The Americanization of Edward Bok, or, For God’s Sake, Swim Against the Algorithm

Above please note my first edition copy of a Pultitzer Prize winning autobiography from around a century ago The Americanization of Edward Bok. I acquired and read this now highly obscure book for the same reason I have also read such things as The Analects of Confucius and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and the humor of George Ade. In my late teens I came across a list of “Great Books” in the back pages of an old midcentury dictionary my father kept in the attic of our “barn” (in reality an old carriage house that we used as a garage. It’s where I also encountered Sex to Sexty). Unable to afford the college of my choice, I began to work my way through this list during what you might call my gap years. (I didn’t stop at “A”, btw. At some point I began to prioritize and jump around.) I still refer to this list, it may amuse you to know, and check off books when I get to them.

Many smart, modern people would be inclined to dismiss a list like this. It has been superseded many times over in recent decades in the name of inclusion, with many unfashionable entries struck off in the approved Stalinesque fashion. My personal inclination would be to certainly add more books by women and people of color and LGBTQ writers, while retaining the older names as well. So it’s a longer list! So what? The tendency now instead is to overwrite, eliminating much of what had previously been considered important to make way for the new. As a consequence, while some human experience has laudably been foregrounded, some has been lost, at least in terms of the ongoing cultural conversation. And I’m the guy, this lover of vaudeville, and silent movies, and old time radio, and melodrama, and Greek and Latin, who who wants NOTHING to be lost. EVER.

October 9 is the birthday of Edward Bok (Eduard Willem Gerard Cesar Hidde Bok, 1863-1930), a colossally important, transformative figure in American culture, whom I assure you, almost no American remembers. It would boggle the mind of anyone of Bok’s time to think that a figure this towering would ever become obscure, let alone virtually erased. So today I will be his champion. The short answer of who he was is the editor of Ladies Home Journal, back when it was a much more important magazine. His influence through that platform was instrumental in transforming American domestic culture from Victorianism to what we recognize as modern.

The great H.L. Mencken, in a 1920 tribute called “The Incomparable Bok” in The Smart Set, painted this wonderful portrait that, though focused merely on aesthetics, captures the sort of change he brought to the culture: “When he looked at the houses in which his subscribers lived, their drab hideousness made him sick. When he went inside and contemplated the lambrequins, the gilded cattails, the Rogers groups, the wax fruit under glass domes, the emblazoned seashells from Asbury Park, the family Bible on the marble-topped center-table, the crayon enlargements of Uncle Richard and Aunt Sue, the square pianos, the Brussels carpets, the grained woodwork—when his eyes alighted upon such things, his soul revolted, and at once his moral enthusiasm incited him to attempt a reform. The result was a long series of Ladies’ Home Journal crusades against the hideousness of the national scene—in domestic architecture, in house furnishing, in dress, in town buildings, in advertising. Bok flung himself headlong into his campaigns, and practically every one of them succeeded. … If there were gratitude in the land, there would be a monument to him in every town in the Republic. He has been, aesthetically, probably the most useful citizen that ever breathed its muggy air.”

More remarkably, Bok was an immigrant — a Dutch immigrant no less. There aren’t many of those. There are plenty of Dutch Americans, but most trace their origins to colonial times, when New York was New Netherland. (As just one example out of millions — Bruce Springsteen). So The Americanization of Edward Bok has a certain rags-to-riches, Horatio Alger quality. (Digression, but the title of the novel and 1964 Julie Andrews movie The Americanization of Emily surely owes its title to it). Bok’s family had been wealthy but the father lost their wealth through speculation. They moved to the U.S. when Edward was six or seven years old and settled in Brooklyn, where the boy washed windows after school, and did odd jobs at the Brooklyn Eagle. The ladder he climbed looked like this: office boy at Western Union…stenographer at Henry Holt and Company…advertising manager at Charles Scribner’s Sons…then editor at Brooklyn Magazine, the newsletter of Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church.

In 1886 he married Mary Louise Curtis, daughter of the publisher of Ladies Home Journal (her father) and its editor (her mother). Thus he obtained power and influence the old-fashioned way — he married it. In 1889 he took over the editorship of the magazine and in short order made history by bringing its subscription base to over one million readers, the first periodical in history to hit that benchmark. He revolutionized both the magazine and the culture. His crusades were countless. He waged a war against patent medicines and argued for the kind of reforms that resulted in the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. His articles and editorials argued for sanitation, sex education (within the limits of his time), and environmental conservation. He was part of the Beautification movement, which, man oh man, could do with some reviving. After attending the Columbian World Exposition in 1893 he became interested in architecture, and distributed plans and schemes for simple and affordable homes of the type that characterized the 20th century — quite a deviation from the Gothic revival aesthetics of the Victorian era. Some of his contributers included Jane Addams, Edward Bellamy, and even Helen Keller. He engaged in endeavors of one kind or another with several Presidents: Grover Cleveland, Teddy Roosevelt,Woodrow Wilson, and Calvin Coolidge.

Bok advocated for something he called “The Simple Life”. He was associated with progressivism, though not of the muckraking sort. He was not waging a war with capitalism (quite the contrary, he was one of its success stories). But he did champion better living for the middle class. In fact, he is largely responsible for the fact that we now call what is the main room of the house the “living room”, as opposed to the “drawing room” or the “parlor”, as it had previously been called, and suggested that, having furnished it, we use it more often than once a week on Sundays.

Occasionally Bok ran afoul of his readership. One of his more amusing crusades was a critique of the women’s clubs that were so prevalent in his day, mostly due to the superficialty of the “educational” culture they purported to provide (i.e., Renaissance Art would be covered as a single one hour lecture). The blackest mark against Bok was that he took the wrong side on the topic of Women’s Suffrage. (You will find him described incorrectly with regard to this in nearly every article about him on the internet, a clear symptom of how the internet perpetuates and amplifies errors. Most articles claim he was pro-Suffrage. Simply not the case). Initially neutral on the issue, in 1912 he finally made a careful survey of his readers, and concluded that it was the wrong thing for America’s women, at adds with their ultimate domestic happiness. It should be noted though that he came to the conclusion from his own readers. But of course, a better sample for his survey would have been much wider than that. Anyway, he was on the wrong side of history there, and by 1919 it was moot. He retired from publishing that same year.

Since Ladies Home Journal ceased publication in 2016, Bok’s most lasting and visible legacy is the amazing Bok Tower Gardens, with its Singing Tower as its crown jewel. Located in Central Florida, as I write this it is dead in the expected path of Hurricane Milton. So too are the homes of my two brothers. Worried about them, last night I did something that, like most people under 80, I haven’t really done in about 20 years or more — watched the CBS Evening News. I mean the old-fashioned, half-hour network news. The format was like a balm to me. Like a variety program, or if you prefer, like a magazine, you are presented with a curated menu of items that are considered valuable for you to experience. As a consequence you learn much about the world, much MORE about the world than you might if you were just being fed what you, or some computer, pre-decided that you already wanted. If you’re interested in growing as a person, and not shrivelling up into a withered and insane remnant of a three dimensional human being, I highly recommend it.