Modern Mind by Peter Watson Page A

were not enough wavelengths to go round, producing ‘chaos in the ether.’ 17
    As a consequence of this, new print media set the agenda for two generations, until the arrival of television. An added reason, in America at least, was a rapid expansion in education following World War I. By 1922, for example, the number of students enrolled on American campuses was almost double what it had been in 1918. 18 Sooner or later that change was bound to be reflected in a demand for new forms of media. Radio apart, four new entities appeared to meet that demand. These were
Reader’s Digest, Time,
the Book-of-the-Month Club, and the
New Yorker.
    If war hadn’t occurred, and infantry sergeant DeWitt Wallace had not been hit by shrapnel during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, he might never have had the ‘leisure’ to put into effect the idea he had been brooding upon for a new kind of magazine. 19 Wallace had gradually become convinced that most people were too busy to read everything that came their way. Too much was being published, and even important articles were often too wordy and could easily be reduced. So while he was convalescing in hospital in France, he started to clip articles from the many magazines that were sent through from the home front. After he was discharged and returned home to Saint Paul, Minnesota, he spent a few more months developing his idea, winnowing his cuttings down to thirty-one articles he thought had some long-term merit, and which he edited drastically. He had the articles set in a common typeface and laid out as a magazine, which he called
Reader’s Digest.
He ordered a printing of 200 copies and sent them to a dozen or so New York publishers. Everyone said no. 20
    Wallace’s battles to get
Reader’s Digest
on a sound footing after its launch in 1922 make a fine American adventure story, with a happy ending, as do Briton Hadden’s and Henry Luce’s efforts with
Time,
which, though launched in March 1912, did not produce a profit until 1928. The Book-of-the-Month-Club, founded by the Canadian Harry Scherman in April 1926, had much the same uneven start, with the first books, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s
Lolly Willowes,
T. S. Stribling’s
Teeftallow,
and
The Heart of Emerson’s Journals,
edited by Bliss Perry, being returned ‘by the cartload.’ 21 But Wallace’s instincts had been right: the explosion of education in America after World War I changed the intellectual appetite of Americans, although not always in a direction universally approved. Those arguments were especially fierce in regard to the Book-of-the-Month Club, in particular the fact that a committee was deciding what people should read, which, it was said, threatened to ‘standardise’ the way Americans thought. 22 ‘Standardisation’ was worrying to many people in those days in many walks of life, mainly as a result of the ‘Fordisation’ of industry following the invention of the moving assembly line in 1913. Sinclair Lewishad raised the issue in
Babbitt
and would do so again in 1926, when he turned down the Pulitzer Prize for his novel
Arrowsmith,
believing it was absurd to identify any book as ‘the best.’ What most people objected to was the mix of books offered by the Book-of-the-Month Club; they claimed that this produced a new way of thinking, chopping and changing between serious ‘high culture’ and works that were ‘mere entertainment.’ This debate produced a new concept and a new word, used in the mid-1920s for the first time:
middlebrow.
The establishment of a professoriate in the early decades of the century also played a role here, as did the expansion of the universities, before and after World War I, which helped highlight the distinction between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow.’ In the mid- and late 1920s, American magazines in particular kept returning to discussions about middlebrow taste and the damage it was or wasn’t doing to young minds.
    Sinclair Lewis might decry the very idea of trying