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Albany, NY – In today's Academic Minute, Dr. Robert Vanderlan of Cornell University explains the role poets played in creating one of the twentieth century's great media empires.
Robert Vanderlan is a visiting assistant professor of history at Cornell University. He teaches modern American history, including courses on the cultural and political ramifications of war, on the history of free speech and on the rise and fall of liberalism. His work on the role of public intellectuals in shaping American political and cultural debates has recently been published in Intellectuals Incorporated: Politics, Art, and Ideas Inside Henry Luce s Media Empire.
Dr. Robert Vanderlan - Poets and Fortune Magazine
In the mid-1930s, the worst years of the Great Depression, Fortune magazine was written largely by poets and intellectuals. Henry Luce hired poets for his magazine, he said, because it was easier to teach a poet to read a balance sheet than it was to teach an accountant to write. And Luce wanted his magazine to be well written. But why did poets like the well known Archibald MacLeish and the ambitious James Agee choose to write for a business magazine? Later intellectuals viewed mass culture magazines such as Luce's as politically pernicious and culturally destructive. Today's intellectuals view the academy as their natural home. But serious writers in the 1930s saw possibilities as journalists and intellectuals, writing for the nation's most important and popular magazines, Fortune among them.
Luce's great business magazine tasked itself with chronicling what it called America's "business civilization." During the Depression, driven by its poets and intellectuals, this came to mean criticizing corporations for failing to serve the public interest. It meant advocating a "radical capitalism" that could make freedom meaningful by providing working men and women with economic security. Fortune became an important critic of business and a surprising champion of the assumptions that fueled the New Deal.
Today we talk about our new media. The twentieth century saw the advent of its own new media - mass circulation magazines, radio programs, and newsreels - and saw similar debates about their impact. At that time, serious writers, poets included, saw this new media as an opportunity to create a more democratically inclusive and culturally rich nation. Rediscovering why they sought to achieve helps us understand what is at stake in our own time.