Ralph Ingersoll (PM publisher)

Ralph Ingersoll (c. 1900 – c. 1984) was an American writer, editor, and publisher, probably best known as the founder and publisher of the short-lived 1940s New York City left-wing daily newspaper "PM".Roger Starr, [http://www.city-journal.org/article02.php?aid=1480 PM: New York's Highbrow Tabloid] , "City Journal", Summer 1993. Accessed online 5 March 2007.]

Before founding "PM", Ingersoll was managing editor of Time-Life publications, and devised the formula of business magazine "Fortune".

Prior to that he had been managing editor of the New Yorker. [2]

One of his first jobs at Fortune was to see that a detailed description of how the New Yorker was run was published. This initiated a feud between Time and Fortune publisher Henry Luce and Harold Ross, editor in chief of the New Yorker. Highlights (or lowlights, if you prefer) of the feud a Profile of Luce that ran in the New Yorker in 1936 that lampooned both Luce and [Timestyle] , the art decoish writing style Time was (in)famous for and Luce getting caricaturist Al Hirschfield to draw an image of [Josef Stalin] over a picture of Ross. Other than the two principles of the feud, it was a source of some amusement. [2]

"PM" was founded with $1.5 million of capital, a fraction of the $10 million that Ingersoll initially sought. Unlike usual U.S. practice, "PM" (1940–1948) took no advertising; editorials did not appear every day, and when they did were signed by an individual, initially Ingersoll himself, instead of anonymously coming from the paper itself. Sometimes these editorials took over the front page. His first editorial took a forthright stand on World War II, already under way in Europe: "We are against people who push other people around," he wrote, demanding material U.S. support for the nations opposing Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

Ingersoll hired distinguished writers, including (at one time or another) articles by Erskine Caldwell, McGeorge Bundy, James Wechsler (eventually the paper's editorialist); Penn Kimball, Heywood Hale Broun, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, I. F. Stone, Eugene Lyons, Ben Stolberg, Malcolm Cowley, and Ben Hecht.

The first year of the paper was a general success, though the paper was already in some financial trouble: its circulation of 100,000–200,000 was just not enough. Marshall Field III had become the paper's funder; quite unusually, he was a "silent partner" in this continually money-losing undertaking.

The 41-year-old Ingersoll was drafted into the military; when he returned after the war, he found a paper that was less lively and well-written than under his leadership, and with the pro-communist and anti-communist liberals writing at cross purposes. The paper never quite recovered, an early victim of the Cold War (and of Field's increasing interest in the "Chicago Sun" rather than "PM").

Ingersoll later wrote numerous books about his service in World War II.

Notes

[2] Genius in Disguise Thomas Kunkel