SOURCE: "Politics and Economics: The Emergence of a The New Yorker Tone," in Studies in American Humor, n.s., Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring, 1984, pp. 74-82.

Hausdorff is an American critic and educator. In the following excerpt, he analyzes the editorial tone of the New Yorker as revealed by its contributors' treatment of political and economic subjects during the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1925, when The New Yorker made its first appearance, the Jazz Age was at its peak. John Held, Jr.'s flappers were dancing and smoking through the pages of College Humor; Gloria Swanson and Babe Ruth were being bally-hooed in the tabloids; and the cocktail party crowd, between snorts from their hip flasks, were chattering about Freud and Picasso. High Culture was big business, as Vanity Fair was demonstrating, and so too was the iconoclasm of H. L. Mencken in the pages of the American Mercury. The consumerist...