When George Horace Lorimer took over as editor of the Saturday Evening Post, America was a patchwork of expat communities. Memories of the Civil War still cleft the nation; European Jews, Irish, Italians, and Chinese immigrants lived in separate enclaves. The Germans and Scandinavians were already out farming the Midwest. There was no real sense of nation or unity.
The Post was founded in 1821 and printed in the former office of Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette, which had ceased publication. Cyrus H.K. Curtis bought the Post in 1897, when circulation had stalled at two thousand readers. He was determined to publish stories he said Franklin would have chosen himself: “practical, moral, humorous, inventive.” He hired Lorimer to be the Post’s literary editor in 1899. Lorimer accepted, with one caveat: “I’ll spend your money, you’ll ask no questions.”
Lorimer realized there was no magazine on the market that could reach the entire nation. Ladies Home Journal was the great success of the day; the Post, Lorimer said, would be the same for male readers—everything the aspirational, well-rounded businessman ought to know, delivered weekly. Lorimer believed the country yearned for a unifying identity. Fireside chats lay three decades away; America needed the Post.
What Americans shared, Lorimer decided, was the desire to get ahead. In 1903, he launched “Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son.” The column was a series of missives from a fictional business tycoon to his heir. Lorimer wrote in the voice of the wealthy father the Post’s aspirational readers may not have had. Here was a path for new Americans to understand their country and achieve success.
Lorimer aimed to prime his readers for success with top-quality, accessible content. In interviews over the years, Albert Einstein himself explained relativity in lay terms to a Post correspondent. Edward Teller told about the H-bomb. Thomas Edison bemoaned the loopholes in patent law.
Lorimer was a quick reader and a decisive judge of talent. He was determined to steer clear of what he called the “big name fallacy.” He ran a small block ad in the back of the magazine: “Good short stories bring good prices.” The pitches poured in. Each night, he would grab a stack of unsolicited submissions from the slush pile to read on the train ride home to Wyncote, Pennsylvania. (He discovered Sinclair Lewis on that train.) Each week, he read a reported 500,000 words in manuscripts. The quality of the Post’s content was so high that soon, female readers were just as plentiful as male.