Where Life Is Better: An Unsentimental American Journey (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Where Life Is Better: An Unsentimental Ameri...)
Excerpt from Where Life Is Better: An Unsentimental American Journey
To most of them I was almost or wholly unknown. When I told them that I would be able to Spend four days, perhaps a week in that community, they Shrugged. Mine was a fantastic enterprise. It would take at least four months, they assured me, to Obtain an approximate understanding of that one community. After which they proceeded, with a generosity for which I cannot be too grateful, to give me much more of their time than they could afford; to give me the benefit Of their own informed expertness which in most cases I must keep anonymous because they were often talking off the record. Newspaper men, especially, know infinitely more than they can print.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
(Excerpt from Our Master's Voice Advertising
Two basic de...)
Excerpt from Our Master's Voice Advertising
Two basic definitions will perhaps assist the reader to understand the scope and intent of this book.
The advertising business is taken to mean the total apparatus of newspaper and magazine publishing in America, plus radio broadcasting, and with important qualifications the movies; plus the advertising agency structure, car card, poster, and direct-by-mail companies, plus the services of supply: printing, lithography, engraving, etc. which are largely dependent upon the advertising business for their existence.
The advertising technique is taken to mean the technique of manufacturing customers by producing systematized illusions of value or desirability in the minds of the particular public at which the technique is directed.
The book is an attempt, by an advertising man and journalist, to tell how and why the traditional conception and function of journalism has lapsed in this country. It describes the progressive seizure and use, by business, of the apparatus of social communication in America. Naturally, this story has not been "covered", has not been considered fit to print, in any newspaper or magazine dependent for its existence upon advertising.
In attempting to examine the phenomenon of American advertising in the context of the culture it became necessary to examine the culture itself and even to trace its economic and ideological origins. This enlargement of scope necessitated a somewhat cursory and inadequate treatment of many detailed aspects of the subject.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
James Rorty was a 20th-century American radical writer, poet and self-described "last of the muckrakers".
Background
James Hancock Rorty was born March 30, 1890, in Middletown, New York to Richard McKay Rorty, who ran a small grocery store, and Octavia Churchill. His father, an Irish nationalist, had fled British persecution, and Rorty grew up under the formidable influence of Richard Rorty's political convictions.
Education
Rorty attended high school and later Tufts College in Medford, Massachussets, earning a bachelor's degree in 1913.
For the next few years he lived in New York City and pursued a number of eclectic interests, briefly studying at both New York University and the New School for Social Research.
Career
While still in high school, he worked as a reporter on the Middletown Daily Times Press.
In 1913, he began his career with work in the advertising industry. He also worked in settlement houses.
Despite his emerging socialist politics, which had anarchist overtones, Rorty volunteered to serve in World War I and became a private in the ambulance service, carrying stretchers in the Argonne Forest. His work earned him the Distinguished Service Cross and also made him a pacifist.
After returning from Europe, he rmoved to San Francisco. By day he worked in advertising; at night he wrote experimental poetry.
In 1924, Rorty returned to New York City in order to join the staff of The New Masses. A founding editor, he left the magazine the following year after clashing with his colleagues over the publication of a poem by his West Coast friend Robinson Jeffers.
For the rest of the 1920's, he returned to the familiar pattern of writing advertising copy by day and verse in his free time. He published two volumes of poems, What Michael Said to the Census-Taker (1922) and Children of the Sun (1926).
Rorty's brief sojourn at The New Masses marked the beginning of his radical political career. In 1927, he was arrested for protesting the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Boston. In 1932, he became secretary of the League of Professionals for Foster and Ford, an organization promoting the election of the Communist party's candidates for president and vice-president. But he was not comfortable with the Communists' sectarian philosophy modeled on the Soviet Union and left them in 1934 for the American Workers' Party, more attuned to American circumstances.
His 1936 book, Where Life Is Better, challenged the Communist party line by asserting that the American masses were not especially revolutionary. By the late 1930's, Rorty was a mainstay of the oppositionalist Marxist movement and active in two important anti-Stalinist organizations, the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky and the Committee for Cultural Freedom.
In 1934, he published Our Master's Voice. His 1939 book, American Medicine Mobilizes, was an attack on the American Medical Association. He also wrote Tomorrow's Food (1946) with N. Philip Norman, The American Fluoridation Experiment (1957), and dozens of articles concerned with health, nutrition, ecology, and consumer affairs.
During the 1940's, Rorty moved toward the center politically. From 1946 to 1949, he was a consultant for the Tennessee Valley Authority, authoring two of its pamphlets, "Food at the Grass Roots" and "Soil, People and Chemical Engineering. " Another government agency, the Voice of America, employed him as a scriptwriter, but after a loyalty hearing, he lost his job in 1951 because of his radical past. Yet he was a Republican and avowed anti-Communist in the 1950's.
He belonged to the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, which opposed totalitarianism at home and abroad. In 1954, he coauthored a book for the ACCF, McCarthy and the Communists, with Moshe Decter. The work expressed the anti-Communist view of McCarthyism but denounced extremism, staying within bounds of traditional civil liberties while investigating potential security threats.
During the 1950's, Rorty wrote both fiction and nonfiction. He produced articles on organized labor and civil rights as well as poetry and plays. A severe mental breakdown in 1962 left him unable to write. In 1971, he published an anthology of his poems, Selected Poems, 1930-1970. Rorty died in Sarasota, Florida.
Rorty married Maria Ward Lambin on the 20th of September 1920. His first brief marriage ended in divorce. The same year, he married Winifred Rauschenbusch, daughter of the Christian socialist reformer Walter Rauschenbusch, in the spring of 1928. Their only child, Richard Rorty, who became a noted philosopher, was born in 1931.