Edward W. Bok

(click to enlarge)
Edward Bok, photograph by Pirie MacDonald, 1909. (credit: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

(born Oct. 9, 1863, Den Helder, Neth. — died Jan. 9, 1930, Lake Wales, Fla., U.S.) Dutch-born U.S. editor. Raised in a poor immigrant family in Brooklyn, N.Y., Bok pursued a career in book and magazine publishing. As editor of the Ladies' Home Journal (1889 – 1919) he devised departments to inform women on diverse subjects and led campaigns for public health and beautification. His decision to stop accepting patent-medicine advertising helped bring about the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906). He also broke the taboo against the printed mention of venereal disease. His last years were devoted to working for civic improvement and world peace. He wrote a notable autobiography, The Americanization of Edward Bok (1920, Pulitzer Prize).

For more information on Edward William Bok, visit Britannica.com.

A longtime editor of the influential magazine "The Ladies' Home Journal", Edward W. Bok (1863-1930) embodied the ideals of Progressive Era America. Espousing free enterprise, civic responsibility, and the ideals of American womanhood, Bok was one of the best-known magazine editors of his day. He also wrote a series of books which included his Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography, "The Americanization of Edward Bok".

Ahousehold name in America during his editorship of The Ladies' Home Journal from 1889 until 1919, Edward W. Bok built the magazine into one of the most successful publications of its era. Moreover, Bok used his position to encourage a number of reforms ranging from civic beautification to sex education. He also used his pulpit to speak out on issues that included Americanization programs for immigrants, a limited role for women in the nation's political life, and the continued promise of free enterprise to alleviate the problems of poverty. In his retirement, Bok maintained his high profile by writing a series of books, one of which, The Americanization of Edward Bok, won the Joseph Pulitzer Prize in 1921. Bok was also actively engaged in philanthropic work throughout his life. In addition to endowing professorships in literature and government, he also sponsored the American Peace Prize to encourage the participation of the United States in international affairs. Bok died in 1930, but his legacy lived on through his sons, one of whom served on Pennsylvania's Supreme Court, and his grandson, Derek Bok, who was named president of Harvard University in 1971.

Emigrated from The Netherlands

Edward William Bok was born on October 9, 1863 in the Dutch city of Helder. The Boks were one of the leading families of the Netherlands: Edward's grandfather served as the chief justice of the Supreme Court and his father, William J.H. Bok, was a well connected diplomatic figure in the Dutch government. Unfortunately, Bok's father lost much of the family's fortune with a series of bad investment decisions. Seeking a fresh start, the family moved to the United States when Bok was six years old. Making their new home in Brooklyn, New York, Bok and his younger brother were enrolled in the city's public schools, even though they did not speak English. Later writing of the difficulty in adjusting to his new life as an American schoolboy, Bok referred bitterly to this experience as the beginning of his Americanization.

With the constant financial difficulties of his family, Bok contributed to the family coffers by performing whatever odd tasks would bring in some money. The strain on the family became so great that at the age of thirteen Bok left school for good to work as a messenger for Western Union. As he recalled in his book Twice Thirty, "There was no choice. My father, a stranger to American ways, could not readjust himself at his age to the new conditions of a strange country. My mother had not the health to endure housework; she had not been brought up to it. There was nothing for us boys to do but to get out and help to make the domestic machinery run a bit easier." Indeed, his father, who never achieved the success he had hoped for in America, died when Bok was eighteen, leaving the two sons to support their mother. By that time, Bok had decided to enter into a career in publishing. The ambitious young man began reporting for the Brooklyn Eagle in addition to taking classes to sharpen his office skills. After working as a stenographer for the New York publishing house of Henry Hold and Company in 1882, Bok started to edit the Brooklyn Review, a magazine affiliated with the Plymouth Church of renown minister Henry Ward Beecher. Taking advantage of his connection to the famous preacher, he founded the Bok Syndicate Press in 1886 to sell feature articles that included essays by Beecher. Adding to his responsibilities, Bok also worked for another New York publishing house, one founded by Charles Scribner. Bok rose to the position of head of advertising at Scribner's; still in his early twenties, it seemed that the once poor immigrant was a true American success story.

Success with The Ladies' Home Journal

In 1889 the young advertising director was offered a position as head of the editorial and art departments at a new magazine, The Ladies' Home Journal. The magazine had first appeared as a supplement to the weekly Tribune and Farmer, a journal aimed squarely at the rural market. Its founders, Cyrus and Louisa (Knapp) Curtis, expanded the supplemental women's section into the Ladies' Home Journal and Practical Housekeeper in December 1883 and by 1889 the magazine had about 440,000 subscribers. Eventually, the magazine dropped the "Practical Housekeeper" from its name. The Curtises decided to refocus their publication away from its rural audience and appeal to the growing middle-class, urban market.

Bok's first challenge at The Ladies' Home Journal was to reshape the magazine into a far more prestigious publication than it was perceived to be. He actively solicited advertisements for luxury products while gradually purging the pages of solicitations for products such as patent medicines of dubious medical value. Bok and the Curtises also attempted to link the magazine with the wealthiest families in urban centers across the United States in their presentations to advertisers. The efforts paid off, and The Ladies' Home Journal quickly cast off its image as a rural publication aimed at farmers' wives. Once the image makeover had been substantially completed, the publishing team worked at increasing its circulation to reach a broader urban and suburban audience. In 1891 The Ladies' Home Journal reached the 600,000 mark in paid subscriptions; the figure passed one million subscribers in 1903. By fashioning itself into an upper-class publication accessible to the mass market, the magazine became one of the first to capture a middle-class readership aspiring for upward mobility and respectability.

With the groundbreaking success of The Ladies' Home Journal, Bok became something of legend in the magazine field by the time he was thirty years old. He married Louise Curtis, the daughter of Cyrus and Louisa Curtis, on October 22, 1896. Making their home in the Philadelphia area, the center of Curtis Publications, the young couple raised two sons: William Curtis Bok was born in 1897 and Cary William Bok arrived in 1905. The elder son, who went by his middle name, eventually served on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and was the father of Derek Bok, who became the president of Harvard University in 1971.

Typified Progressive Era America

As an influential magazine editor and frequent contributor to The Ladies' Home Journal, Bok typified many of the sentiments of the Progressive Era of American history, a period that spanned the years from 1890 to World War I. At a time of explosive growth, as immigrants arrived by the hundreds of thousands, many Americans were concerned at the possible effects on the social, economic, and political life of the country. The far-reaching effects of industrialization and mass marketing also seemed to threaten the established social order. In response, Progressive Era leaders called for a variety of reforms; although few argued for a fundamental overhaul of American institutions, the period was nevertheless marked by a nationwide preoccupation with reform measures.

Considering the target audience of his magazine, Bok was especially concerned with the role of women in American life and their participation in keeping the country safe and sound in a turbulent era. Like many of his contemporaries, Bok esteemed the American woman as a source of morality and virtue in the nation's life through her role as mother and wife, a point of view that later historians described as the cult of true womanhood. Notwithstanding the moral authority of American women, however, Bok did not believe that women should play an active role in public life. He opposed extending the vote to women; as he wrote (in the third person) in The Americanization of Edward Bok, "He felt that American women were not ready to exercise the privilege intelligently and that their mental attitude was against it." Indeed, Bok favored the idea of noblesse oblige, or leadership by the privileged for the benefit of the masses, when it came to governance. Writing in Twice Thirty, Bok stated, "Those who were born under favorable conditions should be leaders of men and the doers of things, provided they take their America right and see its people truly."

Although he had become a citizen as a child at the time of his father's naturalization, Bok's attitude toward other immigrants was a contradictory one. He always took pride in his Dutch heritage, writing about it at length in his personal reminiscences. However, Bok was convinced that other immigrant groups posed a threat to American life, especially to native-born women and children. He expressed concern, for example, that foreign-born men such as Greek vendors could take sexual advantage of American women, and that Irish-born nannies did not have the innate control over their temperaments to raise American children properly. Despite these misgivings, however, Bok avoided most of the worst ethnic stereotyping of the day. Indeed, as a magazine that steered clear of the most controversial topics, The Ladies' Home Journal rarely covered inflammatory subjects such as race relations, prison reform, or poverty. One typical call for reform included demands for better labeling laws in food and drugs to assure consumers of their purity. Other appeals attempted to convince communities to undertake civic beautification drives and to reform the public schools. An exceptional reform crusade in Bok's final decade as editor was his encouraging of educators to take up sex education as a civic responsibility and to safeguard the health of women and children.

Won the Pulitzer Prize

In the wake of World War I, Bok's persistent calls for reform fell out of step with the times. With Americans retreating from international involvement after the war, many sensed that the era of domestic reform had also ended. Stepping down from the editorship of The Ladies' Home Journal in 1919, Bok's passage also seemed to mark the end of an era. However, he did not disappear from public sight once his days as an editor were over; if anything, his role as a reformer picked up pace in the last decade of his life.

In 1921 Bok published The Americanization of Edward Bok, an autobiography that topped the bestseller lists. Bok also received the Joseph Pulitzer Prize for his book, which recounted the author's many triumphs over adversity through hard work, persistence, and optimism. Indeed, the entire tome read as an homage to the free enterprise system and the ability of individuals to become successful by taking advantage of their own talents in the land of opportunity. Bok followed the prize-winning volume with another book of autobiographical sketches, Twice Thirty, which was regarded as somewhat more revealing of the author's life.

In 1923 Bok donated $100,000 to the American Peace Prize, a contest to develop a plan that would engage America in international affairs and prevent another world war. Bok also donated money to endow professorships at Princeton University and Williams College, and undertook philanthropic efforts to beautify the city of Philadelphia. He spent much of his retirement time in Florida, where he created a nature preserve in Lake Wales that opened in 1929. One year after the dedication of the preserve, Bok died in Lake Wales on January 9, 1930.

Books

Bok, Edward W., The Americanization of Edward Bok: The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1921.

Bok, Edward W., Twice Thirty: Some Short and Simple Annals of the Road, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925.

Steinberg, Salme Harju, Reformer in the Marketplace: Edward W. Bok and The Ladies' Home Journal, Louisiana State University Press, 1979.

Periodicals

Saturday Evening Post, September-October 2001.

Online

"Edward William Bok: Founder of Bok Tower Gardens," Bok Tower Gardens Web Site,http://www.boktower.org/bok.html (October 23, 2001).

(1863-1930), editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. In 1870, when Edward was six years old, the Bok family left a comfortable life in the Netherlands to immigrate to the United States. When his family suffered financial reverses, Edward quit school after six years to go to work. By his early teens, however, he was visiting and corresponding with famous literary, religious, and political figures, including presidents of the United States. And before the age of twenty, this born entrepreneur was publishing a magazine and syndicating articles nationally.

In 1889, Bok accepted an offer from Cyrus H. K. Curtis to become editor of the Ladies' Home Journal; the two built the Journal into the world's most widely circulated magazine. During Bok's reign, from 1889 to 1919, the Journal led the industry, making many innovations, including high-quality illustrations and printing techniques, a different cover for each number, and extensive marketing research. In addition, the Journal's policy of reporting accurate circulation figures served as the basis for new federal regulations in this area.

Balancing his personal principles with the demands of advertisers and the interests of subscribers was usually not a problem for Bok. His intellectual and artistic tastes harmonized closely with those of his middle-class readers in everything from fashions, home design, and etiquette to literature and secular ethics. It is unclear whether the magazine was reflecting opinion or molding it--probably both.

Nevertheless, Bok occasionally risked offending some of his subscribers and advertisers in order to champion causes he favored. The most significant of these were a crusade against patent medicines, a campaign promoting frank sex education for children by their parents, and a series advocating progressive educational reforms. During World War I, the Journal worked closely with federal agencies to enlist women's support on the home front.

On one major issue, however, Bok's personal views became anachronistic; that issue, ironically, was women's role in society. Early in his tenure, Bok assailed the New Woman, insisting that women's proper sphere was the home and entreating them to fulfill their divinely ordained roles as wives, mothers, and homemakers. But American women did not listen; indeed, during these years they made more advances than at any earlier time. To maintain his magazine's popularity, Bok had to yield. By the early teens he had ended his attacks on the New Woman and was publishing articles and short stories praising her. During World War I, the Journal's endorsement of female employment in industry erased the final vestiges of genteel womanhood from the magazine. This shift was testimony to the magnitude of the shift in the public's perception of woman's place in society as well as to Bok's expediency.

In retirement, Bok was justifiably proud of his role in improving the quality of American magazines, advancing the reforms he had crusaded for, molding middle-class attitudes, and supporting the war effort. He was not proud, however, that when the American woman had brazenly stepped down from her pedestal, he had given her a helping hand.

Bibliography:

Edward William Bok, The Americanization of Edward Bok: The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After (1920); Salme Harju Steinberg, Reformer in the Marketplace: Edward W. Bok and "The Ladies' Home Journal" (1979).

Author:

Michael D. Hummel

See also Feminist Movement; Magazines and Newspapers.

Quotes:

"A young person, to achieve, must first get out of his mind any notion either of the ease or rapidity of success. Nothing ever just happens in this world."

Edward William Bok in the frontispiece to his autobiography, A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After

Edward William Bok (9 October 1863 – 1930) was a Dutch born American editor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. He was editor of the Ladies Home Journal for thirty years. Bok is credited with coining the term, living room as the name for room of a house that had commonly been called the parlor or drawing room.

Contents 1 Life and career 2 Published works 3 References 4 External links

Life and career

He was born in Den Helder, The Netherlands. At the age of six, he immigrated to Brooklyn, New York, USA, and became an office boy with the Western Union Telegraph Company in 1876. In 1882, he began work with Henry Holt and Company, and then, in 1884, he became involved with Charles Scribner's Sons, where he eventually became its advertising manager. From 1884 until 1887, Bok was the editor of The Brooklyn Magazine, and in 1886, he founded The Bok Syndicate Press.

After moving to Philadelphia in 1889, he obtained the editorship of Ladies Home Journal, when its founder and editor, Louisa Knapp Curtis, stepped down to a less intense role at the popular, nationally-circulated publication. It was published by Cyrus Curtis, who had an established publishing empire that included many newspapers and magazines.

In 1896 Bok married Mary L. Curtis, the daughter of Louisa and Cyrus Curtis. ^[1] She shared her family's interest in music, cultural activities, and philanthropy and was very active in social circles.

During his editorship, the Journal became the first magazine in the world to have one million subscribers and it became very influential among readers by featuring informative and progressive ideas in its articles. The magazine focused upon the social issues of the day. It also became the first magazine to refuse patent medicine advertisements.^[2] In 1919, after thirty years at the journal, Bok retired.

In 1923, Bok proposed the American Peace Award^[3].

In 1924 Mary Louise Bok founded the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, which she dedicated to her father, Cyrus Curtis, and in 1927, the Boks embarked upon the construction of Bok Tower Gardens, near their winter home in Mountain Lake Estates, Lake Wales, Florida, which was dedicated on February 1, 1929 by the president of the United States, Calvin Coolidge. Bok Tower sometimes is called a sanctuary and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a National Landmark. Bok is used as an example in Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People."^[4]

Bok is credited with coining the term, living room as the name for room of a house that was commonly called a parlor or drawing room. This room had been traditionally been used only on Sundays or for formal occasions such as the displaying of deceased family members before burial. Bok believed it was foolish to create an expensively furnished room that was rarely used, and promoted the new name to encourage families to use the room in their daily lives. He wrote, " We have what is called a 'drawing room'. Just whom or what it 'draws' I have never been able to see unless it draws attention to too much money and no taste..." ^[5]

His 1920 autobiography, The Americanization of Edward Bok, won the Gold Medal of the Academy of Political and Social Science and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. Edward W. Bok died on January 9, 1930.^[6])

Published works

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Edward W. Bok

• Successward (1895)
• The Young Man & The Church (1896)
• Her Brother's Letters (1906)
• Why I Believe in Poverty (1915)
• The Americanization of Edward Bok (1920)
• A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After, edited by John Louis Haney (1921)
• Two Persons (1922)
• A Man from Maine (1923)
• Twice Thirty (1925)
• Dollars Only (1926)
• You: A Personal Message (1926)
• America Give Me a Chance (1926)
• Perhaps I Am (1928)

References

1. ^ Hamersly, Lewis R. (1904). Who's who in Pennsylvania: A Biographical Dictionary of Contemporaries. L.R. Hamersly & Co.. p. 66. http://books.google.com/books?id=HFADAAAAYAAJ&dq=cyrus+curtis&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0. 
2. ^ 30. Cleaning Up the Patent-Medicine and Other Evils. Bok, Edward William. 1921. The Americanization of Edward Bok
3. ^ http://americanpeaceaward.org/index.html
4. ^ He appears in Part Two, Chapter 4 ("How to Become a Good Conversationalist").
5. ^ Anonymous. The Living Room is Born. Ladies Home Journal, 125(6) 12.
6. ^ Anonymous (4 October 1948). "Ladies' Choice" (in English). Time. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,799257,00.html. Retrieved 24 May 2009. 

External links

• Works by Edward William Bok at Project Gutenberg
• Edward Bok profile at Internet Accuracy Project
• Successward (1895) full text digitized online version from the University of Michigan Library MBooks.

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