PM's Impossible Dream

On June 18, 1940, a five-cent newspaper called PM hit the streets of New York, a daring, epic, and ultimately doomed experiment that drew such talents as James Thurber, I. F. Stone, Dorothy Parker, and Weegee to the quixotic vision of editor Ralph Ingersoll. Bankrolled by department-store heir Marshall Field III, PM had lots of pictures and no ads, crusaded against big business, racism, and Anti-Semitism, and alternately enraged and enthralled its readers. DAVID MARGOLICK resurrects eight years that would forever change the face of American journalism

DAVID MARGOLICK

There are no plaques on the shabby, graffiti-scarred three-story building at 27 Sixth Avenue, Brooklyn, New York. For all the walking tours around historic New York these days, this tired old factory is on nobody's itinerary. One recent tenant, the Marine Electronic Company, has gone, along with the M, the A, and most of the R from the sign it left along the dingy, faux-stucco facade. Slightly more current is the notice posted by Crosstown Realty, AVAILABLE, it

But this desolate scene, next to the Long Island Rail Road tracks and across from the abandoned plant where Spalding once made basketballs, is a landmark of American journalism, site of one of the epic experiments in the annals of 20th-century newspapers. This was the birthplace of PM, New York's daring but doomed tabloid.

Nearly 60 years ago, on the second and third floors of this building, a group of reporters, editors, and photographers, a few of them middleaged and prominent, most of them young and green and idealistic, put out a different kind of newspaper: one with lots of pictures and no advertisements, one that was sophisticated, stylish, irreverent, progressive— "against people who push other people around"—and way ahead of its time. So hyped was the new paper, and so psyched was the public about it, that when the first copies appeared on June 18, 1940, readers attacked the delivery trucks and besieged newsstands to get at them.

For eight turbulent and precarious years, through World War II and the dawn of the Cold War, PM tried to deliver on its promises—sometimes brilliantly, sometimes ridiculously, usually somewhere in between. Max Lerner, James Thurber, Heywood Hale Broun, Ben Hecht, I. F. Stone, and Dorothy Parker wrote for it. So did a young Shana Alexander (and her mother, who was its film critic). Margaret BourkeWhite and Weegee took photographs for it, and Ad Reinhardt drew marginalia for it. Dr. Seuss did many of its editorial cartoons (making Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo look like forerunners of the Grinch who stole Christmas), and Dr. Spock discussed child rearing for it. Lillian Ross got her start there. Dashiell Hammett pitched in briefly as a glorified copy editor. James Baldwin was a copyboy.

"We need both screwballs and Competent technicians Ingersoll remarked. "So far I've been concentrating pretty heavily on the screwballs."

PM's editorial staff was already called by those in the know "the most brilliant... ever gathered."

Marshall Field III, scion of the Chicago department-store family, bankrolled it. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt extolled it.

And Albert Einstein, Jack Benny, Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk, Emily Post, Thomas Mann, J. Edgar Hoover, Congressman Albert Gore Sr., and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr read it. So did 150,000 others— "graduate students, schoolteachers, artists, people in the garment industry, people who wished they were intellectuals or were intellectuals, people who wanted to be connected to something that was onward and upward, people who were mad about something all the time, people who wanted to save a few pennies on tooth powder by going to Brooklyn," said Heywood Hale Broun, the former CBS News sports reporter who helped give birth to PM and, after a few years off for the war, returned only to watch it die.

And a generation of precocious kids was raised on it. There was 11-year-old Victor Navasky, later editor of The Nation, whose letter to the editor of PM marked his first appearance in print and won him a twodollar prize. And Philip Roth, who had one of his most famous characters, Alexander Portnoy, recall how by protesting the racism of the Daughters of the American Revolution as a 12-year-old boy, he'd gotten to shake the hand of the renowned PM columnist he read daily. And Clay Felker, the originator of New York magazine, who first read PM as a teenager in St. Louis and who, like Broun, had worked for it in its final incarnation. "It had a profound effect on me," said Felker. "It showed me as a young boy that there was another way to put out a newspaper."

At one time or another, almost everyone—Communists and anti-Communists, socialists and Republicans, southern demagogues and midwestern reactionaries, the German-American Bund and the U.S. Army, organized labor and management, the rightand left-wing press—dumped on PM. Before it was a week old, a Catholic priest in Brooklyn was denouncing it from the pulpit; before it was seven months old, Nazi radio had criticized or misquoted it repeatedly. To the Chicago Tribune, PM was a Communist rag. But to the Communist Daily Worker, PM was dangerously reactionary, a paper "tied to the money bags of the Marshall Field fortune" that "out-Hearsts Hearst." As for press baron William Randolph Hearst, whom PM labeled a Nazi sympathizer, he tried to have PM effectively banned in Boston, and his New York Daily Mirror called PM the "New Deal's Wall Street-financed mouthpiece in New York." Inside PM s offices, things were just as contentious. PM's top brass had to make sure that Stalinist editors on one floor weren't tweaking copy in one way and Catholic Linotype operators on another in another.

Two years into PM s tumultuous life its founding father, an Ivy League aristocrat, journalistic visionary, and epic egomaniac named Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, called its saga "the god-damndest dog fight, both internally and externally, in the history of journalism." That seems no less true today.

For eight years PM got under America's skin, and then it just disappeared. To see it nowadays, you have to unspool a reel of microfilm, or leaf through bound volumes in solemn libraries, or unfold disintegrating bits of newsprint retrieved by elderly hands from the backs of closets or the bottoms of desk drawers. Mention PM to most people and either they look blank or they tack on the word "magazine," confusing it with a short-lived television show.

Yet PM lives on in every American newspaper. With larger and blacker type, bigger and better pictures, wider margins, cleaner layout, and greater use of color, it was "readerfriendly" long before the term was coined. PM was the first paper to have radio and movie listings and to cover consumer affairs, labor, and the press itself. Its Sunday supplement survived the demise of the newspaper and became the ubiquitous Parade magazine, which lands every Sunday in more than 37 million homes. PM was the first paper to recognize that in an electronic age newspapers had to be smarter, brighter, more efficient and analytical. Long before everyone did it, PM practiced personality journalism. It was humane before its time.

While the competition was overwhelmingly right of center and isolationist—only one of New York's other eight papers endorsed Franklin Roosevelt in 1940—PM was unabashedly pro-New Deal, pro-labor, pro-getting into World War II. It was the only American newspaper ever to compare Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Father Charles Coughlin (the right-wing, antiSemitic "Radio Priest" of the 1930s), and Hearst to Joseph Goebbels. Long before other daily newspapers, it exposed and fought against racial and religious discrimination; someone once observed that the prototypical PM headline was MAN BITES UNDERDOG. Or, as a woman to whom The New Yorker's A. J. Liebling introduced PM remarked, "Doesn't anybody have any trouble except the Jews and the colored people?"

Ralph McAllister Ingersoil, Hotchkiss T7, Yale '21, was an unlikely revolutionary. On his father's side, his ancestors included lawyers, i clergymen, governors, and congressmen; on his mother's was Ward McAllister, who coined the phrase "The 400" to describe New York's social elite. (The term signified the number of people who could fit into Mrs. William Astor's Fifth Avenue ballroom.)

Ingersoll slummed for a time as a gold and copper miner out West, but his real passion was journalism. He began at the New York American, which he quit in a huff after an editor changed his copy to fit the Hearst party line. Harold Ross then hired Ingersoll for his fledgling New Yorker, ostensibly because Ingersoll's extensive social connections could prove useful. "He knows the clubs Percy R. Pyne belongs to and everybody else," Ross once told James Thurber.

Ingersoll developed the formula for "The Talk of the Town," with its mixture of anecdotes, short essays, "visits," and mini-profiles, all designed to convince the reader that, as Ingersoll put it, he "had been everywhere, knew everyone, was up on everything." But chafing under the eccentric Ross, who refused to let him write much and resented Ingersoll's new marriage (the first of four), Ingersoll was enticed away in 1930 by Fortune. Inheriting writers such as Archibald MacLeish, supplementing them with talent such as James Agee, Ingersoll turned the magazine into a legend in American journalism and a literate chronicler of an American economy in turmoil.

He then became general manager of Time Inc., where he helped devise, launch, and christen the fabulously successful Life, rejuvenated Time, and ran the entire company while Henry Luce's first marriage fell apart and his second—to Clare Boothe Luce—took shape. At the age of 36, Ingersoll was, in the words of his biographer Roy Hoopes, "probably the most powerful journalist in New York." But he butted heads and egos with both Luces and grew tired of hatching ideas for other geniuses. So Ingersoll, a compulsive writer of memoranda and manifestos, took a month off, brainstormed, and dictated.

The result was a 61-page tract he called "A Discursive Outline of a Proposition to Invent a Daily Newspaper." There, and in a variety of presentations written over the next couple of years for prospective investors, staff members, and readers—documents filled with some of the most inspiring and provocative rhetoric in the history of American journalism—he laid out his dream.

Newspapers, he wrote, had not been redesigned in 50 years, and had actually regressed, becoming less imaginative, more reactionary, less convinced of Right and Wrong. The time was ripe for a crusading "daily newsmagazine." It would use a rotogravure press, for optimal photo reproduction. It would cover medicine and movies and health and education. It would pursue truth and social amelioration, and be premised on the notion that "right lies to the Left." It would cost a nickel (two or three cents more than the competition, and as much as a subway ride or a Nathan's hot dog) to free it from advertising and advertisers.

The paper would not be objective, because journalistic objectivity was a sham, a mask for conservative politics. Instead, it would be evangelical and optimistic, for injustice and cruelty were no less eradicate than yellow fever once was.

PM would be concise—a 30-second glance at its front page would tell readers what was new—and complete; one would not need to read any other newspaper. Inside would be news briefs and a feature called "File and Forget," with a standing disclaimer like: "The following news came over the wire. We do not consider it important enough to give much space." In lieu of ads would be summaries of sales at local department stores, which PM deemed "just as much news as the marching of armies, a Congressional investigation, or the results of a baseball game." It would be written in English, not journalese, and written brightly.

PM would be just as distinctive for what it would not have: gossip columns, press releases, racing resuits, advice to the lovelorn, horoscopes, crosswords, comics (though it would later have the much-admired "Barnaby"), or stock listings, though it pledged that through vividly written personality profiles it would "make a few hundred important financiers a year into human beings." Because of better newsprint and improved technology, PM would not rub off on either hands or, though few of PM s proletarian readers could be expected to wear them, gloves. Its 32 pages—64 on Sundays— would be stapled together like a magazine, to ease subway reading. Stories would never jump from one page to another. And photographs would be used liberally, not just to illustrate stories but also to tell them.

Ingersoll thought he could initially entice at least a million readers a day away from other papers, and maybe five million because the opposition was, he said, "so soft."

"Liberal, my eye. Its a dirty Communist sheet.

Armed with a dummy issue of his new newspaper (then dubbed simply "Newspaper" and featuring contributions by Bourke-White, novelist Erskine Caldwell, Hammett, pianist Oscar Levant, and playwright Lillian Heilman), Ingersoll went looking for what he called some "VRM's"—very rich men—to back the enterprise. Eager to bring a liberal paper to life, the Roosevelt White House pitched in. Ingersoll eventually amassed $1.5 million from a group of investors which, according to one magazine, read "like a list of Dun & Bradstreet's AA ratings," including Marshall Eield and sportsman and financier John Hay Whitney; the heads of Simon & Schuster, the Book-of-the-Month Club, and Wrigley gum; and the heirs to the Sears, Deeringtractor, Gimbels, A&P, and John Deere fortunes. Still, he later conceded that it was less than a fifth of the capital he really needed. The investors promised that Ingersoll could create the paper he wished, without any interference from them.

How it came to be called PM, and whether it was Ingersoll, Walter Winchell, Heilman, the gossip columnist Leonard Lyons, or someone else who was responsible, never quite clear, nor whether the PM stood for "Picture Magazine" or "Photographic Material" or the time of day when the paper was originally supposed to appear (it actually came out late in the morning). In any case, The New Yorker reported, "so many outsiders began using the name that when it came time to make a formal announcement, Mr. Ingersoll just thought what the hell."

Some competitors followed the experiment eagerly. The new paper's location near the old Spalding Lactory and the Long Island Rail Road was fitting, the Herald Tribune reported, because "'PM' is a sporting venture and, like the railroad tracks beneath its window, may go far." But others, including Ingersoll's old boss at The New Yorker, Harold Ross, were more skeptical. "You don't write a story about a goat while he's still in midair leaping from one side of a chasm to the other," he told someone pitching him an Ingersoll profile. "You wait until he's got there—or has broken his neck."

Franklin Roosevelt sent his encouragement, calling PM's approach "a new and promising formula for freedom of the press." Madison Avenue guru William Benton launched a lavish promotional campaign on the subway, in magazines and other newspapers, on the radio, and through the mail—one whose extravagant claims no paper, in retrospect, ever could have met.

Lured by the chance to fight the good fight, to escape the hidebound or reactionary places where they were, and bowled over by rather implausible promises that their stories could be long and as literate as they wanted them to be (Ingersoll actually proposed to make do without any copy editors), more than 10,000 people applied for the fewer than 200 positions PM was offering. Ingersoll set only a few limitations: no racists, strikebreakers, antiSemites, or "aggressive reactionaries" need apply.

"Everyone thought it was going to be the beginning and end of journalism—at last, a liberal paper in New York," recalled Amos Landman, who became a labor reporter on the paper. "They didn't have to entice people. Everyone was dying to be on PM. " That went as well for photographers like Mary Morris, Arthur Leipzig, and Morris Engel, each of whom saw PM as a showcase for his or her art. "Suddenly I took the fast elevator to heaven," said Engel, now 80 years old, of the day in 1940 when PM put him to work.

Like Kenneth Stewart, who quit The New York Times for PM, many of them took pay cuts, plus a loss of security and prestige, plus abuse, for the move. "As we left our old posts to go over to Brooklyn," he later wrote, "we heard the scoffers and the doubters, the Red-baiters and the die-hards, the Hearsts and the [conservative columnist Westbrook] Peglers, and we remembered a phrase that Broun [Heywood Broun, father of Heywood Hale Broun] had liked, a phrase that he picked up at the Sacco-Vanzetti hearing: 'It is death condemning life.'"

"The men who will run this paper have already been called by those in the know 'the most brilliant editorial staff ever gathered together by one newspaper,"' Ingersoll boasted in one promotion. In fact, determined to launch PM more quickly than he had any business doing, he hired haphazardly. Some choices, like the arts critics—Louis Kronenberger for theater, Cecelia Ager for movies—were superb. But many others were mediocre, inexperienced, or worse. The labor editor couldn't type. Cronyism, too, played a part—most notably in the case of Huntington Hartford II, the newly divorced, 29-year-old A&P heir, who landed a job because he'd bought a piece of the paper. More than for any story he ever wrote, Hartford is remembered for coming to work in a chauffeur-driven limousine; for neglecting to pick up his paychecks; for traveling to an assignment on Long Island via his 40foot yacht (and being unable to get ashore upon his return); and for attending a 1940 benefit for Vichy France, an event his fellow PM reporters both picketed and covered. (Now 87, Hartford said he could recall nothing about his PM experiences.)

"We need both screwballs and competent technicians," Ingersoll remarked. "So far I've been concentrating pretty heavily on the screwballs." Within three months, 75 staffers were gone.

But what those who hung on remember was not the chaos. "To me they were these great, heroic front-page journalists, shirtsleeves rolled up, cigarettes drooping from the mouths," Lillian Ross, who went on to a long career at The New Yorker, said of her first colleagues. "To someone who was just starting out, it was so exciting." She was part of a newsroom with an inordinate number of women, Jews, and blacks, at least compared with other newspapers. "It was the first time 'Religion' did not appear on a personnel application and where I felt comfortable being Jewish and happy to see some Jewish faces here and there," said Hannah Baker, who as cartoon and comics editor was among the first to print the work of Saul Steinberg.

PM had problems even before its debut. The head of the Daily News, Joseph Patterson, and his circulation manager, Ivan Annenberg, tried to keep PM off the newsstands, a problem that prompted Ingersoll to rouse Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in the middle of the night. The A.P. would not sell PM its services. Trialsubscription forms filled out by 100,000 readers were temporarily lost, though whether by negligence or sabotage wasn't clear. Ingersoll found the trial issues dull.

On June 18, 1940, the first edition of PM rolled off the presses. Copies were promptly passed around the city room, where people pored over and pondered what had just been born. "There was absolute silence at every desk," recalled Peggy Wright Weidman, a young reporter at the time. "There was both a sense of letdown and excitement and justification. It took us all a time to get used to what it looked like." It was hard to believe that something so little—PM was a bit smaller and squarer than the other tabloids, and on day one it had reddish-brown trimhad exacted such labors or raised such expectations.

I loathe it. Loathe it." said Tallulah Bankhead

On the outside, people were just as curious. Though PM printed more than 370,000 copies of the first issue, newsstands ran out, and scalpers got as much as 50 cents apiece for them. One Times Square newsdealer complained of getting "punch drunk" answering questions about PM "Not since Charles Dickens serialized The Old Curiosity Shop and Little Nell had been left at death's door had a periodical been so eagerly awaited," wrote Paul Milkman in PM: A New Deal in Journalism, the most comprehensive history of the paper.

Any new newspaper seems both fragile and promising, but coming only four days after the fall of France, PM's debut seemed especially portentous. "PM starts off at the most critical moment in the history of the modern world," Ingersoll wrote in the maiden issue. "It means that we, who wanted time in which to grow up, shall have no youth—shall be gray-haired from birth—and that with no experience, we must rise instantly to a sense of enormous responsibility."

While the rhetoric was lofty, the reviews were disappointing. Miffed either by PM's leftist politics or by the way PM patronized everyone else—its premise, said the New York Post, seemed to be that other newspapers "were being run by obsolescent incompetents and that Ingersoll and a group of magazine wonder-boys would revolutionize things overnight"—its competitors were lying in wait, FORGET WITHOUT FILING, the New York WorldTelegram gloated. Ingersoll didn't disagree. The early PM, he later said, was "a turkey." PM didn't know whether it was offering fact or opinion, nor who its readers were. "For whom are we writing, the proletariat or the people who believe in the proletariat or the people who believe they believe in the proletariat?" one copy editor (for Ingersoll quickly had to hire some) asked.

PM's play for the masses, Time reported, consisted of "two pages a day devoted to labor news, union activities and unemployment, also bargains in food and clothing, cartoons by some leftist artists, drawings and photographs of garment workers, Negro scrubwomen, shirt-sleeved men and blousy women at play."

Readers left in droves, and the paper quickly foundered. By August 1940, circulation was down to 40,000. Marshall Field proceeded to buy out the other investors for 20 cents on the dollar. Like Ingersoll, Field was an aristocratic dreamer; that they shared an exotic Russian-born psychiatrist provided fodder for critics and conspiracymongers. Field's goal was to create the kind of paper newsmen fantasized about "at bull sessions over glasses of beer." "I'm not supporting a newspaper, I'm supporting an idea," he said.

Cushioned by Field's fortune, PM caught its breath, found its voice, created a constituency willing to forgive what Ingersoll conceded to be "a long list of inconsistencies and inadequacies." Its staff settled into a routine of long days in a stifling office (in summer, PM alumnus Penn Kimball recalled in an interview, the men stripped down to their skivvies), late-night Ingersollian journalistic tutorials, and endless staff meetings where everything was open for discussion and even copyboys had a vote. Only that could explain how Broun, recently graduated from his position of "opener of letters and writer of filler," could have led a campaign to drive the great Ben Hecht from the paper.

Ultimately, though, only one ballot really mattered. To his young staff, Ingersoll, a tall, balding, ursine man in shirtsleeves and suspenders who loped and shambled and paced around the office, and was forever dictating something to his secretary, was simultaneously larger than life, remote, and a bit ridiculous. William McCleery, PM's longtime Sunday editor, recalled a time when Ingersoll arrived at a staff meeting late and obviously upset: some unidentified staff member was spreading the notion that he never made a major decision without consulting his psychiatrist. "We all looked guilty because we'd all said that," recalled McCleery, now a playwright in Princeton, New Jersey.

PM never was a complete newspaper; according to Arnold Beichman, a PM reporter and editor for several years and now a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, the joke always was that PM actually cost eight cents: five cents for itself, and three more to get the real news in The New York Times. What PM did provide were endless crusades, exposes, consumer reporting, and high-quality arts coverage.

Months before Pearl Harbor, and while American Communists and isolationists alike opposed American entry into World War II, PM urged it. There were daily accounts of Nazi aggression and atrocities, followed by the phrase "What are we going to do about it?" At one point, Ingersoll even announced that PM had declared war on the Axis powers; any staffers who objected could become "non-combatants," ex1 empted from all war-related stories. Once war came, PM covered it extensively, though it initially had no foreign correspondents. At home, PM reporters ferreted out corporate profiteering, footdragging, and collaboration with the enemy. (PM was by no means humorless, as some charged, but its humor was of a certain type: for instance, it held a contest to see who could devise the nastiest birthday message—or "Goebbelgram"—to be sent to the Nazi propaganda minister. The winner received $25. Sample message: "You are Herr today / May you be gone tomorrow")

PM targeted the Ku Klux Klan, the German-American Bund, Lindbergh, Father Coughlin, Henry Ford, and anyone else who it deemed represented Fascist values in the United States. (One of its prime weapons, for a time, was Dr. Seuss, who enjoyed a great luxury: if he thought someone was a horse's ass, he could depict him as one.) A single early issue of PM, in which the paper called Franco a "gangster" and ran risque photographs of Gypsy Rose Lee at the New York World's Fair, brought denunciations from the Catholic Church in Brooklyn. One prominent local priest declared that "there is no room in Brooklyn for PM, " and called on colleagues to denounce PM from the pulpit. Their parishioners, he said ominously, "will know what to do." In fact, children were soon chasing PM trucks in Brooklyn, shouting "Communist!"

Some staff member claimed that Ingersoll never made a decision without consulting his psychiatrist. "We all loked guilty because we'd all said that."

The paper championed the New Deal and covered its leader worshipfully. Astonishingly, compared with the ostensibly nonpartisan pose of most American newspapers, it actually raised funds to pay for three of Roosevelt's radio broadcasts during the presidential campaign of 1944. Roosevelt, in turn, gave Ingersoll audiences and exclusives, while the First Lady gave him blurbs. "I wonder if PM is becoming to you as interesting a paper as I find it," Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her syndicated column. "There is barely a day when some article in it is not worth reading from beginning to end." (The New York WorldTelegram, which printed the column locally, omitted that passage.)

PM followed organized labor fully and sympathetically. "While it's doctrinaire to say a strike is always right, it almost always is," Ingersoll wrote. It covered not just strikes but also strikers, supporting their right to go out even in wartime, humanizing them with words and pictures. PM reporters and photographers went into coal mines, company towns, Chinese laundries. When peanut vendors at Yankee Stadium struck, the paper considered dropping coverage of the team. For a time Kronenberger was barred from all Shubert theaters in New York—not just because he panned the Ziegfeld Follies, but also because PM had accused the Shuberts of underpaying chorus boys in The Student Prince. When strikers would eye them menacingly, Arthur Leipzig recalled, PM photographers like him could shout, "I'm from PM\ I'm not the enemy!" Usually it worked.

PM covered its own considerable labor problems extensively; in fact, PM's very first labor story told how newspaper deliverers were picketing its plant. (At the end of the story, the following parenthetical line appeared: "Attention, pickets: PM is spelled 'PM,' not 'The P.M.'")

Blacks, nearly invisible in American newspapers except when accused of crimes, appeared in diverse and sympathetic settings in PM, and with remarkable regularity. PM reporters wrote about discrimination in the armed forces, about lynchings, about the segregated Dixiebound trains leaving Penn Station. They also detailed the glories and trials of Harlem for a white audience years before other newspapers did. PM documented how the Red Cross deemed black men's blood not good enough for white soldiers. Even Weegee, photographer of the "naked city," was enlisted in the cause, photographing a segregated movie theater in the nation's capital.

One jPMinvestor complained, "The trouble with Ingersoll is that failure has gone to his head."

PM covered black entertainers—Leadbelly, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Paul Robeson—more frequently and intelligently than did any other newspaper, black or white. It was known for having black employees. "There's the nigger from PM" someone at Parade magazine once said when a PM messenger arrived. And those blacks it did employ, it killed with kindness. "My career at PM was very nearly as devastating as my career as a civilian employee of the U.S. Army, except that PM never (as far as I know) placed me on a blacklist," James Baldwin wrote in The Price of the Ticket. "If the black newspapers had considered me absolutely beyond redemption, PM was determined to save me: I cannot tell which attitude caused me the more anguish."

A joke of the era had one Jew saying to another, "I read Father Coughlin because he makes the Jews seem very important, while PM takes them for granted." In fact, many of PM s readers were Jews—as the comedian Henry Morgan once cracked, PM's trouble was that every article started out something like "My name is Minnie Moskowitz and I live on Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn, and I think it's a shame ... and its reportage on the Holocaust was considerable, at least by the meager standards of the wartime media; in 1943, at a point when the Germans had murdered two million Jews, Max Lerner begged Roosevelt unavailingly in print to help save four million more.

The paper launched a campaign against hotels catering to "restricted" or "select" clientele—code words for "white Christians only"—or, more precisely, against the newspapers carrying their advertisements. Years before Ingersoll's longtime girlfriend, Laura Z. Hobson, wrote Gentleman's Agreement, in which a reporter posing as a Jew (played by Gregory Peck in the film) is turned down at a swank hotel, PM was obsessed with the issue. Under headlines such as THE NEW YORK TIMES PRINTS MOST HATE ADVERTISING, it reproduced entire pages of the offending advertisements. Small wonder, then, that when Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger complied with Ingersoll's request and sent greetings on PM's second birthday his message was more admonitory than congratulatory. "Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice," he wrote, quoting Polonius's speech to Laertes in Hamlet. "Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment."

Writers such as Elizabeth Hawes, editor of PM's "News for Living" section, explained how to be chic and cheap: "Pants from 5 to 10 May Solve Your Lingerie Problem." Food reporters advised where to shop, what were the best buys, how to plan meals. For a time the paper printed two menus daily, for low and medium budgets, and recommended what to do with leftovers. PM reviewed local restaurants (and exposed dirty ones) long before it was commonplace. It offered a canning clinic, a slimming menu, and an exercise column with the svelte young wife of Willy Ley, PM's rockets expert, doing the working out. PM investigated life-insurance scams and decrepit schools and inadequate hospitals. One PM reporter was sent out to ask doctors about the dangers of cigarettes, only to report back that every doctor she talked to smoked.

Readers sent in their questions. Mrs. N. Kristel of Brooklyn asked where she could buy a leather chair that turned into a bed. "We would like to advise you against a chair-bed combination," PM earnestly replied. "Sleeping across three ridges is not desirable. More discouraging yet, furniture experts say leather is uncomfortable and impractical because it would break in folding and unfolding the chair, besides being a great deal more expensive than fabric covering." (But if Mrs. Kristel really insisted on it, Macy's could get her one.) Like everything else about PM, it was ripe for parody. A 1942 Harvard Lampoon takeoff on PM had one J. Kallikak of Colvin Hollow, Kentucky, asking where he could buy a toothbrush. "We have found that a small twig, frayed at one end, is much more effective and cheap than storebought brushes," "PM" replied. "PM believes in saving its readers money."

PM's readers, Ingersoll once said halfhumorously, were like a "sect." Like a family, they celebrated joyous events together: on its second anniversary, PM printed not only pages and pages of birthday greetings from prominent readers but also numerous photographs of children sharing its birthday. Rather than maintain a distant, severe presence, PM talked to and leveled with those who bought it. The paper's correspondence page was called "Letters to and from the Editor." Readers facetiously upbraided PM for complicating their lives; one lamented how its exposes had forced him to boycott Texaco and Ford. Some exhorted PM to do better; if PM ran more coverage about baseball's color line, one letter writer stated, more people would read its sports section.

If PM transgressed, readers pounced. Thus, Mrs. Bernard Smith complained when its restaurant critic, Charlotte Adams, praised a restaurant called Absinthe House, which workers were picketing at the time. "Am I in inferring that Mrs. Adams's labor and foreign policies are opposed to Mr. Ingersoll's?" she asked snippily. ("There was no picket line at Absinthe House the day Mrs. Adams visited there," the editor explained. "It is not her policy or PM's to recommend any struck place.") One "H.H.C.R" grew irked when PM recommended some inexpensive Italian hats. "I am not interested in savings effected by purchasing Nazi, Fascist or Japanese goods," he or she harrumphed. ("We are assured that the hats had been bought before Italy entered the war," the editor replied.)

PM asked readers whether it should print photographs of executions. It listed story ideas they had sent in—e.g., an expose on the dirty dishwater in local restaurants—and catalogued their mail, including the number of "mash notes" and "hymns of hate" it received each week. In a weekly photo feature on "Baby Lois," Dr. Spock (identified simply as "the doctor" or "the pediatrician") told readers how to raise their children. Such attention prompted great expressions of loyalty. A slew of babies were named Lois. Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Spinney named their firstborn son "PM." At Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, Ingersoll finished second only to Lou Gehrig in the balloting for the school's annual Lincoln medal.

But however loyal PM's readers, they remained limited. The paper labored vainly to appeal to the working class, printing cheesecake shots of union girls and profiling "PM's Average Girl" each Sunday. ("You should be good-looking but you needn't be beautiful," the application stated. "We want you to be average, so don't hold back because you haven't a silver fox cape or 18 pairs of shoes.") But the strikers and blacks and poor people PM championed went on buying the News or the Mirror for the sports and the numbers; the underprivileged, as I. F. Stone lamented, "preferred Dick Tracy." And whether or not advertisements were contaminating, women liked looking at them.

With the exception of the semi-autonomous Sunday magazine, which was consistently more contemplative and literate than the daily edition, PM could be tendentious, overheated, simplistic. Hodding Carter Sr., a native southerner who worked on the paper briefly, objected to a column that began, "Down in Mississippi, where the only forms of recreation are drinking Coca-Colas and lynching Negroes, they've done it again ..." There was nothing subtle or unpredictable about PM's politics; it was forever printing front-page editorials, open letters, screaming headlines, coupons to clip and send to the president, the mayor, the secretary of state. When PM lobbied Attorney General Francis Biddle to ban Father Coughlin's magazine Social Justice from the mails—by the way, an embarrassing stance for any advocate of free speech—Biddle received 40,000 pieces of mail.

Then there was the Cult of Personality around Ingersoll. So completely did he dominate PM's pages that The New Yorker suggested it be renamed Rl. PM charted Ingersoll's every move, printed his every pronouncement. "Everywhere," The New Yorker wrote, "the reader is able to observe the workings of a single brain, turning over as publicly as a sample motor at the Automobile Show." Or, as one frustrated PM investor complained, "the trouble with Ingersoll is that failure has gone to his head."

Most egregious was the moment in June 1942 when Ingersoll was drafted. Though ready to serve, Ingersoll felt with some justification that he'd been targeted by people who would have been only too happy to shut PM down. He resisted his induction, and splashed that resistance all over page 1—and pages 2, 3, and 4—of the paper. PM, the Herald Tribune observed dryly, was "giving the story precedence over the news from Russia and Egypt."

Ingersoll's situation delighted his detractors. "The newspaper men of this country are not all heroes, but the business has been singularly free of cowards," crowed the Chicago Tribune, which called Ingersoll "a disgrace." The editor of a newspaper "devoted to ... stirring up of race hatred throughout the country," a paper that was really "the uptown edition of the Communist Daily Workershould not be exempt from the draft, complained Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi. Rankin also accused Ingersoll of "trying to pollute the bloodstream of America" by forcing the Red Cross and military "to pump Negro blood and Japanese blood into the veins of our wounded white soldiers." Ingersoll soon enlisted and the flap subsided. Without him, the paper grew more stable—but also less inspired. To some, it was the beginning of the end.

But what plagued PM most was politics—particularly the byzantine, fratricidal left-wing politics of its era, shaped by Stalin's short-lived dalliance with Hitler. At the very time he was essentially running Time Inc., Ingersoll briefly belonged to a Communist "study group" and, though he dropped out, he remained tolerant. "I think Communists are people," he once wrote. He was clearly naive about Stalin, whom he described after a 1941 Kremlin interview as "very affable." Amazingly, he asked Earl Browder, the head of the American Communist Party, to send him a journalist; Communism was entitled to representation in his newsroom. A second reporter came with glowing references from the Soviet news agency, Tass.

From the outset, leftist and rightist critics alike claimed that PM was overrun with, and run by, Communists. H. L. Mencken's magazine, The American Mercury, posed the paradox: though PM s backing was "respectably and almost belligerently plutocratic," the paper was "colonized" by Communists, Communist stooges, and fellow travelers. When James Wechsler, a disillusioned Communist who later left PM over what he perceived to be excessive Communist influence there, recruited Arnold Beichman for the place, he told him sardonically, "Brooklyngrad needs you."

Soon after the paper appeared, an anonymous letter began circulating around other newspapers, cataloguing the numerous staffers at PM who were either party members or sympathizers. (Among the Communists was Hartford, who was characterized as a "parlor pink.") Ingersoll promptly reprinted the list in PM and invited the F.B.I. to investigate PM whenever it wished. Anyone caught tailoring copy to a party line would be thrown out on his ear, he said, but there'd be no witch-hunt.

"If what is meant by a Communist sympathizer is a man who sympathizes with some part but not all of the Communist Party line, then I would be willing to state unequivocably that I have not knowingly hired a man who is not a Communist sympathizer," he wrote.

In fact, the F.B.I. had already opened what was to become a thick file on PM. In editorials and in letters to the director himself, Ingersoll fawned over Hoover and the bureau. Once, after the F.B.I. rounded up some Nazi spies off Long Island, PM awarded Hoover a special scroll designed by Dr. Seuss. On another occasion, Ingersoll wrote to the F.B.I. of suspicions that PM s phones were being tapped. "If it's you, that's fine," he said. "But if it's someone else, I wish you would get him for us." The soft soap didn't wash. PM was "a bad outfit," Hoover wrote on one memo in the file.

What's so odd about the charges of PM s Communist influences is that the Communists themselves, Americans and Soviets alike, considered PM pernicious. PM might have been liberal in the P.M., Earl Browder wrote, but in the A.M. it was reactionary. And yet, Browder complained, PM did its work "in such a charming and innocent and interesting fashion that even the members of our own Association, I am sorry to say, often prefer PM rather than the Worker.When Ingersoll sought permission to report from wartime Moscow, the Soviet apparatchik in Washington scolded him. "Mr. Ingersoll, if I were to make a list of all the references to the Soviet Union in PM which have outraged me—it would take three days to do it," he groused.

For eight years the specter of Communism bitterly divided PM employees and their union, colored personnel decisions and assignments, raised concerns about the newspaper's independence, made it an easy target for Red-baiters and malcontents. "My God! If I'd known ... ," Tallulah Bankhead once exclaimed at a press conference upon learning that the young woman questioning her, Peggy Wright, came from PM. "Of all the filthy, rotten, Communist rags, that ... is ... the ... most vicious ... hating paper that's ever ... been ... published." A reporter interjected that PM was not Communistic but liberal. "Liberal my eye," replied Bankhead, who hadn't liked a profile PM had done of her a year earlier. "It's a dirty Communist sheet. I loathe it. Loathe it." Her maid, she said, handed it to her with tongs, and only so she could read "Bamaby."

Wartime scarcity made PM cut back on pages, color, paper quality. Even the staples went. Aided by price restraints and a strike that shut down its competitors, it actually made a small profit in 1945. But when inflation returned with peacetime, its financial woes also returned. Ingersoll, back from the war, quickly tried to reassert his authority and set things right, adding baseball box scores, more crime and sex coverage, and some new columns (including one on Broadway gossip and another by the producer Billy Rose) to the mix. "The New Postwar PM," he promised, would be "better, stronger ... more like PM than PM itself!" Meanwhile, he searched desperately for 100,000 more readers. "With plenty of nickels, there'll never be an end," he said. He even envisioned a chain of PM s in other cities.

But his attempts to trim the Washington bureau led to mass resignations, plus renewed charges that he was soft on Communists. And the new nickels never came. When, in November 1946, Marshall Field insisted that PM finally run advertising (though nothing, the paper pledged, "for patent nostrums, for personal finance loans, for any advertising, in fact, which we have the slightest reason to believe might be dishonest or a gyp"), Ingersoll quit, though it seemed like a pretext; he'd had it. Once it became clear the advertisements weren't helping. Field had had it, too. By 1948, he had lost at least $4 million on PM, and, as he once said, "I am not an eleemosynary institution." Moreover, with Roosevelt dead, labor on the defensive, the country moving to the right, and the Cold War in full swing, PM suddenly seemed out of step.

In 1948, Field all but gave the paper away, to the liberal San Francisco lawyer Bartley Crum, who was representing some of the "Hollywood 10," and Joseph Barnes, the foreign editor of the Herald Tribune. "The new PM is going to be a NEWSpaper," the new owners said—betraying, inevitably, what they'd thought it had been. Distancing themselves still further, they renamed it The Star. PM last appeared on June 22, 1948. Crum's daughter, the author Patricia Bosworth, wrote in her family memoir, Anything Your Little Heart Desires, that the columnist Joseph Alsop bet her father $500 that the paper would not last the year. It did, but only barely: on January 28, 1949, The Star, too, died.

In The Star itself, there were no elaborate postmortems. "PM and The Star were never strong on reporting," someone observed. But elsewhere, the reactions were predictable. "Leftwingers and the Moscow-line faithful said they expected some of the Star's circulation will be picked up by the Communist Daily Workerthe Journal-American said smugly. Westbrook Pegler, its columnist, later added, "That neuro-psycho-journalistic monstrosity, PM, otherwise and more fittingly called PU, is dead and gone after an evil career promoting the Communist line, but its reek lingers and the harm that it wrought in promoting dormant hatreds will be a long time healing."

I. F. Stone, by then at the New York Post, struck a very different note. "The paper was often sloppy, screwy, and exasperating," he wrote. "But it wasn't dull. It got people mad, sometimes mad enough to get results. It had excitement. In between endless griping, we were proud to be PM-ers."

As of June, half a century had passed since PM saw its last. To paraphrase Alan Ginsberg, the war and the Nazi era and the Soviet Union ended long ago. Aunt Rose. People are now saying that Senator Joe McCarthy may not have been so bad, or so wrong, after all. Father Coughlin and Henry Wallace are gone. So, too, is Ralph Ingersoll, who died in 1985 after years spent in obscurity running a small chain of northeastern newspapers.

Meanwhile, the ranks of people extant who once worked for PM have dwindled and dispersed; often, they are surprised to learn that their old colleagues are still alive. But mention PM to them, or to readers of a certain age and time and place, and moods lighten. "PM was a dream about pure journalism, and a dream is always important, whether or not it succeeds," said Heywood Hale Broun, as the sun set over his home in Woodstock, New York. "What the hell, they hung John Brown, but they're still singing about him."