Life: Dead & Alive

Last week a U. S. magazine of ripe years and rich reputation came to an end in all but name when Life was purchased by TIME Inc. With its November issue now on the presses, that civilized funsheet will, after 53 years, cease to function as the good-humored critic, the caustic commentator on the U. S. scene, will pass into the realm of great things gone forever.

From its journalistic grave TIME is saving only Life's worthy name, to be conferred as a birthday present upon TIME'S forth coming newspicture magazine. First issue of the new LIFE will be in subscribers' hands by Nov. 19. Life's staff will be taken over by TIME Inc. intact. Only Life activity to be continued by TIME Inc.

is its Fresh Air Fund for providing slum children with country outings.

Life was born in 1883 as a weekly in the Broadway studio of a New York artist named John Ames Mitchell. Thirty-seven at the time, Mitchell pined to publish his black & white drawings by the new zinc process and for that purpose was willing to spend a $10,000 legacy from a relative.

Level-headed Publisher Henry Holt told Artist Mitchell that Life's life would be short, advised him to stay out of a field in which Judge and Puck were already established. Single-minded Publisher Mitchell went ahead with his plans, engaged as literary editor a young man named Edward Sandford Martin. Six years out of Harvard, where he was a founder of the Lampoon, Martin had the definite idea that that college comic could be transmuted into a professional periodical.

For Vol. 1, No. 1, Artist-Publisher Mitchell drew the first Life nameplate with its mascot cupids, later contributed the famed masthead of a knight leveling his lance at the posterior of a fleeing devil.

Caption: "While there's Life, there's hope." The new magazine set forth its principles and policies thus: "We wish to have some fun in this paper. . . . We shall try to domesticate as much as possible of the casual cheerfulness that is drifting about in an unfriendly world. . . . We shall have something to say about religion, about politics, fashion, society, literature, the stage, the stock exchange, and the police station, and we will speak out what is in our mind as fairly, as truthfully, and as decently as we know how."

On this broad platform the infant publication immediately began to cut capers.

Though Editor Martin, who suffered from malaria, retired for a few years to build up his health, there was no dearth of energetic contributors. From the magazine's point of view, most important of these was Charles Dara Gibson. To Life for $4 he sold his first contribution: A dog outside his kennel baying the moon.* Encouraged by a publisher who was also an artist, Gibson was joined in Life's early pages by such celebrated draughtsmen as E. W. Kemble (funny Negroes), Palmer ("Brownies") Cox, F. G. Attwood, A. B.

Frost, Oliver Herford. By the time Edward S. Martin was well enough to resume contributing editorials in 1885, Life had lined up such impressive literary talent as John Kendrick Bangs, James Whitcomb Riley, Brander Matthews.

.What from first to last set Life apart from Puck and Judge was its impulsive, often quixotic but always warm-hearted editorial crusades. No believer in vaccination, Mitchell used Life's pages to oppose all serum treatments, plug sanitation istead. A dog-lover, he missed no chance to whack vivisection in line and letter.

Among oldsters today one of Life's best remembered double-spreads is "The Reward of Virtue," which showed a dog about to be sliced by a cruel-visaged scientist. Violently averse to "The Trusts" Mr. Mitchell liked to heckle J. P. Morgan Sr. and John D. Rockefeller Sr. The latter he depicted as a sniveling psalm-singing hypocrite. Taking note of matters great & small, Life also inveighed at various times in its career against the "hobble skirt" ("Don't cry, Tommy, it's only a woman''), against the closing of the Metropolitan Museum on Sundays, against the marriage of U. S. girls to foreign fortune-hunters, against loveless marriages generally, against theatre-ticket speculators, against the carnage of an oldfashioned Fourth of July.

Never fond of Jews, Publisher Mitchell was sometimes accused of outright antiSemitism. When the magazine blamed the theatrical team of Klaw & Erlanger for Chicago's grisly Iroquois Theatre disaster in 1903, a great hue & cry ensued. Life's pugnacious Drama Reviewer James Stetson Metcalfe was barred from the 47 Manhattan theatres controlled by the so-called "Theatrical Trust." His magazine hit back with invidious cartoons of grotesque Jews with enormous noses.

Another Mitchell dislike was for Publisher William Randolph Hearst. Of all Life's political cartoons the one which has dated least is that of Publisher Hearst as an evil-faced spider, his multiple arms spanning the U. S. horizon, one hand over the New York Capitol at Albany, another fingering the dome of the U. S. Capitol in Washington. Drawn by Oliver Herford, this caricature was published in Life in 1922.

By the time Thomas L. ("Tom") Masson became Life's managing editor in 1893, the 10-year-old magazine had become a respected U. S. fixture. Mr. Masson, author of Why I am a Spiritual. Vagabond and Tom Masson's Compendium of Wit and Humor, was credited with having originated 50,000 gags. Soon after his arrival Life entered its golden age which lasted until the War. Life prints, big reproductions of the magazine's pictures, were sold widely throughout the land. Some favorites: "A Hurry Call," a doctor racing the Stork in his buggy;* "Hers," an urchin gaping at a tiny pair of drawers on a clothes line; "For he's a Jolly Good Fellow," a beauteous young wife weeping alone by lamplight over an unoccupied armchair, empty slippers.

Just as such pictures were Life's most compelling feature, so Charles Dana Gibson who did them best was by far its most celebrated figure. The "Gibson Girl," a tall, queenly beauty who first appeared in Life in the 1890's, became the nation's feminine ideal, took her place in fashion history, served as the subject of an elaborate act in the first Ziegfeld Follies in 1907. Artist Gibson put a gilded dome on his romantic career by marrying lovely Irene Langhorne of Virginia, made enough money from Life to go abroad to paint, lost lots of it in the 1907 Panic, returned to Life and black & white drawing. His clean-looking characters and gentlemanly point of view provided a perfect artistic facade for Life's greatest editorial days.

Ardent Francophiles both, Publisher Mitchell and Artist Gibson took it as a personal affront when Germany attacked Belgium, went determinedly to work in 1914 to hustle the U. S. into the War.

Tossing neutrality out the window, Gibson savagely depicted the Kaiser as a bloody, ravening boor insulting Uncle Sam, sneering at War cripples, shooting Red Cross nurses. Publisher Mitchell lived just long enough to see Life's last great crusade flower in the U. S. declaration of War in 1917.

After the War, with Founder Mitchell gone, Artist Gibson bought the magazine for $1,000,000, dramatically outbidding agents of Publisher F. N. Doubleday. But the world of Publisher Gibson was no longer the world of Publisher Mitchell.

The War had vulgarized U. S. tastes in humor. Life's brand of fun, clean, cultivated, sentimental, began to pale before the new variety, profane, sexy, cynical.

Mr. Gibson put tall, brilliant Robert Emmet Sherwood in as Life's editor and the magazine bravely bucked the tide with burlesque issues, a crusade against Prohibition, the humorous writings of Frank Sullivan, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Franklin P. Adams and Corey Ford, the funny pictures of Ellison Hoover, Ralph Barton, H. T. Webster, Don Herold, Art Young and John Held Jr. Percy Crosby's "Skippy" grew to fame if not to maturity in Life's pages.

Nevertheless Life had passed its prime, was definitely on the downgrade. The New Yorker, coming smartly into the field in 1925, was setting the pace for the New Humor. Later appeared such crude periodicals as Ballyhoo and Hooey, with their backhouse atmosphere. Esquire joined Life's competitors in 1933. After three gnawing years of Depression Publisher Gibson stepped out of Life, turning the decaying property over to Clair Maxwell, Henry Richter and Frederick Francis.

"Obey That Impulse--Cut the Coupon" had been a circulation slogan that had carried Life to 250,000 readers in 1920. Now the impulse had gone and with it that intangible of talent, tempo and temper which makes or breaks a magazine. By the time Publisher Maxwell got Life, it had been changed from a weekly to a monthly. He and Editor George Eggleston went manfully to work revamping its editorial style to meet the times, winning new readers. Life breathed again, made a profit in its dying days.

Simultaneously with Life's sale, its publishers last week told its readers that henceforth they would get Judge instead of Life. With the circulation of the oldest funsheet in the U. S. thus doubled, Judge, control of which last week passed to new and unknown owners, set out to woo Life's old contributors and advertisers, make Life's old subscribers feel as much at home as possible.

Announcing the death of Life after a valiant fight, Mr. Maxwell declared: "We cannot claim, like Mr. Tunney, that we resigned our championship undefeated in our prime. But at least we hope to retire gracefully from a world still friendly."

For Life's final issue in its original vein, Edward Sandford Martin, now 80, was recalled from editorial retirement to compose its obituary. Wrote the man whose name appeared in Life's first masthead with that of Founder Mitchell: "That Life should be passing into the hands of new owners and directors is of the liveliest interest to the sole survivor of the little group that saw it born at 1155 Broadway in January 1883. ... As for me, I wish it all good fortune; grace, mercy and peace and usefulness to a distracted world that does not know which way to turn nor what will happen to it next. A wonderful time for a new voice to make a noise that needs to be heard!"

*Published this week was Portrait of an Era --As Drawn by C. D. Gibson (Scribner, $3.50) in which Biographer Fairfax Downey records the artist's career, his long connection with Life. *For reproductions of this and other great Life pictures, see pp. 12 & 13.

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