Edward William Bok

• Edward William Bok
• Born: October 9, 1863
• Died: January 9, 1930

Humanitarian, editor, and writer, was the younger in two sons of William John Hidde Bok and Sieke Gertrude (van Herwerden) Bok, born at Den Helder, the Netherlands. A grandfather was presiding judge of the Netherlands supreme court; his father, an official at the royal court. Around 1870 William Bok lost his money through bad investments and the family emigrated to the United States, settling in Brooklyn.

Bok’s mother, who hated her unaccustomed poverty, taught him a respect for honesty, hard work, and frugality. At the age of ten he started work as window washer for a bakery, earning one half-dollar weekly. When thirteen years old, he left school to join the Western Union Telegraph Company as an office boy. He also wrote news about the theater for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, designed playbills, and published picture cards with short life histories of well-known Americans. These became so popular that others were soon paid to assist him in the writing.

Bok was hired by Henry Holt & Company as a stenographer from 1882 to 1884, when Charles Scribner’s Sons employed him for similar work. He remained there until 1889. Meanwhile, Bok had become editor of the Philomathean Review for Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. The publication’s name was changed to Brooklyn Magazine during 1884. It printed articles by public figures—at least partially obtained through the acquaintances he had made while collecting autographs.

He and Frederic L. Colver, associated with some of Bok’s previous enterprises, soon initiated a business that during 1886 became Bok Syndicate Press. He hired female contributors; then developed a woman’s page widely subscribed to as well as imitated. His series on writers and books, “Bok’s Literary Leaves,” reached forty periodicals. The syndicate had 137 subscribers. In 1887 he became head of advertising for Scribner’s Magazine.

On October 20, 1889, Bok assumed editorship of the Ladies’ Home Journal, founded in Philadelphia in 1883 by Cyrus H. K. Curtis. To gain circulation, he encouraged and applied ideas suggested by the publication’s feminine audience. He was editor for thirty years, also becoming vice president of Curtis Publishing Company in 1891. Under his leadership, the Journal became the country’s first magazine to reach a circulation of one million readers (two million by 1919).

Bok married twenty-year-old Mary Louise Curtis, only child of Cyrus Curtis, on October 22, 1896, after a four-year engagement. The marriage was serene and produced two boys, William Curtis and Cary William. Their house was built in Merion, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb; later they had homes in Camden, Maine, and Lake Wales, Florida.

Besides presenting literature of high quality, Bok used the Journal to promote causes and attempt to change the attitudes of its middle-class readership. His early experience with the demoralization of poverty gave him sympathy with the underprivileged. It led him to believe that improving the lot of individuals—as he had bettered his own—was the surest way to improve society. Although he considered himself a reformer and believed in many progressive ideas, his approach was a middle-class one; he argued for improvement of consumer protection, housing, education, and conservation that reflected such an orientation. He never became involved with vital causes of his time such as slum conditions, racism, or the labor movement. Many issues still central to reform, however, were raised in the periodical.

Bok called his first campaign “Beautiful America” and argued for conservation, better sanitation, improved roads, and public parks. Theodore Roosevelt credited the Journal with the passage of a bill that prevented further use of Niagara Falls by private power companies. The magazine also helped avert a scheme by advertisers to place the world’s largest billboard along the rim of the Grand Canyon.

The Journal endorsed such educational reforms as small classes and language study in early grades; editorialized for regulated hours and standardized wages; and aired both sides of the temperance controversy, although Bok was against compulsory laws. The magazine stayed neutral on the issue of woman suffrage, printing opposing views, until March 1912, when he came out in opposition, claiming research showed that females were not ready for the vote.

Patent-medicine abuses and sex education were major issues in the Journal, which barred all advertising of nostrums from its pages in 1892, the first publication to do so. During 1904 Book began an article series attacking patent medicines and impure foods; in 1905 Collier’s Magazine joined the fight. During 1906 the Journal supported congressional legislation against such drug companies, asking readers to cut out the texts of the proposed bill from the magazines for their congressmen. The Journal’s efforts led to enactment of the 1906 Food and Drug Act.

Bok, who believed that sexual knowledge would protect, not ruin, children, conducted an ongoing campaign to inform his readers. Although he mentioned venereal disease only indirectly, the subject was shocking; Bok’s crusade lost the Journal more than 25,000 subscriptions.

He was, Bok said, “appalled” at the “wretched architecture of small houses” and decided to use the Journal as his “medium for making the small-house architecture of America better.” With only one architect cooperating, he began in 1895 to publish specifications for houses that could be constructed for $1,500 to $5,000. His audience swamped him with inquiries and he gradually won over many leading architects, who all contributed plans (including some by Frank Lloyd Wright that began serially in 1901).

Describing these, Bok wrote, “I offered my readers full building specifications and plans to scale…with estimates from four builders in different parts of the country—for five dollars a set... so complete in every detail that any builder could build the house from them.” The designs sold by the thousands for almost twenty-five years, and during that period entire suburban developments were established using them. Later, he printed free garden plans and examples of furnishings.

His efforts were widely lauded. The noted architect Stanford White praised him thus: “I firmly believe that Edward Bok has more completely influenced American domestic architecture for the better than any man in this generation.” So did Theodore Roosevelt. “Bok is the only man I ever heard of who changed, for the better, the architecture of an entire nation, and he did it so quickly and yet so effectively that we didn’t know it was begun before it was finished. That is a mighty big job for one man to have done.”

After he left the Journal, Bok wrote his autobiography; The Americanization of Edward Bok was published on September 20, 1920, fifty years following his landing in the United States. Immediately popular, it received approximately sixty reprintings in a twenty-year period and during 1921 won the Pulitzer Prize for biography.

Bok devoted the last ten years of his life to philanthropy and universal harmony. Civic service and culture in Philadelphia benefited from his donations. The Academy of Political and Social Science, during 1921, gave him its gold medal. In 1923 he set up the American Peace Award, offering $100,000 for “the best practicable plan by which the United States may cooperate with other nations to achieve and preserve the peace of the world.” Bok created an American Foundation in 1925, as a pressure group for the country’s participation in the World Court. He erected the Singing Tower carillon in a bird preserve at Lake Wales, with dedication to the “American people” during 1929.

Bok died at sixty-six in his Florida home, of cardiac failure, leaving $2 million to the needy and having founded the Woodrow Wilson Chair of Government at Williams College. He was buried at the foot of Singing Tower.

Bok’s papers are in the University of Pennsylvania library and at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Files of the Ladies’ Home Journal covering the years of Bok’s tenure may be found at the New York Public Library. Among the books he wrote are: Successward: A Young Man’s Book for Young Men (1895); A Man From Maine (1923), life story of Cyrus Curtis; Twice Thirty; Some Short and Simple Annals of the Road (1925); Dollars Only (1926); and America, Give Me a Chance! (1926), which contains a good description of Bok’s housing crusade. The full-length biography about him, S. H. Steinberg, Reformer in the Marketplace (1979) has a good bibliography. See also F. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines (1957); G. Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (1981); and The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 1 (1944). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, January 10, 1930.