National Geographic
Abramson, Howard S.
S o, Bucky, you thought it was all bare breasts and nifty scenery, did you? Howard Abramson is here to tell you that it was also marketing genius, cupidity, deceit, - racism, rose-colored glasses,...
...Why should we believe that the Society is really owned by its members when they are denied the right even to visit the facilities they supposedly own...
...Anyone interested in this subject can skip this book if he wishes and wait for THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987 41...
...He pioneered the use of photography and then color photography as the identifying mark of the publication...
...One gets a whiff of the editorial policy of Abramson's employer in some of his prose...
...After the controversy became political, with the Congress deciding the issue by taking a vote on emoluments for Peary, all hope of reality settling the matter was gone...
...But it will also probably be written with large quantities of whitewash, especially concerning l'affaire Peary, and without the embarrassing questions about public subsidies for a competitive commercial product...
...Nobody who has noted the ubiquity of those yellow covers will be surprised to learn of the worldly success of the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC: BEHIND AMERICA'S LENS ON THE WORLD Howard S. Abramson/Crown Publishers/$17.95 Herbert Schlossberg 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987 Society and its magazine...
...By the time Hubbard died, his son-in-law had become a rich and famous man in his own right...
...Hubbard's daughter Mabel was one of his students, and because of this connection Hubbard provided the funds that made it possible for Bell to perfect his invention of the telephone, and then to protect it in the courts against patent raiders...
...The most important of his tasks was to manipulate the board so that Hub-bard's vision of a popular organization would win out over the elitist vision of the scholars...
...Howard Abramson is here to tell you that it was also marketing genius, cupidity, deceit, - racism, rose-colored glasses, and nepotism...
...Can it really be said that the publication is "non-profit" when so much of its benefit accrues to one family...
...Hubbard induced some friends to join him in the formation of an organization for the diffusion of the knowledge of geography...
...by 1957 it had reached 5,500,000...
...he shared a small office with the American Forestry Association, and didn't even have a desk until Bell sent his own over to the cramped quarters...
...A t the time he met Hubbard more than twenty years earlier, Bell was a poor immigrant from Scotland who earned his living by teaching deaf students in Boston...
...It will have the benefit of the official records that Abramson couldn't obtain...
...Abramson carps at the Society's low-risk high-profile approach to financing geographical exploration, but that criticism misses the mark...
...Bell reluctantly acceded to the National Geographic Society board's request that he fill the leadership vacuumthat Hubbard's death had created, but once he had done so, he moved decisively and with a good deal of flair to put his own stamp on the organization...
...National Geographic now goes to eleven million people, third behind Reader's Digest and TV Guide, and the renewal rate is an enviable 84 percent...
...Grosvenor's only obvious asset was Bell's patronage...
...How would the magazine stand vis-a-vis its competition were it, like they, paying real estate taxes on its extensive properties and full freight on postal expenses...
...From the start, it didn't appear that the professional caste of the organization would last very long...
...These are (I) absolute accuracy, (2) an abundance of beautiful illustrations, (3) articles with permanent value, (4) everything trivial to be avoided, (5) nothing controversial to be published, (6) nothing unpleasant or unduly critical to be published, and (7) timeliness...
...Reasoning that another fully professional geographer's organization already existed, Bell thought it should be the function of the National Geographic Society to "sugarcoat the pill," as he put it, and make scientific learning accessible to the public...
...Ten years after its founding, its publication a rather, boring magazine of interest mainly to specialists, and with a circulation of about a thousand, the languishing Society launched an expensive campaign to attract the public's attention...
...It was to be a source of encouragement and support for explorers, but also a sort of meat market for professional geographers seeking employment...
...There he joined with other wealthy businessmen at the Cosmos Club in fostering the creation and growth of a number of organizations designed to increase the public's appreciation for scientific learning...
...Would the Society have attained its present status without the support of prominent politicians beginning with William Howard Taft, a cousin of Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor...
...At this darkest hour Gardiner Greene Hubbard died...
...Tired of the Boston winters, Hubbard moved to Washington, DC, where his business interests increasingly took him anyway...
...In his address at the initial meeting of the new society on January 27, 1888, he noted that his election was a token of the Society's intent to extend its work beyond the narrow sphere of the professional geographers, so that the general public would benefit from the spread of scientific knowledge...
...To do well while doing good apparently is impermissible.the authorized version due to be published in time for next year's centennial celebration...
...That the Society and magazine didn't die with him is due to the fact that his son-in-law was Alexander Graham Bell...
...Hubbard, who readily acknowledged his lack of standing as a scientist, became the first president...
...When Peary asserted his claim to have been the first man to reach the North Pole, Grosvenor jumped feet first into the ensuing struggle to validate the claim...
...In October 1900, Grosvenor, who would later impart an anglophiliac flavor to the magazine, traveled to London just off Grosvenor Square, as he liked to point out—to marry Elsie May Bell...
...Surely Abramson is right to highlight the tawdry role the Society played in this sorry affair...
...He thinks the first Grosvenor's increasing wealth led him to a pro-fascist editorial policy...
...He has included a number of interesting photographs, not many of which would meet the Grosvenors' standards for inclusion in the National Geographic...
...From this we get the admirable if obsessive fact-checking, but also the blandness and the failures of analysis...
...Grosvenor was succeeded by his son and eventually his grandson, and Abramson makes hay with the nepotism issue...
...The steel is gone...
...Sometimes he writes as if nobody's motives can be accepted at face value if his income is above a certain level—above, perhaps, that of an editor of the Washington Post...
...Unaccountably, the National Geographic Society—which had sunk some money into Peary's expedition—was not laughed off the stage when it asserted a right to adjudicate the dispute...
...Perhaps that's the way it always is when the pioneers leave the stage and are succeeded by the consolidators...
...1=1 Nevertheless, Abramson raises some valid public policy issues...
...He parlayed assiduous market research, indefatigable energy, and great flairinto immense popularity for his magazine...
...Herbert Schlossberg is the author of Idols for Destruction (Thomas Nelson...
...Grosvenor was a marketing genius...
...The founders decided to call their new creation the National Geographic Society...
...Shortly before World War I, circulation passed the one hundred thousand mark...
...Having labored to help the deaf to communicate, and then to bring long distance communications to the home of everyman, he now brought the same populist passion to the Society and its magazine...
...Entirely unrepentant, the Society is still trying to silence the opposition...
...This desperation move coupled a newsstand drive with a program of lifetime memberships, and was a dismal flop...
...Robert E. Peary was already a well-known explorer when the Society began championing him...
...He doesn't break new ground in this exposition, but is justified in so fully exposing an episode in which the National Geographic Society played such a crucial role...
...The Society stood in jeopardy of its existence...
...These pictures confirm a nagging suspicion that the text first engendered: the original personalities—Hubbard, Bell, and Grosvenor—were followed by successors of a different mien: grayer, pudgier, and more pliant...
...He also is plainly resentful of the high salaries and perks enjoyed by the top officials of this non-profit organization...
...In 1915 Grosvenor published an enduring credo for the National Geographic, the "Seven Principles" that still guide the editorial staff...
...Once the decision was made to depart from the highbrow tedium of the pre-Bell years, it was inevitable that the Society would sponsor the kind of expedition that would pay off in the form of great photographic spreads in National Geographic...
...Peary's story, which he began telling only after Dr...
...Frederick A. Cook claimed to have reached the Pole, looked increasingly fishy as the details broke into the public's attention...
...M ore justified is Abramson's critique of the Peary affair, to which he devotes three chapters...
...His own standing as a scientist made it more likely that he could carry out this task than if Hubbard the entrepreneur had been doing it...
...If that were not sufficient, the ancillary publishing interests of the Society have also enjoyed great success...
...Meanwhile Bell had fallen in love with Mabel, and in 1877 married her...
...The tension between the populist and the elitist elements, both of which had a hand in the Society's founding, was to be a recurrent theme of its early history until the final victory of the populists...
...Bell had launched himself on the glory trail through a relationship with his patron's daughter, and now his protege followed that example...
...How does it happen that a few cronies get together and form an educational society, and a hundred years later we have what people are pleased to call a "national institution," one with the patronage of Presidents and Supreme Court chief justices...
...Abramson takes us back to Gardiner Greene Hubbard, lawyer and entrepreneur, and one of the wealthiest men in New England in the 1880s...
...In the intensely competitive field of popular magazine publishing, with its numerous expensive failures, what is the justification for this publication receiving enormous financial advantages by virtue of its non-profit status...
...Although Abramson is not an accomplished wordsmith, this book is worth reading...
...To carry out his intention, Bell recruited the twenty-three-year-old Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, a recent Amherst graduate and the son of a friend, to take over the National Geographic, and he even paid the new editor's salary out of his own commodious pocket...
...Add those to the first two items, says Abramson, a financial editor at the Washington Post, and you get the National Geographic...
...That's why the magazine could publish articles on Germany and Italy in the 1930s without apprising its readers of certain unpleasant events taking place in the political arena of the two countries...
Vol. 20 • July 1987 • No. 7
