Look: How a Highly Influential Magazine Helped Define Mid-Twentieth Century America

Abstract

In the world of American general interest magazines, Time Inc.’s Life takes up a lot of oxygen. Partially, this is because Life was a central component of the contemporaneous media fabric, claiming to reach roughly 17 million readers at its height. Its photography-driven journalism, adapted from earlier French and German periodicals, acclimated a generation of US readers to what Jeff Allred calls “the camera-guided mind.”1But Life also dominates twenty-first century histories of postwar culture for reasons having little to do with its original print run. Since 2008, through an arrangement with Google Books, every issue—along with millions of photographs from Life’s own archive, many never published—has been digitized and made freely available to anyone with web access. If one searches for images of John F. Kennedy, or articles about the Ford Motor Company, or coverage of the moon landing or postwar swimming pools, chances are they’ll find Life. Forty years after its demise, this outsized digital footprint means the magazine reigns supreme as the barometer of midcentury culture.Andrew Yarrow’s passionately argued and deeply researched history of Look magazine, one of Life’s major competitors, returns needed texture to the print media ecology of the midcentury United States. Yarrow convincingly challenges the notion that Life sat alone on the throne of American magazines, but he also offers a nuanced rebuttal to the dominance of Luce’s “American Century” political agenda. To the first point, for most of the 1960s Look outsold Life (and every other magazine) on newsstands while drawing top talent to its masthead: Norman Rockwell, Joseph Heller, William H. Whyte, Marshall McLuhan, Supreme Court justice William O. Douglass, anthropologist Margaret Meade, and a young Stanley Kubrick, to name a few.To the second, Look succeeded in the market while championing African American civil rights and gender equality, challenging the worst of McCarthyism, and countering Luce’s jingoist “American internationalism” with its own “One World” philosophy. All the while, it deployed self-aware rhetorical panache: an exemplary 1950s advertisement reads, “Bored with life? Get LOOK, the exciting story of people.” Look’s mission statement was “the democratization of learning” (36), and its “tough-minded optimism” rested on the equation of access to information with social progress. A list of impending social and ecological catastrophes, from an early editorial, looks downright contemporary: “We believe that problems confronting our civilization—peace, poverty, population, and pollution, just to name a few—can and will be solved. But only if more people understand what’s really going on around them and why” (5).For Yarrow, Look’s disappearance from contemporary cultural memory—and, along with it, a mainstream version of progressive politics—follows from accessibility rather than the quality of the product. Whereas digitized issues of Life are everywhere, Look only exists at the Library of Congress and the special collections at Drake University, in Des Moines, Iowa. While Yarrow’s main goal is to return attention to this popular, influential, but nearly forgotten publication, he also makes an implicit argument about the potential for black holes in cultural history. Look supported anti-segregation efforts in the early 1940s, ran a celebratory article about “the first homosexual marriage” in the early 1960s, and fought back against the worst of the Cold War’s anti-communist demagoguery. Yarrow sees this progressive impulse exerting a gravitational force on its competitors, bending the moral arcs of all other midcentury magazines. And yet, without easy access to this archive, Yarrow believes, the past looks more conservative than it really was.Yarrow worked as a reporter for the New York Times and frequently writes for an array of other newspapers and popular magazines, a background that benefits the book’s narrative pace. The first half details Look’s growing pains as it helped develop the new periodical genre of photo weeklies. Founder Gardner (Mike) Cowles was the ambitious scion of wealthy Iowans, and in 1936 he began a photo-driven Sunday supplement in his father’s daily paper, the Des Moines Register and Tribune. When it first appeared as a standalone title in 1937, Look featured photo essays on politicians and New Deal programs alongside slightly down-market items like “Photocrime,” which asked readers to solve a real crime based on photos and clues, and “Confidentially,” which paired suggestive letters to the editor with photos of women making bedroom eyes.Early reviews were mixed at best. Time dismissed it as “barbershop reading” while the New Republic referred to it as “a morgue and dime museum on paper” (22). And yet, Look sold over 700,000 copies of its first issue in January, and almost 1.5 million of its mid-May issue. While those numbers closely track with Life’s early success, Yarrow points out some fascinating differences between how and where readers got their hands on each title. Life leaned on paid subscriptions, but Look sold the majority of its issues on newsstands. And Look sold proportionately more copies in rural zip codes, particularly in the Midwest, than in the urban cores. Yarrow also includes details that help explain seemingly anomalous blips in circulation: for example, the bidding war between Life and Look for serialization rights to William Manchester’s The Death of a President, which Look purchased in 1967 for $665,000, then the largest sum ever paid for a magazine series, which led to the highest circulation numbers in Look’s history.This presidential focus wasn’t typical of Look, though. Yarrow attributes the magazine’s appeal in rural areas to its “people-centered” point of view, rather than Life’s alignment with “the power elite” and reliance on “leaders and official sources” (9, 13). This was especially true in its coverage of science and technology, where it tended to report innovations in medicine, transportation, and “labor-saving” devices from the experience of patients, families, or workers rather than doctors or scientists. Luce allegedly claimed that Life shared its readership with the New York Times, while Look overlapped with the New York Daily News. It’s a shorthand that reinforces rather than explains the different readerships. Nevertheless, coupled with resources like those Brooks Hefner’s and Edward Timke’s Circulating American Magazines makes available, Yarrow helps expose the eddies and contours of what otherwise might look like a homogenized mass culture.The early chapters are at their best when contrasting Look’s artisanal editorial model with Time Inc.’s top-down, production-line approach. Look maintained a small, consistent, and tight-knit staff: Cowles, editor Daniel Mich, and photo editor Arthur Rosenstein stuck around for almost the magazine’s entire run. They prided themselves on giving contributors extraordinary leeway in developing their work, as well as lead time: usually six weeks for a feature story. This made the magazine less news-driven than competitors, but helped artists feel respected and empowered. For example, when Look lured Norman Rockwell away from The Saturday Evening Post in 1963, his work became far more attuned to the changing political landscape. His iconic 1964 painting of Ruby Bridges flanked by US marshals as she integrated a public school in New Orleans first appeared in Look, as did thirty other works on subjects such as three murdered civil rights workers in Mississippi and a group of Peace Corps workers in a Bogotá shantytown.While Look’s photographers lack the name-recognition of Margaret Bourke-White or Gordon Parks, their work can be just as jaw dropping, and Yarrow includes a wide array of Look covers and photographs that exemplify their talent. Seeing James Karales’s epic photo of the Selma to Montgomery March next to John Vachon’s portrait of J. W. Milam (one of Emmett Till’s murderers) showcases the range of artistic style that Look encompassed, but it also attests to the magazine’s ability to succinctly visualize the cultural contradictions of an unjust nation. Civil rights marchers are depicted as world conquerors, while the entire legal apparatus looks the other way from an unrepentant child murderer.The second half of Yarrow’s book changes course, with each chapter tracking Look’s coverage of a single issue over several decades. Here, we learn about the magazine’s depictions of the Affluent Society, the civil rights movement, family and gender roles, technology and techno-utopianism, the role of government in the everyday lives of citizens, and internationalist politics. The sheer quantity of material he covers is impressive, but so is his ability to summarize broad trends. While each topic follows its own course, there’s a general movement from an optimistic centrism in the Fifties, to ambivalence in the Sixties, to a “hotbed of radicalism” in the Seventies (177). For example, in May 1968, Look published George Leonard’s “New Liberal Manifesto,” and a 1971 illustration showed an American flag whose stripes read “racism,” “power structure,” and other structural modes of oppression. The shift might neatly be summarized in its switch from referring to Baby Boomers as “The Explosive Generation” in the late 1950s, to the “Tense Generation” in 1963,” to “The Open Generation” at the decade’s end.Yarrow’s methods here are quite unlike other studies of big magazines, which tend to affix a publication’s history to the biography of a singularly brilliant editor or publisher. Here, I’m thinking of Alan Brinkley’s The Publisher (on Luce at Time and Life), Jennifer Scanlon’s Bad Girls Go Everywhere (on Helen Gurley Brown at Cosmopolitan), or Jan Cohn’s Creating America (on George Horace Lorimer at Saturday Evening Post), all of which read the publication through the life of a single person. Instead, Yarrow offers a true biography of the magazine itself. We learn almost nothing about any of the central players outside of their office life. In this way, his method looks more like earlier scholarship on little magazines, such as Suzanne Churchill’s study of Others or Jason Harding’s work on The Criterion, which productively leverage a magazine’s collaborative creation and seriality to get away from Great Man history.Yet unlike much work on little magazines, especially the strand coming out of new modernist studies, there is little in the way of broader print culture history or media theory. This leads to some oversights; for example, Yarrow says nothing about how the rise of New Journalism affected Look, even when discussing a 1967 article where William Hedgepeth covered the Haight-Asbury scene by moving into a communal apartment and seeing the Grateful Dead in Golden Gate Park. He also tends to overplay Life’s conservatism, especially around civil rights. Even at the time, Robert Wallace’s five-part “Background on Segregation” series, published between September and October of 1956, was heralded as a landmark in popular journalism. And Gordon Parks’s contribution to the fourth installment, “Restraints: Open and Hidden,” especially his photograph from the point of view of Black children looking at a segregated playground through a fence, exposes the injustices of “the power elite” as well as anything in Look.When Yarrow does venture into more abstract considerations of media and culture, he tends to put forward an undercooked decline narrative that the end of mass-market magazines gave rise to twenty-first century political disfunction and authoritarian propaganda. A “long-gone type of journalism made the United States a better country and Americans a better people” (xiv), and we now live in a world where “the unifying effects of mass media [have] ended” (237). Perhaps. But in an otherwise compelling and meticulously researched book, this is one place where Yarrow’s thinking could benefit from a deeper engagement with the literature of “media determinism.”Especially at the present moment, as civil rights and federal protections that once felt secure begin to topple around us, it’s easy to get nostalgic for a lost moment of national consensus and ambient optimism—and then, as Yarrow does, to attribute that cultural mood to the media form that dominated the era. Even if one remains skeptical about such pronouncements, Yarrow contributes a welcome and necessary entry into conversations about both midcentury mass media and how it re-circulates—or doesn’t—in digital forms today.