Edward William Bok

“ I merely ask of the American, interested as he is or should be in the Americanization of the strangers within his gates, how far the public school system, as a whole, urban and rural, adapts itself, with any true efficiency, to the foreign-born child. I venture to color his opinion in no wise; I simply ask that he will inquire and ascertain for himself, as he should do if he is interested in the future welfare of his country and his institutions; for what happens in America in the years to come depends, in large measure, on what is happening to-day in the public schools of this country. ”

“ At school, I quickly learned that to "save money" was to be "stingy"; as a young man, I soon found that the American disliked the word "economy," and on every hand as plenty grew spending grew. There was literally nothing in American life to teach me thrift or economy; everything to teach me to spend and to waste.
I saw men who had earned good salaries in their prime, reach the years of incapacity as dependents. I saw families on every hand either living quite up to their means or beyond them; rarely within them. The more a man earned, the more he—or his wife—spent. ”

“ Obstacles, to Edward Bok, soon became merely difficulties to be overcome, and he trusted to his instinct to show him the best way to overcome them. He soon learned that the hardest kind of work was back of every success; that nothing in the world of business just happened, but that everything was brought about, and only in one way—by a willingness of spirit and a determination to carry through. He soon exploded for himself the misleading and comfortable theory of luck: the only lucky people, he found, were those who worked hard. ”

“ With an editor ever alive to the new message, the new note, the fresh way of saying a thing, the new angle on a current subject, whether in article or story—since fiction is really to-day only a reflection of modern thought—the foolish notion that an editor must be approached through "influence," by a letter of introduction from some friend or other author, falls of itself. There is no more powerful lever to open the modern magazine door than a postage-stamp on an envelope containing a manuscript that says something. ”

“ Evidence there is, of course, to the contrary in American life, experiences that seem to give ground for the belief that the man succeeds who is not scrupulous in playing his cards. But never is this true in the long run. Sooner or later—sometimes, unfortunately, later than sooner—the public discovers the trickery. In no other country in the world is the moral conception so clear and true as in America, and no people will give a larger and more permanent reward to the man whose effort for that public has its roots in honor and truth. ”

“ He can go where he will: no traditions hamper him; no limitations are set except those within himself. The larger the area he chooses in which to work, the larger the vision he demonstrates, the more eager the people are to give support to his undertakings if they are convinced that he has their best welfare as his goal. There is no public confidence equal to that of the American public, once it is obtained. It is fickle, of course, as are all publics, but fickle only toward the man who cannot maintain an achieved success. ”

“ What every magazine publisher knows as the most troublous years in the establishment of a periodical, the first half-dozen years of its existence, had already been weathered by the editor and publisher. The wife as editor and the husband as publisher had combined to lay a solid basis upon which Bok had only to build: his task was simply to rear a structure upon the foundation already laid. It is to the vision and to the genius of the first editor of The Ladies' Home Journal that the unprecedented success of the magazine is primarily due. ”

“ Edward Bok does not now remember whether the mental picture had been given him, or whether he had conjured it up for himself; but he certainly was possessed of the idea, as are so many young men entering business, that the path which led to success was very difficult: that it was overfilled with a jostling, bustling, panting crowd, each eager to reach the goal; and all ready to dispute every step that a young man should take; and that favoritism only could bring one to the top. ”

“ His boyhood days had been too full of poverty and struggle to permit him to mingle with the opposite sex. And it is a curious fact that Edward Bok's instinctive attitude toward women was that of avoidance. He did not dislike women, but it could not be said that he liked them. They had never interested him. Of women, therefore, he knew little; of their needs less. Nor had he the slightest desire, even as an editor, to know them better, or to seek to understand them. Even at that age, he knew that, as a man, he could not, no matter what effort he might make, and he let it go at that. ”

“ Their Americanization consists of lip-service; the real spirit, the only factor which counts in the successful teaching of any doctrine, is absolutely missing. We certainly cannot teach anything approaching a true Americanism until we ourselves feel and believe and practise in our own lives what we are teaching to others. No law, no lip-service, no effort, however well-intentioned, will amount to anything worth while in inculcating the true American spirit in our foreign-born citizens until we are sure that the American spirit is understood by ourselves and is warp and woof of our own being. ”

“ No man has a right to leave the world no better than he found it. He must add something to it: either he must make its people better and happier, or he must make the face of the world fairer to look at. And the one really means the other.
"Idealism," immediately say some. Of course, it is. But what is the matter with idealism? What really is idealism? Do one-tenth of those who use the phrase so glibly know its true meaning, the part it has played in the world? The worthy interpretation of an ideal is that it embodies an idea—a conception of the imagination. All ideas are at first ideals. ”

“ One had merely to do all that one could do, a little more than one was asked or expected to do, and immediately one's head rose above the crowd and one was in an employer's eye—where it is always so satisfying for an employee to be! And as so few heads lifted themselves above the many, there was never any danger that they would not be seen.
Of course, Edward Bok had to prove to himself that his conception of conditions was right. ”

“ It is a very unfortunate impression that this American lack of respect for those in authority makes upon the foreign-born mind. It is difficult for the foreigner to square up the arrest and deportation of a man who, through an incendiary address, seeks to overthrow governmental authority, with the ignoring of an expression of exactly the same sentiments by the editor of his next morning's newspaper. In other words, the man who writes is immune, but the man who reads, imbibes, and translates the editor's words into action is immediately marked as a culprit, and America will not harbor him. ”

“ And when the American public gets that point of view—as it will, and, for that matter, is already beginning to do—the work of the American Y. M. C. A. will no longer suffer for its omissions, but will amaze and gladden by its accomplishments. As an American officer of high rank said to Bok at Chaumont headquarters: "The mind cannot take in what the war would have been without the 'Y.'" And that, in time, will be the universal American opinion, extended, in proportion to their work, to all the war-work agencies and the men and women who endured, suffered, and were killed in their service. ”

“ One day the question of heresy came up between the two men, and during a pause in the discussion, Bok, looking for light, turned to Doctor Briggs and asked: "Doctor, what really is heresy?"
Doctor Briggs, taken off his guard for a moment, looked blankly at his young questioner, and repeated: "What is heresy?"
"Yes," repeated Bok, "just what is heresy, Doctor?"
"That's right," interjected Doctor Patton, with a twinkle in his eyes, "what is heresy, Briggs?" ”

“ The editor is the pivot of a magazine. On him everything turns. If his gauge of the public is correct, readers will come: they cannot help coming to the man who has something to say himself, or who presents writers who have. And if the reader comes, the advertiser must come. He must go where his largest market is: where the buyers are. The advertiser, instead of being the most difficult factor in a magazine proposition, as is so often mistakenly thought, is, in reality, the simplest. He has no choice but to advertise in the successful periodical. ”

“ Poor Abbey! His life had been made so tortuous by suggestions, ideas, yes, demands made upon him in the work of the Harrisburg panels upon which he was engaged, that a commission in which he was to have free scope, his brush full leeway, with no one making suggestions but himself and Mrs. Abbey, seemed like a dream. When he explained this, Bok assured him that was exactly what he was offering him: a piece of work, the subject to be his own selection, with the assurance of absolute liberty to carry out his own ideas. Never was an artist more elated. ”

“ It is this lesson that the American business man has still to learn: that no man can be wholly efficient in his life, that he is not living a four-squared existence, if he concentrates every waking thought on his material affairs. He has still to learn that man cannot live by bread alone. The making of money, the accumulation of material power, is not all there is to living. ”

“ The public does not give credit to the editor, particularly of the modern newspaper, for the high code of honor which constantly actuates him in his work. The prevailing notion is that an editor prints all that he knows, and much that he does not know. Outside of those in the inner government circles, no group of men, during the Great War, had more information of a confidential nature constantly given or brought to them, and more zealously guarded it, than the editors of the newspapers of America. Among no other set of professional men is the code of honor so high ”

“ It was this consciousness of a void ready to be filled that made the Philadelphia experiment so attractive to the embryo editor. He looked over the field and reasoned that if such magazines as did exist could be fairly successful, if women were ready to buy such, how much greater response would there be to a magazine of higher standards, of larger initiative—a magazine that would be an authoritative clearing-house for all the problems confronting women in the home, that brought itself closely into contact with those problems and tried to solve them in an entertaining and efficient way ”

“ It is a wonderful inner personal satisfaction to reach the point when a man can say: "I have enough." His soul and character are refreshed by it: he is made over by it. He begins a new life! he gets a sense of a new joy; he feels, for the first time, what a priceless possession is that thing that he never knew before, freedom. ”

“ Whatever shortcomings I may have found during my fifty-year period of Americanization; however America may have failed to help my transition from a foreigner into an American, I owe to her the most priceless gift that any nation can offer, and that is opportunity. ”

“ Where would the human race be were it not for the ideals of men? It is idealists, in a large sense, that this old world needs to-day. Its soil is sadly in need of new seed. Washington, in his day, was decried as an idealist. So was Jefferson. It was commonly remarked of Lincoln that he was a "rank idealist." Morse, Watt, Marconi, Edison—all were, at first, adjudged idealists. We say of the League of Nations that it is ideal, and we use the term in a derogatory sense. But that was exactly what was said of the Constitution of the United States. ”