For weeks beforehand, the newspapers were filled with details of the upcoming Farrell-Murray nuptials. The wedding was to take place at St. Joseph’s Church in South Norwalk, Connecticut, with a huge breakfast reception following at the Farrells’ nearby estate, “Rock Ledge.” There were to be sixty people in the bridal party alone, plus hundreds of guests including all the “top” New York Irish Catholic names—Nicholas Brady, Judge Morgan O’Brien, and assorted Gormans. A special train would depart from Grand Central Station for South Norwalk on the morning of the wedding, just to transport the guests. The wedding pages would wear white knee-stockings and patent-leather pumps with colonial cut-steel buckles. Meanwhile, three large rooms of the Farrell mansion were filling up with wedding presents—”The silverware especially was remarkable!” the press gushed—and James Francis McDonnell’s gift to his future sister-in-law was a rope of pearls reported, with some degree of exaggeration, to be “the size of hens’ eggs.” The honeymoon couple would take a six weeks’ automobile trip around the United States, and would then make their home, of course, on Park Avenue.
But on the day of the wedding, June 19, 1916, the deluge of publicity took a decidedly unpleasant turn. After the throng of guests had left the church, and had gathered in the garden of “Rock Ledge” and the festivities had begun, a sudden puff of smoke burst from the roof of the big house, followed by a column of flame. Almost before the guests’ eyes, the entire Farrell house seemed to explode into fire. “Save the wedding presents!” was suddenly the cry, as the men tried vainly to push their way into the burning house and attempted to douse the flames with bottles of champagne, and the women clutched at their rosary beads. But it was no use. The combined fire departments of South Norwalk and Rowayton could not extinguish the blaze, and the great house burned to the ground, taking with it $100,000 worth of furnishings and all the wedding gifts, valued at $30,000, the remarkable silver pieces melted into lumps. Repeated attempts were made to save the presents, but when the walls of the house began to crumble the bride’s father refused to let either firemen or guests go inside, crying gallantly, “Don’t worry! It’s all insured!”
Later, it was concluded that the fire was the result of “the extraordinary amount of cooking being done” in the Farrell kitchens. But there were some who wondered worriedly: Was the fire the doing of a stern Deity who was punishing the Farrells and the Murrays for the sin of pride? In any case, the press commented that the fire left the couple’s honeymoon plans “somewhat up in the air.”
But two more rich Irish-American families were now joined in marriage, in what would become an increasingly complicated interfamily linkage. Mr. Farrell later commemorated this union by adding “Braised Breast of Lamb à la Murray” to his Farrell Line menus, which already offered such quaintly designated dishes as “Farrell’s Dublin City Prime Ribs of Beef” and something called “O’Camembert.” And Farrell-Murray family accounts were gradually added to the list of those handled by McDonnell & Company.
The firm’s business continued to burgeon. Soon there would be McDonnell & Company offices in twenty-six different American cities, in every major money capital in the United States, with three separate offices in New York alone, and another in Paris. Throughout all this, no one seemed to worry about the fact that this was a business founded on a single gimmick that happened to work well. No one seemed to think it surprising, either, that what might have seemed an excessive amount of money was being spent on decorating McDonnell & Company’s offices, which were lavishly furnished with imported chandeliers, thick carpets, and French and English antiques. Along with this went an increasing sense of the family’s social importance. In the early 1930’s, one of the Murray children heard one of his parents remark that Mrs. So-and-so was “from the wrong side of the tracks.” What, the child wanted to know, did this expression mean? “New Jersey” was the reply.
Chapter 6
THE GREATEST NOSE COUNT OF THEM ALL
A singular fact about the Irish in America has been that they have been able to succeed in a wide variety of fields. There is a “difference,” again, between the Irish and the Jews—the latter having tended to distinguish themselves in retailing, investment banking, and, later on, in dress manufacturing and show business. The Irish, on the other hand, have managed to be successful not only in politics (with a concentration on elective offices, while the Jews have seemed to prefer appointive ones) but also in banking, insurance, engineering, industry, and show business, as doctors and lawyers and stockbrokers and advertising men—a whole spectrum of endeavor. Proud and scrappy and ambitious, the Irish quickly got into everything. Joseph P. Kennedy, for example, made money not only in finance but in whiskey and the motion picture industry. In the case of New York’s Cuddihy family—which would soon ally itself, through marriage, to the ubiquitous Murrays—the money was made in publishing.
Isaac Kauffman Funk, the founder of the Literary Digest, was a Lutheran clergyman who had retired from the ministry in 1872 to become a publisher of religious tracts and sermons, and a magazine called Metropolitan Pulpit. In 1877, Funk was joined by a former schoolmate named Adam Willis Wagnalls, who had been a lawyer in Atchison, Kansas, and in 1884 Funk & Wagnalls began publishing a Prohibition journal called Voice. In 1888 the firm took over another religious periodical called Missionary Review of the World.
From the beginning, a kind of missionary zeal marked all the new publishers’ ventures, even though neither Mr. Funk nor Mr. Wagnalls had any qualms about lifting and republishing previously published matter—material that had been printed in England, for example, or that had gone into public domain. Since this was before the advent of an international copyright law, this sort of thing was, though perhaps deceptive to readers, more or less legal, and when Funk & Wagnalls was attacked by a reporter from the New York Evening Post for highhandedly reprinting the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica in a cheap edition, Funk sued the reporter for his story and won his case. In 1890 Funk & Wagnalls brought out a new magazine called the Literary Digest, but only the title of the publication was really new. In line with Mr. Funk’s policy of borrowing freely from the work of others, the Literary Digest, in the beginning, was nothing more than a compilation of stories and articles that had been published before by others. Even the format of the magazine was stolen from the then popular Washington magazine Current Opinion. At the outset, the magazine was only a moderate success and sold only a few thousand copies at ten cents each, or three dollars a year, and consisted of unstimulating columns of gray type, no illustrations, and three or four pages of advertising per issue.
Robert Joseph Cuddihy had gone to work for Funk & Wagnalls as an office boy at age sixteen, several years before the Literary Digest came into existence. Cuddihy was poor and an Irish Catholic, and both Mr. Funk and Mr. Wagnalls were wealthy Protestants. At the same time, Cuddihy’s devoutness and sense of moral rectitude were very much in line with Isaac Funk’s ethical Lutheranism, and the older man took the younger one under his wing. Cuddihy was also tough, aggressive, and fiercely ambitious, and his rise in the firm was rapid. Wagnalls, meanwhile, was showing only a dilatory interest in the company, and Funk was spending more and more time investigating psychic phenomena and spiritualism. In 1905, Robert Cuddihy was named publisher of the Literary Digest and, though Funk made occasional appearances in the office, Cuddihy was in charge of things.
Robert Cuddihy’s two main drives for the fledgling magazine were to maintain a high moral tone and to build circulation through advertising promotion. To establish the former, Mr. Cuddihy dictated that male and female personnel could not occupy the same offices, nor were men and women editors permitted to lunch out with one another or be seen together after hours. Both smoking and drinking were rigidly banned, and divorce was punished with quick dismissal. To achieve his second goal, Cuddihy believed in spending money, and in 1906 he bought the magazine Public Opinion, merged it with the Digest, and embarked upon an advertising campaign so expensive that it is said to hav
e “terrified” his partners—but it boosted the Digest’s circulation to 200,000 by 1909, and to double that figure seven years later.
The Digest’s coverage of the events of World War I perhaps did more than anything else to establish it among the front-runners of American magazines. Its maps, prepared by professional cartographers and printed in two or three colors, were marvels of clarity and precision, and brought the details of overseas battles stunningly home to American readers. With this grew the Digest’s reputation for absolute and strict impartiality; if it quoted a Republican newspaper editorial on any issue, it was always careful to give an equal and balancing amount of space to a Democratic source, and the same to an Independent voice. At Robert Cuddihy’s—or “R.J.” as they called him in the office—insistence, no trace of bias or prejudice was ever to be discernible in the Digest’s pages, whether the subject at hand was politics, religion, economics, history, or literature, and by the 1920’s hundreds of thousands of Americans had learned to believe that if you saw it in the Digest it was not only so, but fair.
By the end of the war the Literary Digest’s circulation had climbed to 900,000, and, under the Cuddihy aegis, it continued to climb until, by 1927, it had reached 1,500,000, when it was topped only by the mighty Saturday Evening Post. Its success at garnering advertising pages was one of the wonders of the era, and in a single issue in 1920 it contained 174 pages, with many issues of 150 or more pages following, while the weekly price for the magazine—out of Mr. Cuddihy’s staunch respect for his readers’ pocketbooks—remained at ten cents. By the late 1920’s the Literary Digest had become a publishing phenomenon, and its boss a legend and a rich man. At one point during this great success Robert Cuddihy offered Mr. Funk $5 million to buy out Funk’s 40 percent interest in the publication. Funk turned the offer down. He would live to regret his cavalier decision. But then, at the time, the Digest was making a profit of $2 million a year.
One reason for the Digest’s enormous popularity was Robert Cuddihy’s innovative idea, in 1916, of conducting “straw votes.” Voters in key areas were polled by mail as to their stands on various political issues; their individual responses to the questionnaires were then tallied, analyzed, and a “prediction” of the political outcome was reached. The first poll was of members of state legislatures on their choices of party nominees for President. Charles Evans Hughes and Woodrow Wilson would be the two candidates, the Digest announced—and they were. Next, in the autumn of that year, the Digest polled labor-union officials as to the outcome of the impending election, and followed this with a pole of fifty thousand Digest readers in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, New Jersey, and New York—on the basis of which the Digest was able to announce that Wilson would be the winner. When the election results were in, the figures were astonishingly close to the Digest’s projection, with Wilson, of course, the winner. It began to seem that the Digest was an infallible barometer of public opinion.
Nothing at all like the Literary Digest polls had ever been done before in publishing, and from the outset the polls were hugely successful for at least three different reasons. They were, to begin with, highly interesting to Digest readers, who enjoyed looking into the magazine’s crystal ball, and they increased circulation. Also, the results of each Digest poll were published in newspapers across the country, and thus provided a vast amount of free publicity for the magazine. Furthermore, every ballot that went out was accompanied by a Digest subscription blank, making the polls a gimmick through which to gain subscribers.
In 1920 the Digest predicted Harding over James M. Cox—again correctly—and in 1924 picked Coolidge over Davis. The Digest continued to be right in 1928 with Hoover over Alfred E. Smith (interestingly enough, R. J. Cuddihy himself, though normally nonpartisan, went to the Republican convention in Kansas City that summer to help nominate Hoover, instead of supporting Smith, the first Catholic candidate for President in American history). And in 1932 the Digest correctly stated that Hoover would be defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Digest’s winning streak at picking winners and losers was extended into other areas besides Presidential elections. In 1922, 1930, and 1932, from eight to twenty million ballots went out to car owners and telephone subscribers on the issue of Prohibition. The results showed an eventual victory for the “wets”—again an ironic contrast to the magazine’s Prohibitionist management, but it underscored Robert Cuddihy’s policy of editorial impartiality.
R. J. Cuddihy himself was a small-boned, fine-looking man who dressed conservatively and shunned publicity. He hated to be photographed, and only four pictures are known to have been taken of him in his lifetime. In 1886, still a rising young man at Funk & Wagnalls, he had married a Miss Emma Frances Bennett. When their son, Herbert Lester Cuddihy, was born, Mr. Cuddihy again showed the independent and impartial side of his nature by deciding that, when the time came, his son would not be sent to a Catholic school or college. His son Lester was sent to Lawrenceville and Princeton. When the boy left college, he went to work for an advertising tycoon, Baron Collier. Anxious to have his son join him at the Digest, R. J. Cuddihy told the young man that he would double his Collier salary if he would come over. Explaining this situation to Mr. Collier, Herbert Lester Cuddihy suggested that Collier double his salary. Collier did, and then, to lure his son away, R. J. had to double the double. But it hardly mattered. The Cuddihys were by now quite rich. R. J. Cuddihy had acquired a yacht, and Lester soon owned a town house in East Seventy-third Street that had its own elevator—very much a novelty in private houses in those days.
One of his son’s first notions for the Literary Digest was to reduce the size of its pages by one-eighth of an inch. Even such a tiny reduction would, the younger Cuddihy pointed out, lower the Digest’s bulk weight in the mails and would result in a substantial saving in postage. The senior Cuddihy was reluctant to tamper, even in so slight a way, with a successful product, and was certain that the move would bring a storm of protest from readers. But he let his son have his way and the reduction was made—and no one noticed it. Only one reader, in fact, wrote in to complain. Another hugely successful Funk & Wagnalls venture was the publication, in 1922, of a volume titled Etiquette by a socially prominent New York divorcee named Emily Price Post. Mrs. Post’s book went into hundreds of printings and new editions, and made Emily Post a rich woman and Funk & Wagnalls an even richer company. The Cuddihys found Mrs. Post a somewhat prickly author to deal with. She was intensely jealous of her name and her product, and when she spotted an advertisement for a deodorant cream called Etiquet, she clipped the ad and wrote indignantly across the face of it, “Dear Mr. Cuddihy—is there no way to check this association with ‘Etiquette’? Few things could be more revolting! At least could the illustration—” it showed a young woman stroking her underarm—”be forbidden? Certainly it is a revolting offense against ‘Etiquette.’ As a matter of fact, I was asked to go on a radio program by these manufacturers …” (The rest of her angry scribble is indecipherable.)
R. J. Cuddihy’s favorite philanthropy was a center for cancer patients run by a Catholic order which had been started by Rose Hawthorne, daughter of Nathaniel, herself a convert and thus “more Catholic than the Catholics.” Mr. Cuddihy approved of Miss Hawthorne’s zeal, and to aid her cause he regularly carried about on his person a hefty wad of large bills. Whenever he encountered a rich Catholic friend, Mr. Cuddihy would produce the wad, tap it significantly with his finger, and suggest that the friend fatten the pile with a few big bills of his own. Among Mr. Cuddihy’s well-heeled friends were members of Chicago’s Cudahy family, including Michael Cudahy himself, who had gone to work as a butcher at the age of fourteen, and later revolutionized the meatpacking industry by developing the process for summer curing of meat under refrigeration; the result was the Cudahy Packing Company. Cudahy once dropped in on Cuddihy in New York just to ask him for a semantic explanation of the different spellings of their name—clearly the field of Mr. Cuddihy, the publisher, and not Mr. Cudahy, the butcher. R. J. C
uddihy told his Chicago kin Cudahy, “Both our families came over in the forties from the same county, Kilkenny, and the same town. Only there was this difference between our two sets of forebears: ours knew how to spell. The officials at Ellis Island thus recorded your name phonetically —that is, incorrectly—as Cudahy. Our name we ourselves wrote—to wit, Cuddihy.” After imparting this information, Mr. Cuddihy took Mr. Cudahy to lunch. Meanwhile, back in Kilkenny, the name turns up in various guises, from Cuddy to McGillicuddy.
Mr. Cuddihy was equally precise in other matters. His grandson Jack recalls bringing a schoolmate home one weekend from Portsmouth Priory. At lunch, Grandpa Cuddihy asked the friend, “Where are you from, George?” The young man replied, “Manchester, New Hampshire, sir.” “Ah,” said Mr. Cuddihy, “Manchester, New Hampshire—population 78,563,” or whatever it was at the time. The young man was dumfounded that Mr. Cuddihy had the figure right to the last digit.
At the same time, Mr. Cuddihy was consistently reserved in respect to his religion, and was careful never to discuss his faith with his non-Catholic friends and business acquaintances, nor to proselytize in any way, nor to get into religious arguments. This was not so much a matter of conscience as it was in line with the Digest’s editorial policy of strict neutrality in all matters. Few non-Catholics who knew him suspected Mr. Cuddihy’s affiliation with the Church, and, in fact, one of his best friends was a Baptist minister named Justin D. Fulton, D.D. Obviously, Dr. Fulton did not realize that his friend was a devout Catholic because, on one occasion, Dr. Fulton presented Mr. Cuddihy with a little book he had written, and which had been published in 1893 by something called the Pauline Propaganda Company. The book, warmly inscribed to Cuddihy by Fulton, was called How to Win Romanists, and was dedicated:
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