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This article argues that regional variations in audiences have

played an important and generally unexplored role in journalism his-tory. Its geographic analysis of the reading patterns of the SaturdayEvening Post in 1911, 1920, 1928, 1935, and 1944 nds strong areasof readership in the Western United States and low readership in theSouth. The pattern of the Post closely resembles that of another Curtis

Publishing Company magazine, the Ladies’ Home Journal , during a similar time period. Post readership also showed a correlation with such demographic areas as literacy rates, race, family size, income,

and ownership of household appliances. The article argues that aconsistent geographic and demographic pattern of readership overmore than three decades suggests a deeper, more complex relation-

ship between the Post and its audience than one created solely byeditorial content. It reinforces the idea of Post readers as well-to-dowhite urbanites. Yet it shows that Post readership was far more com-

plex than the notion that “everybody read the Post ” (a common impli-cation through the years). The circulation distribution of the Post was

indeed mass in number, but with many regional variations.

F ew magazines have ever achieved thestatus of the Saturday Evening Post in the early twentieth century. With

a weekly circulation in the millions, iconic cov-ers by such artists as Norman Rockwell and J.C.Leyendecker, articles and stories by the likes ofF. Scott Fitzgerald, David Graham Phillips, Agatha Christie, Rich-ard Byrd, Edith Wharton, and Samuel Blythe, and pages packed

The Geography of an American Icon:An Ana ysis of the Circu ation

of the Saturday Evening Post , 1911-1944

By Douglas B. Ward

American Journalism, 27:3, 59-89Copyright © 2010, American Journalism Historians Association

Doug Ward is an associateprofessor of journalism atthe University of Kansas,1435 Jayhawk Blvd.,Lawrence, KS 66045.(785) [email protected]



with advertising for automobiles, soap, appliances, and other prod-ucts of a growing consumer economy, the Post came to symbolizethe rise of mass magazines. Frank Luther Mott calls the Post “oneof the outstanding successes in the history of American magazines.”

John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman call it “the bible of middle-class America” in the early twentieth century, and Daniel Boorstincalls it “weekly fare for the great mass of Americans who consid-ered themselves middle class.” Jan Cohn calls it “one of America’sgreat mass magazines – perhaps its greatest.” 1

A 1928 article by Leon Whipple, a writer and social critic, sumsup some of the sentiments that have persisted into the twenty- rstcentury about the appeal of the Post :

Who reads the Post ? Who looks in the mirror? Everybody – high-brow, low-brow, and mezzanine; the hardboiled business man and the soft-boiled leisure woman; the in-telligenzia, often as a secret vice; Charles M. Schwab hassubscribed for twelve years, Elbert Gary had for eighteen.The White House must take in a copy or two if it has asense of gratitude. You read it –and I. 2

The general portrait that scholars have painted of the Post lookssomething like this: Cyrus H.K. Curtis, the founder of Curtis Pub-lishing Company, bought the nearly defunct Post in 1897 in hopes ofre-creating the success he had had with the Ladies’ Home Journal ,which emerged in the late-nineteenth century as a model for shiftingthe economics of publishing to advertising over subscriptions and

political subsidies. Curtis wanted to aim this new magazine primar-ily at men, to make it a weekly rather than a monthly like the Jour-nal and to push its circulation nationwide. He found a young editornamed George Horace Lorimer, who created an editorial formulathat attracted millions of loyal middle- and upper-class readers ina nation that was an emerging economic, consumer, and militarysuperpower. The Post became the vehicle for some of the best writ-ers of the era as well as for Lorimer’s pro-business editorials andidealistic views of America, and it became the prime advertisingmedium for the nascent automobile industry. Circulation of the Post

rose from fewer than 400,000 copies a week in the early 1900s to1,000,000 in 1908, 2,000,000 in 1919, and 3,000,000 for some is-



The Post achieved success at a time when mass marketing wasstill taking shape and radio was in its infancy. This is at the cuspof what David Abrahamson has called the Golden Age of MassMagazines, a time when magazines served as the dominant form of

popular culture.4

As Jan Cohn has argued, understanding the Post is an important step toward understanding mass communicationsand mass society. 5 And yet, despite the accolades that have beenshowered upon the Post as one of the great magazines of all time,we know surprisingly little about its readers. Where, for instance,did they live? Was the magazine read more widely in some areasof the United States than in others? How did the composition of itsaudience change over time?

This study seeks to address such questions, using an analysisof geographic and census data to explore the readership of the Post .It draws on circulation records of the Curtis Publishing Company,along with records of the Audit Bureau of Circulations, to map statedistribution of the Post in ve periods from 1911 to 1944. It alsocalculates a ratio of Post circulation to population for each state, us-ing that to measure intensity of readership, and uses census statisticsto correlate readership with demographics. Then, by supplementingthat statistical and geographic information with qualitative analysisof Curtis’s business records and surviving market research, it at-tempts to expand the historical understanding of the Post ’s audiencewithin the context of mass culture and cultural geography.

Many of the results of this study are descriptive and statistical,and because the circulation gures contain no speci c cities or ad-dresses, they do not allow for de nitive answers to many questionsabout the Post’ s audience. And yet, through the combination of map-

ping, and statistical and qualitative analysis, this article argues thatthe Post was part of a wide geographical divide that developed inthe consumption of mass magazines early in the twentieth century,one that tied East and West together while excluding the South. Theresults of this study raise many questions that warrant additionalinvestigation, but those results mesh with the ndings of previousresearch, pointing toward a strong regional cultural undercurrentthat ran beneath mass magazines of the early twentieth century, onethat has largely gone unexplored.

Background and Context



Home Journal , had an enormous reach in the rst half of the twen-tieth century, dominating the marketplace in both circulation andadvertising revenue into the 1930s. Under Lorimer, who becameeditor in 1898, the Post focused rst on businessmen, then on a

broader range of men, and nally on both men and women, aimingto become a family magazine, but one with a strong embrace of freeenterprise and the virtue of American business. 6 Business, publicaffairs, and romance predominated in Lorimer’s early formula forsuccess, along with sports, humor, science, photography, theater, lit-erature, and foreign affairs. Non ction and ction alike emphasizedstrong personalities who rose to power, overcame physical hard-ships, and achieved great wealth, with the Post becoming what Mott

called “the prophet of business success.”7

The Post covers became areality unto themselves, with J.C. Leyendecker’s New Year’s cher-ubs, Harrison Fisher’s idealized women, and Norman Rockwell’stableaus of a mythic Everytown. Cohn describes the “reality” of the

Post in terms of Lorimer’s contradicting beliefs: “the pious weightof traditional values and the heady promise of the present and the fu-ture.” She says the terms “American,” “businessman” and “commonsense” were touchstones throughout the Lorimer years as he createda “culture of business” within the pages of the Post .8

Both the Post and the Journal have been the subject of numer-ous studies, 9 often relating to portrayals of women, 10 and more re-cently to the magazines’ role in a consumer culture. 11 For instance,Jennifer Scanlon and Helen Damon-Moore have examined the rolethe Post played in promoting and helping Americans adapt to a con-sumer society. 12 And Jan Cohn, in her admirable study of the Post ,goes further than previous historians in eshing out the complex re-lationships that helped the Post achieve its success, concentrating onthe social construction created within the magazine’s editorial pagesand, to a lesser extent, on its advertisements and artwork. Lorimer,she says, “virtually created the idea of the businessman,” someonewho “would work hard, vote intelligently, and shape the future.”That businessman was an American archetype, and the AmericaLorimer created in the Post “represented the future and celebratedmanly competition, progress, and common sense.” 13

Few researchers have tried to analyze mass media audiences of

the past. Scholars in book history and cultural studies have providedmany useful studies in areas like literacy, television, and the readers



studies that tie audiences together with the idea of community. 15 In one study, Nord used a subscriber list and copies of New-York

Magazine to analyze readers of the late eighteenth century, arguingthat magazine reading at that time was not limited to the elite. In

another study, he used cost-of-living surveys to examine media useof the working class in late nineteenth-century America. Nord foundthat a signi cantly higher proportion of working-class families inthe South spent nothing on reading materials, compared with fami-lies in New England and the Mid-Atlantic. He argues that the mostavid readers were those who embraced the communities and institu-tions of modern industrial life. 16 Nord has also called on historiansto study audiences in more detail, though he admits that the nec-

essary evidence is “scattered, fragmentary and sometimes missingaltogether.” As a result, most historical studies of audiences havefocused on texts. Before we can understand those texts, though,

Nord argues, we must understand the environments in which thetexts were produced and consumed. 17

The present author has teased out information about readersfrom the records of Curtis Publishing Company. In one study, helooked at how the Post and other American publications shiftedtheir perception of readers from citizens to consumers at the turn ofthe twentieth century, and at how those magazines portrayed theiraudiences as a “buying class.” In others, he looked at how the false

promise of objectivity allowed magazine companies and marketersto embed that idea of a buying class into their audience researchin the early twentieth century, and how audience research emergedat Curtis Publishing Company, which had one of the rst marketresearch departments in an American company. In a study of the

Ladies’ Home Journal , he examined the audiences themselves, exploring geographic patterns in Journal readership and arguing thatscholars must begin to see magazine audiences in regional terms,

just as they do forms of ction writing, social interaction, and waysof life. 18

Thomas Leonard provides one of the broadest accounts of read-ership from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century, tyingdemocracy to Americans’ taste for news and looking at how news-

papers and magazines t into people’s daily lives. He argues that

“our picture of the past is lled with momentous headlines, grasping publishers and dashing reporters, but few pictures of the people who



1960s and early 1970s and a low readership in the South of nearlyall of the 22 mass magazines he studied. The geography of massmagazine circulation, he said, “appears to be a very complex and, asyet, clearly unsolved problem.” 20

Method

Little has been done to analyze audiences of early twentiethcentury magazines in part because surviving statistics about read-ership are rare. Even in later years, available data about magazinereadership are harder to come by than data about the reading of

books or newspapers. 21 Because of that, Curtis Publishing Company

provides a rare opportunity for exploring readership. Curtis was aleader in collecting circulation statistics in the late nineteenth cen-tury and in publishing such statistics in the early twentieth century.Its surviving records provided an important resource for this project,yet even Curtis’s records are spotty. This analysis starts with 1911,the rst year for which complete national statistics were available.That starting point is not long after the Post’ s circulation reached amillion, a time when it had yet to achieve its iconic status but had

become widely popular. It then jumps to 1920, providing a glimpseof post-war readership; to 1928, near the peak of the Post’ s success;to 1935, well into the Depression and a year before Lorimer retiredas the Post’ s editor; and nally to 1944, when the United States hademerged from the Depression and displayed a nationalist fervor asthe country fought in World War II and two years after Ben Hibbs,who revitalized the Post at mid-century, took over the editorship.Combined, the ve periods provide a span of nearly 35 years forexamining the Post in the rst half of the twentieth century. 22

To analyze the Post circulation statistics, state-by-state salesstatistics were compiled and sorted in an Excel database. 23 To help

put the raw numbers into perspective, the researcher calculated aratio of circulation to population in each state. The straight circula-tion gures emphasize those states with the largest populations, asthe most populous states have the most people who potentially couldhave bought magazines. By dividing the circulation gures into thestates’ populations, the researcher created a metric that allowed the

states to be compared on a mostly even basis, in effect showing theintensity of readership in a given area. 24 The gures from Curtis are



In each case, the gures and the maps are simply snapshots in time.The single issue that Curtis used to calculate its circulation gurescould have sold better or worse than other issues for the year, espe-cially early in the century, when street sales accounted for a larger

percentage of overall sales.25

Magazine sales tended to be strongestin the winter, when people spent more time indoors, and weakest inthe summer. Still, in most cases, the results show consistent patternsover 35 years, indicating a fairly accurate view of distribution.

After the databases were compiled, statistics were plotted on aUnited States map using ArcGIS mapping software. That softwareallows researchers to put complex geographical data into a visualform that helps show patterns and changes over time, and several

historians have used the software successfully.26

Black, MacDonaldand Black were among the rst to suggest that book historians expand their tools of analysis and make use of geographic informationsystems. They suggest that this GIS software, as it is known, could

be used to analyze such data as the number of books printed, soldand exported; the location of bookshops and libraries; literacy rates;and the routes that books took on their way to towns, cities andcountries. 27 This approach seems particularly relevant to an analysisof magazine readers. 28

Once the maps were complete, another series of databases wascreated using SPSS statistical analysis software. Historical censusdata were downloaded from the Inter-University Consortium forPolitical and Social Research 29 and combined with data for Post cir-culation and the ratio of circulation to population. Those statisticsallowed the researcher to conduct bivariate correlation analyses foreach year of Post circulation that had been compiled. This type ofanalysis allows researchers to determine a possible relationship be-tween two variables. As Konrad Jarausch and Kenneth Hardy pointout, this technique does not prove cause and effect. It is effective,though, at suggesting that a shift in one variable leads to a shiftin another. 30 This technique seemed especially useful in comparingcirculation statistics with hundreds of census categories over fourdecades. Interpretation of the numeric data was aided by extensivequalitative analysis of Curtis Publishing Company records. Curtiswas among the rst companies to establish a market research depart-

ment, and many of its records have survived. They provide impor-tant insights into the workings of the company and to its approaches



to the Atlantic Ocean; a dearth of circulation in the South; and ahigh ratio of circulation to population in the West. First, a handfulof states dominated the Post ’s circulation: New York, Pennsylvania,Ohio, Illinois and California. (See Maps 1 and 2.) Those ve states

accounted for more than 40 percent of Post circulation in each ofthe ve periods. Those states plus the 10 states that were next inline accounted for more than 70 percent of circulation. Sales of the

Post increased 58 percent from 1911 to 1935, and nearly 12 percentfrom 1935 to 1944, yet circulation patterns remained remarkablyconsistent, with a core from Massachusetts and New York south andwest through what Carl Degler describes as the “heart of industrialAmerica” in the early 1900s 32 and what the historical geographer

D.W. Meinig calls the “American core” of culture and industry from1870 to 1930. 33 New York, the largest state at the time, had the high-est circulation each year until 1944, when California rose to the top.(See Table 1.)

The second broad pattern that emerges is a dearth of circulationin the South. Certainly there were pockets of Post readership in theSouth, mostly in and around cities like New Orleans, Atlanta, Mem-

phis, Charlotte, Little Rock, and Norfolk. Those pockets of read-ership were few, though, especially compared with the Northeast,Upper Midwest, and West Coast. That lack of distribution is par-ticularly apparent in looking at the ratio of circulation to population.

Nine Southern states – Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, NorthCarolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas –ranked at the bottom in each of the ve periods analyzed. Moreover,those states ranked far below the median in each year. For instance,in 1911, the U.S. median ratio of circulation to population was 19.82while the bottom nine Southern states ranged from 6.60 (Missis-sippi) to 10.48 (Tennessee). By 1928, the U.S. median had risento 23.63, though sales in the bottom nine states had barely budged,ranging from 5.95 (Mississippi) to 10.15 (Louisiana). The patternheld for 1935 and 1944, as well. The U.S. median dropped slightlyduring the Depression, to 23.71, while readership of the bottom nineranged from 6.65 (again, Mississippi) to 10.58 (Arkansas). Sevenof those nine states gained readership by 1944; the other two lost.One state in the Southeast, Florida, stood out from all others, at least

partly re ecting the growth of its population and its appeal as a re-tirement and vacation spot. Circulation in Florida grew 542 percent



Tab e 1: Saturday Evening Post Circu ation in the 48 Contiguous States and D.C.

Year 1911 1920 1928 1935 1944

Total circ. 1,823,015 1,911,034 2,856,136 2,882,621 3,226,785

High217,721

New York 236,380

New York 383,769

New York 380,714

New York 359,055California

Low2,608

Nevada3,107

Nevada4,071

Nevada4,265

Nevada6,500

Nevada

Median15,293Oklahoma

21,742Maryland

28,807Maryland

29,959D.C.

38,517Colorado

Map 1: Distribution of Post Circu ation, 1920

Map 2: Distribution of Post Circu ation, 1935



in contrast to the South. Circulation in California rose 293 percentfrom 1911 to 1944, compared with 77 percent for the Post overall.In Arizona, circulation rose 342 percent, and other Western statesshowed substantial gains. California ranked sixth in total circulation

in 1911, third in 1920, second in 1928 and 1935, and rst in 1944.What stands out in the region, though, is the consistently high ratioof circulation to population. California, Washington, Oregon, andMontana ranked among the top nine states in ratio of circulation to

population in each of the ve years, and were joined in some years by Arizona, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada. Alsoworth noting is the high readership in Washington, D.C., whichranked at the top each year when placed among a list of states.

Literacy, race, and rural population help explain some of thesedisparities in the Post ’s audience. An analysis of census statisticsshows that Post readers tended to live in areas that were more urbanthan rural and, not surprisingly, live in areas with higher literacyrates. Across all four decades, the Post had the lowest readershipin areas with the highest African American population. These cor-relations do not prove that the Post ’s audience was overwhelminglywhite, as other researchers have suggested, but they certainly provideanother piece of evidence in that direction. The analysis of the cen-sus data provided other interesting correlations. For instance, stateswith high numbers of farms, especially farms of 50 acres or less,had a lower ratio of circulation to population, and the discrepancy

between rural and urban grew over the rst half of the twentieth cen-tury, re ecting in part the growing urban population of the UnitedStates, but also suggesting a cultural distance between the Post andmany rural areas of America. Family size seems to have played arole, as well, at least in later years. In the 1940s, those states with thelargest families and those that had the largest numbers of people liv-ing in one household had a lower ratio of circulation to populationthan other states. On the other hand, in 1944, states with the highest

percentages of homes with radios, refrigerators, and electric lightshad a higher readership, as did those that paid higher rents. Thosecorrelations match the image that Curtis tried to paint of its readersover the years and that historians have reiterated: that they were

people with money and an interest in buying the consumer products

that were advertised in its publications. (See Table 2.) In addition tothose broad themes, some subtler changes emerged, especially when



Tab e 2: Corre ation of Post’s readership intensity* with census categories n=49

Variab e 1911 1915 1920 1928 1935 1944

Rura /Urban Categories

Rural population -0.548 -0.515 -0.527

Rural farm population -0.640 -0.641 -0.662Value of all other crops -0.531 -0.508 -0.514 -0.548 -0.525

Value of garden vegetables -0.673 -0.677

Total number of farms -0.593 -0.595 -0.595 -0.624

Number of farms of native white farmers -0.505 -0.529

Number of farms of black and nonwhite farmers -0.600 -0.562 -0.597 -0.620 -0.605 -0.530

Number of farms of 10 to 19 acres -0.600 -0.578 -0.611 -0.576 -0.569 -0.511

Number of farms of 10 to 29 acres -0.548

Number of farms of 20 to 49 acres -0.608 -0.591 -0.654 -0.658 -0.651

Number of farms of 30 to 49 acres -0.643 Number of farms of 50 to 69 acres -0.615

Number of farms of 70 to 99 acres -0.550

Number of farms of 50 to 99 acres -0.533 -0.560 -0.574

Number of tenant farms -0.550 -0.558 -0.629 -0.641 -0.622 -0.656

Percent urban 0.521

Race

Total male black population -0.646 -0.616 -0.648 -0.632 -0.626

Total female black population -0.639 -0.613 -0.641 -0.629 -0.622

Total black population 10+ -0.643 -0.618 -0.646 -0.624 -0.617Total black population -0.557

literacy and Education

Total illiterate males of voting age (21+) -0.501 -0.503

Total illiterate native white males of votingage (21+) -0.594 -0.603 -0.663

Total illiterate population 10+ -0.548 -0.560 -0.533

Illiterate native white population 10+ -0.620 -0.618 -0.667 -0.670 -0.670

Median years of school of men 25+ 0.790

Median years of school of women 25+ 0.850Housing

Persons per occupied dwellings -0.707

Persons per private family (1930) -0.731

Dwellings without shower or tub -0.563

Median persons per occupied dwelling -0.774

Median persons per tenant-occupied building -0.847

% of dwellings for sale or rent 0.511

% of dwellings with electric lights 0.674

% of dwellings with radio 0.579% of dwellings with refrigerator 0.665

A h f d lli



1910s: The South as ‘Sub-Norma ’

The Post became the most successful magazine of the earlytwentieth century in large part because Curtis Publishing recognized

the equal importance of its editorial, advertising, and circulation op-erations. People bought the Post , which published about 70 pagesin 1911, primarily for the information it offered: news and analysislike “Making Over the Public Schools,” by Henry M. Hyde; ctionlike David Graham Phillips’s novel “The Grain of Dust,” which was

being serialized in 1911 just weeks after Phillips was gunned downin New York City; features like “Who’s Who – And Why,” short

personality pro les of newsmakers; but also for the many pages of

advertising of consumer products like Gold Medal Flour, Detroit-Fenestra Windows, Ivory Soap, Rambler Motor Cars, Oldsmobile,Regal Shoes, Liggetts Chocolates, Acme Paint, and Oliver Type-writer. 34 Curtis didn’t count on that editorial content to sell the mag-azines, though. It actively promoted each issue. The Post came outeach Thursday, and Curtis’s philosophy was to get the magazine infront of people as many times a day as possible, what in the early1910s one district sales agent called “the Keep-after-’em System.” 35 At the time, Curtis used more than 50,000 boys to sell its publi-cations everywhere from large cities to towns of fewer than 500residents. 36 Just as important, the company encouraged agents andnewsboys to promote the speci c contents of the magazine. Whatabout this issue was new and unique and would be of the greatestinterest to people in the seller’s area? Curtis followed circulationclosely, and when sales lagged in certain states, the company used

promotions to try to increase the circulation numbers. “Of course,the ratio of sales to population is not uniform in every state,” thecompany said, “but it is more nearly so with our publications thanwith others.” 37

In reality, the circulation patterns of the Post were far from uni-form, showing wide regional differences in distribution and inten-sity of readership. (See Map 3.) Lorimer, the Post ’s editor, may havesought to “create” America, as Jan Cohn has argued, but Lorimer’svision played far better in some areas than others and received littleenthusiasm in the South, which had the highest African American

population and the lowest readership of the Post . Cohn argues thatLorimer saw the country as a collection of regions that he sought to



as problematic as it sought to articulate an ideal “buying class” foradvertisers and sought to assist manufacturers in setting sales goals.Certainly, Curtis saw some opportunities in the South, yet it consid-ered the South’s large population of black and poor white residents“sub-normal in buying power.” Only by eliminating these peoplefrom its estimates did Curtis feel it could make adequate compari-sons between cities in the South and the North. 38

That isn’t surprising, given the racial and class divide betweenan urban white elite and much of the rest of the United States. Atthe turn of the century, the per capita income of the South Atlanticstates was the lowest in the United States, and per capita income inall regions of the South lagged behind the U.S. average throughoutthe twentieth century. In many cases, money to spend on periodi-cals was scarce. Nord has showed that working-class Southerners inthe late nineteenth century spent considerably less on reading mate-rial than people who lived in New England and the Mid-Atlanticstates. 39 Gray and Munroe likewise cite low readership of books,magazines, and newspapers in the South in the 1920s. 40 A study oftwo Southern counties in the 1930s showed that only one in eight

Map 3



nal , the present author found similarly low rates of readership in theSouth compared with other areas of the United States. 42

Literacy, of course, played an important role in the disparity ofreadership. Literacy rates across the United States rose considerably

at the turn of the twentieth century, re ecting the spread of manda-tory lower-level education. Those rising literacy rates contributedgreatly to the growing success of many magazines. Researchers inthe 1920s estimated that 75 percent of Americans read magazinesand that 95 percent read newspapers, though they found wide varia-tions in magazine circulation among the states. They also identi edwhat later researchers called a “communications elite,” a group thatread more books, magazines, and newspapers, and attended more

movies than other Americans.43

Few blacks were among that group,though, as their literacy rates lagged those of whites. For instance,the 1920 census reported that 4 percent of whites and 23 percent of

blacks described themselves as illiterate. 44 Cohn says the Post never wrote about race while Lorimer was

editor and gave little coverage to immigration. 45 That is important, but only one piece of the disparity in readership. Clearly, a strongcultural force was at work, too. As John Shelton Reed explains, theSouth has many cultures within it, but he cites research saying thatthe differences between white Southerners and white non-South-erners were bigger than the differences between nearly any othertwo groups, whether classifying them by age, sex, job or education.Reed says that “if any cultural differences in the United States areimportant, regional ones are.” 46 This study certainly supports thatthinking.

1920s: The West and Its Cu tura Af iations

Frederick Jackson Turner said in the 1920s that geographic sec-tionalism had played an important part in American life since the1700s. The West, wherever its boundaries of the time, saw itselfas separate from the rest of the nation, even though it was made upof migrants from other regions. “The settlers and the eastern capi-talists transformed the wilderness,” Turner wrote, “but in the very

process they were themselves transformed by the conditions with

which they dealt.”47

Turner noted a heightened regional awarenessacross the United States in the early twentieth century, pointing to



gional awareness is both useful and problematic in trying to explainreadership patterns of the Saturday Evening Post . Post readers werea community in a temporal sense, but not really in a physical sense.That is, people who lived in areas of high (or low) readership acted

Map 4



individually and often privately in their magazine purchases. Andyet, Westerners showed a collective interest in a periodical silent-ly and, mostly, unnoticed. (See Maps 4 and 5.) Curtis Publishingrecognized the Paci c Coast as an important part of Post circula-

tion, yet it dismissed the rest of the Western states, saying they wereworth little sales effort, largely because populations were small andscattered. In fact, Curtis put the Rocky Mountain states in the samecategory as the South, steering manufacturers away from them. 48

The question is, Why did Westerners show such interest inthe Post ? Most certainly, Lorimer’s conservative ideals meshedwell with the West’s embrace of individualism. After World War I,Lorimer pushed nationalism even harder than he had before the war,

railing against foreigners, embracing free-enterprise business, self-reliance, self-denial, and the myth of a classless society, showing,Cohn argues, “only too clearly how desperately the mainstream, likeLorimer, sought the assurances of the past.” 49 The region’s historyoffers additional clues about the geographical character of Western-ers. In the mid- and late 1800s, migration to the West was dominated

by prosperous white, native-born Americans who thought they couldimprove their lives. 50 This was the very group that the Post cateredto.51 As Richard White points out, these migrants west also tendedto move along a line of latitude similar to that of their home states.That is, those from, say, Illinois tended to move along a line to-ward Kansas, Colorado, and California. With these types of moves,

people took the cultural values of their old homes with them. In thiscase, that seems likely to have made them familiar, even comfort-able, with the values the Post espoused and open to the ideas of amagazine produced in Philadelphia. Similarly, given the distancethey were from their former homes, these transplanted Easternersand Midwesterners may have looked to the Post as a means of con-nection to, and identi cation with, their former regions, and with thenation as a whole. 52

The changing populace of the West also offers some clues. Be-tween 1900 and 1910, nearly a million people moved to Washing-ton, Oregon, and Idaho, nearly doubling the populations of Wash-ington and Idaho. By 1910, only two of ten Washington residentshad been born in the state. Many of these migrants were farmers,

but, as White says, distinct rural and urban Wests emerged duringthe early twentieth century. In 1900, the populations of Washing-



As early as 1913, Post circulation had a large urban tilt, somethingthat is not surprising considering that only a quarter of its circu-lation came from subscriptions at the time, the rest through suchmeans as sales agents and news boys. In 1928, the company said

the Post was “most intensive” in cities with populations of 2,500and above. 54 Other company documents show the concentration inareas that were even more densely populated. 55 It was far easier tohawk magazines on a crowded street corner in, say, Boston or SanFrancisco than on a quiet Main Street in a small town in Texas. Andyet, despite that urban circulation, to call the Post solely an urbanmagazine would be a mistake. Clearly, it lacked wide appeal in therural areas of the South, but it had a high ratio of circulation to popu-

lation in such areas as Florida (52 percent urban in 1930), Montana(33 percent urban), and Nevada (38 percent urban), as well as instates with large urban populations, such as California (73 percenturban) and Massachusetts (90 percent urban). But the West’s mixof rural individualism and fast-growing urban areas made it primeterritory for the Post .

1930s: The Depression and the End of an Era

In a mail survey Curtis conducted in 1930, the company es-timated that each copy of the Post it sold was read by nearly four

people. Curtis said that in doing the survey, it sent letters to everystate and to cities of every size. Interestingly, it divided the lettersso that 60 percent went to men and 40 percent to women, offering alook at how Curtis perceived the gender breakdown of Post readers.More than half of the men who responded were either executivesor professionals, while merchants and shopkeepers, salesmen, andthose in skilled trades accounted for about 10 percent each. Amongwomen, 65 percent were housewives. The rest had “other occupa-tions” that Curtis apparently did not see as signi cant enough tolist. 56 In other words, while Curtis wanted women to read the Post ,especially for the advertising, it clearly saw them as inferior, at leastwhere the Post was concerned. Men were its primary audience. Astudy of weekly magazines by George Gallup in 1931 backed that

perception. Gallup found that among men the Post had slightly low-

er readership than Liberty but slightly higher than Collier’s . Women,on the other hand, seemed to prefer both Liberty and Collier’s (and



come readers. That study divided the readers of 64 magazines intosix income groups. It found that the Post reached 46 percent of allfamilies in what the association considered the “AA” group, thosewith incomes in the top 1.4 percent of all U.S. incomes ($10,000 and

above, or about $120,000 and above today). That group accountedfor 6.93 percent of total Post circulation. The Post reached 31 per-cent of families in the “A” group, those with incomes of $5,000to $9,999 (or 7.4 percent of all Americans). Those who made be-tween $2,000 and $10,000 accounted for more than three-fourthsof Post circulation. 58 One grocer whom Curtis interviewed in 1930said that Post readers were “the cream of this town,” and Curtis con-tended that that “cream” stayed atop Post circulation lists through

the 1930s. In 1939, the company said that 80 percent of familiesthat read the Post were in the upper half of incomes in the UnitedStates. Throughout the 1930s, Curtis went to great lengths to de neareas with the highest incomes and to steer its sales representativesto those areas. Representatives were told to continue to avoid areas“with foreign-speaking or colored residents.” 59

Despite the company’s claims, the Post struggled nanciallyearly in the Depression as advertising dried up and the price ofCurtis Publishing stock dropped more than 90 percent. The com-

pany began accepting cigarette advertising for the rst time, andit spent more than a million dollars on promoting its magazines inthe last half of 1931. And though the size of the Post dropped frommore than 200 pages to fewer than 100 pages, Lorimer fought tomaintain the quality of the content, continuing to hire writers likeF. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Thompson, and Sinclair Lewis. 60 Post circulation fell slightly, from about 3,000,000 in 1930 to 2,800,000in 1935, but it climbed above 3,000,000 before the end of the de-cade. Overall, circulation patterns showed only slight change from1911 to 1935. More rural areas than urban areas made gains duringthe Depression, yet that didn’t hold true in every state. Circula-tion in states like Alabama, Arkansas, and Kansas increased, but sodid that in areas like California, Massachusetts, and Washington,D.C. The South made gains while many areas in the East and Up-

per Midwest declined. The ratio of Post circulation to populationremained strong in most Western states, as well as in Massachu-

setts and Florida. (See Map 6.) In fact, across the country, thoserates mostly stayed steady, though the reputation of the Post as the



was aware that the feel of America had somehow escaped him, thathe lived in an alien land bound on an alien journey. Worst of all,he realized that he was an old man and the ne, golden days weregone.” 61 Perhaps, but Lorimer’s suspicions of government inter-vention during the Depression and his ideals of self-reliance andhard work tapped into values that have persisted into the twenty-

rst century. In a March 2, 1935, editorial, for example, Lorimerrailed against the idea of Social Security (“the present craze forexcessive Government doles”), likening it to stock speculation andlumping both among the country’s “Great Popular Delusions.” Inthe same issue, he warned of “Our Immigration Emergency,” urg-ing Congress to reduce “the in ux of aliens at a time when manymillions of our own people are out of work.” Similar concerns ral-lied conservatives again and again through the century, with theirvoices becoming especially strong during the economic downturnthat became known at the Great Recession, starting in December2007. 62 Whether the the geographic pattern re ected in this study

also shows a pattern in political philosophy is beyond the scope ofthis research. It raises interesting questions, though.

Map 6



1940s: Competition and Rejuvenation

The Post stood alone in advertising revenue and circulation inthe rst third of the twentieth century, but that dominance gradually

diminished. Time and Life both caught the attention of the Americanreading public, and, along with other publications, chipped awayat the perch the Post once held. Lorimer’s hand-picked successor,Wesley Stout, took over as editor of the Post in 1937, maintain-ing Lorimer’s approach to editing, modernizing the typography andadding full-color printing. Circulation rose steadily, but he battledwith company of cials over the direction of the magazine as ad-vertising declined in the early 1940s. In 1942, he was replaced by

Ben Hibbs, who had been editor of the Curtis magazine CountryGentleman and who remained as editor of the Post for 20 years.Hibbs favored shorter articles and emphasized non ction over c-tion, especially during World War II, and he gave the magazine a

brighter, bolder look even as he maintained the Post ’s conservative political philosophy. Part of that redesign included headlines that provided considerably more information about an article’s contents,a return, of sorts, to a style the magazine had favored earlier in thecentury and indicating a need to market the magazine rather thansimply expect that everyone would want to read it. For instance,a blurb accompanying the March 11, 1944, article “The Battle ofFlorida” says: “At last America can know how close Hitler’s terrorcame to our shores: Ships burning in sight of land; torpedoes plow-ing into bathing beaches; oil covering our waterfronts.” Such blurbsextended even to the ction, as with the short story “At Anselm’s”:“While Thad was studying ways to outwit the marauding Indians,

pretty Mercy Anselm was studying Thad in light of her mother’sadvice about men.” 63

Although the look of the Post changed signi cantly in the earlyand mid-1940s, readership patterns remained little changed, with a

pattern of strong readership in the West, the Northeast, and Florida,separated by much weaker readership in between. (See Map 7.) Sev-eral Northeastern states showed substantial gains while those in thecentral part of the country held steady or declined. North and SouthDakota, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Indiana ranked at

the bottom of circulation gains in 1944, with circulation in NorthDakota actually declining 14.8 percent. Overall, the mean and me-



In 1944, for the rst time, that ratio of circulation to popula-tion showed a strong correlation with urban population, somethingthe statistics had suggested from the start. Not surprisingly, areas inwhich adults were more educated had higher levels of readership.Interestingly, readership in 1944 showed an inverse relationship tofamily size and the number of people in a single household, sug-gesting that men and women with larger families were less likelyto buy the Post and foreshadowing a later trend among printed me-dia in which people cited lack of time as a prime reason for notreading. (See Table 2.) The 1944 data also solidify the connection

between Post readers and consumer culture, as states with a highratio of circulation to population correlated with high numbers ofelectrical connections, refrigerators, and radios in homes. (A fewyears after the war, Curtis issued a report that reinforced that percep-tion, calling its study Manufacturing Customers .64) At the bottom ineach category were the same states that had the lowest readership,nearly all of them in the South. Other historians have identi ed an

emphasis on consumer goods in the Post’ s editorial material, butnone have sought to break that out in geographic terms. Rather, they

Map 7



consideration to geographical differences in buying habits. Likemagazine reading, consumer culture did indeed develop nationally,

but that national ideology may have signi cant regional elementsthat remain unexplored.

Conc usions

In 1912, Curtis Publishing Company boasted that the Post had“not merely attracted, but has actually created a new class of read-ers.” In portraying those readers, Curtis pictured lines of men andwomen in lockstep – all white, all dressed in hats, suits and ties, ordresses – holding red-tinted magazines aloft as they marched down

a tree-lined road. The individuals in the drawing quickly convergedinto a river of red that snaked through cities of diminishing size untilit branched into tributaries that moved through ever-smaller villages

before disappearing into hills and valleys in the distance. A caption beneath the illustration in a Curtis promotional book read, “The Sat-urday Evening Post Readers – An Army of More Than 1,900,000

– From City, Town and Village.” 65 An army, perhaps, but by Curtis’sown resolute proclamations, a very select army. The Post was avail-able to anyone willing to hand over a nickel to thousands of dis-tributors (mostly boys) every Thursday. But Curtis recruited those

boys from the af uent and middle-class parts of towns, had themsell in areas most traveled by that very class of people, and adver-tised the Post in the newspapers most read by that crowd. Lorimersaid that the Post avoided barbershops and bars, and that the peoplewho bought the magazine at newsstands were “the class of peopleyou like to see – the prosperous business men and the young womenwho have positions with good rms,” what the company later called“the pick of the ock.” 66

This study reinforces that idea of Post readers as well-to-dowhite urbanites. Yet it shows that Post readership was much morenuanced than categorization by race, sex, and income, and far morecomplex than the notion that “everybody read the Post” or that cir-culation was evenly distributed across the United States. This study,for instance, shows that the South accounted for only a small pro-

portion of Saturday Evening Post readership, and that Post circula-

tion was concentrated in a handful of states but that the West hadan extremely high ratio of circulation to population. The circulation



terms of time and space. D.W. Meinig, for instance, suggests lookingat the United States as an ever-changing collection, structure, andsystem of places. These places were created by people of distinc-tive social character and shaped, in part, by a distinctive landscape.

These regions are complex, ambiguous, and changing, he writes,and offer a deeper and yet more fundamental framing for histori-cal analysis. As part of this framework, he suggests looking at theWest not as a frontier but as a place where an expanding imperialistsociety pushed a dominant national culture onto many regional cul-tures. 67 Looked at that way, we can see the region as a place in whichregional identity and national identity commingled. The Post , in onesense, represented a dominant national culture, one that stressed an

entrepreneurial spirit and an embrace of a rising consumer economy, but it also represented a conservative political philosophy (pro-busi-ness, hostility toward government regulation, anti-immigrant) thathas ridden in waves through the decades. Meinig says the “subor-dination of the South and the West to the economic, political, andcultural power of the Northeast is an old theme in American his-tory.” Yet, he says, few have studied it in a geographical sense. 68 This study does indeed suggest a subordination of the South (or atleast a lack of interest from a majority of residents there) in terms ofmagazine readership. The West seems hardly subordinate, though,and looks like a cultural partner, re ecting what J. Wreford Watsoncalls a strange duality among Americans. They believe in personalenterprise and in individuals’ ability to transform themselves. Yet,in fact, competition between individuals forces people to identifythemselves as much as possible with their own group, otherwise thatgroup may not support their particular enterprise. 69 Indeed, histori-ans often see the West as a vast frontier separated by geography andcharacter from the “cultural center” of the country, an area roughlyfrom New York to Chicago. This study suggests a different, morecomplex view. The West of the early twentieth century was sepa-rated physically from the rest of the nation and indeed was a frontierin many ways. And yet, it maintained strong cultural connections tothe East and to the nation as a whole through the pages of the pre-eminent national magazine of the day.

Along those same lines, we can consider magazine reading part

of what Robert Sack calls “place as context.” That is, any consumer product consists of three cultural realms that make up a sense of



act as a symbol or a channel of personal de nition. 70 The Post itselfwas produced in Philadelphia, taking on many of the characteristicsthat Philadelphia had associated with itself: independence, personalliberty, and a strong connection to the past. The sense of place the

Post provided was that of the United States as a whole, or rathercollective and individual constructions of what that meant. So eventhough the magazine was read in California or Nebraska or Mas-sachusetts, the association with those speci c places existed only inthe sense that the readers themselves and the magazines themselveswere in those places at a certain time. Neither was the Post itself a

place, at least not geographically. And yet, reading the magazineallowed people to be part of an abstract community of readers, a

community created by consumption (purchase of the magazine) andsustained by consumption (the purchase of consumer products ad-vertised within the magazine). In that sense, reading the magazinerepresented an embrace of a national culture, a social constructionof place through articles, stories, pictures, and advertisements.

This study shows that this geographical makeup of Saturday Evening Post readers maintained a relatively stable pattern, much asWard found in readers of the Ladies’ Home Journal . In one sense,that isn’t surprising. The Post and the Journal were published inthe same building and distributed and sold by much the same salesforce. That in itself would encourage overlapping trends. The twostudies, though, seem to indicate common regional cultures that em-

braced or rejected these magazines and that the magazines them-selves helped create by steering their sales staffs and their advertis-ers toward some parts of the country and away from others. Thosestates that had strong readership in 1911 generally remained strongin 1920, 1928, 1935, and 1944, and those areas that were weaklargely remained weak, even as the Post added a million and a halfreaders. That seems to indicate a loyalty among Post readers andan ability by Curtis Publishing to recognize and exploit those areaswhere the magazine had the most potential.

The consistent geographic pattern of readership over more thanthree decades also suggests a deeper, more complex relationship

between the Post and its audience than analysis of editorial con-tent can explain. Journalism historians, many of whom are former

journalists, tend to assume a connection between editorial contentand circulation. There is a logic to that reasoning, but it can blind



area. Habit plays a role, as do such cultural factors as vanity (buyinga magazine for show), peer pressure or cultural identity (others in a

particular social group read the publication), and self-improvement(reading as education, regardless of the speci c content). In its inter-

views in the early 1910s, Curtis researchers found that businessmensubscribed to the Post to keep track of the advertising, which theystudied for ideas on how to sell more products in their own stores. 71 This study suggests regional patterns in reading of the Post , patternsthat also suggest ties to literacy rates, race, family size, income, andownership of household appliances. That is, readership is a mindsetthat involves availability of time and money, a desire to read, anda stew of cultural factors that goes far beyond the pages of an indi-

vidual issue. This study points to the need for journalism historiansto recognize that complexity and to reach beyond mere analyses ofcontent.

Combined, the Post and Journal studies also raise questionsabout the role of geography in the spread of a consumer society.In the case of the Post , the buying and consuming of magazines

pushed readers further into a culture in which consumption tookcenter stage. If we accept that premise, which several authors haveargued forcefully, 72 we can ask whether areas with high magazinereadership were the frontier of a consumer society. In a sense, thattakes us back to the model that Curtis used to sell its advertising:People who bought the Post and the Journal were the types of peo-

ple who bought other consumer products. So businesses could use Post and Journal circulation as a map to areas of strong and weakconsumption. Were these areas, physically and ideologically, whatDaniel Boorstin called “consumption communities”? Can we usethese reading patterns to explore mass culture, especially consumerculture? A de nitive answer is beyond the scope of this study, butthe evidence suggests yes.

This study raises other questions, as well: Did this regional pattern of heavy and light readership hold true with other maga-zines? Why were the people in certain areas more receptive (or not)to magazines? Does the same pattern apply to books, newspapers,and other reading material? Have these patterns carried forward intothe twenty- rst century, and if so, what legacy did they leave? The

Post , along with Life, Look , and other magazines that once had mil-lions of circulation folded as television took hold of the American



of mass magazines. One thing this study does make clear, though, isthis: When we refer to “mass magazines,” we can never assume thatthe “mass” means evenly distributed or inclusive. It is a term withfar more nuance than historians have ever tried to give it.

Endnotes

1 Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines , vol. IV (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 688; John Tebbel and MaryEllen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America, 1741-1990 (New York: Ox-ford University Press, 1991), 73-97; Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans:The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973), 151; JanCohn, Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and The Saturday Eve-

ning Post (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 3.2 Leon Whipple, “Sat Eve Post,” Journalism Quarterly 5 (November 1928):20-30.3 Although Post circulation reached 2,000,000 in 1913, it dropped below2,000,000 the next year and didn’t reach 2,000,000 again until 1919. See

Advertising in the Saturday Evening Post, 1926 (Philadelphia: Curtis Pub-lishing Company, 1927), Curtis Publishing Company papers, Special Col-lections, Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, Box 125 (hereaftercited as Curtis papers); “Total Advertising – 1928 in 64 Publications,” Cur-

tis Bulletin 107, January 1929; “The Year 1928,” Bulletin 107; “Rank ofTen Leading Publications,” Bulletin 59, March 25, 1925; “Total Advertising

– 1926,” Bulletin 83, Jan. 21, 1927, Curtis papers, Boxes 159-162. On gen-eral background of the Post, see, for instance, Mott, A History of American

Magazines , vol. IV, 684-689; John Tebbel, George Horace Lorimer and theSaturdayEvening Post (Garden City, N.Y.,1948), chapter 2.4 David Abrahamson, “Magazines in the Twentieth Century,” in History ofthe Mass Media in the United States: An Encyclopedia , ed. Margaret A.Blanchard (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998), 340-342.5

Cohn, Creating America .6 Cohn, Creating America ; Tebbel, George Horace Lorimer and the Satur-day Evening Post .7 Mott, A History of American Magazines , vol. IV, 688.8 Cohn, Creating America , 6-119 See, for instance, Tebbel, George Horace Lorimer and the SaturdayEve-ning Post ; Cohn, Creating America ; Walter Fuller, The Life and Times ofCyrus H.K. Curtis (New York: Newcomen Society of England, AmericanBranch, 1948); Kenneth Stewart and John Tebbel, Makers of Modern Jour-

nalism (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952); and James Playsted Wood, TheStory of Advertising (New York: Ronald Press, 1958); Otto Friedrich, De-cline and Fall (New York: Harper & Row 1970); Joseph C Goulden The



Patricke Johns-Heine and Hans H. Garth, “Values in Mass-Periodical Fic-tion, 1921-1940,” Public Opinion Quarterly (Spring 1949): 105-113; MaryEllen Waller-Zuckerman, “Marketing the Women’s Journals, 1873-1900,”

Business and Economic History 18 (Fall 1989): 99-108; and Michael Den-nis Hummel, “The Attitudes of Edward Bok and the Ladies’ Home Journal Toward Woman’s Role in Society, 1889-1919,” Ph.D. dissertation, NorthTexas State University, 1982.11 Helen Damon-Moore, Magazines for the Millions: Gender and Com-merce in the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, 1880-1910 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); Christopher P.Wilson, “The Rhetoric of Consumption: Mass Market Magazines and theDemise of the Gentle Reader, 1880-1920,” in The Culture of Consump-tion: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980 , ed. Richard Wight-man Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 40-64; T.J.Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and theTherapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930,” in The Culture ofConsumption , 3-38; Bonnie J. Fox, “Selling the Mechanized Household: 70Years of Ads in Ladies’ Home Journal ,” Gender & Society 4 (1990): 25-40;Richard W. Pollay, “Thank the Editors for the Buyological Urge: AmericanMagazines, Advertising and the Promotion of the Consumer Culture, 1920-1980,” in Marketing in the Long Run: Proceedings of the Second Workshopon Historical Research in Marketing , ed. Stanley C. Hollander and Terence

Nevett (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1985).12 Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal,Gender and the Promises of Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge,1995); Damon-Moore, Magazines for the Millions ; Wilson, “The Rhetoricof Consumption”; Also see, for instance, Cohn, Creating America ; Waller-Zuckerman, “Marketing the Women’s Journals”; Pollay, “Thank the Editorsfor the Buyological Urge.”13 Cohn, Creating America , 4-5, 28, 30-31, 65-66, 71-78, 100-101, 136.14 See, for instance, Perspectives on American Book History , ed. Scott E.Casper, Joanne D. Chaison, and Jeffrey D. Groves (Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press, 2002); Cathy N. Davidson, ed., Reading in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Janice A. Radway,

Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (ChapelHill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Michael Denning, Mechan-ic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (London:Verso, 1987); Carl F. Kaestle et. al., Literacy in the United States: Readersand Reading since 1880 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991);and the wide variety of studies that have appeared in the journal Book His-tory .15

David Paul Nord, “A Republican Literature: Magazine Reading andReaders in Late-Eighteenth-Century New York,” in Reading in America ,114 139; David Paul Nord “Working Class Readers: Family Community



Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001).16 Nord, “A Republican Literature” and “Working-Class Readers.”17 David Paul Nord, “Intellectual History, Social History, Cultural History ...and Our History,” Journalism Quarterly 67 (Winter 1990): 645-648.18 Douglas B. Ward, “The Reader as Consumer: Curtis Publishing Compa-ny and its Audience, 1910-1930,” Journalism History 22 (Summer 1996):46-55; Ward, “Readers, Research and Objectivity,” in Fair & Balanced:

A History of Journalistic Objectivity , ed. Steven R. Knowlton and KarenL. Freeman (Northport, Ala.: Vision Press, 2005), 167-179; Ward, “FromBarbarian Farmers to Yeoman Consumers: Curtis Publishing Company andthe Search for Rural America, 1910-1930,” American Journalism 22 (Fall2005), 47-67; Ward, A New Brand of Business: Charles Coolidge Parlin,Curtis Publishing Company and the Origins of Market Research, 1911-1930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010); Ward, “The Geogra-

phy of the Ladies’ Home Journal : An Analysis of a Magazine’s Audience,1911-1955,” Journalism History 34 (Spring 2008): 2-14.19 Thomas C. Leonard, News for All: America’s Coming-of-Age with the

Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), xii.20 Michael M. Swann, Mass Magazine Circulation Patterns in the UnitedStates: Regional Variations in Rural and Urban Tastes (Syracuse, N.Y.: De-

partment of Geography, Syracuse University, 1975).21 Helen Damon-Moore and Carl F. Kaestle, “Surveying American Readers”in Kaestle et. al., Literacy in the United States , chapter 6.22 I ended in 1944 because I wanted to get an idea of readership during thewar and how the Post might have changed after Lorimer left. I could not

nd statistics for 1945, so 1944 seemed a logical stopping point.23 Because of the rapid population growth at the time, mid-decade estimatesare dif cult, especially for each county. With the ratio of Post circulationto population for 1935 and 1944, results seemed skewed in some cases byusing either the 1930 or 1940 census gures. To try to eliminate some ofthose anomalies, I created composite population gures by averaging thecensus totals for 1930 and 1940, and 1940 and 1950. I used those averages

to calculate the ratio of circulation to population for 1935 and 1944.24 The Post had some circulation beyond the 48 contiguous states, in Alaska,Canada and other areas. Those numbers amounted to less than 3 percent oftotal circulation, though, and I have focused on the 48 contiguous states andthe District of Columbia because that is where Curtis’s records are mostcomplete. For instance, in the circulation records I used from 1920, the Post had a circulation of 1,911,034 in the contiguous 48 states, 35,652 in Canada,7,487 in Alaska and other U.S. possessions and 10,306 abroad. Curtis brokedown its state circulation by county but offered no more detail on the cir-

culation in other areas. See “Circulation of the Saturday Evening Post byCounties,” March 1915, Curtis papers, Box 124; “Circulation by CountiesThe Saturday Evening Post Issue of May 1 st 1920 ” in Sources of In



Publishing Company, 1928), Sales Opportunities, 1935-1936 (Philadelphia:Curtis Publishing Company, 1935); and ABC Bluebook , 1944. In guringthe ratio of circulation to population, I used the totals of the contiguous48 states and the District of Columbia only. The total census populationsinclude territories other than states.25 The 1920 gures are from the May 1 issue, the 1928 gures from theMarch 3 issue, the 1935 gures from the March 2 issue, and the 1944 g-ures are from the March 11 issue. The 1911 gures are either averages orfrom an issue different from the one Curtis listed in The District Agent asa Sales Promoter . Curtis listed them as being from the Saturday Evening

Post , March 1, 1911, but the Post was published on March 4 and March 11that year, not on March 1.26 For instance, Social Science History devoted an entire issue to the use ofGIS in historical research, exploring such issues as migration patterns, thespread of industry and the spatial history of cities. MacDonald and Blacksuggest that GIS software is especially useful with questions of location(What is at ...?), condition (Where is ...?), trends (What has changed since...?), patterns (What is the spatial distribution of ...?) and projections. SeeSocial Science History 24.3 (Fall 2000). The special issue is titled “Histori-cal GIS: The Spatial Turn in Social Science History”; and Bertrum H. Mac-Donald and Fiona A. Black, “Using GIS for Spatial and Temporal Analysesin Print Culture Studies: Some Opportunities and Challenges,” Social Sci-ence History 24:3 (Fall 2000): 506-536.27 Fiona Black, Bertrum H. MacDonald and J. Malcolm W. Black, “Geo-graphic Information Systems: A New Research Method for Book History,”

Book History 1.1 (1998): 11-31. It is also available at www.sharpweb.org/ bookhist.html (accessed June 2010).28 See, for instance, Nord, “Intellectual History, Social History, CulturalHistory ... and Our History.”29 Michael R. Haines and the Inter-University Consortium for Political andSocial Research, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data:the United States, 1790-2000 [Computer le]. ICPSR02896-v2. Hamilton,

N.Y.: Colgate University (Ann Arbor: Mich.: Inter-university Consortiumfor Political and Social Research, producers, 2004). The data are availableto member universities through the consortium’s Web site, www.icpsr.org (accessed June 2010).30 Kondrad H. Jarausch and Kenneth A. Hardy, Quantitative Methods for

Historians: A Guide to Research, Data, and Statistics (Chapel Hill: Univer-sity of North Carolina Press, 1991), chapter 8. Also see R. Darcy and Rich-ard C. Rohrs, A Guide to Quantitative History (Westport, Conn.: Praeger,1995); and Thomas J. Archdeacon, Correlation and Regression Analysis: A

Historian’s Guide (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994).31 The most extensive collection of Curtis papers is in Special Collections atthe University of Pennsylvania The Curtis Archives in Indianapolis has a



33 D.W. Meinig, “The Continuous Shaping of America: A Prospectus forGeographers and Historians,” American Historical Review 38 (December1978): 1186-1205.34 Saturday Evening Post , March 4, 1911.35 The District Agent as a Sales Promoter , 185.36 ”Selling Through Boys,” Obiter Dicta 9 (December 1914), 15-17, Curtis

papers, Box 153.37 The District Agent , 218-220.38 See Charles Coolidge Parlin, “Department Store Lines: Textiles,” vol. B,Retail and Jobbing, Curtis papers, Boxes 21 and 22.39 Nord, “Working-Class Readers.”40 William S. Gray and Ruth Munroe, The Reading Interests and Habits of

Adults (New York: MacMillan, 1929), chapter 2.41 Gavin Wright, “Persisting Dixie: The South as an Economic Region,” inThe American South in the Twentieth Century , ed. Craig S. Pascoe, KarenTrahan Leathem and Andy Ambrose (Athens: University of Georgia Press,2005), 77-90; Leonard, News for All, 109; Nord, “Working-Class Readers.”42 Ward, “The Geography of the Ladies’ Home Journal .”43 Gray and Munroe, The Reading Interests and Habits of Adults , 17-21,262-63; Damon-Moore and Kaestle provide an insightful overview of thisand other surveys in “Surveying American Readers.”44 William Vance Trollinger Jr. and Carl F. Kaestle, “Highbrow and Middle-

brow: Magazines in 1920,” in Kaestle et. al., Literacy in the United States,

chapter 7.45 Cohn, Creating America , 170.46 John Shelton Reed, “Southern Culture: On the Skids?,” in The AmericanSouth in the Twentieth Century, 143-153.47 Frederick Jackson Turner, “Geographic Sectionalism in American His-tory,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 16 (June 1926):85-93.48 “Some Manufacturers Who Use the Curtis Quota Plan,” Curtis Bulletin 61 (22 April 1925); “Companies Using Sales Quotas,” Curtis Bulletin 91

(22 July 1927), Curtis papers, Boxes 160-161; Sales Quotas, 1928-29 .49 Cohn, Creating America , 135-141; quote on 138.50 Richard White, A History of the American West (Norman: University ofOklahoma Press, 1991), 183-193.51 See, for instance, Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings; Zuckerman, A Historyof Popular Women’s Magazines; and Carolyn Kitch, “The American Wom-an Series: Gender and Class in the Ladies’ Home Journal , 1897,” Journal-ism and Mass Communication Quarterly 75 (Summer 1998): 243-262.52 J.O. Rankin, Reading Matter in Nebraska Farm Homes, Agricultural Ex-

periment Station of the University of Nebraska Bulletin 180 (June 1922), 4.53 White, A History of the American West , 415-433; also see United StatesCensus Urban and Rural Population: 1900 to 1990 available at http://



55 See, for instance, “Distribution of Magazine Circulation in United States,”Curtis Bulletin 103 (1928), Curtis papers, Box 162.56 The Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia: Curtis Publishing Company,1930), Curtis papers, Box 140.57 George Gallup, Survey of Reader Interest in Saturday Evening Post, Lib-erty, Collier’s, Literary Digest (Chicago: Northwestern University, 1931).58 Daniel Starch, Magazine Circulations: Quantitative Analysis by Incomesof Readers (New York: American Association of Advertising Agencies,1930); the conversion of 1930 dollars into today’s dollars was made us-ing the Consumer Price Index calculator at MeasuringWorth.com (accessedAugust 2007).59 Middletown Story (Philadelphia: Curtis Publishing Company, n.d., c.1930), Curtis papers, Box 118; City Markets: A Study of Thirty-Five Cit-ies (Philadelphia: Curtis Publishing Company, 1932); Sales Opportunities,1930-31 (Philadelphia: Curtis Publishing Company, 1930).60 Goulden, The Curtis Caper , 44-45; Cohn, Creating America , 218-226.61 Tebbel, George Horace Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post , 204-05.62 “Great Popular Delusions,” Saturday Evening Post , March 2, 1935, 22.63 Philip Wylie and Laurence Schwab, “The Battle of Florida,” Saturday

Evening Post ,” March 11, 1944, 14-15, 52, 54, 58; Ernest Haycox, “At An-selm’s,” Saturday Evening Post , March 11, 1944, 18, 46, 48, 50-51; Mott,

A History of American Magazines , vol. IV, 708-715; Goulden, The CurtisCaper , 54-61.64 Manufacturing Customers (Philadelphia: Curtis Publishing Company,1951), Curtis papers, Box 113.65 National Advertising: The Modern Selling-Force (Philadelphia: CurtisPublishing Company, 1912), 30-34.66 “Condensed Report of Advertising Conference,” typescript, Curtis Pub-lishing Company, 1915, Curtis papers, Box 18; “People on the Way Up,” inSources of Information , Curtis papers, Box 130.67 D.W. Meinig, “The Continuous Shaping of America: A Prospectus forGeographers and Historians,” American Historical Review 83 (December

1978): 1,186-1,205.68 Meinig, “The Continuous Shaping of America.”69 J. Wreford Watson, Social Geography in the United States (New York:Longman, 1979), 104-105.70 Robert D. Sack, “The Consumer’s World: Place as Context,” Annals ofthe Association of American Geographers 78 (December 1988): 642-664.71 See, for instance, Charles Coolidge Parlin, “Department Store Lines: Tex-tiles,” vol. B, Interviews and General Index, Curtis papers, box 21.72 See, for instance, Cohn, Creating America ; Damon-Moore, Magazines

for the Millions; and Robert David Sack, Place, Modernity, and the Con- sumer’s World: A Relational Framework for Geographical Analysis (Balti-more: Johns Hopkins University Press 1992)



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