Edward W. Bok Encourages All Young Men To Be Honest, Rich and Spiritual
Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis started life with three cents. He accumulated a fortune. All his life he founded or bought papers doomed to failure, but never once did he fail. He hates details but can easily grasp them. He is a master of business but it has not enslaved him. He loves big things. He works hard. He enjoys vacations. He has always been scrupulously honest. He is a perfect judge of men. His associates and employees adore him. Cyrus H. K. Curtis is public-spirited. He is spiritual-minded. He never took music lessons but can play the organ marvellously. He has a very big yacht. The above is the substance of what his son:in-law, Edward W. Bok, has vouchsafed to the American public in regard to Mr. Curtis. Mr. Bok does not call his book— a biography, and only the lacerated imagination of book reviewers could call it such. Mr. Curtis must have made one mistake; he probably sinned once. Neither the mistake nor the sin is even remotely referred to. And for a very good reason: the book is not a biography; it is a moral treatise. The moral is directed to all young men now entering business. " Look at Mr. Curtis," it says on every page. " He started with zero, he was honest, he found business to be a glorious adventure, he made a lot of money. You can do the same! Look at Mr. Curtis! He did it! " How, is never explained.
Edward W. Bok, aglow with a poetic and moral enthusiasm for business, fairly slaps the young man on the back and says: " Character, my boy! Honesty is the best policy."
The person who comes to this book most anxious to learn something about Mr. Curtis will be the person who is most likely to be disappointed. The biography of this magnificently capable publisher remains to be written.
The outline of Mr. Curtis' life is:
1850: Born in Portland.
1863: Started his own paper, Young America, with privately accumulated capital of $5.
1875: Married a lady who later gave him the idea of The Ladies' Home Journal, which he founded in 1883 with his wife as editor.
1897: Purchased The Saturday Evening Post, which he built up on the idea that business men wanted to read about the romance of business
1911: Having filled the " women's " and " men's" fields, he bought The Country Gentleman to fill the " farmer's " field.
1913: Purchased the Public Ledger from Mr. Adolph Ochs, owner of The New York Times, because he wanted it to be owned by Philadelphia capital. Lost $1,000,000 on it and then began to break even.
He was a pioneer in his insistence upon clean and true advertising. He even eliminated from The Ladies' Home Journal all cosmetics advertisements because he did not approve of rouge.
He Wants Facts
Ambassador George Harvey, who at the age of 27 was Managing Editor of The New York World, is going to turn reporter again. He will seek the facts in the English farm strike, which he considers the most important current problem in Great Britain.