Few & far between are the books on U. S. politics which really sell and make money. Most publishers suppose the public is not deeply interested in its national scene. The House of Putnam considers its Mirrors of Washington by Clinton Wallace Gilbert highly successful because 62,891 copies have been sold in ten years. When in 1926 Samuel Hopkins Adams cast the scandals of the Harding era into fiction, his Revelry found 96,000 buyers. Frank Richardson Kent's tart, authoritative The Great Game of Politics has sold but 8,660 copies in four years.
Last week, however. Publisher Horace Liveright concluded that he had what promised to be a political best-seller in his anonymous Washington Merry-Go-Round. In six weeks it had sold 36,000 copies. The Mirrors of 1932, put out a few days earlier by Brewer. Warren & Putnam (TIME. July 20), had accounted for less than half as many sales. Merry-Go-Round was even making legitimate news squibs: President Hoover was trying to identify its authors; Senator Borah headed the Library of Congress list of those waiting for a copy.
Not only for Mr. Liveright but also for a small group of Washington correspondents who composed it was Merry-Go-Round making money. Briskly and irreverently, they had set forth the gossipy details of Washington social and political life in a manner new and interesting to those not intimately familiar with the capital. While their characterization of individuals was a matter of opinion, the basic facts of which they wrote were passing into national history.
Merry-Go-Round was born among a coterie of newsmen known as the Georgetown Group who gather periodically at each other's homes to discuss the state of public affairs. Liberals at heart, they are dissatisfied with the political times and Merry-Go-Round is the expression of their dissatisfaction. Those who either wrote chapters of the book or materially contributed ideas and information are supposed to include (though each diplomatically denies it) Farmer Murphy and Drew Pearson of the Baltimore Sun, Robert S. Allen of the Christian Science Monitor, George Abell of the Washington Daily News, Charles Ross and Paul Y. Anderson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Ray Tucker of the New York World-Telegram and Ruby Black, freelance.
Washington society is dissected under a chapter entitled "Boiled Bosoms" with the Gann-Longworth and McLean-de Ligne feuds recounted (TIME, Dec. 15 et ante, May 13, 1929). Tittle-tattle: Bachelor Senator Tydings of Maryland playing "footie" with sedate ladies; Mrs. Trubee Davison, wife of the Assistant Secretary of War, smoking a pipe; Daisy Harriman trimming Senator Walsh's walrus-like mustache.
President Hoover is flayed as an executive who failed to come up to expectations in a national emergency (TIME,
March 2). He is accused of "incompetence, do-nothingness and reactionary stultification." Four reasons for this result are advanced: 1) The Hoover myth of a superman, built on propaganda; 2)