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The Business Ethic for Boys: The Saturday Evening Post and the Post Boys

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Jan Cohn
Jan Cohn
Affiliation:
Jan Cohn is Dean of the Faculty atTrinity College.
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Abstract

George Horace Lorimer, editor of The Saturday Evening Post from 1899 to 1937, dedicated his magazine to business, businessmen, and business values. As part of an early campaign to increase the Post's circulation, the Curtis Company extended their interest to the businessmen of the future. The Circulation Bureau devised a plan of recruiting middle-class boys, training them in selling techniques, and educating them in business values. Victor Pelz, a boy agent recruited in Seattle, soared to selling stardom between 1902 and 1905. During those years the Post wrote him hundreds of letters, exhorting, praising, sometimes chastising. In Victor's career and in this surviving correspondence are inscribed the business ethic of the early twentieth century with all its promise and all its contradictions.

Type
Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 61 , Issue 2 , Summer 1987 , pp. 185 - 215
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1987

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References

1 “The New Kind of Graduates,” editorial. The Saturday Evening Post, 18 July 1903.

2 The following were all published in The Saturday Evening Post; they represent only the merest sample of business articles and stories. Serializations are noted by the date of the first installment.

“How I Made My First $1000”: Andrew Carnegie, 11 Feb. 1899; Russell Sage, 18 March 1899; Collis P. Huntington, 15 April 1899; Cyrus H. McCormick, 10 June 1899.

Harlow Huntington, “The Making of (a Merchant,” 3 June—1899.

William Matthews, LLD, “Shyness is Foe to Success,” 11 April 1899.

William H. Maher, “A Clerk Who Makes Friends,” 27 Jan. 1900.

Martin Kallman, “Buying Business Supplies,” 14 Jan. 1900.

Ernest Poole, “Do Clerks Get Fair Play?” Dec. 1906.

René Bache, “Back-Yard Business Enterprises: Raising Cats for Profit,” 19 Jan. 1901; “Raising Angora Goats in America,” 26 Jan. 1901.

Charles N. Crewdson, “Tales of the Road,” 25 March—1905.

Frank Norris, The Pit, 20 Sept.—1902.

Robert Herrick, Memoirs of an American Citizen, 13 Oct.—1906.

Edwin Lefevre, Sampson Rock of Wall Street, 13 Oct.—1906.

Anon. [George Horace Lorimer], Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son, 3 Aug.—1901; Old Gorgan Graham, 16 July— 1904; Letters to Unsuccessful Men [published in book form as John Spurlock], 10 Nov.— 1906.

3 The following articles all were published in The Saturday Evening Post: Herbert H. Vreeland, president, Metropolitan Street Railway Company, New York, “The Young Man's Opportunity in the New Business Order,” 23 March 1901; Grover Cleveland, “The Young Man in Politics,” 26 Jan. 1901; Albert J. Beveridge, “The Young Man and the World,” “The World and the Young Man,” 7 July and 1 Sept. 1900.

4 Unpublished minutes of the Curtis Publishing Company (Aug., Nov., Dec. 1897). Cyrus Curtis started The Ladies' Home Journal in 1883 “as a personal business,” eight years before the Curtis Publishing Company was incorporated. I am grateful to The Saturday Evening Post, and particularly to archivists Carol Brown McShane and Steve Pettinga, for providing me with an abstract of the Curtis Company minutes and other related materials.

5 Curtis Company minutes (Oct., May, 1898). The 300,000 circulation figure comes from an editorial in The Saturday Evening Post, 26 Jan. 1901.

6 Ibid. (Oct. 1899). In October 1899, 179,000 copies of the Post were shipped to newsdealers, with 57,473 returns; these figures are for the month as a whole.

7 Ibid. (April 1900).

8 Building a College Career on Character (Philadelphia, Penn., 1925)Google Scholar. Horatio Alger (1832–99; Harvard, 1852) was chaplain to the Newsboys' Lodging House in New York when he began his writing career. He wrote over 125 wildly successful stories for boys, featuring urban adventure and (limited) upward mobility achieved through a combination of “pluck and luck.” Typical titles include Work and Win, Strive and Succeed, Do and Dare, Struggling Upward, Risen from the Ranks, and Bound to Rise.

9 How to sell 100 copies weekly (Philadelphia, Penn., 1912), 26–27Google Scholar.

10 Advertisement, The Saturday Evening Post, 11 July 1903.

11 Advertisement, The Saturday Evening Post, 25 July 1903.

12 Copies of lists of prize winners sent by the Curtis Company to Post boys; from the Victor H. Pelz Collection, University of Oregon Library. I am grateful to Hilary Cummings, Manuscript Curator, Special Collections, for providing me with material from the Pelz Collection and to Victor Pelz's widow, Mrs. Lois Short, for permission to publish these letters.

13 Cawelti, John G., Apostles of the Self-Made Man (Chicago, 1965), 112Google Scholar.

14 “The Leading Competitors for the Championship of the Pacific Coast,” Curtis Company, 24 Dec. 1904, Pelz Collection.

15 “The Hard Fought Contest isn't Won by Spectacular Plays but by ‘Bucking the Line,’” Curtis Company, 3 Dec. 1904, Pelz Collection.

16 “The Leading Competitors for the Championship of the Pacific Coast,” Curtis Company, 28 Jan. 1905, Pelz Collection.

17 “The Hard Fought Contest.”

18 “The Prize Winners in the August Share Earners' Contest for the St Louis Trip,” Curtis Company, [n.d.] May 1904; “The Prize Winners Nine-Trip World's Fair Contest,” Curtis Company, 22 Aug. 1904, Pelz Collection.

19 For example, in 1905 boys from western states could select from San Francisco, Yellowstone Park, and the Lewis and Clark Exposition, “No Shrewd boy will let this Experience go to Waste during the First Wonderland Contest,” Curtis Company, 25 Feb. 1905, Pelz Collection.

20 Advertisement, The Saturday Evening Post, 7 Nov. 1903.

21 “You are on a Level now with the boy who is Finally to win the first Wonderland Offer,” Curtis Company, 17 March 1905, Pelz Collection.

22 Advertisement, The Saturday Evening Post, 18 July 1903.

23 Curtis Company to Pelz, 20 Jan. 1905, Pelz Collection.

24 Lorimer, George Horace, Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son (Boston, 1902Google Scholar), first serialized anonymously in The Saturday Evening Post, 1901; and see the Introduction by Lawrence Granman, Jr., and Robert S. Fogarty, to their new edition (New York, 1970).

25 Editorial, “A Liberal Education,” The Saturday Evening Post, 3 Dec. 1904.

26 Catalogue for August and September 1904 (Philadelphia, Penn., 1904)Google Scholar.

27 Ibid.

28 To estimate the present value of the money Post boys were investing, earning, and competing for, one should multiply by 12. One dollar in 1900 is calculated as equal to $11.94 in 1983, the most recent year for which these figures are available in The Economic Report of the President, 1984 ed., cited in Levine, Robyn E. and Kolp, Felicia G., Economic Statistics: Selected Statistics, Sources of Current Information and Historican Tables (Report No. 84–81C, Congressional Research Service, Washington, D.C.), 29Google Scholar. Calculations for 1900 come from U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C., 1975), 1:211Google Scholar. By that calculation 1,000 copies of the Post at 3 cents a copy cost $30 in 1902 and approximately $360 today. A top cash prize of $25 represents $300.

29 Curtis Company to Pelz, 4 Nov. 1902, Pelz Collection.

30 Curtis Company to Pelz, 19 Nov. 1902, Pelz Collection.

31 Curtis Company to Pelz, 11 and 19 Nov. 1902, Pelz Collection.

32 Curtis Company to Pelz, 2 Dec. 1902, Pelz Collection.

33 Curtis Company to Pelz, 10 Dec. 1902, Pelz Collection.

34 Curtis Company to Pelz, 9 Dec. 1902, Pelz Collection.

35 Curtis Company to Robert Drake, 22 Dec. 1902, Pelz Collection.

36 Curtis Company to Victor Pelz, 22 Dec. 1902, Pelz Collection.

37 Curtis Company to Pelz, 27 Dec. 1902; Curtis Company to Drake, 27 Dec. 1902, both in Pelz Collection.

38 Curtis Company to Pelz, 15 Jan. 1903, Pelz Collection.

39 Curtis Company to Pelz, 1 June 1903, Pelz Collection.

40 “November Prize Winners in Contest no 2,” Curtis Publishing Company, [n.d.], Pelz Collection.

41 “The Prize Winners in the May Contest no 3,” Curtis Publishing Company, [n.d.]; “The Prize Winners in the July Offer no. 6,” Curtis Publishing Company [n.d.]; “The Prize Winners in the November Contest no. 7,” Curtis Publishing Company, [n.d.], all in Pelz Collection.

42 “The May Prize Winners Offer no 5,” Curtis Publishing Company, [n.d.], Pelz Collection.

43 Curtis Company to Pelz, 5 Sept. 1903, Pelz Collection.

44 Curtis Company to Pelz, 25 Sept. 1903, Pelz Collection.

45 Curtis Company to Pelz, 16 Oct. 1903, Pelz Collection.

46 Curtis Company to Pelz, [n.d.] Nov. 1903, Pelz Collection.

47 “The Prize Winners in the Novemrer Contest no 7,” Curtis Company, [n.d.], Pelz Collection.

48 Curtis Company to Pelz, 12 Nov. 1903, Pelz Collection.

49 Curtis Company to Pelz, 21 Nov. 1903; Curtis Company to Pelz, 30 Nov. 1903, both in Pelz Collection.

50 Curtis Company to Pelz, 14 Dec. 1903, Pelz Collection.

51 On 29 October 1903, the Curtis Company sent Victor a list of names of all boys who had written to them asking to sell the Post; they asked Victor to inform them of the names of those who had bought copies of the magazine from him in October, the number of copies each had sold, and reasons why any of them were not selling. The list has eighty-one names, of which twenty-five are checked off. Curtis Company to Pelz, 29 Oct. 1903, Pelz Collection.

52 Curtis Company to Pelz, 22 March 1904, Pelz Collection.

53 Curtis Company to Pelz, 18 May 1905, Pelz Collection.

54 Curtis Company to Pelz, 7 June 1905, Pelz Collection.

55 After the June 7 letter about Mr. Baker, there is one more routine business letter in the collection (28 June 1905). Pelz had periodic offers to buy his agency, routinely forwarded to him from the Curtis Company.

56 Curtis Company to Pelz, 30 March 1905, Pelz Collection.

57 Curtis Company to Pelz, 19 Jan. 1905, Pelz Collection. The assumption that Victor was ordering 2,500 copies is made in part on evidence of a 30 March 1905 letter from the Curtis Company to Pelz, explaining that the Puget Sound News Company received 1,250 copies a week, that there were 764 annual subscribers to the Post in Seattle, and that there were a total of 4,500 Post readers in that city. Further evidence comes from adding known monthly total sales, announced in winners' lists, to sales increases noted in circulars about leading boys in ongoing competitions.

58 Curtis Company to Pelz, 27 Dec. 1904; Curtis Company to Pelz, 14 Jan. 1905; Curtis Company to Pelz, 16 May 1905; “The Prize Winners in our Scholarship Offer #1,” Curtis Company, 17 May 1905, all in Pelz Collection.

59 Information relative to the Pelz Collection, Special Collections, University of Oregon Library.

60 “The ‘Poor Richard’ Papers,” The Saturday Evening Post, 1 April 1899.

61 “Curtis Circulations Stand Firm,” In-House Memo, Curtis Company, 1933.