A Magazine for All of Us

Last week,its parent company in the US,RDA Holding Co,filed for bankruptcy for the second time in four years. Amid the recent battering of the magazine world,it isn’t surprising that Reader’s Digest is struggling to survive. This decline can’t be blamed on the Internet alone — once dubbed the biggest publishing success since the Bible,the Digest has been freefalling for the last couple of decades.

But as someone who spent most of a childhood vacation in a loft at my grandparents’ home,lounging on a dusty mattress and reading decades-old issues of Reader’s Digest,I do feel a twinge at the prospect of its passing. Long familiarity,if not affection for the magazine,should prompt us to remember its glory years,when Pleasantville,New York was about as desirable a workplace as Mountain View,California today.

It was a time when mass media as we know it was taking firm shape. Newsweeklies,radio,women’s magazines,tabloids,crime fiction,celebrity culture,television,were all taking baby steps through those decades. Reader’s Digest filled a clear need in an America where culture was being cut down to size. Amid major economic and social changes,a growing class of Americans wanted to present themselves as educated,sophisticated and able to articulate aesthetic preferences.

And so,a new set of intermediaries arose,to select prestigious cultural works,and make them available to the common reader. Intellectuals despised this blend of culture and commerce — the “middlebrow” impulse that audaciously took the best of high culture and made it easier to consume. Cultural scholar Janice Radway has described the “warm-blooded,embodied sentimentalism and individualism” of middlebrow culture. Sniffy elites may debate whether Reader’s Digest has any brow at all,but for many,it is a point of entry into a richer mental and imaginative world. The series of condensed books that the Digest put out,features like ‘Quotable Quotes’,‘Points to Ponder’ and ‘Improve Your Word Power’,are all vestiges of that levelling impulse.

Self-improvement was the key,in Wallace’s view. He wanted “articles of lasting interest that will appeal to a large audience,articles that come within the range of interests,experience and conversation of the average person”.

And in an era of intellectually elevated,self-important Little Magazines,Reader’s Digest was just plain product. It assembled the optimal mix of current affairs and human interest content. Wallace believed that everyone else had ideology,while his magazine just had blunt good sense.

That was just a self-serving delusion,of course. Reader’s Digest was a tentacle of American propaganda in the Cold War years. Its first foreign edition in Latin America,in 1938,was supported by the Roosevelt administration. It ventured into Italian territory as a direct response to the victory of the Popular Front. And over the decades,its undeclared mission was showing up Soviet servitude and contrasting it with a shampoo commercial view of American values. Its stories of perseverance and danger,the little guy triumphing over vast impersonal forces,and easy uplift made it a disarming package.

If you read it with a cold eye,the agenda was hard to miss. It inserted a flag into 18 million copies of its February 1969 edition (exhorting readers to Fly This Flag Proudly). It ran regular features on the bloat of the bureaucracy and twistedness of the legal system (‘That’s Outrageous’ and ‘Mugged by the Law’). From telling the “black underclass” to start expecting less from the government and purging pinko incursions of every kind,it coasted on its conservative base for years.

All that said,those days when Reader’s Digest riveted my attention,the messaging was lost on me. It was just an entry into a long-ago time,with ads for Cuticura talcum powder and Binaca toothpaste,amid all the ‘Drama in Real Life’ and ‘Points to Ponder’.

And if this wave of bad luck swamps the magazine,we should feel some regret for this communication colossus of the 20th century,but remember it had a good life. At a time when our newspapers and magazines are forced to erect walls or whisper to the likeminded,Reader’s Digest believed in its own big mission,and confidently addressed the world.