Norman Hapgood

• Norman Hapgood
• Born: March 28, 1868
• Died: April 29, 1937

Writer and editor, was born in Chicago, the eldest son of Charles Hutchins Hapgood and Fanny Louise (Powers) Hapgood, daughter of a Chicago physician. He had two brothers, Hutchins and William Powers, and a sister, Ruth, who died of diphtheria at the age of ten. The elder Hapgood, only son of a successful banker and politician, moved to St. Louis in 1871 after his drygoods store had been destroyed in the great Chicago fire, then settled in Alton, Illinois, in 1875 and established a thriving business manufacturing farm implements. The family was affluent and literate. Charles Hapgood, an agnostic, refused to send his children to Sunday school; Fanny Hapgood read Shakespeare to them, instead, instilling in them a lifelong interest in the theater.

Norman Hapgood was graduated from Harvard College in 1890 and from Harvard Law School in 1893. He spent a year as a lawyer in Chicago, then decided to make journalism his career. After several months as a reporter for The Chicago Evening Post, he became drama critic and political and editorial writer for The Milwaukee Sentinel, then a reporter for The New York Evening Post, whose staff then included Lincoln Steffens.

In 1896 Hapgood married Emilie Bigelow of Chicago, who was also interested in drama and who became a well-known producer of amateur and professional theatricals. They had one daughter, Ruth, and were divorced in Paris in 1915. Little is known of reasons for the failure of the marriage, and Hapgood never mentioned Emilie Hapgood in his autobiography, The Changing Years (1930). In December 1916 he married twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Kempley Reynolds, who had studied at the University of Paris and who later became a leading translator of Russian works. They had three children, Elizabeth, Norman, and Ten Eyck.

In 1897 Hapgood and Steffens joined The New York Commercial Advertiser and the intellectual Hapgood made a name for himself as a drama critic. He applauded innovation, was supportive of foreign-language theaters that mounted experimental dramas, and argued against theatrical enterprises of the time, which hampered the freedom of actors and independent producers. Also on the staff was Hapgood’s brother Hutchins, later known as the “sociologist of the muckraking movement,” a man with deep empathy for the poor who wrote The Spirit of the Ghetto and Types from the City Streets.

During these years, Norman Hapgood wrote three popular biographies: Abraham Lincoln and Daniel Webster, both published in 1899, and George Washington (1901). The Stage in America also appeared in 1901. He left The Commercial Advertiser in 1902 to write and travel for several months.

Hapgood was named editor of Collier’s Weekly in 1903 and remained with the publication until October 1912. This was a time when popular magazines were becoming outspoken and influential in their stands on social issues, the journalistic activism culminating in the muckraking era in American reform. By nature, Hapgood was moderate, disliking overcolorful exposition, and he became a muckraker slowly. Finley Peter Dunne’s “Mr. Dooley” once parodied Hapgood thus: “Th’ Homeeric Legend an’ Graft; Its Cause an’ Effect; Are They th’ Same? Yes and No, be Norman Slapgood.”

Collier’s and Hapgood’s first reform campaign in 1904 discredited the publication Town Topics for its blackmailing tactics. In 1905 Collier’s began its most famous crusade: a fight against the patent medicine industry and for pure food and drugs. Articles with such titles as “The Great American Fraud” and “Is Chicago Meat Clean?” brought a public outcry and resulted in congressional action. Hapgood also fought against William Randolph Hearst and “yellow journalism.” However, he rejected for publication Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle because he thought it too sensational.

In his role as a crusading editor, Hapgood was a leader in the successful fight in 1910 to reduce the powers assumed by House Speaker Joseph G. Cannon, and in the controversy over the laissez-faire conservation policies of President William Howard Taft’s Secretary of the Interior Richard A. Ballinger, who became the subject of a congressional inquiry into his handling of Alaska coal mining lands and who resigned in 1911. Collier’s and Hapgood made this partisan fight a public issue, spreading across the magazine’s cover the words: “Court of Public Morals. Indictment. The American People Against R. A. Ballinger.”

At this time, Hapgood met Louis D. Brandeis (who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1916) and became a strong admirer, a follower of Brandeis’s reform theories and a firm supporter of Zionism. He also shifted his support from Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson in 1912, and this led to dissension between him and Robert Collier. Hapgood resigned in October 1912, and from 1913 to 1916 served as editor of Harper’s Weekly, writing increasingly on the money trust and on labor problems. In 1913 he was chairman of the Committee of One Hundred and Seven, which nominated John Purroy Mitchel for mayor of New York City as a reform candidate.

In 1918-19 Hapgood wrote a liberal column for Leslie’s Weekly; he lived then in Hanover, New Hampshire, where Elizabeth Hapgood was establishing the Russian Department at Dartmouth College. He became the first chairman of the League of Free Nations Association, which was formed on November 10, 1918, and which became the Foreign Policy Association in 1921. From February to December 1919 he was United States minister to Denmark, resigning to spare President Wilson controversy over his appointment.

In 1920 Hapgood contributed a column to Hearst’s New York American and published The Advancing Hour, in which he presented his theories on issues of the day. He favored recognizing the Soviet Union because it was an existing government and because, he asserted, the “future of Russia cannot be separated from the future of the rest of the world.”

In a statement of his own liberal principles, Hapgood wrote: “When our school books are rewritten, when thousands of newspapers and periodicals are owned by groups that use the power of the press for other purposes than money-making, when no man is honored because he wastes more than his fellows, when the great material needs of life, that are limited in amount, are in the hands of the community, when the great mass of ordinary business is in one form or another cooperative, then shall we be able to guide the flood of human thought and purpose away from personal ambition and fear.”

Hapgood, having ceased to deplore Hearst’s journalism, accepted the editorship of Hearst’s International Magazine, serving from 1923 to 1925. In 1919-20, Hapgood had been an adviser to and enthusiastic supporter of New York State’s Governor Alfred E. Smith; in the Hearst magazine he supported Smith for the Democratic nomination for president in 1924, switching to Robert M. La Follette only when Smith’s candidacy failed. As editor of Hearst’s, he also attacked the Ku Klux Klan and exposed its anti-Semitism and that of Henry Ford.

Hapgood, with Dr. Henry Moskowitz, wrote a biography of Smith, Up from the City Streets, published in 1927. He helped his brother William convert his Indianapolis company into a worker-owned cooperative in 1930. Soon after becoming editor of the Boston-based Unitarian publication Christian Register in 1937, Hapgood died, at sixty-nine, following a prostate operation in New York City. He was buried in the family plot in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn.

Hapgood wrote, in addition to the works cited above, Industry and Progress (1911) and Why Janet Should Read Shakespeare (1929). The only full biography is M. D. Marcaccio, The Hapgoods: Three Earnest Brothers (1977), which has a bibliography and notes on collections of papers and letters with information on Hapgood. See also L. Filler, Crusaders for American Liberalism (1939), which discusses Hapgood and Collier’s; H. Hapgood,/! A Victorian in the Modern World (1939); and the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 2 (1958). Obituaries appeared in The New York Times and The New York Herald Tribune, April 30, 1937.