The Tabloid Newspaper

An Investigation Involving Big Business, the Pilgrim Fathers and Psychoanalysis

E. E. CUMMINGS

EDITOR'S NOTE—Almost a score of tabloid newspapers are presently being published in the United States. The New York Daily News, the first to be published in America, began in 1919, and now has a circulation of over a million. The circulation of many of the others is increasing by the hundreds of thousands. These tabloids frankly base their appeal on morbid and sensational details, "faked" news and "faked" pictures, prize contests and trashy stories on sex themes. The Macfadden publications, publishers of the incredibly successful New York Evening Graphic, frankly declare themselves in favour of a sex interest to attract their customers, while more conservative editors stress "big" news pictorially presented, with reading matter deliberately concocted for a public of minimum intelligence. In this article, Mr. Cummings considers the prevalence of tabloids as an index to the national mentality

I IKE all phenomena which we are in the evil habit of taking for granted, the mentality of the Great American People— by which is meant, that kind of liveliness or unliveliness which is common to most citizens of our grand and glorious republic—invites more than a casual inspection. We should not merely realise, as most of us merely do, that "Americanism" rules supreme in this epochmaking day and time, or that "Americanisation" now applies to everything from non-citizens to safety-pins. Granted, that the entire universe echoes and re-echoes to the mighty strides of our nation's progress—assuming that a whole civilization trembles in the hollow of our superhuman hand—in brief, admitting that nobody "never saw nothing" like us—it is far from improbable that an analysis of the invincible spirit underlying this uncontested supremacy will give quite as startling results, in a quiet way, as the huge and noisy product itself. Moreover (economists, sociologists, efficiency experts and similar learned gentry to the contrary) such an analysis does not involve a very vast acquaintance with the occult science of Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Quite the contrary. From a thousand adjectives which fairly clamour for a chance to describe the Great American Mentality, there immediately stands forth one adjective in which our epoch finds its perfect portrait, in which our civilization sees itself miraculously mirrored, in which the U.S.A. shimmers in all the unmitigated splendour of its great-and-only-ness. This adjective is: infantile.

By no circumstance the least important, and certainly the most obvious, example of the strictly infantile essence of America's all-conquering mentality greets our eyes daily, anywhere and everywhere, in the guise of the tabloid newspaper. The tabloid newspaper actually means to the typical American of this era what the Bible is popularly supposed to have meant to the typical Pilgrim Father: viz. a very present help in time of trouble, plus a means of keeping out of trouble via harmless, since vicarious, indulgence in the pomps and vanities of this wicked world.

WITHOUT the Bible, as everybody knows, your Pilgrim Father would have been seriously inclined to wonder why an Almighty Providence saw fit to freeze him in Winter, starve him in summer and fill him full of arrows at all times. He might even have been tempted to register a few complaints with his Omnipotent Protector. Conceivably, this righteous person might eventually have strayed so far from the path of righteousness as to throw up the sponge entirely or join the wicked Indians. But the Pilgrim Father's Bible solved his problem very nicely, by pointing out to him that things are not what they seem and by furnishing him with a pleasing catechism of values in place of a painful concatenation of realities. Furthermore, it occasionally stopped an arrow or two.

If the tabloid newspaper cannot boast of stopping arrows, it can at least retort that arrows are not being done this year, and that, if the woods are not full of Indians, the skyscrapers are full of time-clocks and that a struggle is a struggle still, the noblest thing alive and that temptation remains temptation, no matter which of innumerable disguises the insidious Tempter may sec fit to assume. Ask Billy Sunday, he knows. Or, to put the matter a little differently: just what would become of the machine known as Big Business, were many hundreds of thousands of male and female cogs denied their daily oil in the form of the tabloid newspaper, Heaven alone knows; but it is not difficult to guess.

In "ye good olde days" of a year or two ago, these human cogs were being satisfactorily, if not thoroughly, lubricated by means of common-or-garden newspapers which appealed to the mind through intricate symbols, such as words of one, two, or even three, syllables. But that is over. Gone are the snows, etc. The Big Business Machine (as any Big Business Machinist will be the first to admit) has been enormously developed in a couple of years. The parts of each and every subsidiary mechanism have not only been standardised but have been rendered accessible at all times and under all conditions. Whereas, not so long since, the prerogative of a human cog was his or her occasional obscurity, he or she is now always observable and easily getatable. Such complicated oilcans as were suitable for eliminating obscure sources of friction have accordingly been dispensed with.

NOT the mind, but the eye of the human cog has become the centre of lubrication. To keep fit for one's job, one no longer reads, one merely secs. The ordinary newspaper with its histories of what happened, yields to the tabloid newspaper with its pictures of what is happening. Thus it would appear that, the tabloid newspaper celebrates a climax in the orgiastic worship of the present tense of the verb To Be.

But the great supremacy of the tabloid newspaper will be better understood when we realise that its only contemporary rival is an even more familiar pictorial phenomenon with an even wider circulation—the dream. The dream, indeed, differs fundamentally from the tabloid newspaper only in age and pedigree. In aim, in format and in effect, the dream and the tabloid newspaper arc so similar as to be almost indistinguishable. To be sure, as regards efficiency there is no comparison: the tabloid newspaper wins in a walk from the dream. A few years hence, given a very slight heightening of our lofty present-day standard of efficiency, we may see the dream completely supplanted by the tabloid newspaper. The human cog in the machine known as Big Business may very possibly find it obsolete to dream. The Big Business God will then be in his jpg Business Heaven and psychoanalysts will cure their patients , through a study of their patients' tabloid newspapers.

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Let nobody hereby take it for granted that we are attempting to disparage psychoanalysis. .@h die contrary. Be it known that we attribute to this science our understanding, not merely of the tabloid newspaper, but of the colossal civilization which the tabloid newspaper so triumphantly typifies. The very adjective "infantile" is a direct theft from psychoanalysis, which explains a variety of otherwise completely inexplicable occurences by the concept of "infantile fixation". The dream, we know, is a compromise, on the part of our so-called better nature, with repressed wishes of infantile origin—whence dream-distortion—and I)r. Freud himself long ago compared the dream censor to a newspaper censor. The most obvious characteristic of the dream, as of the tabloid newspaper, is its pictorial quality. In unconscious life, as manifested by the dream, "opposites" go hand in hand. The tabloid newspaper shows us, on one page, a delectable specimen of virginity in a one-piece bathing suit and, on the next, a man being sentenced to twenty years for rape. Indeed, the further we look, the more dreamlike the tabloid newspaper becomes. "Every issue an Oedipus complex" would be a first-rate slogan for the Daily News, the Daily Mirror and, more especially, for the superpaternal Mr. Bemarr Macfadden's Daily Graf hie.

We know, thanks to psychoanalysis that the predominant quality of chil dren is their all-pervading and illimifc.;. able egoism. This simple revelation is I' worth more, for an understanding of ; civilization in general and of the civilization of the almighty dollar in particular, than a$l the theories of all the economists, sociologists, efficiency experts, etc., who have ever livecli Thanks to this .discovery ' of childegoism, our eyes are opened for the J first time to the true meaning of the age in which we move and have our being. We discover, to our astonishment, that what has really happened America from the day of Flymoutlv Rock and the Bible to the day of Big Business and the tabloid newspaper is exactly the opposite of what the economists and their ilk would lead us to suppose. America has grown down, not up. From Pilgrim Fathers we have become Pilgrim Children. The United States, today, is nothing more nor less than a Great Big Egoistie Baby. When, glancing about us, we perceive the whole world following this infantile nation of ours, let us remember the Bible of the Pilgrim Fathers, wherein it is written that "a little child shall lead them". And let us admit that the Pilgrim Fathers, al$ things considered, may not have been* so limited as we originally supposed^

At least the Pilgrim Fathers used tor shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time-clocks.