A magazine editor is a man who says "Sit down," then knits his brows for five minutes, and suddenly brightens as he exclaims, "Why don't you do us a series like Mr. Dooley?"
In his book Average Americans, Theodore Roosevelt comments on the fact that all classes and conditions of men were to be found in the ranks of the American army—waiters, chauffeurs, lawyers. He adds:
"A lieutenant once spoke to me after an action, saying that when he was leading his platoon back from the battle one of his privates asked him a question. The question was so intelligent and so well thought out that the lieutenant said to him: 'What were you before the war?' The reply was 'City editor of The Cleveland Plain Dealer.'"
The story does not surprise us. Years before the war we maintained that if ever a catastrophe great enough to shake the world came along a certain appearance of intelligence might be jarred loose even in city editors.
Henry Ford, so the story goes, called upon the editor of his magazine The Dearborn Independent to ascertain how things were going.
"We're too statistical, I'm afraid," said the editor. "Of course we can try and get that sort of stuff over by putting it in the form of how many hours it takes to turn out enough end-to-end Fords to reach from here to Shanghai and back, but that sort of thing has been done before. It doesn't take the curse off. What we need is some good, live fiction."
"All right," replied Mr. Ford, "let's have fiction."
"It's not as easy as all that," objected the young editor. "There's very keen competition among all the magazines for the fiction writers, and I'd need a pretty big appropriation to get any of them."
"Why not get some of the bright young men on the magazine to write us some fiction?" suggested Ford.