, as an incentive to be more insistent in customer service interactions, but the implied next thought here—is that belief true? And what are you going to do about it?—is hard not to read more militantly a century later.
1922 was a low point for American labor, with declining union membership, management’s aggressive suppression of collective action, and courts siding with corporations over and over. 1922 was a year after President Harding sent the army against coal miners at the Battle of Blair Mountain and months after a massive railroad strike was defeated by a federal judge. Over a century later, we’re again finding ourselves in a moment where we feel lonely and small in the face of sneering corporations and political corruption—in 1922, the revelation of Harding’s Teapot Dome corruption and his vetoing of the Bonus Act were coming soon.
The prescription of this last article, to growl and kick, is more true than ever. But I would this idea a step farther: we can growl a lot louder and kick a lot harder if we do it together.
