Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 11

Fortune Magazine in the 1930s

found it difficult to live on $25,000 a year in Chicago. That this
perspective was uniquely geared to Fortune's affluent readership is
evident by the budget figures, which show that only $15,000 of the
$25,000 was earned from a job; the remaining $10,000 was "revenue
from Securities." One of the largest single expenditures, moreover,
was for servants.^ ^ Also popular in these early issues were features
on notable business personalities. This first issue included one of Mr.
Gamble of Procter and Gamble, a personal acquaintance of Henry Luce.
By way of contrast, the contents for the July 1935 issue of Fortune
contained only seven feature articles. Only two could be described as
corporate stories, one a richly illustrated feature on Anheuser-Busch
and the other on U.S. Smelting and Refining. Fortune pointed out that
each of these com panies had been helped by Roosevelt
administration policies: Anheuser-Busch by the end of Prohibition
and U.S. Smelting by the June 1934 Purchase of Silver Act. Fortune
described Clarence A. Hight, the President of U.S. Smelting, as "rockribbed and Republican" and pleased by the fact that his company
had become so profitable. He reportedly grieved, however, that this
was due to the hated New Deal's direct intervention in the silver
market.
The remaining five articles include a piece on cotton that
heavily emphasizes the effect of Henry Wallace's government
funded crop-reduction program, and a 15,000-word portrait of Harry
Hopkins, close adviser to F.D.R. and Administrator of the
controversial Federal Emergency Relief Act, whom Fortune describes
as an "Iowan, veteran of twenty years of social work, student of Keats,
fungi, and psychoanalysis, spender of $4,880,000."^^ Another lengthy
article, including a number of specially conunissioned paintings by a
noted artist, is on the restoration of colonial Williamsburg.
The final two articles in the July 1935 issue merit special mention.
One is the first of a ground-breaking series of three articles on
"Women of Business" which discusses in detail what is described as
the "feminization of the American office, a phenomenon not
duplicated anywhere else in the world."^^ There is a detailed,
surprisingly late 20th century-sounding recount of the Women's
Movement as "a struggle for liberation as conceived by the
intelligentsia who, generally speaking, were already economically
free."