Imitation is more than just a sincere form of flattery. It is a way of life, and more importantly a way of improving life. Most of the pivotal advances in technology, art and culture throughout human history can be credited to the sharing of ideas between widely different groups of people. By traveling from one head to another, new ideas are developed and refined in ways that the original inventor could scarcely have imagined.

Modern numerals originated in India and traveled through Arabia to Europe, where they enabled the development of modern science centuries later. Tea was first cultivated in China, but migrated to Europe in the 16th century and eventually, with the addition of milk and sugar, became a quintessential aspect of English culture. A Japanese cartoonist named Osamu Tezuka was inspired by a childhood fascination with Disney films from America to create his own art style, which later returned to the U.S. in the form of anime and influenced a new generation of American cartoons. None of these innovations can be attributed to one culture exclusively; they are all the result of cross-cultural pollination.

Among the other products of this cultural interchange, we can count one of the most subtly influential revolutions in modern history: the rise of Japan after World War II from a savage and humiliating defeat to become one of the world’s wealthiest and most influential nations. After many years of trying to push the Western world and its culture away, Japan ultimately succeeded by imitating the best ideas the West had to offer and adding a few of its own. In the process, it relied on the advice of many American business experts, including a pioneering engineer and statistician named W. Edwards Deming.

Deming was born in 1900 in Sioux City, Iowa, and grew up on a chicken farm belonging to his grandfather. With parents who had both received a university education, he was encouraged in his academic pursuits and ended up enrolling in the University of Wyoming when he was still 17 years old. After graduating with a BA in electrical engineering he continued his education, studying mathematics at the University of Colorado and Yale. By the early 1940s Deming was a recognized expert in statistics and quality-control techniques, and had begun to work for the U.S. Census Bureau.

Deming’s work on the census, as well as several wartime lectures he had given on the subject of applied statistics, drew the attention of General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers during the U.S. occupation of Japan. MacArthur was disturbed and frustrated by the disorganization of Japan’s post-war economy, which made it nearly impossible to keep communication and supply lines open. This was an especially grave concern in a country where many citizens were still homeless and starving, desperately in need of supplies that the existing infrastructure struggled to bring them. MacArthur was convinced that Deming’s expertise would be essential in fixing these problems, so in 1947 he asked Deming to come to Japan and lead two critical projects: the upcoming 1951 Japan Census and an educational program to teach modern business methods to the Japanese.

Deming, MacArthur, and everyone else trying to rebuild Japan at this time faced a grim prospect. Nearly half of the country’s industrial plants had been destroyed in the war, with staple industries like cotton having been particularly hard-hit. Production levels of basic commodities sank to where they had been fifteen years before, but the country’s population was almost 10% higher than in 1930. The public mood was dismal, summarized by many with the word kyodatsu, literally “exhaustion”. The only hope for Japan was to rebuild as quickly as possible, with as few mistakes as possible.

Fortunately for Japan, avoiding mistakes was precisely what Deming knew how to do. Statistical process control, which he had used during the 1940 U.S. Census to cut errors down to a bare minimum, was exactly what the country’s new factories needed. He also advocated continual improvement of manufacturing processes, better product testing methods, and the use of foreign market surveys to establish a global customer base. Many diverse factors contributed to the post-war “economic miracle” that began at this time, but this new way of doing business would prove decisive in establishing a competitive advantage that Japan would maintain for the next half-century.

Using Deming’s new methods, Japan rapidly moved up the ranks of manufacturing nations over the next several decades. During the years of the U.S. occupation Japan had been seen by most Americans as a producer of cheap toys and ceramic knickknacks, but a decade after the occupation that image had changed radically with the advent of Japan’s world-class transistor radios and motorcycles. By the late 1970s Japanese automobiles, musical instruments, electronic calculators and industrial equipment, among much else, were considered equal to anything made in Europe or the United States.

Japan was so successful, in fact, that the countries it had copied were now starting to fall behind. During the 1980s, many American companies found themselves outcompeted by Japanese firms and responded by imitating the techniques used in Japan. Total Quality Management and Toyota’s “just-in-time” production system became hot topics in the business world, and later inspired home-grown American programs such as Motorola’s Six Sigma. Just like Walt Disney’s big-eyed animated characters, the business concepts pioneered by W. Edwards Deming had travelled to Japan, adapted to their new home, and then returned in a different form.

Many countries across the world, including the United States, are in the middle of troubling economic developments right now. Factories have been shuttered, international trade has shriveled, and unemployment has skyrocketed. Many of us, for the first time in our lives, now have to adjust ourselves to a smaller and more constricted economy, just as Japan did in 1945. In such trying circumstances, it would be easy for us to feel exhausted and hopeless as well.

However, maybe what we need, more than financial help, is simply a new way of doing things. Japan got itself out of the doldrums by abandoning its conservatism and accepting new ideas from far away. It took advantage of the diversity of ideas that prevails across the world, and in the process leapfrogged the competition. The brilliant new solution to our current predicament doesn’t necessarily have to come from overseas. It might be struggling to express itself in some obscure corner of your own country. It might be in your own organization, buried underneath the weight of tradition and social pressure. It might even be in you. But to benefit from that idea, we have to find it first, and be willing to use it no matter how foreign it appears.

In the words of an American TV program from 1980:

If Japan Can…Why Can’t We?

When Sir Isaac Newton famously conceded, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”, he was appealing to an image of progress that had been shared by many other scientists before him, dating back to the twelfth century. Even today it’s quite a common belief that science advances by a gradual process of building more levels onto an existing edifice, taking the conclusions of the past and adding our own to them in order to get closer to the truth. This belief, however, is misleading, because it assumes that brilliant people never make mistakes. What happens when those intellectual giants are facing the wrong way, and the cleverness of their theories is only a distraction from those theories’ essential flaws?

Copernicus’ heliocentric view of the universe, for instance, was violently opposed not only because it contradicted the Church’s interpretation of scripture, but also on the grounds that it differed from the opinion of the greatest astronomical authority of the ancient world: Ptolemy of Alexandria. Ptolemy’s geocentric system was elegant, mathematically rigorous and intuitively appealing. It also happened to be wrong, but accepting that fact meant throwing out centuries of scholarly additions to the Ptolemaic theory, so many intellectuals simply refused to do so. Aristotle, another insightful ancient thinker, was so respected by medieval philosophers that for many centuries every one of his observations was regarded as an infallible truth; this even though Aristotle was responsible for his fair share of erroneous ideas, perhaps the silliest of which was his belief that women had fewer teeth than men.

For the true scientist, working to separate truth from speculation, one of the thorniest obstacles to overcome is actually the work done previously by other scientists. A great deal of science is based on incomplete or false information, and attempts to correct errors are often met with hostility by those who, whether out of financial interest, intellectual prejudice or personal pride, would rather let the error stand. And this was precisely the problem faced by the first astronomer to correctly identify the elemental composition of the stars, a woman whose revolutionary ideas would never have come to light if certain authorities had had their way.

Cecilia Payne was born on May 10, 1900 in Wendover, Buckinghamshire. Her father, a prominent London barrister, died when she was only four years old, leaving her mother to raise three children alone. Payne was interested in math and science, but unable to get much training in either field at the schools she attended as a girl. In 1918, however, she was able to transfer to St. Paul’s Girls’ School, where one of her teachers, the renowned composer Gustav Holst, suggested she take up a musical career. She preferred to focus on the opportunities the school gave her to study the physical sciences, and a year later this choice paid off when she won an all-expenses-paid scholarship to Newnham College at Cambridge.

While at Cambridge, Payne attended a lecture by the astronomer Arthur Eddington that opened up a fascinating new world of study right before her eyes. Hoping to find concrete evidence of Albert Einstein’s revolutionary theory of general relativity, Eddington had travelled in 1919 to the west coast of Africa to photograph the stars next to a total eclipse of the sun. As he explained to the assembled students, the experimental results had confirmed Einstein’s theory and all its strange implications. Payne’s whole view of the universe and how it worked was altered over the course of that lecture. In fact, she later claimed that the experience nearly drove her to a nervous breakdown. This was no doubt the spark of inspiration that eventually led to her question several of the fundamental astronomical beliefs of her time.

Payne finished her course of study, specializing in physics and astronomy, but was not awarded a degree. Hers was far from a unique situation, as Cambridge (like many other universities until well into the 20^th century) officially did not give degrees to female students. However, it did put her into a difficult predicament. With no degree, opportunities for further research were closed off to her. If she stayed in the United Kingdom, her only real option would be to teach in a secondary school; even becoming a university professor would be out of the question. This led her to one of the most momentous decisions of her life: moving to the United States to take advantage of a newly-created women’s fellowship at the Harvard College Observatory. Only the second woman ever to be admitted under the program, she would study under the observatory’s director, Harlow Shapley.

Shapley encouraged Payne to write a doctoral thesis and pursue a PhD in astronomy, which she eventually obtained in 1925 from Radcliffe College. Drawing on the latest discoveries of the pioneering Indian astrophysicist Meghnad Saha, Payne devoted her dissertation to the absorption and emission of light spectra by stars. Among her many observations, the most groundbreaking was her estimate of the elemental composition of stars, which suggested that they were composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium.

Today this observation is widely known to be true, but in Payne’s day it ran contrary to the expectations of most established astronomers. The prevailing theory at the time, based on the work of astronomical authority Henry Rowland, was that the Sun had almost exactly the same elemental composition as the Earth, and that the differences in their spectra were entirely due to temperature. Henry Norris Russell, another leading light of American astrophysics, had written only a decade before that if the Earth were heated to the same temperature as the Sun, it would give off practically the same light.

The errors of the past weren’t going to go down without a fight. Russell himself got in contact with Payne and urged her to leave the elemental composition figures out of her dissertation. After all, if those estimates disagreed with the current scientific consensus, then surely there must be some mistake in them that simply slipped Payne’s mind at some point. Looking back, we can see how narrow-minded and self-serving this argument was, but we have the advantage of scientific certainty that neither Russell nor Payne had at that time. As it happened, Russell successfully convinced Payne that her figures were incorrect; in the published dissertation, she presents the estimates but describes them as “spurious”. Only a few years later, however, new experimental data confirmed that Payne had been essentially correct and the established authorities had been wrong. Russell, to his credit, admitted that he had made a serious mistake, and in a 1929 paper he credited Payne for opening his eyes to the truth.

Contradicting the scientific authorities wasn’t the only daring or dangerous thing Payne did in her life. In 1934 she visited the Leningrad Observatory in the U.S.S.R. as well as research institutions in Germany, all in pursuit of better data. On this trip she encountered a Russian astronomer named Sergei Gaposchkin, who had left Russia because of political persecution and now faced ethnic persecution from the newly-formed Nazi government. Moved by his plight, Payne petitioned the U.S. government to give him asylum; later that year the two were married.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin had the kind of mind that belongs in science. Throughout her long career at Harvard, she constantly sought out the latest and most advanced research from around the world, paying little attention to the cultural trappings of its source. She worked hard, and constantly, to establish a foothold in an academic community infamous for its tacit sexism, in the process becoming Harvard’s first female astronomy professor and department chair. Her example was inspirational to more than a few modern academics, because it shows that ultimately it’s the quality of a person’s ideas, and not their status, that counts.

Next (and Final) Post: The “economic miracle” of the 1950s and ‘60s that pulled a war-torn and impoverished Japan up to become the second largest economy in the world, and its principal architect, the American engineer W. Edwards Deming.

As a branch of the liberal arts, logic often gets short shrift from the general public. Few university students take classes in logic unless they’re required to. Popular culture mostly ignores it, preferring to draw inspiration from broader fields like physics and psychology. Although formal logic has a history that goes nearly as far back as philosophy itself, the term “philosopher” suggests a brilliant thinker unraveling the enigmas of the universe, while “logician” conjures up the image of a dry-as-dust bookworm who somehow makes even the simplest concepts confusing.

Much of this repugnance towards logic apparently stems from its close association with higher-level mathematics, which many students find intimidatingly complex.  But math wasn’t introduced into logic with the goal of making it more confusing; in fact, it was just the opposite. So-called “Boolean algebra”, a concept best known today for its use in Internet search engines, was originally developed to simplify logic and make its rules clearer. This logic is so simple, in fact, that even a digital logic gate, which only recognizes two “ideas” (open or closed), can understand it. Hundreds of millions of these gates are using Boolean algebra in your computer right now, which is why it’s working, and it’s all thanks to the accomplishments of an obscure English logician who never saw a computer in his life.

George Boole was born on November 2, 1815 in Lincoln, the county town of Lincolnshire. His father, who worked as a shoemaker, was a lover of science and the liberal arts, and under his tutelage young George became a wide-ranging scholar as well, despite receiving only a primary school education. He had a particular fascination for languages, both modern and ancient. At the age of 14 he penned an English translation of a poem originally written by the ancient Greek author Meleager, which was published in the Lincoln Herald. Soon afterward, one of the paper’s correspondents wrote an indignant letter to the editor claiming that the translation had been plagiarized. The man had no evidence for this accusation other than the self-evident (as far as he was concerned) fact that no 14-year old boy could possibly have written it. This was the first time that one of Boole’s achievements would be dismissed as impossible because of classist bigotry and narrow-mindedness; it would not be the last.

The passion that Boole’s father had for amateur intellectual pursuits did have one rather unfortunate downside: he wasn’t a very good businessman. By the time he was 16 his father’s shoemaking business had nearly collapsed, leaving the burden of supporting the family on his shoulders. Characteristically, he chose to work as a teacher in nearby schools, and a few years later he took the risky and ambitious step of opening his own in Lincoln. At an age when many of us were still attending school, Boole was running one.

Remarkably, Boole was able to make a success of his small day school while also continuing his own education almost entirely outside the academic system. With his thorough knowledge of French, German and Latin he was able to read the works of many great mathematicians in the original, which often did more to help him understand their theories than any university could have done. In 1841 he managed to get one of his papers published in the Cambridge Mathematical Journal, and many other publications followed. By the age of 30 he had already become a prominent mathematician, even receiving a gold medal from the renowned Royal Society for a paper discussing ways to combine the methods of algebra and calculus. However, this accolade didn’t come easily; many of the Society’s members felt that a man with no academic background wasn’t a proper scientist, and the paper had to be submitted twice before its merit was recognized.

Up to this point, Boole had been noted primarily as a mathematician and schoolmaster, not a logician. However, this would all change in 1847, when he published an essay titled “The Mathematical Analysis of Logic”. In the essay he argued that logic, which had traditionally been treated as a branch of philosophy, could be dealt with more effectively if it was considered as a branch of mathematics, particularly by using the methods of algebra. In the process he reduced the possible “values” of logical statements to two numerical alternatives, either 1 (“true”) or 0 (“false”). Although Boole could hardly have known it at the time, his “binary logic” anticipated by a century the technology which benefited most from its existence: the modern digital computer.

The rewards which Boole received for his contributions were, like the man himself, modest. In 1849, he was appointed Professor of Mathematics at Queen’s College in Cork, Ireland. The job came with a salary of £250 a year (equivalent to around £30,000 today), but very little increase in status; he had no assistant and graded all his students’ work himself, just as he had while running his own school. More impressively, in 1857 he was elected to a fellowship in the Royal Society, as one of its few fellows with no university education. The principal reward he received, which mattered to him far more than money or status, was the esteem and kudos of his fellow researchers.

However, Boole was not a monomaniac obsessed with science to the detriment of everything else. He spent a great deal of time on social causes, particularly the promotion of intellectual resources for the working classes. One of his favorite causes was the Mechanics Institute, an educational institution created to educate adult men in technical subjects. On top of his promotion of charitable education, he also campaigned for the reduction of laboring hours in city shops, as well as supporting the pro-democracy Chartist movement in the 1850s. Among the many famous scientific personalities of the 19^th century, Boole stands out not as an eccentric genius with a one-track mind, but rather as a true philanthropist in the vein of Andrew Carnegie.

George Boole was a man who brushed right past the class-based barriers that stood in the way of his goals. His early dedication to amateur intellectual pursuits, which would have struck many at the time as a foolish indulgence, became in his hands a way to climb the ladder of success. Despite never attending a university, he became a respected professor at one for many years, as well as a pioneer of thought whose work commanded the attention of those who read it. Back when he was a 14-year old boy publishing poetry in a local paper, it may have been possible to deny his genius; in the middle of his career, there were still some who doubted his credentials; but now, after his theories have produced one of the most transformative technological revolutions in history, he cannot be ignored.

Next Post: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, the obscure astronomer whose thesis on the elemental composition of the Sun was so revolutionary that established authorities couldn’t (and wouldn’t) believe it.

If we were to compare our own lives with the lives of people who lived at the turn of the last century in the United States, the first things that would come to our attention would be the many differences that separate us from them. Our early 20th-century counterparts wore different clothes, ate different food, listened to different music and even spoke quite differently from us. On the other hand, if we were inclined to dig a little deeper, we would also discover a strong resemblance to life as we know it. Middle-class citizens of that time had office jobs in the city, long commutes to work, trips to the movie theater, picnic excursions on the weekend, and many other experiences that would be familiar to us.

Go even deeper than this, however, to the most basic conditions of society, and we again find differences, differences that are much more fundamental than the clothes we wear or the food we eat. One of the most striking of these is the presence of domestic service as an institution. It was not at all unusual for a middle-class bachelor of the 1910s to employ a cook to make his meals for him, and when he married and had children his household would generally include numerous other servants to do a wide range of daily chores. Today, primarily because of improvements in the average standard of living, only the wealthiest members of society employ personal servants, and the services once performed by them are now generally done either by the families themselves or outside the home by professionals.

For several decades, however, there was an awkward period of transition during which many found themselves struggling to do the things which they had grown up expecting that someone else would do. One of the most taxing, since it had to be done three times a day and often for a demanding “client”, was cooking. Domestic appliances were of some help, but what the housewives of the early 20th century really needed was good advice and moral support. They found both in one of the best-selling cookbooks in the history of the world, The Joy of Cooking, a work which is all the more remarkable because its author, Irma S. Rombauer, had no formal training in the culinary arts; in fact, according to most of her close friends, she wasn’t even a particularly good cook!

Rombauer was born Irma von Starkloff on October 30, 1877 in St. Louis, Missouri. The daughter of a prosperous doctor, she grew up in affluent surroundings and was introduced to high society at a young age. Although she showed an interest in the fine arts, with a few art courses at Washington University constituting her entire university education, her real passion appears to have been entertaining and acting as a hostess. In 1899 she married Edgar Rombauer, a prominent local attorney, and for the next three decades she spent much of her time planning events for their friends and business associates.

Edgar was a successful and hard-working man who shared many interests with Irma, even teaching her how to cook early in their marriage; unfortunately, he also had a very sensitive and melancholic disposition that occasionally turned self-destructive. Professional frustrations and personal concerns caused him to experience many episodes of severe depression, including one which occurred only a few years after they married, in 1902. This came to a head in the fall of 1929, when he suffered a complete nervous breakdown. Although the rest of the family believed that he had recovered from this attack of nerves a few months later, he was still deeply troubled, and on February 3, 1930, while alone in the house, he took his own life by shooting himself in the head.

Rombauer was devastated by this loss, and she found herself at both an emotional and a financial loose end. The ravages of the Great Depression had wiped out most of her savings, and with an unemployment rate of almost 9% (and steadily growing higher by the day) this was not an easy time for anyone to get a job, let alone a middle-aged woman who had never been in the workforce before. Her two children were already grown up, with one living hundreds of miles away and the other planning to move after an upcoming marriage. For the most part she was on her own, with no obvious way out of her predicament. So instead she hit upon a way that was not so obvious: writing a cookbook.

This came as a surprise to most of her friends and family. Rombauer had never been known for the quality of her cooking. Her success in hosting parties had mostly been due to her personal charm and talent for making conversation. Cookbooks at this time were generally seen as manuals for making the best meals possible; how could a person who barely knew how to cook make a great cookbook?

Her solution was to change the idea of what a cookbook was for. Rombauer’s new book was to be informal and relatable, not stuffy and didactic as previous cookbooks had been. Instead of treating the reader as a student to be instructed, she spoke on the same level as her audience, sharing personal anecdotes and humor along with the recipes. Throughout the book she adopted a lighthearted tone, treating cooking as a hobby, not as tiresome drudgery that has to be endured for the sake of the finished product. This new approach was reflected in her book’s title, The Joy of Cooking: a Compilation of Reliable Recipes with a Casual Culinary Chat.

Rombauer privately published the original Joy of Cooking with the last of her savings, and she and her daughter personally sold the initial run of 3,000 copies, first to their acquaintances and then through small bookstores and gift shops in the St. Louis area. By the summer of 1932 it had become a modest success, encouraging her to seek a publisher for a new, expanded edition. In 1935 her manuscript was finally accepted by the Bobbs-Merrill Company of Indianapolis, which had never published a cookbook before. Rombauer and Bobbs-Merrill had a tempestuous partnership, with the publisher initially wanting to cut out her anecdotes even though they were the main selling point of the book; however, they did promote the book heavily, and it soon grew into a bestseller.

For many decades The Joy of Cooking was a staple of American culture, popular as a wedding gift because it did such a good job of explaining cooking to people with little experience or skill. Thanks to numerous updates by Rombauer, and later by her daughter Marion, it was able to keep up with new cooking trends while retaining the affable charm that was its claim to fame. In modern times it has arguably been superseded, first by cooking magazines and then by recipes shared on the Internet, but take a look at the style in which many of those recipes are written and you’ll note an obvious debt to the legacy of Rombauer’s original cookbook.

Irma Rombauer’s great contribution to the art of cooking was to make it about more than just the food. She recognized that any activity which takes up such a large part of a person’s day ought to be enjoyable as well as productive, a social activity and not a tedious chore. For centuries cookbooks had been primarily focused on the pleasure of the eater, practically ignoring the cook’s needs. But in the modern world of self-service, the cooks often are the eaters, so they want to enjoy themselves in both capacities. And thanks in part to books like The Joy of Cooking, they can.

Next Post: George Boole, the self-taught mathematician whose pioneering work in applied logic, the famous “Boolean algebra”, paved the way for modern computer coding.

Among the many fictional characters who rub shoulders with real historical figures in the pages of E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel Ragtime, one who stands out as particularly heroic is Tateh, a Latvian Jew who immigrates to the United States in search of a better life for himself and his young daughter. Artistically gifted, but poor and with no connections, he manages to make a meager living selling paper silhouettes in the street, until one day a passerby notices him working on a flipbook of silhouettes and offers to buy it for a high price. Although Tateh had made the book as a gift for his daughter, he agrees to sell it to the stranger and uses the profits to buy materials for more flipbooks. This business proves enormously successful and leads him to further innovations, until eventually he becomes a pioneering animator and director as well as one of the richest characters in the story.

In many ways Tateh comes across as a composite of many different immigrants’ experiences in America, yet whether by chance or intention his story also bears a strong similarity to one famous immigrant’s life in particular. Like Tateh, this man was a Jew from Eastern Europe who came to the U.S. hoping to find a better life; like Tateh, he struggled to provide for his young family and suffered repeated financial setbacks; and, like Tateh, his success was the result of a critical contribution to the motion picture industry that brought him wealth and prominence beyond his wildest dreams. This real-life protagonist of today’s story is the cosmetician Maksymilian Faktorowicz, better known to the world as Max Factor.

Factor was born on September 15, 1877 in the town of Zduńska Wola, near Lodz in central Poland. His father’s occupation is not precisely known, but what is certain is that he was a poor man who could not afford formal education for any of his children. Instead, like most boys of his time, Factor was apprenticed at an early age, first to a dentist and pharmacist and then to a wig-maker and cosmetician. He proved to have a knack for working with cosmetics, and by the age of 14 he had gone to Moscow to work for a leading makeup artist whose clients included the Tzar’s own opera company. After four years of this work, followed by a compulsory four-year term in the Russian army as a nurse, he finally felt prepared to open a shop of his own in the city of Ryazan.

From this point on Factor’s career looked like it could go nowhere but up. His shop was successful, and the quality of his cosmetics was so widely respected that within a few years he was appointed official cosmetician to the royal family itself. But there were dark clouds on the horizon. Factor could never forget, even in his moment of triumph, that he was a Polish Jew in a country that seethed with bitter and widespread anti-Semitism. This traditional race hatred expressed itself publicly through occasional pogroms in which Jews would have their homes and property destroyed by angry mobs, who at the same time assaulted them in the streets and even murdered them with no fear of prosecution. In 1903 and 1904 a series of particularly violent riots had shaken Factor deeply and convinced him that, despite the success he had built up in Russia, in the long run it held nothing for him but misery. Following the example of his brother and uncle, who had emigrated several years before, he decided to move with his young family to St. Louis.

Factor landed in the U.S. with a fair amount of money saved from his successful cosmetics business, but circumstances soon conspired to take it away from him. Factor spoke almost no English, leaving him dependent on associates to make business deals on his behalf. Even after he acquired a rudimentary grasp on the language, he spoke with a thick Eastern European accent that made it easy for any con artist to identify him as an easy mark. He discovered the truth of this for himself at the 1904 World’s Fair, when after doing a brisk business for several days he realized that the “business partner” who had found him a space at the exhibition had also cut and run with all of his profits. At a loose end, he turned to his American relatives, who loaned him the money to start a barbershop in St. Louis.

However, Factor had no intention of spending the rest of his life cutting hair. In 1909 he moved to Los Angeles, California to resume his original career, making wigs and cosmetics for actors, but now it would be for the budding motion picture industry instead of theater. And movie actors needed the help, because at the time there was no makeup in use that could deal with the unique challenges of film. Traditional theater greasepaint, which was the standard both on stage and in front of the camera, would crack and flake off as actors moved their faces; this was never a problem when the audience was twenty feet away, but a movie close-up would reveal every imperfection. Actors would often whip up their own homemade concoctions to give their faces a more natural appearance on camera, but nothing worked well enough to become the new standard.

His first innovation was a more flexible form of greasepaint that could stretch with the actor’s face. This quickly became popular with film actors, who felt that the new makeup allowed them to put their talents to full use. Within a few years, Factor was being consulted by directors for help with a multitude of tricky visual problems, like designing false eyelashes to draw more attention to an actress’s eyes, or creating fake sweat to make an actor’s athletic stunts look real on screen. And when films started to be made in color, making all of his old black-and-white makeup obsolete, he responded by producing what is still his company’s most famous product: the lightweight, natural-looking foundation he called Pan-Cake.

Factor’s glamorous products didn’t take long to leap from the screen to the marketplace. As early as 1916 he began marketing eye shadow and eyebrow pencils to the general public, breaking the precedent of selling these products only to actors. By the early 1920s he was selling a full range of professional-grade cosmetics across the country, promising that anyone who put the time and effort in could look like a movie star. His pioneering Pan-Cake foundation was a fixture not merely on Hollywood sets, but also on dressing tables all over the United States; a few years after its launch, a survey estimated that nearly a third of American women used it. In a sense, the whole phenomenon of mainstream fashion adopting the unique looks of famous actors, from Joan Crawford’s lips in the 1930s to the “Rachel” haircut in the 1990s, stems from Factor’s unique approach to marketing.

Just like many of the protagonists in the films he helped bring to life, Max Factor was a man who hitched his wagon to a star. Even when he struggled to make ends meet, his mind was never far from the world of drama that he had observed from behind the curtain for practically his entire life. The unique looks which he devised for some of Hollywood’s biggest stars showed the world that true glamour has as much to do with taste as it does with natural endowments. With his line of cosmetics he hoped to prove that any woman could look beautiful, just as his own life story demonstrates that anyone, from any background, can be successful.

Next Post: Irma S. Rombauer, who responded to the stress and financial concerns that followed her husband’s suicide by penning one of the most popular cookbooks of the 20^th century, The Joy of Cooking.

Talent is something that’s easy to recognize retrospectively. We look back and see the great things that certain people have accomplished, and we infer from this that they must have been quite talented. Many people’s careers, however, depend on their ability to do something far more difficult: spotting the potential of people whose greatest work is still to come. You can find professionals doing this in practically every industry, from movie producers in Hollywood to hiring managers in major corporations, but a less prominent figure who often does exactly the same job is the magazine editor.

It’s sometimes said that behind every great man you will find a great woman. The truth behind this truism is that all talented people depend on the support and encouragement of those around them, and writers are no different; they depend on editors and publishers who understand them and drive them to do their best. During the flowering of black literature in New York City known as the Harlem Renaissance, there were many young and ambitious writers who needed this kind of help more than ever, and fortunately they had a champion close at hand: the editor of NAACP’s magazine The Crisis, Jessie Redmon Fauset.

Jessie Fauset was born on April 27, 1882, in what is now Lawnside, New Jersey. She grew up as part of the large, interracial family of Redmon Fauset, a Methodist minister, and his second wife Bella; Jessie’s own mother had died just a few years after giving birth to her. The family was poor but placed great stock by education, like many church families at the time. Jessie lived up to her parents’ aspirations by becoming an exceptional student. Her grades were impressive enough to earn her admission to the newly integrated but mostly white Philadelphia High School for Girls, where she would graduate at the top of her class.

Fauset now hoped to move on to the prestigious Bryn Mawr College, even though it had never accepted a black student before. In a remarkable display of soft racism, Bryn Mawr chose to spare itself the trouble of debating her admission by applying on her behalf for a scholarship at Cornell University and advising her to go there instead. Interested more in the quality of her education than the prestige of her school, she took the scholarship and studied classical languages at Cornell.

After graduating, the next obvious career step for a woman in Fauset’s circumstances was to teach for several years, but here she ran into a snag. Ironically, her home of Philadelphia, which had been one of the first cities to promote the integration of students, apparently had no interest in integrating the faculty who taught them. Fauset was unable to find a teaching position in any Philadelphia school, and ultimately accepted a position at the segregated M Street High School in Washington, D.C., where she taught French and Latin for more than a decade.

While working as a language teacher, Fauset also continued her education and wrote in her spare time. Starting in 1912, she began submitting pieces to The Crisis, a new magazine funded by the NAACP and edited by its most prominent founder, the writer and social activist W.E.B. Dubois. Dubois was impressed by her writing, and he urged her to join the magazine’s staff to improve its still embryonic literary section. After several years of correspondence, Fauset agreed to become The Crisis’ literary editor in 1919.

The timing couldn’t have been more opportune. The previous year had seen the end of World War I and the return of normal life in the United States, and the response from New York City’s populace was an outpouring of literature. 1918 is widely considered to mark the beginning of the “Harlem Renaissance”, the first African-American literary movement to receive national attention, and Fauset was right in the thick of it. For seven years she filled the pages of The Crisis with the work of New York’s greatest writers, like the introspective poet Countee Cullen and the envelope-pushing novelist Claude McKay. At the same time she put out several of her own novels about black identity and society. For both her own work and the pieces she edited, her standards were the same: write what you know, don’t resort to clichés or stereotypes, and keep your characters and stories true to life.

Although Fauset was involved in the publishing industry for nearly two decades, one of her greatest accomplishments was also one of the most short-lived. In late 1919, she collaborated with Dubois to expand the yearly “children’s issue” of The Crisis into an independent publication, to be called The Brownies’ Book. Dubois and Fauset were both concerned about the stereotypical and prejudiced depictions of African Americans in children’s fiction, when it even included them at all. In place of this, they hoped to tell black children stories about the real history and achievements of black citizens, to give them confidence in themselves and role models to emulate.

As literary editor of The Brownies’ Book, Fauset would provide an inviting and entertaining complement to Dubois’ editorial content, which like most of his work for The Crisis tended to be rather dry and factual. The new monthly magazine, the first in history aimed at a young black audience, was one of the most ambitious projects either of them had ever attempted; it may, in fact, have been too ambitious to last. The Brownies’ Book launched in January of 1920 and continued until December of 1921, when financial concerns caused it to be reabsorbed by The Crisis. Although the magazine was short-lived, its influence on literature was surprisingly and subtly profound. To give an example, among the pieces Fauset published in her literary section were the first published poems by a young writer who would later rise to the top of the Harlem Renaissance pantheon: Langston Hughes.

Before Jessie Redmon Fauset arrived at The Crisis, the magazine was not well known for publishing literature, and after she left in 1927 it mostly abandoned literature as a focus; because of this, it was easy for the general public to slowly forget the editorial force it had once been. Fauset continued to teach and write long after she left the publishing industry behind, but because she wasn’t a devotee of the limelight she allowed her fame to slip away. However, no one should confuse this lack of self-promotion with unimportance. Although Fauset’s name is not well known, the revolutionary literature which she promoted and produced is a fixture of modern American culture. In a world obsessed with talent and fame, we would do well to remember that behind every great work there is more than one great worker.

Next Post: Max Factor, the Polish-American cosmetician whose long and difficult career began in poverty at the age of eight and ended in national acclaim.

In this series we’ve looked at many entrepreneurs whose hard work resulted in small victories, which then built the groundwork for greater success in the future. However, as we recount these successes we should bear in mind that failure is also a major part of the entrepreneurial experience. Around 20% of new businesses in the United States fail within their first year of operation. By the time five years have passed, that figure rises to about 50%. Entrepreneurship is a process of experimentation, and no matter what field one is in there are always experiments that don’t pan out.

Laws which allow a debtor to declare bankruptcy are not often considered a lynchpin of the economy, but in many ways the modern business landscape would not be possible without them. Before these laws existed, the state’s usual approach to debtors was to throw them in prison to work off their debt, a brutal and often ineffective punishment that ruined the lives of many over a simple reversal of fortune. Such a fate would have prevented the eventual rise of many of America’s greatest citizens, including the future presidents Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman, as well as the subject of today’s story.

Simon Bergerson Klæve was born on September 9, 1851 in Gausdal, a small town in southern Norway. In his mid-teens his family immigrated to the United States, settling in Black River Falls, Wisconsin and in the process changing their surname to “Benson”. Simon Benson worked as a farmhand and logger for several years, carefully saving his money in the pursuit of a typical American dream: running his own business. By age 24 he had saved up enough to open a general store in nearby Lynxville, which did well for several years.

Then, one day, a fire broke out in his store and destroyed everything: the building, his merchandise, and all the money he had invested in it. Benson, who by this time was married and had an infant son to take care of, was left destitute. All he had left was his knowledge of the logging industry, which he determined to put to good use by moving his family to Portland, Oregon, the center of a rapidly growing timber industry. Benson flourished in Oregon, building up the capital he needed to acquire timberland and go into business for himself.

Benson introduced several innovations into the business that lowered his operating costs significantly. The traditional method of logging up to his time had been to use teams of oxen to drag logs across makeshift “skidroads”, greasing the logs’ path to speed up the process. Benson replaced the skidroads with narrow-gauge railroads, and the oxen with “steam donkeys”, small industrial winches that could work all day and all night. He was the first operator in Oregon to adapt these new technologies to the logging industry, and within a decade his new approach had made him a very wealthy man. His most revolutionary invention, however, came more than a decade later, in response to the booming population of turn-of-the-century California.

In 1906, Benson decided to build a sawmill in San Diego to provide timber to southern Californian cities. He faced a serious problem, though: San Diego, unlike the heavily forested Pacific Northwest, had practically no raw lumber to be milled. Benson had to find a way to economically transport thousands of tons of wood from his logging operations in Oregon to southern California. His solution was a “log raft”, constructed from hundreds of huge logs held together with heavy chains. Log rafts had been used on a small scale to transport lumber down rivers for decades, but Benson was proposing to build massive rafts, nearly an acre in size, and haul them across the ocean.

Many onlookers shook their heads, certain that his rafts would break up and sink, bankrupting him in the process. In the event, only two of the 120 rafts he eventually built were lost, and the venture turned out to be an immense success that lowered lumber costs and sustained the California building boom for the next decade. Benson had proven that he had extraordinary business acumen in every part of the lumber industry, from tree to log to board.

However, Benson’s astuteness wasn’t limited to his business ventures. He also put it to work for philanthropic purposes later in his life. In 1913, for instance, he was pitted against the Portland-based developer George Wetherby in a dispute over the nearby Multnomah Falls. Wetherby, who had leased the land around the waterfall for several years, wanted to build a hydroelectric power plant there; Benson, along with many of Portland’s citizens, wanted to preserve the falls’ beautiful natural scenery and keep the land from being developed. Rather than engage in a lengthy legal battle, he simply purchased the land from its original owner and donated the title deed to the city, allowing the falls to be turned into a public park.

The same year, Benson used charity to solve one of his own labor issues. For many years he had observed some of his workers showing up to the factory drunk. To Benson, who was a teetotaler, this was a disturbing sight that raised concerns about the quality of his employees’ work. After a bit of reflection, he concluded that punishing the offending workers wouldn’t eliminate the source of the problem. Instead, he proposed to take the opposite approach: offer the beer-drinkers a free alternative. With this in mind, he offered Portland’s government $10000 to install public water fountains throughout the city. These unique “Benson bubblers” are still an icon of downtown Portland, and provide over 100,000 gallons of drinking water to the city’s residents every day.

Simon Benson was a lifelong entrepreneur. Even after “retiring” in the 1920s, he soon got involved with property management and began a second career that lasted the rest of his life. However, he was far from a narrow-minded businessman, focused only on profits and the bottom line. He was never afraid to invest his money in the community, taking his dividends in the form of increased civic spirit and greater opportunities for his fellow citizens. It is telling that of the West Coast “timber barons” who made fortunes in the logging industry, only Benson is remembered to any considerable extent today.

Next Post: Jessie Redmon Fauset, the novelist and editor who rose from humble origins to become a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance.

When the historian Alexis de Tocqueville visited the young United States in the 1830s, one of the facets of American life that left the deepest impression on him was the variety and intensity of opinions held by citizens from every walk of life, expressed both in conversation and in print. “In America”, he later wrote, “there is scarcely a hamlet which has not its own newspaper”. Tocqueville also observed that Americans were very proud of their freedom to print whatever they believed to be the truth, regardless of the disapproval of those in power. He concluded that, as in other aspects of American life, the attitudes of its citizens toward their “free press” sprang from a firm attachment to democratic principles.

Many papers have names that evoke this democratic spirit, such as the popular “Tribune”, a reference to the officials in ancient Rome whose role was to protect the common people against governmental abuses. The Chicago Tribune was one of the first American newspapers to give itself this aspirational name, back in the 1840s when the greatest and most controversial issue dividing the nation was slavery. Half a century later Chicago would witness the rise of a second national newspaper dedicated to the cause of civil rights for African-Americans, although this one dispensed with classical allusions and cut straight to the point; it was called the Chicago Defender, and its founder was the chronically poor but relentlessly active Robert Sengstacke Abbott.

Robert Abbott was born in Saint Simons, an island off the coast of Georgia, on November 24, 1868. His father, Thomas Abbott, died of tuberculosis less than a year later, leaving him in the care of his mother Flora. Abbott’s relatives, who disliked Flora, sued for custody of the child, but with the help of a recent German immigrant, John Sengstacke, she won the suit. Five years later the two married, and as Robert’s stepfather Sengstacke would strongly influence the boy’s development.

John Sengstacke was a mixed-race child himself. His parents were a slave woman and a German ship captain who had purchased her freedom. As an adult John worked as a Congregationalist minister and a schoolteacher, and later in life would publish a small journal called the Woodville Times. Abbott admired his stepfather’s intellectual accomplishments, and among many odd jobs he performed as a boy one of his favorites was a stint as a “printer’s devil” for a local newspaper. Although he would try many different lines of work in his career, the press and its possibilities were never far from his mind.

However, it would be a long time before Abbott found a niche for himself. He studied printing at the Hampton Institute, graduating in 1896, and later worked part-time as a schoolteacher, but even into his late 20s he still had not settled into a career. Disillusioned by his lack of success, he traveled to Chicago and studied at the Kent College of Law hoping to become a lawyer. He managed to earn a Bachelor of Law degree, but unfortunately there was an obstacle in his way, one which most people today would rightly dismiss but which in his own time was insurmountable: his appearance.

Abbott had been discriminated against for his dark skin, even by other black children, for most of his life. Unlike fairer-skinned people, who were generally perceived as smarter and better, and who could sometimes even “pass” as white, he showed unmistakable signs of his Gullah racial heritage. Abbott had been the only black student in his class at Kent, and when he graduated only five black lawyers had ever been admitted to the Illinois bar. One of these men, the fair-skinned Edward H. Morris, personally warned him that the prejudices of his neighbors would make a career in law practically impossible. In the end, Abbott gave up his dreams of a legal career and returned to his first calling: the press.

Abbott worked at several low-ranking printing jobs over the next several years, but his goal was always to publish his own newspaper. Finally, in 1905, he used his meager savings to start the Chicago Defender. Chicago at this time already had several well-established newspapers aimed at a black audience, and this amateur upstart had seemingly little chance of displacing them. But Abbott was a tireless promoter, travelling across the city to hawk his four-page paper and hear the latest news for his next edition. For seven years he personally folded and distributed issues of the Defender, until finally in 1912 it established a presence on Chicago’s newsstands.

The principal appeal of the Defender was its fiery, sensationalist editorial stance. Abbott reported on the afflictions of the black community with indignant outrage, denouncing lynchings in the South, the concentration of vice in black neighborhoods in the North, and the persistence of ugly race prejudice everywhere. Thanks to the assistance of Pullman porters working on trains across the nation, the Defender soon outgrew Chicago and reached a nationwide readership eager to hear what was going on in the rest of America. Like the “grapevine telegraph” that spread messages through the antebellum South, the Defender became an institution in black households hundreds of miles away from its hometown.

Abbott’s most cherished cause was the “Great Migration” which brought black workers and families out of the southern states and into the large industrial cities of the North. Although he admired Booker T. Washington and his ethic of black self-improvement, Abbott differed from Washington in his opinion of where opportunities for that self-improvement existed. Through the Defender, he shared stories of struggling black families who had found success in Chicago and other northern cities, advice on how to migrate and establish oneself in a new city, and editorials urging his readers to take a stand against social and economic discrimination. He was so successful in promoting migration that many southern towns censored and banned the Defender, hoping to keep black residents from moving. Great as its financial success was, the paper’s true success was its ability to stir the hearts and minds of readers; at its peak circulation, historians estimate that every copy purchased was read by around four other people.

Like many successful entrepreneurs, later in life Abbott retired from his work to become a philanthropist. Extending his interest in black enfranchisement to children, in 1923 he founded the Bud Billiken Club, named after a popular mascot of the time who represented good luck. One of the first black youth organizations, the club was a focal point for his charitable interests and survived him as his principal legacy to the world. The club’s annual Bud Billiken Parade, which commemorates the return of children to school after summer vacation, remains one of the largest African American community events in the country. For Abbott, who constantly faced obstacles to his own education and success, this undoubtedly would have been a great source of pride.

Robert Sengstacke Abbott was a man who tracked down opportunity instead of waiting for it to arrive. His tireless energy transformed a tiny home-published newspaper into a cultural institution, and through the medium of his newspaper he communicated that energy to countless others throughout the United States. With stories of success, not the least of which was his own, he inspired the poor and disenfranchised to change their circumstances and make something of themselves. And through it all, he maintained that black and white citizens would have to learn to live together in a spirit of peace and mutual respect. He never lost track of the founding principle of the Chicago Defender: “American race prejudice must be destroyed”.

Next Post: Simon Benson, the farmhand who emerged from bankruptcy to become one of the great “timber barons” of the Pacific Northwest.

In many ways the progress of female emancipation can be credited to the efforts of exceptional women in broadening the definition of “women’s work” over the past several centuries. At the time of the Renaissance in Europe, a typical upper-class woman was not expected to work at all, and her education was restricted to ornamental pursuits such as music, dancing and needlework. By the late eighteenth century it was commonly accepted that a woman might study the humanities and be a writer or an artist, but the thought of educating women as men were educated, in the way that the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft advocated, was ridiculed and dismissed by most men. It was not until the Victorian era that a woman could study a technical subject like engineering and expect to be taken seriously, and even then most women could hardly dream of a life as a businesswoman or an engineer.

One traditionally male role that is often overlooked by chroniclers of women’s history is that of the architect. However, architecture is quite an interesting field in this respect, because despite its close ties to the fine arts, a field in which women have been able to distinguish themselves for close to three centuries, it has also historically been one of the most socially conservative and resistant to the entry of women. The most prestigious architectural college in the world, that of Paris’ School of Fine Arts, did not even accept a female student until close to the turn of the twentieth century, and even then not without controversy. The woman who rose above this controversy, and who defied great odds to become the school’s first female graduate, was a Californian civil engineer named Julia Morgan.

Julia Morgan was born in San Francisco on January 20, 1872. Her family circumstances were unusual for the time because her father, an unsuccessful serial entrepreneur, was not the family’s primary source of income. It was her mother, the heir to a cotton fortune, who exercised a great deal of control over the family finances. Young Julia grew up under the influence of both her mother and her strong-willed grandmother, who moved in with the family after her grandfather passed away in 1880.

Morgan graduated from high school in 1890 with the intention of studying to be an architect, but unfortunately the University of California in nearby Berkeley did not have an architecture program. Instead she studied civil engineering, another male-dominated field in which she was the only female student for most of her classes. She was fortunate, however, to have as a professor the independent-minded architect Bernard Maybeck, who acted as her mentor and encouraged her to complete her studies at Paris’ School of Fine Arts. Maybeck was an inspiration to the young civil engineer, and he would later collaborate with her on two commissions for one of her most important clients: the Hearst family.

As Maybeck had suggested, Morgan travelled to Paris and applied to join the school as an architectural student. But this was a very exclusive program. Hundreds applied to study there every semester, and by tradition only the top 30 were accepted. In October of 1897 she took the entrance exam for the first time, but was only able to rank 42nd and was rejected; it didn’t help that all the exam problems were given in metric units, which she had never used before going to Paris. The next semester she tried again, and this time made it into the top 30, but here discrimination intervened. She was rejected again, without explanation, but a French acquaintance informed her that the examiners had arbitrarily lowered her score to keep her out. Like many gatekeepers of male-dominated professions, they were willing to resort to exceptional measures to exclude women, even flagrant cheating.

Morgan was undeterred. In October of 1898 she took the exam once more, and this time ranked 13th. Left with no excuse to reject her application again, the school was compelled to reluctantly accept her, and her studies began. She was not out of the woods, though. One of the requirements of the program was participation in a series of public design competitions, for which entrants were required to be younger than 30. Morgan at this time was already 27, giving her only three years to complete a course of study that took most students, including her mentor Bernard Maybeck, five. Working with an intense determination, she entered the contests and managed to earn enough credits to graduate just short of her thirtieth birthday.

Shortly after graduating, amid much fanfare from San Francisco newspapers, Morgan returned to her hometown to begin her career. She became California’s first licensed female architect, and in 1904 set up her own practice. Morgan was a detail-oriented and innovative architect with several characteristic touches, such as a fondness for reinforced concrete, which paid off handsomely in new commissions during the city’s rebuilding after the 1906 earthquake. Her early training in civil engineering also made her a master of structural design, whose buildings were noted as much for their superb construction as for their aesthetic qualities.

Morgan’s most famous commission was the monumental Hearst Castle at publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon estate. The castle, which Morgan designed, refined and elaborated over a period of nearly three decades, became one of the most luxurious private residences in the world and inspired many imitators, including the fictional “Xanadu” that serves as the setting for Orson Welles’ landmark film Citizen Kane. Though most of her buildings were nowhere near as ostentatious as Hearst Castle, she brought to all of them the same flair for decoration and sense of organized style.

More than many, in fact more than several of the other Achievers discussed in this series, Julia Morgan was a professional driven by passion for her work. She lived a simple life with few luxuries, never married, and seemed to have little interest in celebrity. It was her fascination with the technical aspects of architecture, and her determination to be the best, that saw her through both the good and bad times of her career. Her dedication to the craft seems to strike a chord with many professional architects even today. Just a few years ago, in 2014, the American Institute of Architects awarded her a posthumous Gold Medal, their highest honor. Morgan is the first woman in history to receive this particular honor, but thanks in large part to her own example, we can be sure that she will not be the last.

Next Post: Robert Sengstacke Abbott, the newspaper publisher whose Chicago Defender led the charge for black solidarity and self-improvement across the country during the years of the Great Migration.

For about a century of American history, starting in the 1840s, the only medium of news and entertainment that was truly nationwide was the magazine. Unlike books, which were often too expensive to be accessible, and newspapers, which were generally circulated only within their own hometown, publications like The Saturday Evening Post and Godey’s Lady’s Book reached into hundreds of thousands of homes across the country with news stories, serialized works of fiction, and opinion pieces discussing the burning issues of the day. Readers turned to their favorite magazine for many things that we now tend to get from television or the Internet: information about what’s going on in the world around us, the latest trends in fashion and society, or just a few moments of much-needed diversion.

It is generally conceded that the periodical which led the field at the turn of the last century, both in circulation figures and social importance, was The Ladies’ Home Journal, then a monthly magazine published in Philadelphia. The Journal benefited from being located in one of America’s largest cities, as well as belonging to the same prestigious publisher as The Saturday Evening Post, but its greatest assets were the wide-ranging interests and intellectual zeal of its editor, a young and ambitious Dutch immigrant named Edward William Bok.

Edward Bok was born in Den Helder, a coastal city in the Netherlands, on October 8, 1963. When he was six years old his family moved to Brooklyn, where like many immigrant families they faced a steep uphill climb to prosperity. In his autobiography, Bok recounted childhood experiences of washing a bakery’s windows after school and following the tracks of coal wagons to pick up the bits of coal that fell from them. His father had put considerable stock in education, enrolling his sons in school even before they had learned English, but sadly young Edward was to be torn from his studies while he was still in elementary school.

At the age of thirteen Bok dropped out to help support his family by taking a job as an office boy with the Western Union Telegraph Company. His real passion, however, was always writing, and over the next half a decade he gradually worked his way into the publishing industry. Managing to get a job as a stenographer with Henry Holt and Company, Bok spent his spare time writing articles which he eventually sold to more than a hundred newspapers as a syndicated column, known as the “Bok Page”. By his mid-20s Bok was already making a mark in the publishing world as the co-owner (with his brother) of a private press, editor of several small magazines, and advertising manager for the popular Scribner’s Magazine.

As it happened, many advertisements for Scribner publications were placed in The Ladies’ Home Journal, already one of the leading women’s magazines of its time. Through this connection, and the success of his syndicated column, Bok came to the attention of the Journal’s publisher, media magnate Cyrus Curtis. Curtis was impressed by the young man’s dynamic attitude, and when his wife Louisa retired from editing the magazine in 1889, he asked Bok to step in as its new editor. Against the advice of his business associates, who warned him that leaving New York and his established successes behind would ruin his career, Bok took the job.

Although his popular column had focused on a female audience, this new job running a woman’s magazine wasn’t an obvious fit for the austere, socially awkward Bok. He had very little personal experience with women and women’s issues; in fact, as he later confessed in his autobiography, he had never even had a girlfriend. What he did know well, however, were the problems and hard choices that often confronted those who had a home to manage. As he put it, he chose to aim his magazine at the home his reader lived in rather than the reader herself. Under his leadership, The Ladies’ Home Journal became an all-purpose repository of advice for the busy homemaker, and within a few years Bok’s taste in content and style was validated as the Journal’s circulation figures soared.

Bok also used his editorial position to promote a change in domestic attitudes that he thought was sorely needed in America. An avid reader of Emerson, Bok felt that materialism and an obsession with status were tearing apart the American home, and that simplicity was the solution to this turmoil. Instead of the old-fashioned term “parlor”, Bok for the first time referred to this part of the house as a “living room”, suggesting that this should be a place for family members to enjoy each other’s company, instead of a stuffy and over-decorated shrine reserved for guests. Bok was also a proponent of suburban living, seeing it as a refuge from the clutter and ugliness of the city, and so in 1895 he began publishing plans for simple, inexpensive houses that parents of growing families could build themselves on small plots of land. Professional architects were openly dismissive of these mass-produced house plans, but among the middle-class readers of the Journal they were enormously popular, much like the Craftsman house plans published around the same time by Gustav Stickley.

Bok’s most radical and enduring innovation, however, was something he chose not to do. In 1892, he caused a sensation by announcing that the Ladies’ Home Journal would no longer run advertisements for patent medicines. These quack remedies, many of them containing harmful drugs like morphine and cocaine, were a common sight throughout the 19^th century, and most magazines were willing to share in the enormous profits generated by this unsavory industry. Bok had been an advertising man himself, and he was disgusted by the unwarranted claims and deceptive language that patent medicine advertisements were full of. In addition to refusing to sponsor them, he also ran many articles in the Journal discrediting patent medicines, discussing the dangers of their influence on society, and exposing the lies by which they were sold to the public. By the early 1920s, when Bok retired from the Journal, many other magazines had followed his lead, and the golden age of the snake-oil salesman was over.

In his championing of progressive causes, his ethic of simplicity, and the importance he attached to family togetherness, Edward Bok stands out as a strikingly modern figure, a man ahead of his time. Many of his contemporaries spent their whole lives expanding their fortunes and died “in the harness”, still working in their old age; Bok instead chose to retire early and dedicate much of his later life to his family and philanthropic causes. His career was driven by an idea of the good life which he shared with millions of readers, and which at one point resonated so strongly that it made the Ladies’ Home Journal the most popular magazine in the world. In our own time the idea of tasteful simplicity is a familiar one, but in Bok’s time, it was truly revolutionary.

Next Post: Julia Morgan, the student who raced against time and academic discrimination to become the first feamle architect to graduate from the renowned École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.