The Magazine and the Writer: Harper's and John Bartlow Martin

While living in the Hubbard Woods neighborhood in Winnetka, Illinoi in the early 1940s with his young wife Fran, freelance writer John Bartlow Martin, who made his living writing for true-crime magazines at two cents per word, made an important reconnection with a friend from his days as a student at Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis, Francis S. Nipp, an English teacher earning his doctorate at the University of Chicago.
 
Nipp, who Martin called “a natural editor,” and his wife, Mary Ellen, became frequent weekend guests at the Martins’ home. The couples listened to music—Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Jelly Roll Morton, and especially Louis Armstrong—and the two old high school friends talked obsessively about writing.
 
Martin had begun to grow tired of the true-crime genre, which he once referred to as “monsters and ogres and fiends in human form.” In addition to introducing him to serious classical music, Nipp convinced Martin to become a regular reader of The New Yorker and encouraged him to start thinking about submitting “serious nonfiction” to one of the country’s most prestigious magazines, Harper’s.
 
Although it had a small circulation (109,787 in 1940) and offered its contributors paltry fees (usually $250 for articles) in comparison to other magazines, Harper’s reached a vital audience, what one of its editors described as “the intelligent minority” of opinion makers in the United States, “the thinking, cultured reader who seeks both entertainment and an enlarged and broadened point of view.”
 
By the late 1930s the magazine’s subscribers could look forward to contributions from such noted writers as Elmer Davis and John Gunther, as well as monthly columns from historian Bernard DeVoto, “The Easy Chair,” and E. B. White, “One Man’s Meat.” Frederick Lewis Allen, himself a best-selling author, who took over as Harper’s editor in October 1941, said the magazine under his watch intended to print within its pages “the exciting, the creative, the lustily energetic, the freshly amusing, the newly beautiful, the illuminating, the profound.”
 
Martin’s entry into this world came about as the result of a bungled espionage operation in the United States by Nazi Germany’s military intelligence organization, the Abwehr. On the pitch-black night of June 13, 1942, four men left a German U-boat and paddled their rubber dinghy to land on a beach near Amagansett, Long Island, south of New York City. The men were saboteurs sent by the German high command to infiltrate American society and, using high explosives and incendiary devices, wreak havoc on vital war-related installations on the East Coast.
 

Known as OperationPastorius, named in honor of the first German immigrant to the United States (Franz Pastorius), the bold plan also included a landing by another four-man team on June 17 at Ponte Verda Beach south of Jacksonville, Florida. The daring venture disintegrated in rapid fashion; by June 27 the Federal Bureau of Investigation, tipped off by one of the saboteurs, George John Dasch, had arrested the members of each team and had recovered $174,588 of the $175,200 in U.S. currency given them to finance the operation. President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that the Germans were to be tried before a military commission. They were all found guilty and sentenced to death, but Roosevelt commuted Dash’s sentence to thirty years and gave another conspirator who had cooperated with authorities, Ernest Burger, a life sentence.
 
Two of the eight doomed German agents were American citizens, including twenty-two-year-old Herbert Haupt, a worker at the Simpson Optical Company who had lived in Chicago with his parents on Fremont Street and had attended Lane Technical High School. During his youth his parents, especially his father, Hans Max, who had served in the German army during World War I, taught him to love Germany more than the United States.
 
Haupt had been considered as a bit of a playboy by his fellow saboteurs and after landing in Florida had gone on a shopping spree, buying a three-piece suit, a Bulova watch, silk handkerchiefs, and several pairs of shoes. He made his way to Chicago with thousands of dollars entrusted to him by his team members and tried to resume his old life there, only to be apprehended by the FBI.
 
Writing a query letter to the editors of Harper’s in early December 1942 about doing an article on Haupt, and what happened to his parents and other relatives who helped him (they were tried and convicted of treason), Martin said the story could be seen as a tribute to the FBI’s excellent work, and that he had access to transcripts of the court’s records. “This really is a fantastic story of how treason is nurtured,” Martin wrote.
 
He went on to call it an “unbelievable true story of a youngster who grew up in a middle-class family on Chicago’s North Side, was taken from a factory job and hauled by chartered plane and blockade runner more than halfway around the world to the Reich, was trained, with typical German thoroughness, in the methods of the saboteur, and returned to betray his country, and, failing, brought death to himself and his family and his friends.”
 

Eight days after sending his letter, Martin received an answer from Allen personally, who said the Haupt article seemed to be a “very promising possibility and we hope you give us a chance at it.” Allen went on to warn Martin not to make too much of the story’s moral or play up the dramatic and “fictionizable” aspects of Haupt’s youth and background. “Simply and clearly told,” Allen wrote, “with considerable sharp detail, it ought to be continuously interesting and impressive in its total effect. Of course you can do some pointing of the significance of the story; the great danger, I should think, would be of doing too much.”           
 
At this point in his career, Martin did not yet really know how to write a serious fact piece for a national audience. His story on Haupt relied mainly on newspaper clippings, trial transcripts, and a certain amount of atmospheric writing that resulted from legwork he had done for his true-crime articles in German neighborhoods on Chicago’s North Side, where Haupt grew up. “I plead ignorance,” he said. “Later I became almost obsessed by being thorough in my research, and I always piled up high mountains of notes from interviews and documents and legwork on atmosphere that I could not use. But at that time I knew nothing of this and, I fear, wrote several pieces for Harper’s mainly from clippings.”
 
Martin admitted he probably did less legwork on the Haupt article than he had done on many of his pieces for Keller’s true-crime magazines. Considering the speed at which newspapers operated, and the frequent inaccuracies they therefore contained because they sometimes were written by inexperienced reporters, Martin said it was a “miracle” he never had to answer a charge of libel or had any of his facts successfully challenged in his early work for Harper’s, which also included a piece on the young members of Chicago’s Polkadot Gang that robbed several taverns and killed an off-duty policeman.
 
Martin had the good fortune to have as his editor Allen, who spent considerable time offering him suggestions for improving his Haupt manuscript before its publication in the magazine’s April 1943 issue. Allen told Martin to alter his beginning, adding a reference to the initial landing of the saboteurs, “something everybody remembers and which will arouse sharp interest,” and asked him to cut some of Haupt’s pro-German sentiments, as they were too repetitive.
 
There were a few other queries and revisions he wanted Martin to review, but overall Allen said he did not believe there was anything that needed extensive revision. After seeking approval from the Office of Censorship, which Allen believed would not be a problem, as the trial was public, he said the magazine would send Martin a check for $250. Martin wrote Allen back approving the new lead, saying it “sharpens the story and hammers home its significance.” He ended his letter by noting his appreciation for the publication of his article and expressing the hope they “could click on another one before too long.”
 
Harper’s became so interested in Martin and his work that he eventually traveled to New York to meet with Allen and his associate editors—Russell Lynes, George Leighton, John Kouwenhoven, Jack Fisher, and Eric Larrabee. Martin was impressed by this group, particularly Allen, whom he described as “a slight man, so slight he looked almost frail, with sparkling eyes and a ready laugh, a wise man with an endlessly inquiring mind.”
 
Martin had read Allen’s classic book on America in the 1920s, Only Yesterday, and he eagerly learned about how to write from the way Allen edited his stories, “cutting, tightening, endlessly tightening, and pointing up.” Martin never forgot one of Allen’s pronouncements: “Never be afraid to address the reader directly, to write, ‘As we shall see,’ or ‘Let us first study the slum itself,’” something Martin often did in his later multi-part articles for the Saturday Evening Post.
 
Impressed by the work Martin had done on the Polkadot Gang article, Leighton proposed that he begin writing articles about what the editor called “crime in its social context,” taking one of his fact detective cases, expanding the piece with additional facts, getting rid of the fake detective work, and developing “the lives and social backgrounds of the criminals and their victims.”

Subsequently, crime became for Martin a way to write about his fellow human beings and their place in society. He also learned that East Coast editors felt out of touch with the rest of the country, and often asked Martin about what people cared and thought about in the Midwest. “Just as farm boys yearn to go to New York, so do New York editors yearn to know what’s on the farm boy’s mind,” he said. “Sometimes they sounded almost anxious.” As he talked to them, some of the parochial concerns he had began to fall away and Martin developed a different view of the country’s problems and politics. “From editors I got something more valuable than editing—insight and perspective,” he noted.
 

The leisurely, often luxurious trips Martin made from Chicago to New York by railroad in the 1940s remained firmly etched in his mind for years to come. For the sixteen-hour trip, he had his choice of two trains—the Twentieth Century Limited, operated by the New York Central Railroad, or the Broadway Limited, run by the Pennsylvania Railroad. Martin remembered:
 
“You went down to the railroad station and waited at the gate with the crowd and, when the gate opened, walked through clouds of steam alongside the long train, all Pullman cars, and found your numbered car, and the Negro Pullman porter in white uniform asked your space and, hearing it, called you by name and took your bag and led the way to your roomette, the tiny antiseptic room with its grey steel walls, its gleaming chrome washbowl that popped out of the wall, the heavy windows with their rounded corners, the spongy upholstery, the rust-colored blankets lettered PULLMAN, the little shoebox with a door in the aisle so the porter could get your shoes and shine them during the night and replace them gleaming in the morning.”
 
Once he had stowed his bags, Martin retreated to the bar car so he could sit with a drink and watch through the window as the heavy industrial sights of northwestern Indiana faded into the flat plains of the northern part of the state. By the time dinner was served, the train had made its way to Ohio, the state where he had been born.
 
After dinner, served on tables draped in white tablecloths and decorated with shining silverware and a bud vase with a single rose, he retired to his room to work for a time on his portable Remington Rand typewriter, usually preparing a memorandum or an outline for a story to share with an editor. “I would go to the bar car for a nightcap then back to my room,” said Martin, “pull the bed down feeling it brush my pajamas, then squeeze into bed and snap off the lights and lie in bed watching the night, listening to the soft clickety-clack of the steel wheels on the steel rails in the night, sleeping.”
 

When Martin arrived in New York, he headed for 59 West Forty-Fourth Street, the location of the Algonquin Hotel, where he always stayed, at first because of its writers’ tradition (the hotel hosted the famed Algonquin Round Table of wits, including Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Heywood Broun, Ruth Hale, and George S. Kaufman), but later because he loved its “Edwardian elegance and came to know its staff and its owner and manager.” Martin also preferred the Algonquin because of its location—the hotel was within walking distance of almost anywhere he needed to go to pursue his writing career. “Virtually the whole United States communication system was crammed into a postage-stamp-sized patch of midtown Manhattan,” he noted, including Harper’s offices on Thirty-Third Street.
 
Martin hit his stride in conducting true heavy-fact legwork for a story he did for Harper’s on the wartime mood in Muncie, Indiana, which had a reputation, thanks to studies done in the community by sociologists Robert Stoughton Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd in 1924 and 1935, as being the quintessential midwestern city.
 
For his article, “Is Muncie Still Middletown?” Martin traveled to the smoky factory town and interviewed at length union leaders, factory workers, businessmen, farmers, politicians, soldiers, college professors, and average people eating in cafeterias. “From several I drew their life stories. And repeatedly I asked: ‘What do you hear people talking about these days?’ This was the heart of my story—what Midwesterners were thinking about in wartime,” he said. Martin also believed a writer could get a more accurate sampling of public opinion through personal, lengthy interviewing than by “so-called scientific public-opinion polling.”