Harper's editor Lewis Lapham -- an expert on money & class
In 1994 the witty, erudite, snooty politically liberal editor of Harper's magazine looked down at the culture of American consumerism from his rich and lofty perch and was not too pleased.
Lewis Lapham was a huge intellectual star in the magazine universe of the 1980s and 1990s, thanks to his writings and the way he modernized Harper’s magazine by inventing things like the Harper’s Index.
Lapham single-handedly made Harper’s an important source of news and opinion and wrote articles and commentaries for dozens of other top magazines. He also wrote a bunch of books, including his last one, Age of Folly: America Abandons Its Democracy.
I first talked to him about the changes he made in Harper’s in April of 1984 when I was at the LA Times. See the article below that I wrote for the LAT about editor Lapham and his radical but readable changes for The New Harper’s.
I caught up with Lapham again on the phone in 1994 when I was at the Post-Gazette and he was coming to Pittsburgh to deliver a lecture making his case that the greatest QB in history was the Steelers’ Terry Bradshaw.
Actually, his subject was a little more refined — "On Art and Ideas."
Lapham is 89 today and keeping quiet. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about him.
Q&A From 1994
Harper's editor laments America's 'department store culture'
January 19, 1994
Lewis Lapham's name has impressive drawing power.
The editor of Harper's magazine is well-known in the socio-literary world for his witty, learned and cutting social criticism, especially his jabs at the sins and omissions of America's privileged class.
And that fame explains why his speaking engagement set for tonight at the Frick Art & Historical Center has been sold out for almost two weeks.
Lapham is kicking off the second season of the Frick Center's guest lecture series, "On Art and Ideas."
The author of "Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on Our Civil Religion," he is also a serious student of the lifestyles of the mega-rich and infamous of the Gilded Age, including such locally grown industrial barons as Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie and Richard King Mellon.
The 170-plus people who’ll brave subzero temperatures tonight will hear Lapham explain how the homes of powerful wealthy people — such as Mr. Frick's estate-turned-museum, Clayton — reflect the morals and values of America.
For those who couldn't get tickets, here's a preview of his talk:
Q&A with Lewis Lapham
Question: Today our wealthy are people like Donald Trump, Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates. How do they compare with Henry Clay Frick?
Answer: Nobody is ever going to be as rich again as Frick's generation. They were celebrities in the same way today that rock stars are.
Q: How rich were men like Frick?
A: Take a million dollars in 1900. In our money, it's at least 25 times that and maybe a 100 times. I've seen both numbers.
Q: So what will you be saying in your talk about how wealthy people reflect the values of their era?
A: I'm going to say it hasn't changed that much. I'm going to say that the ideal of the good life, of Eden, of Paradise, of the ease of money and so on, was established in the 1890s and continues today to be the standard to which this society still aspires.
Q: There are a lot more rich people today though.
A: But the value system remains pretty much the same ... the idea of exclusivity, the idea of comfort, the idea of a retreat from the world, the idea of one's own orchestra, of elaborate service ... the idea remains the same.
It's also being sold because there are a million people who can afford the clothes on Madison Avenue or Rodeo Drive, and afford the luxurious vacations and so on.
Q: Do you consider it a good thing or a bad thing that it hasn't changed?
A: I consider it a bad thing, because I think that if you translate the doctrine of the bottom line into your definition of a supreme good of happiness, then I think you doom people. You drain the spiritual side of it and that makes people unhappy. ...
I mean, I'm not against money. I'm not a Marxist and I don't think rich people are evil. The notion of simple collection or amassment of fortune or paintings or invitations to dinner, or however you want to define it, is not a very spacious definition of the good life.
Q: Are there solutions to this, or is this just the way it is and we're going to have to live with it?
A: I think there's a solution to it. I don’t know what the solution is. There's a very interesting book that was published this fall, that got no notice at all, called “The Land of Desire," written by a historian named William Leach.
He takes these same years, 1880 to 1930, and it's a history of the development of the department store and the department-store definition of the good life becoming synonymous with the American Dream. Prior to 1880, there are other definitions of the good life, other than money.
There's a political definition. There's a religious definition. Life is not measured in the United States by possession of things before the Civil War, it really isn't.
Q: But something happened .... ?
A: It very actively happened. The Harvard Business School is established in 1907 on the notion of stimulating desire. By 1907 the industrial system is already good enough in the United States. It is not a problem of producing products, but it's how to make people buy them — the advertising business.
That's very consciously invented in the 1880s by people like John Wanamaker and A.T. Stewart in New York — the department store culture, which we're still living in.
Q: Which is consumerism run amok.
A: Right. And that is what the Gilded Age expresses.
Q: But in those days only Mr. Frick and a few other people could live the good life.
A: That is true. But they were great celebrities and the papers doted on them. They chronicled their parties in the same kind of way that Vanity Fair today talks about movie celebrities.
. . . And when a lot of them went down on the Titanic in 1912, it was Valhalla, it was like Wagner. But the next day a ship sunk in the St. Lawrence River and 2,000 people died — not a word of it in the New York papers. Nobody was rich.
The New Harper’s
In 1984 I did this story about Lewis Lapham and ‘The New Harper’s’ for the Los Angeles Times. I remember that I had to do my phone interview with Lapham a second time because the primitive recording device I was using did not record a word. A former newspaper guy, he was very understanding and not at all annoyed at having to talk to me again about the same stuff. Of course, he knew getting a nice write up in the LA Times — circulation 1.1. million at the time — was a major PR coup. Re-reading this after 40 years, I can’t believe how long, long, long it is. The LAT was famous for its three-foot feature stories in the View section.
The New Harper's: Cutting Its Own Trail Through the Magazine Woods
Los Angeles Times
April 4, 1984
Harper's magazine isn't behaving much like a 134-year-old institution.
Institutions are supposed to fight change and stick to the well-worn path of orthodoxy, but starting with March's radically revamped issue, America's oldest monthly is cutting its own trail through the magazine woods.
Under Editor Lewis H. Lapham, Harper's has significantly restructured its look and redefined its editorial purpose. In an age of splash, its graphics are now simple, clean and readably crisp.
In an age of ever-narrowing special interests, of such specialized magazines as Street Survival Handbook, Harper's has taken aim at a general audience — at what Lapham calls "the curious, intelligent, well-educated layman."
Facts and Opinion
In addition to offering a monthly cross section of current fact and opinion, the magazine's new goal is to become a "non-factional review," a sort of national Op-Ed page for the non-ideological reader who wants to think for himself, said Lapham.
Lapham is the major instigator of changes that are hoped will assure the existence of the financially fragile New York City-based publication of about 140,000 subscribers.
In its Forum section, each month Harper's will provide a debate on an important national subject. The question for March — "Does America Still Exist?" — was mulled in essay form by, among others, novelist Louis L' Amour, peace activist Philip Berrigan and Columbia University Prof. Robert Nisbet.
April's topic — "Should the U.S. Stay in NATO?" — is the edited transcript of a Harper's-convened discussion by 10 American and European authorities on the political and military condition of the alliance.
Fewer Long Articles
The remodeled Harper's includes only a couple of lengthy articles usually found in traditional literary journals of opinion like the old Harper's and Atlantic Monthly. They are sandwiched between several innovations — the Harper's Index, the Readings and Annotation sections are Lapham's favorites.
The Harper's Index is a single page of statistical one-liners culled from diverse sources.
Among March's collection were the average price of a gram of cocaine in Los Angeles ($125) and the number of strategic metals supplied by the Soviet Union to the United States (6) and vice versa (3).
April's index tells you the number of copies of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" sold each day in the United States in January, 1984 (50,000) and the percentage of Americans who don't know which side the United States supports in Nicaragua (87).
The Readings section contains about 15 readings (usually of less than 1,000 words) from books, periodicals, speeches, newsletters, bulletins, abstracts, etc., that ordinarily are inaccessible to the average reader.
Readings have ranged from an adaptation of a speech by former Ambassador to the Soviet Union George F. Kennan and a chunk of dialogue from Tom Stoppard's current Broadway play "The Real Thing" to a list of covert operations undertaken between 1963 and 1983 by the Central Intelligence Agency against foreign governments.
Illustrations, graphs, charts, specialized maps, cartoons from such places as the Russian daily Izvestia, are spotted throughout the Readings section. So are things like the yearly budget of the Gdansk regional branch of Solidarity ($74,568) juxtaposed without comment with Joanna Carson's monthly expenses for her Bel-Air home ($21,625).
The most novel innovation, however, is the Annotation of documents such as contracts, medical bills, police reports, etc.
The March issue reproduced the $47,311.20 hospital bill of a woman who stayed in a Manhattan hospital for 25 days before she died. The bill was annotated by a doctor who made such comments as, "The hospital charges Mrs. K $31 for each Chem-8. Most independent labs charge about half as much; some hospitals charge up to $60."
April's Annotation is a 1040 federal income tax form with commentary by liberal economist Robert Lekachman. The models for the new Harper's were USA Today, the New Yorker's Talk of the Town section, the Sunday New York Times Week in Review, the Wilson Quarterly and television, said Lapham from New York City.
So far, the response to the new Harper's based on about 200 letters "from people whose opinions I genuinely respect" and the reactions of media and advertising folks has been "enormously favorable," the 48-year-old Lapham said. "From what I can see, I think it's going to work."
Unlike money-losing opinion journals such as The Nation or National Review, Harper's has no patron, Lapham said. Harper's was saved from oblivion in 1980 when the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago (with help from the Atlantic-Richfield Co.) bought it and funded the Harper's Magazine Foundation that now owns and publishes the magazine.
But it still must succeed in the marketplace. To do so, Lapham said, it must maintain its current subscription level of 140,000, keep its renewal rate at 70 or higher and generate more ad revenue, all of which, he said, he thinks are attainable. "We don't have a guaranteed subsidy," Lapham said. "If I had one, maybe I'd take a different tack. But I don't I have to go out and find the reader."
Lapham said he seeks an audience of readers, not a market. "It's an aggregation of individuals. It doesn't define itself in terms of white wine and Volvos and zip codes. It defines itself in a kind of curious, inquiring mind."
As the tall, silver-haired, precisely speaking Lapham pointed out earlier this year in his regular Harper's column “The Easy Chair," the goal of the new Harper's parallels what the magazine's original publishers had in mind in 1850 — to provide access to a burgeoning, increasingly fragmented world of information and ideas, to present a compendium that no one with "the slightest desire for keeping himself informed . . . would willingly be without."
A Yale graduate, former ace reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and for 10 years a writer under contract to the old Saturday Evening Post, Lapham worked as a contributing editor at Harper's for five years before becoming editor in 1976.
Lapham Quit In 1981
After a series of conflicts with the board that ran the Harper's Magazine Foundation, Lapham quit in 1981 to write a book and his syndicated newspaper column. But due largely to the efforts of John R. ( Rick) MacArthur, 27, who became president of the foundation and publisher of the magazine last year, Lapham was reappointed in July 1983.
Lapham replaced his replacement, Michael Kinsley, a 30-year-old former senior editor of the New Republic. During his brief reign Kinsley effectively cut costs and injected a somewhat staid Harper's with shots of irreverent liveliness that sometimes bordered on the wacky.
When Kinsley, who returned to the New Republic to write the "TRB" column when Richard Strout retired, was asked what he thought of the new Harper's, he said somewhat sassily: "I was pleasantly disappointed."
The circumstances of Kinsley's leaving and Lapham's return are byzantine at their simplest — "rococo," according to Kinsley, who characterized his departure as "voluntary but bitter."
The accessibility of Harper's is the most significant aspect of the changes he has wrought, said Lapham, who believes that Harper's in the past often has been misperceived as a highbrow publication because of its longish stories that "look like homework."
The new format will especially appeal to people who are used to reading in short lengths, such as the New York bank president who ordered 100 subscriptions to send to his friends.
"If that bank guy doesn't get it in 300 or 400 words, he isn't going'to bother with it," Lapham said. "This gives him a sort of a tour of the horizon, a sense of what the surrounding conversation is in the cultural and political spheres of influence."
According to Lapham, during its long history Harper's has been revised or redrafted six times. In the late 1800s. it was a literary magazine that published travel stories by Henry James, drawings by Winslow Homer and the novels of George du Maurier.
After World War I, it was a forum for the writings of Bertrand Russell, H. G: Wells and the elegantly crafted arguments of Albert Jay Nock. During the New Deal it was very political-minded. In the '60s and 70s it was a home for "the new journalism." Now it's back to its original form, what Lapham described in one of his columns as "a thesaurus of salient fact and opinion."
There are people who don't like the latest Harper's. One is Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post, who wrote in February that it seems to be "a USA Today for soft-boiled eggheads."
Yardley ridiculed Lapham's intention of addressing the current age's familiarity with the techniques of film, shorter literary styles and juxtaposition of both ideas and images. He called it "an evasive way of saying that much of Harper's is a paste-up job."
Lapham said he doesn't know what Yardley meant by "soft-boiled eggheads," and he disagreed with the "paste-up" remark, noting that a lot of work and thought goes into the selection of items.
He said he discounted Yardley's criticism in general because "Yardley is a friend of Kinsley's and is also my implacable enemy and always has been. I've never met him, but every time he gets a chance to attack me, he does. So I don't pay much attention to that."
Still, Lapham admitted, there are many less-partisan readers who will not like Harper's. Because the non-splashy graphics are like the Wall Street Journal's, Lapham said, "It's first of all for people who like to read, who like print and type. Secondly, it's probably not going to be liked by people who are, or consider themselves, high-toned intellectuals. They're going to think the magazine is too popular. Or that it ought to print long, learned, brilliantly written articles.
"Thirdly, it will be disliked by people who want to advocate a particular cause. They'll say it's not political enough — that you're not beating up on McGovern or on Reagan, therefore you're disloyal. The people who won't like it are people who have a different kind of sensibility."
Lapham describes himself ' as "a traditionalist or conservative, culturally, but not necessarily politically." He doesn't have a political label for himself. "I used to be attacked by both the left and the right," he said.
Putting together a genuinely "non-factional" magazine is a realistic possibility, Lapham said.
"I absolutely have a point of view. But it's not Democrat or Republican. What I mean is, I'm not trying to shove an ideology down somebody's throat. Of course I have standards and a bias. Most editorial decisions are entirely arbitrary. It's a matter of opinion and judgment and taste and bias and prejudice and anything else you want to call it.
"I'm not pretending to be objective. I'm simply trying to represent what strikes me as the most engaging and articulate thought on different sides of the political spectrum.
"The political argument is not between Republican and Democrats, although it is on one level. The real argument is between time past and time future, between people who have new ideas and the new generation that's trying to discover and advance the case for mankind — and you can find the opposition in both the Democrat and Republican parties."
Harper's, Lapham said, will be "hospitable to whatever tends to encourage thought, freedom, imagination and so on."