Dear Don, I think I see what you're driving at in your valued note of the 12th, and you have good company in your dissatisfaction. We are paralyzed. I keep wondering if it be my fault and what I could do to mend things. Partly our paralysis is for want of money. We are stalled also by a lack of an assured consensus. Corporation meetings fail to provide us any clear sailing orders. They point up the cross purposes and divergences of opinion that plague our organization, plague the whole movement.
It might help if interested outsiders participated in our meetings. Some such outsiders are our creditors. Other helpful outsiders attending are those men, if there be any, whom we would like to have ''invest in us. Is it possible that some successful businessman might influence our corporation members beneficially?
Our most loved and respected corporation members have an elfin disdain of mere money. That is part of their charm, and without it I imagine One would never have got started. Time was when that what-the-hell, -let’s-go-for-broke attitude was appropriate and availful [sic]. You didn’t know what the future held, you did not have so much as a shirt to lose, you could improvise then and modify later according to developments and you were young and full of mustard. You felt a powerful urge to start something and you started something.
Your very success has changed your situation. You have a lot to lose now: having built something wonderful, you can not stand by and see it ruined. Thousands of men have been looking to become your partners in the great endeavor. Hundreds cling desperately to One for support in trials the horror of which the unthinking can’t imagine. We who have anything to do with managing this wonderful thing have to be conscious of the harm that can come of mismanagement. I’d like nothing better than to step out and let some good man succeed where I have failed. Where can we find that man?
If you have been prolific of shifts, devices and expedients so have I and so have others. If you feel that your suggestions seem to have fallen through a crack in the floor somewhere, I know exactly how you feel. But no malice is at fault, no devil at work. Poverty and the predisposition to poverty are the trouble. Our pixiecrats are incurably antiplutogenic. They believe in poverty in principle. When you started One you probably expected the magazine to make ends meet and bring in a little revenue in addition.
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When it failed to break even you did not suppose you were going into the begging business; you thought you would have to ask special help only to get past a temporary shortage. After twelve years, our corporation has reconciled itself to being perpetually insolvent. I’m shocked at the thinness of the legal ice we’re skating on. We expect to make a big appeal for contributions once a year and to debate occasionally the practicality of our getting out a special solicitation in between times. Our magazines don’t make money for us: they’re a drain on us. And you’re older men by twelve critical years in a world where youth is at a premium and age is an embarrassment and a calamity.
If we are to bring, money in we must first want to.
Nearly as I can tell, you don’t want men to buy One on terms on which they’ll buy it. You’d rather have them shun the magazine—indeed you shun them—unless they’re courageous, extroverted and a little scrappy. You want all men to be Don Slaters. That would be a delectable world, but it is not the world we happen to live in. You’re not going to change, and any hint that you adopt less of a damn-your-eyes policy in the magazine’s format will only make you more determined to express the pure, absolute or 200-proof Don Slater with no concessions to conventions and cowards.
I’m not criticizing. As I say, you are that which you are and that’s why One got, created. In the lines attributed to a Negro preacher of a hundred years ago, According to the gifts they has, folk does the best they knows: We don’t despise the violet because it ain’t a rose.
Let me ask, Whom do you know among the members of the corporation who will change any more readily than you will? What argument can you advance that hasn’t been used already? For example, could you tell Mr. Good anything that would make him confident that your magazine will become a money-maker for him and for us? Could you bring yourself to make changes that would enable more firms to advertise on One?
To ask these questions is to answer them. Each man’s behavior is a function of his principle, his character, his self-respect. That being true, there is no use in calling meetings. We are at a deadlock. It may be deplorable, but any man who might consent to the sacrifice of his principle would expect a disaster to result—and he might be right.
Love,
