[Peterson is an American educator and critic who has written numerous works on magazines and journalism. In the following excerpt, he traces the growth of the New Yorker from its origin through 1964.]

As Time Inc. expanded into a global operation and took the world for its beat, another missionary was deliberately cultivating a relatively small following and was focusing his editorial attention on a single city. Harold Ross and his New Yorker kept their eyes on New York; and although they regularly peered across the ocean at Europe and occasionally looked across the United States at Hollywood, they largely ignored the America west of the Hudson. Yet Ross's New Yorker was an influential magazine. It changed the character of American humor, introduced a new approach to magazine biography, set high standards of reporting, and thereby influenced the course of American journalism in general.

In 1952 when Dale Kramer published a book about Harold Ross and his New Yorker, some of the persons most closely associated with the magazine disavowed the book on principle. No outsider, they insisted, could possibly handle the subject adequately. A number of writers before Kramer, some of them staff members of the New Yorker, had tried to tell what Ross was like. "Unfortunately, it is a story which nobody is able to tell," Russell Maloney, who had worked with Ross for eleven years, admitted in his own attempt in 1947. "No man … has been the subject of so much analysis, interpretation, and explanation, with so little concrete result."

For twenty-six years, from the first issue in February, 1925, until his death in December, 1951, the New Yorker was unmistakably the product of Harold Ross. He worked on every piece of copy which went into the magazine, apart from a few sports columns and foreign newsletters which came in over the weekend, Maloney recalled; and he stalked "through the dirty corridors of his editorial domain, gaunt, gap-toothed, his black hair tousled and his mouth agape like that of a man who has just established contact with a bad oyster, watching the next issue grow and arguing minute points of fact, taste, punctuation, or policy."

By all accounts, Ross was aloof, tactless, rude, given to outbursts of temper and profanity, a man with relatively few friends. Yet the friends he had were remarkably loyal; and he was indisputably a demanding editor, a meticulous one, a great one. The New Yorker reflected Ross's personality; but, curiously, his personality and that of the urbane, witty, sometimes acid New Yorker were totally unalike.

Harold Ross was not a native New Yorker, not even an Easterner. He was born in Aspen, Colorado, in November, 1892, and moved to Salt Lake City with his family when he was seven. He never completed high school. At the end of his sophomore year, he quit to take a job with the Salt Lake City Tribune; and as a young man of college age, he was a tramp newspaperman whose driftings took him to Sacramento, Atlanta, Panama City, New Orleans, and San Francisco. His biographer has described him as a "happy-go-lucky, poker-playing, hard-swearing" reporter, competent but not outstanding. His newspaper associates in San Francisco nicknamed him "Rough House."

In 1917 Ross enlisted in the railway engineers' corps, was among the first American troops to arrive in France, and went to an officers' training camp there. But when he learned that a newspaper for enlisted men was to be published in Paris, he went absent without leave to get a job on it. He became editor of that newspaper, Stars and Stripes, after leading a revolt which deposed the officer in charge of publication. The journalists with whom he worked on the paper and spent his off-duty hours at a restaurant in Montmartre included Alexander Woollcott, Franklin P. Adams, John Winterich, and Grantland Rice.

After the war, Ross edited Home Sector, a short-lived veterans' magazine staffed by former Stars and Stripes men, which tried unsuccessfully to capitalize on the wartime popularity of Stars and Stripes among the troops. From Home Sector he went to the editorship of the official publication of the American Legion, which he left for a brief term as editor of Judge. Meanwhile he was planning a magazine of his own. Meanwhile, too, he was admitted into the select circle of wits who lunched at the famous Round Table in the Algonquin Hotel—Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Marc Connelly, Franklin P. Adams, Edna Ferber, and a few others—and played poker with some of them on Saturday nights.

At one of the poker games Ross met Raoul Fleischmann, whose family had made a fortune from a bakery and yeast business. Fleischmann agreed to help finance Ross's projected magazine, a weekly of high quality humor and satire. The idea for the magazine seems to have grown out of Ross's experiences on Stars and Stripes and Judge, tempered by his association with the Round Table sophisticates. Just as Stars and Stripes had been written by enlisted men for enlisted men and had shown no respect for officialdom, so the new magazine would be written by the urbane for the urbane and would make no concessions to a mass audience. The humor in Judge was broad and obvious because the magazine was addressed to a large audience, and it was often stale because of the big spread between deadline and publication date. By seeking a New York audience, the new magazine could be produced fast enough to preserve the freshness of its humor and commentary; more than that, it could publish what Ross thought was the most successful type of humor, humor with a local flavor like that in Franklin P. Adams' newspaper column.

Ross put his ideas for his magazine into a prospectus which, as it turned out, was a good description of the New Yorker during the twenty-six years of his editorship:

The New Yorker will be a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human. Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit and satire, but it will be more than a jester. It will not be what is commonly called radical or highbrow. It will be what is commonly called sophisticated, in that it will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of its readers. It will hate bunk.

As compared to the newspaper, the New Yorker will be interpretive rather than stenographic. It will print facts that it will have to go behind the scenes to get, but it will not deal in scandal for the sake of scandal nor sensation for the sake of sensation. Its integrity will be above suspicion. It hopes to be so entertaining and informative as to be a necessity for the person who knows his way about or wants to.

The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. It will not be concerned in what she is thinking about. This is not meant in disrespect, but the New Yorker is a magazine avowedly published for a metropolitan audience and thereby will escape an influence which hampers most national publications. It expects a considerable national circulation, but this will come from persons who have a metropolitan interest.

Since Ross's interests were primarily editorial, his biographers have disagreed over whether or not he foresaw the commercial possibilities of his metropolitan magazine. There was no good reason that he should have overlooked them. In retrospect, the idea was simple enough: through a local magazine, an advertiser could reach a sizable number of well-to-do consumers in the New York area with far less expense and waste circulation than he could through metropolitan newspapers or through national magazines. After readers outside of the city came to far outnumber those in New York, the magazine offered advertisers a screened circulation; and even then, advertisers could still buy space in only a special New York edition until 1960, when it was discontinued as anachronistic. Simple as the idea seemed, it failed when publishers tried it in other large cities in imitation of the New Yorker.…

The idea almost failed for Ross at first. He set to work translating his prospectus into the words and drawings of a first issue, and to help him he had a staff consisting only of Philip Wylie, Tyler Bliss, an advertising salesman, two secretaries, and a telephone switchboard operator. The first issue appeared on February 19, 1925. By general agreement, it was terrible. Ross knew little about New York, lacked the sort of material he wanted to publish, and did not have the ability to write it himself. He hoped for an eventual circulation of 50,000 to 70,000. His first issue sold 15,000 copies, his third 12,000, his fourth 10,500. Circulation had dropped to 8,000 by April, and the magazine was losing $8,000 a week. In May, Fleischmann, who was covering the losses, held a conference on the fate of the magazine. He decided to kill it. But as he walked away from the meeting, he overheard an associate remark that "it is like killing a living thing." He was so bothered by the idea that he told Ross he would keep the magazine going a little longer while he sought new capital.

Ross had originally estimated that the New Yorker could be started on $50,000. He had contributed $20,000 and had drawn only a third of his salary; Fleischmann had furnished $25,000. Their first issues, scanty of advertising as well as of circulation, rapidly depleted their initial capital. Its backers invested $225,000 in the New Yorker during its first year of publication, and Fleischmann provided all but $35,000 of it. A total of $710,000—$550,000 from Fleischmann alone—went into the New Yorker before it began paying its own way in 1928. Thereafter it made a profit every year.

When Fleischmann gave the New Yorker its reprieve, Ross, aware that his Round Table friends could not fill the magazine in their leisure time, began building up a staff which, as it enlarged, included Ralph Ingersoll, who later went to Time Inc. and then on to the newspaper PM; Morris Markey, whom Ross lured away from Collier's, Joseph Moncure March; Lois Long; and Corey Ford, a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair. Getting the sort of staff he wanted was a frantic business; Ross is said to have fired about a hundred staff members in the first year and a half of the magazine's existence. The week after the first issue appeared, Fleischmann had sought assistance from John Hanrahan, a publishers' consultant and "magazine doctor," who offered to help manage the New Yorker in exchange for stock in the company. Hanrahan has been credited with recruiting personnel for all departments other than editorial and with having a strong hand in a series of advertisements which promoted the New Yorker among advertising men in the fall of 1925.

At that time there were signs that the New Yorker would survive. Legend credits a series of articles by Ellin Mackay, a young society woman, with establishing the success of the magazine. Miss Mackay was the rebellious daughter of Clarence H. Mackay, president of Postal Telegraph, and she had decided to become a writer. She sent the New Yorker a manuscript written in longhand and impressively bound in leather. Ross had staff members rewrite the article, then ran it under the title "Why We Go to Cabarets," with the subtitle "A Post-Debutante Explains." Miss Mackay's explanation was that society girls frequented cabarets to escape the stag lines of society affairs. Newspapers reprinted parts of the article because it was somewhat iconoclastic and because its author was a member of high society, and the result was a good deal of publicity for the New Yorker. Miss Mackay wrote additional articles for the magazine before she caused another stir by marrying Irving Berlin, the song writer, against her father's wishes. Her articles supposedly brought the New Yorker to the attention of the Park Avenue set. Whether they did or not, the New Yorker ended 1925 with a rising circulation and a growing number of advertising contracts.

In its early years the New Yorker acquired some of the staff members whose names were associated with it at mid-century. E. B. White, a graduate of Cornell who had served unhappily in an advertising agency, joined the staff in 1926. James Thurber, a native of Columbus, Ohio, was hired away from a newspaper in 1927 and thereafter brightened the pages of the New Yorker with prose and sketches. By ruthless hiring and firing, Ross found the other editors, writers, and artists he wanted: Katherine Angell, who married E. B. White in 1929, Alva Johnston, Wolcott Gibbs, John O'Hara, S. J. Perelman, Ogden Nash, Helen Hokinson, 0. Soglow, Peter Arno.

It was a staff whose escapades provided an unending succession of anecdotes about the New Yorker. Ross, intrigued by the weekly editorial teas of Punch, established a private speakeasy to create a bond between the New Yorker and its contributors. One morning the employee who opened it discovered two contributors of opposite sexes stretched out in a stupor, and Ross permanently closed down the establishment. Another day Ross was acquainting a new managing editor with office routine. "I am surrounded by idiots and children!" he complained. Just then a copy boy rushed in shouting, "Mr. Thurber is standing on a ledge outside the window threatening to commit suicide." Ross turned to the new editor. "See?" A man in the financial district once submitted an essay by Stephen Leacock as his own contribution. The New Yorker published it without recognizing it as Leacock's. Ross and Wolcott Gibbs soon learned of the plagiarism, but they took no legal action against the offender. Instead they requested that he write a financial letter each week. They returned each contribution with a note saying that the article was not quite what they wanted but that he was getting close.

Working for the New Yorker as editor or staff writer, Russell Maloney concluded after eleven years of it, was "physically debilitating, mentally exhausting, and a form of social suicide." It was not just the escapades which made it so; it was Ross's insistence upon perfection. For Ross, perfection was "not a goal or an ideal, but something that belongs to him, like his watch or his hat."

Ross's mania for perfection was exemplified in the Profile, a term registered by the New Yorker to designate its probing biographical studies. The Profiles developed from casual sketches of Manhattan personalities into detailed dissections of character and motives. Their development, Wolcott Gibbs once observed, was "the story of Ross' ferocious curiosity about people—struggling against the mechanical limitations of a fifteen-cent magazine and the lethargy of authors generally.…" The Profile became a distinctive form of biography. Clifton Fadiman suggested that the Profile was perhaps no less specific a form of composition than the familiar essay, the sonnet, or the one-act play.

Profiles in the early years were, as the term literally suggests, offhand impressions of the subject which an author could report and write in a few days. As Ross sought perfection, the Profile became increasingly long and complex. By the end of World War II, a reporter sometimes devoted five months to preparing one—three months to collecting his facts, a month to writing his article, and another month to revising it for publication. Ross was no longer content with mere outlines of character; he demanded "a family history, bank references, urinalysis, catalogue of household possessions, names of all living relatives, business connections, political affiliations."

The Profiles, without doubt, helped to improve the quality of magazine biography generally and demonstrated that a person need be neither successful nor significant to be worthy of treatment. Before the New Yorker, magazines had run biographies of successful businessmen, the lives of historical figures, sentimental sketches of lovable characters; but the New Yorker gave attention to persons who, in Clifton Fadiman's words, had "made a success, not of their bank-balances, but of their personalities." Subjects of the Profiles were sometimes eminent citizens, sometimes raffish characters from New York's byways, sometimes persons of accomplishment, sometimes persons of doubtful integrity; but all of them, as Fadiman noted, had one common quality: their personalities were literally outstanding. Reporters conveyed not just a surface impression but explored deep into their characters in a manner of which Plutarch would have approved.

Because of Ross's obsession for completeness, accuracy, and lucidity, the New Yorker established a checking system comparable perhaps only to the research department of Time Inc. Checkers examined and re-examined every fact that went into the magazine. Writing that satisfied Ross could not be done hastily. In the midtwenties, Fillmore Hyde could write the entire 3,000 words of the "Talk of the Town" department in a single afternoon; in 1947 four reporters devoted their entire working week to it.

To what seemed the perpetual astonishment of its executives, the New Yorker prospered handsomely. A share of its stock valued at about $30 in 1925 was worth $1,440 in 1960. The magazine had to ration advertising because it attracted so much. Its profit record was one of the best in the industry. Its income of $2,028,186 on gross revenues of $19,843,337 in 1962 came to 10.2 per cent as compared with an average of less than 2 per cent for many other major publishers. With virtually no bargain offers, it kept its circulation growing at a faster rate than the population after 1950.

Inevitably perhaps, the New Yorker became a regular target for critics as it grew old and wealthy. On the ninth anniversary of Ross's death, Time took a page to complain that the magazine was not what it once had been. No brilliant writers had replaced its original crew, who had died, retired, or become infrequent contributors, Time said, and its editorial formula of the twenties and thirties sat ill with the sixties. Its shapeless, plotless fiction was pedestrian, its cartoons trite. A reviewer noted that the significant young writers, almost without exception, rarely appeared in it. Its Profiles had deteriorated, and although the other nonfiction was of high quality, one read it out of a nagging sense of duty instead out of any provocation to thought. When James Baldwin contributed an angry essay on the degradation of the Negro, another reviewer remarked on the irony of its appearing amidst advertisements for $1,300 chinchilla furs and $18,500 diamond clips and bracelets. Even James Thurber had his say. He worried, he said, about the increase in size, wealth, and "matronly girth": "We have got into a thing that Ross dreaded all his life—the magazine is turning grim and long."

Such complaints had some validity, but it was easy to exaggerate their basis. Executives of the New Yorker, wearing their success with an air of pleasant disbelief mingled with constant apprehension, did seem uneasy about changing an extremely profitable pattern. Indeed, after World War II, the magazine was probably more notable for innovations in advertising than in editorial matter. Editorial copy did trickle in slender streams between mountains of advertising, as critics charged, and flowed on at sometimes inordinate length. The magazine did show signs of greater preoccupation with remote regions of Asia and obscure English villages than with the New York scene.

On the other hand, William Shawn followed an editor who had become almost an institution, and any comparison of his magazine with Ross's was bound to be tinged with nostalgia. Some of the developments that critics complained of, in fact, had begun while Ross was still editor. By any standard, the New Yorker was still an excellent, provocative magazine in the fifties and sixties. It first carried Rachel Carson's warning about the dangers of pesticides, which in 1962 touched off a national debate and a governmental investigation, for instance, and Hannah Arendt's significant series on the Eichmann trial, which engaged intellectuals in controversy in 1963.

Certainly over the years the New Yorker influenced American journalism all out of proportion to its relatively small circulation, about 468,000 in 1963. Perhaps no other magazine in a similar period published as many articles, stories, cartoons, and verses that later appeared in book form. Any listing of such books—and each year brought a fresh dozen or so—would be purely arbitrary; but among them were Clarence Day's Life with Father, James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times, Sally Benson's Junior Miss, Ruth McKenney's My Sister Eileen, John O'Hara's Pal Joey, John Hersey's Hiroshima, to which the magazine unprecedentedly devoted an entire issue in 1946, John Updike's Pigeon Feathers, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and Alan Moorehead's The Blue Nile. At one time in 1941 four comedies based on New Yorker pieces were simultaneously hits on Broadway: Mr. and Mrs. North, Pal Joey, Life with Father, and My Sister Eileen.

Although the New Yorker was not a "funny" magazine, it raised the level of American humor. It showed that humor could take other forms than the traditional "heshe" jokes. Ross's prejudice against that sort of humor was so strong that he published one joke, its lines transposed, in each anniversary issue:

POP: A man who thinks he can make it in par.
JOHNNY: What is an optimist, pop?

The New Yorker helped to popularize the cartoon with caption intimately related to picture. Cartoons in Judge and the old Life were merely appendages to two-line jokes which could have stood without illustration. Ross developed the one-line caption, made pointed by rewriting, and he insisted that readers know at a glance which character in the picture was speaking.

In less apparent fashion, the conscientious reporting by Rebecca West, Alva Johnston, Joseph Mitchell, Richard Rovere, St. Clair McKelway, Lillian Ross, A. J. Liebling, Daniel Lang, E. J. Kahn, Jr., and others surely affected the standards of American journalism. Richard Watts, Jr., succinctly expressed the essence of the New Yorker's reportage:

It doesn't encourage the stuffed shirts and it has a warm place in its heart for the more amiable misfits; it certainly isn't radical, but it can give the reactionaries an expert dressing down; it is often annoyingly supercilious, but it likewise can be perceptive and understanding. Best of all, it not only has a frequent kind of frank honesty which the newspapers too often lack, but it is so professionally skillful that it impresses the journalistic journeymen it tends to despise and serves as a good example for them. I suspect it of being the most forceful influence in American newspaper writing today.