Magazine Publishing in Chicago: A Quest for World Class, #7

Prelude to Magazine Publishing in Chicago

For a city where, I am credibly informed, you couldn’t throw an egg in 1925 without braining a great poet, Chicago is hard up for writers.

A.J. Liebling

New Yorker, Jan., 1952

The Chicagoan magazine was launched in September, 1973 like no other Chicago journal had been. There were press parties of Chicago celebrities, glowing accounts of the new magazine in newspaper feature articles and a major advertising promotion throughout the entire Chicago market. The two luminary publishers of the new Chicago based magazine, Jon and Abra Anderson, were even asked on national television (The Today Show) to explain what kind of magazine their Chicagoan would be. One issue after the first anniversary of that blithe September inaugural, the Chicagoan was no more!

The only real difference between the Chicagoan and the almost innumerable other 20th century magazine failures in Chicago was that the latter briefly existed in obscurity while the Chicagoan was launched and closed in the limelight. Otherwise, the Chicagoan was a classic Chicago failure. A confident Jon and Abra Anderson proclaimed to the world via national television that their magazine would be open, frank and honest and would reflect the true merits of the area in which we live and work. Open, frank and honest is not an editorial policy; it is a basic rectitude. What publisher ever launched a magazine promising to be closed, vague and dishonest? The Chicagoan promised to reflect the true merits of Chicago without explaining what those merits were. In its one year existence, the Chicagoan had four editors and two owners. The keystone of a magazine is its editorial policy and the Chicagoan had been created without one. The magazine was started on the belief that there was a need of one in Chicago because other major cities can support magazines that are uniquely city publications, so, too can Chicago. The Chicagoan lacked a unique editorial character because it was trying to imitate publications that had found a successful formula elsewhere.

Despite the lack of editorial character or policy and the resultant early failure of the magazine, it still could have been a success. Very few magazines are auspicated with a totally successful formula and initial profits. Revisions are usually necessary and time required for a magazine to become profitable. Professional consultants warned Jon Anderson that it would be several years before the Chicagoan even reached the breakeven point. Yet Anderson sold out after only a few months. The second owner had no greater commitment to the magazine than the first; so he sold it to his competitor. The Chicagoan was a magazine with a nebulous and vapid editorial product, owned by people who lacked a deep commitment to the magazine’s existence.

If there was anything to be optimistic about in the Chicagoan debacle, it was that a city magazine was finally firmly enrooted in Chicago. In every decade since Chicago incorporated as a city, there has been at least one attempt, if not more, to establish a city magazine under the appellation Chicago or Chicagoan. None lasted for more than a decade, most fewer than five years and all failed for the same reasons repeated over and over. Until Chicago Guide (a magazine launched by the local PBS television outlet with help from Civic leaders) had absorbed the ill-founded Chicagoan and renamed itself Chicago Magazine, the city had lacked a major city magazine.

As with city magazines, there has been numerous attempts in Chicago to establish national circulation literary or general interest magazines, and almost all were repetitious failures. As early as 1900, Chicago had become known as the graveyard of magazines. Considering in the city’s first six decades there were slightly over 300 unsuccessful attempts at establishing a literary or general interest magazine in Chicago, the city certainly had earned its uncomplimentary epithet. Since 1900, only the number of attempts to publish a periodical has changed, not the failure rate. In the field of periodical publishing, Chicago is not even the second city as Washington, Los Angeles, Boston and, of course, New York publishes more magazines than Chicago. With the Meredith Corporation, the long-time publisher of Better Homes and Gardens and the Ladies Home Journal, located in Des Moines, Iowa, Chicago isn‘t even the magazine publishing center of the Midwest.

The success or failure of a magazine is not a function of the journal’s geographic location; but is due to planning or lack of it, financing or lack of it, sound business management or lack of it, and editorial ability or lack of it. If a magazine fails, it fails for one or more of these factors. Yet even those magazines started in Chicago that don’t fail also don’t generate any interest in Chicago as important cultural institutions. Eventually a New York publisher will purchase the Chicago-begot journal and move it to New York. The magazines of a cultural community is the medium of communication of the cultural community. A cultural community will lack life and growth without a means of communication and interaction that magazines innately provide. The lack of periodical publishing companies in Chicago has been a fetter to the overall growth of an art community in Chicago. Yet the absence of literary and general circulation magazines based in Chicago seems to be a matter of self-bereavement.

A History of Chicago’s Magazine Publishing Industry

1840’s-1860’s

For a publisher of a magazine to be successful, he must possess a sense or intuition as to what values and interests his readership possesses. For the pioneer periodical publishers of mid-19th century Chicago, perceiving the true nature of their target readership presented a problem as Chicago was a rapidly growing and evolving city, developing traditions where none yet existed. Was Chicago frontier West or urban East? During the 1840’s when the first attempts to publish a literary journal in Chicago was occurring, Fort Dearborn still stood by the Chicago River, a reminder that Chicago was yet part of the Western frontier but by 1857, when the anachronistic fort was demolished, Chicago’s complexion had already changed profoundly. As the Cincinnati Inquirer noted: This is no swamp town, it is a metropolis with a future.

Several historians claim Chicago’s first magazine of a literary nature was Gem of the Prairie, founded in 1844 and published for seven years until absorbed by a local newspaper, the Chicago Daily Tribune, to be a Sunday supplement. However, there was another journal that predates Gem of the Prairie: the Prairie Farmer, founded in 1841 by John Stephen Wright. It would seem to be an exercise destined for failure trying to establish a magazine in a city of only approximately 12,000 citizens, many of whom were illiterate anyway; but Wright saw opportunity. Chicago was surrounded by a growing population of farmers isolated from established Eastern publishers. America’s transportation system in the 1840’s was still in a primitive state. News as well as product moved slowly from the East via the Hudson River and Erie Canal to the Great Lakes or by wagons over muddy trails. If there was a market for a general interest magazine west of the Appalachian Mountains, local publishers would have an advantage. Wright, who became known as the prophet of the prairie, was the first publisher to successfully tap the market of rural Midwesterners as they discovered his magazine of news, commentary and fiction. But after the Panic of 1856 and the macro-economic recession that followed, John Stephen Wright was forced to sell his Prairie Farmer to pay the printing bill. The new ownership eliminated any literary pretensions and made the Prairie Farmer into an agricultural trade magazine. Nevertheless, the Prairie Farmer publishing company remained in Chicago and in later eras under new ownership would diversify into other media such as radio. In fact, the Prairie Farmer is one of Chicago’s oldest intellectual property enterprises, although it was rarely deemed as such by the city’s leaders.

All the periodicals launched in the 1840’s, 1850’s and the early 1860’s in Chicago had a motif that was Western in some manner. The editors of these journals were trying to nurture a native Western literature centered in Chicago. They all felt there was a Western literary market; but most failed to find it. None lasted for more than seven years, with the exception of the Prairie Farmer. The most common cause for failure of these pioneer publications was a lack of adequate financing. In fact, few lasted a year: Western Magazine, 1845; Garland of the West, 1845; Sloan’s Garden City 1853, a weekly magazine published by a liniment manufacturer as an advertising supplement to promote his product; Lady’s Western Magazine, 1848; The Youth’s Western Banner, 1853; Chicago Ariel, 1846; Chicago Dollar Weekly, 1849 among others. Several of these publications, especially Chicago Dollar Weekly and Sloan’s Garden City, had meritorious literary value. Sloan’s Garden City achieved some prominence with an adventure serial by William H. Bushnell entitled Prairie Fire that became an early Chicago bestseller in book form. But financially, they were all shoestring operations. That is, they had no financial backing at all, rather, just the hopeful premise that the magazine would be an instant success and thus be self-sustaining. Even though some shoestring magazines have survived and prospered, it is, nevertheless, the least likely way of becoming successful.

Despite the odds against a shoestring magazine, one literary journal succeeded in taking root in frontier Chicago while others didn’t: The Literary Budget. As with all other attempts at magazine publishing during Chicago’s first two decades, The Literary Budget commenced in 1852 with inadequate financial support. However, the publisher, W.W. Danenhower, compensated for the lack of financial support with sound business management and editorial expertise. William W. Danenhower came to Chicago in 1847 from Philadelphia, the city of his birth, to open a bookstore. He soon became an agent for Eastern periodical publishers such as Harper’s, Putnam’s and Appleton’s. From his Chicago store, Danenhower supplied the surrounding small towns with Eastern-originated magazines and the early form of the Dime Novels. His motivation to start a literary journal may have been to promote his small but growing retail and distribution business or he might have believed there was a glaring need for a regional literary periodical. Danenhower, like the other hopeful publishers, promised to provide the West with a marked and original literature of its own. Danenhower delivered. Typical of The Literary Budget’s editorial offering was a serial entitled: Ethzelda; or Sunbeams and Shadows: A Tale of the Prairie Land as it Was by T. Herbert Whipple. The serial was so well received that Rufus Blanchard, an early Chicago printer and part-time publisher, published it in hardcover.

In addition, Danenhower proved far more adroit at innovative business management than his unsuccessful contemporaries. Aiming strictly for a Western readership, Danenhower importuned the friends of Western literature to organize clubs for the maintenance of a good literary paper in this section of the country. An indication of The Literary Budget’s commercial success would be the advertising notices from Eastern periodicals like Putnam’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine. It would be another thirty years before another Chicago-based journal repeated this feat.

By January of 1854, The Literary Budget had obtained a circulation of three thousand which is not the diminutive figure it appears to be considering Chicago’s population at the time was only eighty thousand. The Literary Budget was economically viable and Danenhower felt confident enough to change from monthly to weekly publication. In the first weekly edition of January 7, 1854, Danenhower proclaimed: "The West is full of subject-matter for legend, story, or history. Sublime scenery to inspire the poet is not wanting. All that is