THE WORLD THROUGH A MONOCLE

Historian Corey (UCLA) sets herself an original task—to re-create the complex mosaic of postwar America from the vantage of the New Yorker, the most cosmopolitan and nonpartisan magazine of the time. The New Yorker attained its zenith in the 1940s and ’50s, when it became the voice of the upper-middle-class, urban intellectual elite—and those who aspired to be counted among them. Corey ploughs through various genres represented in the magazine (fiction, journalism, ads, cartoons, literary criticism) in order to distill some features unifying the magazine’s contributors and readership. She discovers, for example, that fear in a nuclear age was the dominant postwar theme, but the magazine managed to take a balanced view of communism. The superpowers were portrayed as only superficially different, both seeking global domination. When the magazine addressed racial tension, it described the problems in the past or in the South, while stressing that its own domain was progressively northeastern. At a time when most servants hired by wealthy Manhattanites were black, they were consistently pictured as white when lampooned by New Yorker cartoonists. Asians and American Indians were idealized as more spiritual than the white people who were writing about them. This self-deprecating attitude soothed guilt and self-doubt in a readership determined to maintain a privileged existence. The magazine’s discourse on women embraced an array of attitudes, from sexism to subversion of the domestic ideal. Finally, the New Yorker marketed exclusive alcoholic beverages through advertising, and at the same time ridiculed the effects of drinking in cartoons and text. Understandably, the magazine’s conflicting aspirations were bound to draw a vast and diverse audience. Corey’s book provides little analysis, and offers as much enjoyment as leafing through dusty volumes of dated periodicals. Nothing robs New Yorker cartoons of humor like the endless verbal descriptions of them. While the book contains some interesting trivia, its basic conclusion, that postwar American society was torn by anxiety and internal contradictions, is hardly eye-opening.