March 1
William M. Gaines (1922)
It was on this date, March 1, 1922, that American publisher and founder of MAD Magazine, William Maxwell Gaines, was born in New York City. William M. Gaines became a comic book publisher literally by accident when, in 1947, his father, the publisher of Educational Comics, died in a freak boating accident. The 25-year-old Gaines inherited EC, which he changed to "Entertaining Comics," but a book by Dr. Frderic Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, charged that full-color horror and science-fiction comic books — which happened to be Gaines's most popular titles — caused juvenile delinquency. A Senate investigation in the mid-1950s resulted in the founding of the Comic Code Authority, and Gaines had to find another genre to generate money.
Gaines invented the black-and-white, self-deprecating satire magazine: MAD. Along with the self-described "usual gang of idiots," Gaines made MAD popular with young people from the 60s through the 80s. The jumbo-sized Gaines was still publishing at his death on 3 June 1992. And MAD Magazine did not spare religion. One satire, called "The Academy for the Radical Religious Right Course Catalogue," included perfect caricatures of Pat Robertson, Phyllis Schlafly, Donald Wildmon, Ralph Reed and other religious bigots of the day, and begins:
Why do members of the radical religious right think the way they do? Are they born like that? Did they have a bad accident as a child? A tragic love affair that soured them on the world? The answer is: none of the above! You have to be taught to be so self-righteous and narrow-minded! It takes years of schooling at a highly specialized learning institution! And we've managed to get our grimy little hands on a brochure for such a place.When emphasizing his sincerity, wrote biographer Frank Jacobs, Gaines would declare, "On my honor as an atheist..." Also, when long-time contributor Dave Berg would greet him with "May God give you his blessing," Gaines would politely reply, "Dave, shut the hell up!"* His friends were just as candid at Gaines's memorial, on 5 June 1992. Joe Raiola, Associate Editor at Mad since 1985, recalled:
Bill was an atheist, and I used to talk to him about this because you know it occurred to me that as atheists went Bill was a very religious atheist. I remember one day I went to his office [and] said, "You know, you are a religious atheist. Because you don't believe passionately. You don't believe as much as people who do believe, believe. And you look kind of like a guru, kind of like a perverted or deranged Zen master. I think you're a religious person after all. I don't believe this atheism bit."
And he said, "Please, will you please get the hell out of here."
* Frank Jacobs, The MAD World of William M. Gaines, Secaucus, NJ: L. Stuart, 1972.
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William Dean Howells (1837)
It was also on this date, March 1, 1837, that American writer, historian, editor and founder of the "naturalist" movement in fiction, William Dean Howells, was born in Martin's Ferry, Ohio. Howells not only learned the print trade as a typesetter on his father's paper, but also his father's creed, which followed the teachings of 18th century Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). Howells became an editor at age 21, began writing poetry shortly thereafter, but achieved his first success with an 1860 Life of Lincoln.
His newfound stature resulted in a call to served as consul to Italy during the American Civil War, 1861 to 1865. There Howells gathered material for his Venetian Life (1866) and Italian Journeys (1867), and much of his future work. On his return to America he became editor of the Atlantic Monthly for ten years, and later of Harper's magazine.
Howells cast off his Swedenborgian creed in his youth and became a social liberal and a sentimental Theist. We can see this in his poem "Lost Beliefs":*
One after another they left us ;William Dean Howells died a non-Christian theist in New York City on 11 May 1920. His novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), is considered a classic, but Howells's Literary Friends and Acquaintances (1901) discusses the Rationalist views of some leading American writers. In it, Howells told his Agnostic friend James Parton** a new light had lately come into his life, "by which I saw all things that did not somehow tell for human brotherhood dwarfish and ugly..."
The sweet birds out of our breasts
Went flying away in the morning :
Will they come again to their nests ?
Will they come again at nightfall,
With God's breath in their song ?
Noon is fierce with the heats of summer,
And summer days are long !
O my life, with thy upward liftings,
Thy downward-striking roots,
Ripening out of thy tender blossoms
But hard and bitter fruits ! —
In thy boughs there is no shelter
For the birds to seek again.
The desolate nest is broken
And torn with storms and rain !
* William Dean Howells, "Lost Beliefs," published in Poems, Boston: J.R. Osgood, 1886, p. 31 (augmented from the 1873 edition).
** Of American biographer James Parton (1822-1891), Howells wrote, "He was a man of eminent courage, and in the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he had the heart to say of the Mysteries, that he did not know." (Literary Friends and Acquaintances, 1901, X., "Literary Boston As I Knew It.")
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