As a graduate student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois, Jim Borg took an independent writing class in the fall of 1975 that required him to research and write an article that might be suitable for publishing in such national periodicals as Esquire or The New Yorker.
A
few months earlier, Chicago newspapers had been full of reports about the death
of Steven Stawnychy, a recruit at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center who had
been abused by his instructors. On the evening of June 3, 1975, Stawnychy had
committed suicide, letting himself be struck by a Chicago and North Western
Railway train. “He walked over and laid his head down on the tracks,” said the
engineer of the train that hit Stawnychy. “When I realized what he was up to, I
just went into ‘emergency’ and tried to stop—but, of course, it was too short a
distance.” For his article, Borg, wanted to “put all the pieces together into a
comprehensive story that also looked at Stawnychy’s background” to unravel why
the recruit had taken his own life.
The result was magic, said Borg. He described his editorial session with Martin as “the most instructive half hour of my life.” Martin also assisted Borg in obtaining a grant from Medill that enabled him to travel to Stawnychy’s hometown in Minnesota to complete his research. Borg completed his article, had it published as the cover story in the April 1976 issue of the Chicago Tribune Magazine, and won an award for it in a United Press International competition.
Martin’s teaching career at one of the country’s top-ranked journalism schools began in 1969 had first joined the staff at Medill in 1969, when he started as a visiting lecturer. He accepted the job in order to help support his family while he labored to finish his Adlai E. Stevenson biography. His hiring had been part of Dean Ira William “Bill” Cole’s effort to bring professional reporters and nationally known individuals in the profession to teach at Medill.
During his time at Medill, Martin taught two graduate-level seminars, including one on the limits of American power, similar to one he had taught at the City University of New York. His other seminar, officially known as Journalism D26, Independent Writing Projects, focused on the how and why of producing serious nonfiction magazine articles. The class helped students improve their writing, sharpened their reporting skills, guided them in organizing their research, and showed them how to structure their material in a way suitable for magazine publication.
The class met irregularly as a group, with Martin spending more time in one-on-one consultations with his students about their projects than in a formal classroom setting. He required them to read, and discussed with them, two well-known books that had often influenced his own work: The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, and A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by Henry Watson Fowler. Martin discovered that some of his students had been previously introduced to Strunk and White either in high school or as undergraduates, but “doting fathers read Huckleberry Finn to small children before they are old enough to understand that Huckleberry Finn is a book about human freedom. Students read Strunk too soon. They need to read him while they are trying to write seriously.”
Worst of all, students had a lackadaisical attitude about the profession they had chosen. “They do not understand,” said Martin, “that writing is a serious and difficult business. They have an unspoken contempt for their material. They need to be made to take it seriously. A writer bears a heavy responsibility. They do not seem to feel it.”
Few of his young writers, however, had anything interesting to say, Martin noted, while the elders they wrote about “have a good deal interesting to say but we cannot hear them because of the authors’ noise.” He also was annoyed with young writers who did not take the trouble to learn grammar, how to write a clear English sentence, or invented dialogue or fabricated “composite characters” without first informing their readers. “To my mind, this is writing fiction, or, less politely, faking a story, lying,” said Martin. “To all this, my students would reply that I am an old grouch. They would be right.”
In addition to Martin, others who became familiar figures at Fisk Hall were Newton Minow, the former Federal Communications Commission chairman, and Sig Michelson, the former CBS News president. “I was a fan of John’s work,” said Peter Jacobi, who began teaching at Medill in 1961, remained there for eighteen years, and served as assistant and associate dean during that time. “His magazine pieces were so carefully reported and brilliantly written. I felt he would make an excellent teacher for our students, particularly the more advanced ones.” Jacobi remembered there was a “certain pride” felt at Medill for having secured Martin as a teacher, and, “because he was a true gentleman, we came to like him as a colleague.”
After just a year at Medill, Cole promoted Martin to full professor rank, complete with tenure, a salary that topped out at nearly $30,000 a year, plus health insurance—a benefit that proved to be vital over the ten years he remained at the university, as health woes plagued Martin, exacerbated by his longtime smoking habit. Although Martin always told his students that writing could not be taught, he did believe that if they already had the ability to write a decent English sentence, he could, perhaps, “teach them to write a better one,” as well as instructing them on how to do the legwork necessary to produce a decent magazine article.
Gregg Easterbrook, a student of Martin’s during the 1976–77 school year and today a well-known author, recalled that when students slipped up even verbally from the dictates of Strunk and White, they were sure to hear about it from their professor. “He didn’t suffer fools gladly,” Easterbrook said.
From Fowler’s classic tome, Martin shared articles on such issues as the that/which problem, formal words, hackneyed phrases, paragraph rhythm, pedantry, meaningless words, and others. “He was very strict about formal grammar rules,” Easterbrook said, adding that Martin’s lessons on the subject came during a time when the proper use of grammar had been in decline.
As a way to improve their style, Martin also encouraged his students to read good writing, using as examples his own magazine stories from Harper’s and the Saturday Evening Post; Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War; Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento; and Paul Horgan’s Approaches to Writing.
Most of the fifty-four students who took Martin’s advanced writing classes at Medill each year had no experience producing anything more complicated than a spot news story, but Martin still made them submit an outline for a magazine article, then report and write and rewrite a story running anywhere from fourteen to eighteen and a half pages. He allowed his students to pick their own topics and let them use newspaper clippings and library materials to prepare their outlines. For their rough drafts and finished article, however, they had to use only interviews, documents, and other primary sources. “The rock-bottom foundation of all journalism is reporting,” said Martin. “Writing is important, editing is important. But in the end everything depends on reporting.”
For those students who were unsure of what to write about, he provided a list of potential topics, using such local stories as the possibility of a third airport for Chicago, a slum fire, voting patterns in Chicago and its suburbs during presidential elections, and public housing. Martin also distributed as a guide a 1954 outline he had done for Post editors on a possible story about the life and death of Gus Amedeo, a Chicago burglar who had killed a policeman and had been gunned down in return (published in the Post in 1955 as “The Making of a Killer”).
Although by the time he joined the Medill faculty general interest magazines such as the Post, Life, and Look were on the decline, hurt by television’s domination of the home entertainment market, Martin maintained an abiding faith “in the ability of a good writer to make a living by simply being able to communicate facts, whether in magazines, books, TV, or elsewhere. The writer serves truth. He is needed.”
When he began his career at Medill, universities across the country, including Northwestern, had been beset by unrest. These were the days, Martin remembered, of the shooting by National Guard troops of students at Kent State, the radical actions of the Weather Underground, and the militancy of the Black Panters—a time known in Chicago as the Days of Rage. Martin said he had been, by and large, on the side of the students, overlooking their long hair, beads, sandals, and chains. While some of them insulted and harassed their professors, Martin said he escaped such outbursts. “It was a hard time to be a student, a hard time to be a parent, and even a rather hard time to be a teacher,” said Martin. He preferred the turmoil of that period—“students were at least alive,” Martin noted—to the “inertia and careerism” that infected students in the post–Vietnam War era.
After a few years of unmet deadlines, broken appointments, and sloppy article drafts seemingly dashed off at the last possible moment, Martin began approaching “each new student somewhat warily.” Writing for magazines proved to be beyond the capabilities of most of his students, as they tended to produce academic papers, not magazine pieces, while nearly most had great difficulty in structuring the material they collected. All too many of them simply could not “write a clean crisp English sentence,” and Martin wondered if elementary schools and high schools in the United States had somehow stopped teaching basic English grammar, let alone syntax.
Growing weary of marking the same errors again and again on every article draft he received, Martin, to save time, had a set of rubber stamps created that offered such straightforward criticisms as: “awkward,” “loose, wordy,” “not entirely clear,” “says little,” and “what mean?”
Many years after his days at Medill, Easterbrook still remembered the corrections Martin made on one of his assignments. Martin had invited Easterbrook, whom he considered be one of the most promising writers he had in his course, to his Highland Park home to discuss his manuscript about the Republican Party in Chicago. What struck Easterbrook, besides the fact that his professor had been willing to invite him to his home and talk to him for a half an hour about his work, was that when Martin returned his article he had made comments on almost every sentence, with some sentences having more than one suggestion for improvement. The corrections—“dull,” “sloppy,” “overwritten,” “bad grammar,” for example—were stamped on his manuscript using orange, green, and red ink. “My God,” Easterbrook said he thought to himself at the time, “this guy uses these words so often he had stamps made.”
Martin also dissuaded his students from erroneous usages that had slowly crept into the English language—“media” for “television,” “image” for “reputation,” as well as “impact” as a verb for “affect” and “input” for “suggestion.” Easterbrook in particular recalled Martin’s maxim that good writing had to be rigorous and that every word on the page had to be there for a reason. It was a lesson that should be learned by a writer in any style or genre, said Easterbrook.
Taking a class with Martin could be an intimidating experience for Medill students, as he had no problem in telling them exactly what he thought about their writing. Niles Howard signed up for Martin’s course while at Medill in the early 1970s, believing it would put his career on the fast track, or so he thought. He believed so even though neither he nor his fellow students were sure what the difference was between a newspaper article and a magazine article.
When Martin, whom Howard described as “a little introverted, not gregarious, not a back-slapper, but thoughtful,” returned his first writing assignment to him, the professor had scrawled on it, “This isn’t even an article. Why don’t you try again?” A chagrined Howard went to Martin’s office and asked for guidance on what he might do to improve his piece. The two of them talked for almost an hour on “how I might salvage my academic standing (let alone my ego),” said Howard.
The memory of what he and Martin talked about has faded over time, but one point his teacher made stuck with him, and it is advice he still hears whenever he sits down at a keyboard and starts to write. “A magazine article is not a bunch of facts and quotes,” Howard quoted Martin as saying. “It’s a journey from point A to point B. Your job is to persuade the reader to ride along.”
If students took their work seriously, Martin treated them with courtesy and did all he could to help them hone their craft. An army veteran from Alabama, Mike Plemmons arrived at Medill in the late 1970s with considerable newspaper experience, having worked at two daily newspapers in the South and another newspaper in Massachusetts. Plemmons spent his first semester at Medill in Washington, D.C., reporting for the Medill News Service, which allowed students the opportunity to live in the nation’s capital and report on the activities of the federal government. A professor-editor at the News Service recommended to Plemmons that he study with Martin when he returned to his studies at Northwestern.
The next semester, Plemmons took Martin’s advanced writing class and decided to create what he called an “experimental” article on the education system, giving three points of view side by side—a seventh-grade student, his parents, and his teacher. Halfway through his project, Plemmons began to be sorry he had ever taken it on. The interviews were easy enough, but he could not find his “lede,” the opening paragraph enticing readers to go further into his twenty-page manuscript.
One day, while going over a draft of the article with Martin, Plemmons remembered that Martin circled a paragraph in his story, a quote from a seventh-grade teacher, sat forward in his creaky chair and said, looking directly at him, “This is good.” Rewriting a piece that size in the days before laptop computers and digital word processing required hard, tedious work, but Plemmons decided to take Martin’s advice, abandoning his previous story structure and restarting his piece with the paragraph Martin had circled. “It worked, of course,” said Plemmons. “The rest of the story wrote itself.”
On the last page of Plemmons’s finished article, Martin simply wrote: “I like this piece.” Although he never published the story he wrote for Martin’s class, Plemmons kept the manuscript in his possession for several years, cherishing the memory of a time when a professor took his writing seriously and treated him like a colleague.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, a large number of Medill students were drawn, thanks to the work of such reporters as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, to careers as investigative reporters, or to find jobs where they could practice the New Journalism that had been pioneered by such talented writers as Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, and Joan Didion. Journalism historian Marc Weingarten noted that in the turbulent 1960s, Wolfe and his cohorts had realized that traditional reporting was “inadequate to chronicle the tremendous cultural and social changes of the era.”
Martin, however, had quite a different viewpoint—he still believed in the old-fashioned advice from Strunk and White that a writer should always place himself in the background and write in a way that drew the reader’s attention to the writing, rather than to the writer. In his estimation, New Journalism required a writer to give his views about every fact, to constantly perform, and to “become, indeed, virtually the principal actor in the drama.”
Today, Medill honors Martin's decade of teaching and his remarkable writing career through its sponsorship of the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism.
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