Newsstand: 1925: National Police Gazette

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a virtual newsstand from the summer of 1925

 

Overview

           Started in 1845, The National Police Gazette was an influential men's magazine that reached the height of its popularity in the decades surrounding 1900. Under the guidance of its flamboyant publisher, Richard K. Fox, the Police Gazette would establish the first ever full journalistic sports department, and push the boundaries of sexual imagery and sensationalism, thus serving as the precursor for magazines such as The National Enquirer, Playboy, and Sports Illustrated.

 

The Beginning

 

           The National Police Gazette was founded in New York in 1845 by journalist George Wilkes and attorney Enoch E. Camp. Patterned after British police bulletins, the original intent of the magazine was to aid police departments in the capture of criminals. Since the idea of a police force and detective work was a new concept, departments had to rely solely upon victim and witness testimony to make arrests; therefore, the Police Gazette was beneficial because it could spread important information about alleged offenders, such as names, aliases, and physical descriptions, to a large audience before the invention of radio news broadcasts. How large of an audience? Wilkes and Camp claimed a circulation of around forty thousand in 1850 (Chudacoff 189).

           Early on, the contents of this weekly dime magazine were exclusively dedicated to sex and crime. Using woodcuts displaying beautiful women in seedy situations, the Police Gazette relied upon a sensational style of journalism to build its readership. The second owner of the publication, former New York City police chief George Washington Matsell, especially preferred tales that centered around love triangles, and Matsell relied upon a corps of reporters scattered across the nation for such stories (189). However, due to the rise of other sensational publications after the Civil War, which reduced subscriptions, and the high cost of the illustrations, Matsell would sell the Police Gazette in 1866 to his engravers and the magazine would experience a period of decline.

 

The Fox Era

 

           Richard Kyle Fox was a journalist from Belfast, Ireland who arrived broke, but ambitious, in New York in 1874. Originally hired by the Police Gazette to sell advertisements, Fox did so well that he was promoted to business manager in 1875 and would eventually buy the paper with the assistance of financial backers in 1877 (189). Fox hired experienced writers; offered reduced subscription rates to saloons, barbers shops, and hotels; expanded the publication from eight to sixteen pages; and switched the paper color from white to pink paper. And Fox ramped up the illustrations as well, increasing the sexual imagery with revealing prints of burlesque dancers. Contributing writer and editor Franklin P. Adams once remarked about the girls:

I would gaze at a picture a long time. Usually it was a picture of a woman, or of many women. Sometimes they were pursuers, sometimes pursued. Occasionally somebody had a revolver...but it was the ankles and legs that really got me...and these pictures showed some skirts – thousands of skirts – in abandoned disarray. Women were running, and were ostentatiously careless whether they displayed their legs almost to the knee. (Chudacoff 191-2)

 

           Fox's success was immediate with the circulation of the Police Gazette tripling what it was under Matsell a decade earlier (191). In fact, the Police Gazette was so popular that they could even demand the one dollar per agate line from advertisers that such large national publications as Ladies Home Journal and Godey's Ladies Book were demanding (ibid). The quick success helped Fox pay for the construction of a new office in central Manhattan and start other sensationalist side publications. One such periodical was Illustrated Day's Doings and Sporting World which started in 1885. With a somewhat misleading title, the publication centered around horror tales of lynchings, tortures, assassinations, and bizarre world events such as a woman giving birth after being buried alive (ibid). However, these side publications never matched the Police Gazette's success and never lasted for more than a few years.

           Other than the sexy burlesque girls, the Police Gazette also featured content that existed a bit below the common standards of decency in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. These stories often revolved around dog or cock fighting, demonstrations of human strength or usual skills, such as champion opium smokers or Minerva, a woman who could catch balls fired from a cannon (192). This type of content made the Police Gazette the magazine of choice in the popular bachelor outposts of the day: saloons and barbershops. A popular joke in the 1890s was to ask a man if he had “Seen the Police Gazette,” to which he would reply, “No, I shave myself” (191). It was in this decade that the Gazette saw its subscription numbers exceeding 150,000, with some special editions requiring printings of more than 400,000, and a regular readership of more than 500,000 men (187).

Becoming a Sports Magazine

 

           It would take John L. Sullivan, a man with as much style and flair as Fox, to change the direction of the Police Gazette. Crowned the first gloved boxing heavyweight champion in 1881, Sullivan was a flamboyant public figure who would walk into a saloon and challenge every man in the establishment to fight him for $250. Although the exact source of the feud is unknown, what is known is that Fox had a very strong dislike for Sullivan and even went so far as to publicly support Sullivan's challengers in the Police Gazette. After the Sullivan-Paddy Ryan fight, one in which Sullivan won by a knockout, Fox sent a telegram to Ryan stating that he [Fox] would be willing to back Ryan again for $5,000 (Isenberg 109). This back and forth with Sullivan, and Fox's own obsession with pugilism, would change the content of the magazine from crime to sports, and almost exclusively boxing. No more would the Gazette concentrate on sordid tales of love triangles, but rather feed the growing thirst of the public for the legal violence of boxing. Fox's enthusiasm and contribution to the sport would land him in the International Boxing Hall of Fame in the “Non-Participant” category in 1997. According to the Hall of Fame, “Fox probably did more to popularize boxing in America than anybody else in the 19th Century.” (1)

 

Later Years

 

           After Fox's death in 1922, the Police Gazette’s popularity began to steadily decline over the next several decades. In many ways the Police Gazette was a victim of its own success, causing big city dailies like the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune to copy the Gazette's format of sensationalism and sports. Not to mention, with the establishment of The Ring Magazine in 1922, the American public would have another outlet for all things boxing related. It is estimated that by the start of the first World War that the circulation had dropped all the way down to 60,000 (Mott 335).
           The Police Gazette did not die, however, but lasted all the way up until the early '80s. Limping along, going through bankruptcies and passing from publisher to publisher, the Gazette would change formats again, switching to monthly publications and nixing the heavy sports format in favor of celebrity tabloid news. On the March 1943 cover rests a beauty in a bathing suit and the headline story reads, “'Zoot' Suit Bandits Kill A Cop.” A 1953 cover shows Adolph Hitler with former President of Argentina Juan Perón and asks, “Is Peron Hiding Hitler?” A November 1968 cover offers the exposé: “Why 64% of Married Women Are Unfaithful.” And the January 1976 cover offers “Earn $25,000-A-Year Making Women Pregnant” in large print above the banner with a color head shot of Ted Kennedy taking up the majority of the page. Over to the side you also see a headline for the story: “Joe Louis: The Five Men Who Could Have Beaten Muhammad Ali,” illustrating that the magazine never completely lost its boxing appetite. (2)

 --Contextualization by Austin Enfinger

 

Notes

 

[1]       “Richard K. Fox.” International Boxing Hall of Fame. 28 October 2010. <http://www.ibhof.com/           pages/about/inductees/nonparticipant/fox.html>

[2]       These covers are hosted on a public image site.
           -March 1943: <http://pic0.picsorlinks.com/ph_or_56613_325f520.jpg>
           -April 1953: < http://pic0.picsorlinks.com/ph_or_56614_693b686.jpg>
           -November 1968: <http://pic0.picsorlinks.com/ph_or_56615_55c6de5.jpg>
           -January 1976: <http://pic0.picsorlinks.com/ph_or_56616_c00f3f8.jpg>

 

Works Cited

 

Chudacoff, Howard P. The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture. New Jersey:   Princeton

           University Press, 1999.

Isenberg, Michael T. John L. Sullivan & His America. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines, 1741-1930. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Harvard
           University Press, 1930.

 

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June 20, 1925