The name on the binder is what stopped me. “Everybody’s Magazine,” it blared in gold lettering.
It was obviously an old magazine, and with that, I knew it was selling itself much too bodaciously. Even before I opened the binder to see how it could live up to its name, I knew the word “everybody” in its title was limited.
I knew everybody didn’t include my African American grandfather, grandmother, their siblings and their parents who were living back then. Nor the millions of other ethnic people who made up the melting pot that was America. Would it also exclude white women, I thought, except in some traditional role?
I flipped open the cover to the front of the magazine, and came upon a color illustration of a white woman in the center of a circle of boys and girls. She looked to be a teacher with her little charges. Despite its homogeneity, the photo was pleasant – not realistic, but a portrayal of how many people viewed the country at the turn of the 20th century.
The binder contained only one magazine, from May 1909. Interestingly, the first ads on the front inside cover appeared to be for companies in Philadelphia and South Jersey. The magazine was published by The Ridgeway Company in Union Square, New York City.
It was an eclectic mix of articles: Wall Street, a new regime in China, the Weather Bureau, along with short stories, drawings and poems (or verse, as the magazine called them).
I went searching for people who might look like me. I flipped through the pages and came to the back of the magazine where I found the ubiquitous Cream of White ad. It was a black and white illustration of a little black boy eating cereal from a big bowl, the Cream of Wheat chef/cook on a sign in the background. The ad, surprisingly, was not distasteful.
I was obviously curious about this publication that so boldy proclaimed itself as “Everybody’s Magazine.” I found out that it had a storied history that I could identify with as a journalist: afflicting the comfortable, comfort the afflicted.
Everybody’s was an investigative magazine founded in 1899. It published articles about corruption in various industries and sectors, including politics, law, industry and government. Its focus was social justice.
A story titled “The Cost of the Wall Street Game” – about “margin gambling” on Wall Street, which appeared in this May 1909 issue at auction – drew intense criticism. The magazine reprinted responses to the article, along with its own reply to the responses.
The magazine attracted such journalists as Charles Edward Russell (a founder of the NAACP in 1909), Upton Sinclair, Ambrose Bierce (who wrote humor articles for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner in the late 1880s) and Lincoln Steffens (one of the most famous of the muckrakers).
Jack London’s short story “The Night Born” appeared in it in July 1911. N.C. Wyeth’s “The Invaders” was published as an illustration for a serialized story called “Sally Castleton, Southerner” in July 1912. The oil-on-canvas painting for the illustration was part of an exhibit last year on the 150th anniversary of the Philadelphia Sketch Club at the Brandywine Museum.
This copy of the magazine also had a poem by humorist and author Ellis Parker Butler called “Jabed Meeker, Humorist.” Butler was best known for his short story “Pigs is Pigs,” published in 1905.
According to the British website spartacus-schoolnet, Everybody’s was one of the magazines that started the muckracking form of investigative journalism, exposing all kinds of ills wrought by those with too much against those with too little. It took on awful working conditions in plants, unsafe food production, child labor, and more.
It was first owned by John Wanamaker (of Philadelphia department-store fame) and was sold to the Ridgeway-Thayer Company in 1903. Circulation began to drop after World War I, according to the website, and the owners cut back on the muckraking. The magazine closed around 1929.
Here are digitized copies of content from the magazine, along with some covers.
So even if it wasn’t “everybody’s” magazine, it seemed to have done some good for somebodys.
