Inside the Callahan Building, thirteen magazines are being put together. They hold “tales of love and desire and hate, fresh each month –as life, moving over cities small and large, leaves a fresh supply of pain and pleasure.” Their circulation runs into millions. Overseeing this enterprise is Jonathan Callahan, an evangelist of physical fitness who descends from his executive suite twice a day to lead the collective staff in an exercise routine. Though in his fifties, Callahan loves to compete with younger men in feats of strength.
As The Great Day opens, Callahan is launching a new venture: a newspaper, The Evening Truth. He has a grand vision of it reaching “a public that no other daily paper in America reaches,” of it being “a great campaigning newspaper.” To run it, he has assigned Stephen Murdock, the young ace of Tales of the Truth, Callahan’s most popular magazine, as managing editor. He’s pumped Murdock and other members of the Truth’s staff full of his vision of bringing truth to power, or whatever the 1920s equivalent crusading phrase was.
Unfortunately, Callahan intends to pursue the truth the same way as he has in Tales of the Truth: through the back door. Instead of civic reform, his real agenda is simple. He wants to sell papers. To do it, he charges Murdock to splash every front page with shocking headlines and even more shocking images. And he equips Murdock with a secret weapon to shake readers out of their comfort zones: the composograph. The composograph, as described by Carneal, is “a photograph, apparently taken from life, in which the true photographed faces of people in the news had been used, but the bodies, the postures, and the event described, were arranged and photographed in the offices of the tabloid.”
Students of American journalism will recognize that composograph provides the key that unlocks the door to the real-life counterparts to most of the characters and constructs of The Great Day. Composographs were introduced in the New York Evening Graphic, the notorious tabloid founded by fitness guru and publisher Bernarr Macfadden in 1924. Some examples, such as this, illustrating the bedroom games of real estate developer Edward “Daddy” Browning and his 15-year-old wife, “Peaches,” described during the trial for her separation application, seem a bit ridiculous today, but at a time when newspaper readership was at its peak, the composographs helped boost daily circulation to nearly one million. Only the New York Daily News and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Daily Mirror, both tabloids, had more readers.
Georgette Carneal was, indirectly, a veteran of The Evening Graphic. Born in Baltimore, she began working as a reporter in the early 1920s, when still in her teens, and moved to New York City in 1923. She quickly earned a reputation for pursuing her stories with fierce tenacity, a reputation due in part to a perhaps apocryphal tale that she won a job with the New York World by convincing Geroge Baker, president of the New York First National Bank, to give her his first and only interview. From 1924 to 1925, she was married (her first, his third) to Louis Weitzenkorn, a veteran reporter who took over as Graphic editor after Macfadden fired the paper’s first editor, Emile Gauvreau.
Weitzenkorn likely served as the inspiration for Stephen Murdock. Weitzenkorn was considered one of the best reporters in a city with some of the best in the country, and he liked to put his hand at other types of writing — magazine essays and plays — when he had a chance. Initially, at least, he bought Macfadden’s line that the Graphic was going to be a crusading paper. It was later said that Gauvreau tried to make the Graphic sensational, and Weitzenkorn tried to make it “semi-respectable.” After Macfadden fired Gauvreau and made Weitzenkorn editor in 1929, he soon learned that his readers preferred scandals to crusades, and he found himself being pressured to put sales ahead of scruples. As Shanon Fitzpatrick puts it in her 2022 book, True Story: How a Pulp Empire Remade Mass Media, about the spectacular rise and slow decline of Bernarr Macfadden’s publishing empire, to compete with the Daily News and Daily Mirror, “the Graphic constantly pushed the envelope, attracting a string of costly libel suits along the way.
The Great Day is a bit of a loose, baggy monster, with dozens of characters and at least a half-dozen subplots, but Murdock’s story is the centerpiece. From the very beginning, he struggles to reconcile the daily choices of running the Truth with his self-image as a man of character and values. His principal weapon in this struggle, though, is nothing more than ferocious rationalization:
I’m still young . . . still young. Only thirty — that’s very young. Besides, none of this touches me. I’m here for a purpose. I’m young enough to squeeze this dirty thing dry; eke out some heavy coin from it — and make my get-away.
Five years later, the age has changed but not the refrain:
“Hell, I’m only thirty-five,” he said to himself, “and I’m making twenty thousand a year. What difference does it make what I’m doing? That’s a lot of money — and that’s young.”
As Weitzenkorn is said to have, Murdock believes himself above the sordid business of tabloid journalism. He recognizes the scent of the muck he’s busy raking, but refuses to accept that any will cling to him:
His eyes leapt, eager, restless, laughing, across the space of office that was the tenth floor of the Callahan Building, and his nostrils dilated as he breathed the breath of Callahan’s again.
It was an odor that contained many elements; there was dry wind and dust, and clothes made to live and breathe with the flesh beneath…. You couldn’t cook a smell like that, he thought; couldn’t brew it, either; but here human beings in a building, stewing all together, some of their worry going into it, and the dust from the floor, and the invisible dust from the buildings: it smelled like fear. He looked at them. Day by day they came into this place, sweated, worked, laughed, lived; the same dumb insistence in their faces, the same futile endeavor. Then they went, and a silence came into the place.
Carneal’s vision of America has had all its idealism wrung out. If the Truth sacrifices journalistic integrity for sensationalism, it is merely a mirror of everything that surrounds it. A world where immigrants live in fear — not of deportation but of exploitation, poverty, illness, and accident. Murdock recalls seeing a German-American man weeping over the body of his dead wife in Bellevue Hospital and the indignity brought upon him by the tabloid photographers hoping to catch a dramatic picture of his grief. The only thing separating them was a matter of degree, “of nearness to or distance from — poverty.” Poverty that results chiefly from the immigrant’s failure to jump on the American merry-go-round, driven not by capitalism but graft:
The very graft and crookedness that made people rich, that was the life-blood of great cities. This man or that man had gotten a few hundred, a few thousand, a few million, dependent upon the circumstances, upon the time and place. It was — opportunity…. That was how fortunes were made. Even the men who wrote the stories for the papers, they did it, too.
Murdock thinks he’s found a way to get off the merry-go-round when he meets and falls in love with Julia O’Day, a sad-faced beauty he spots one night in a nightclub. She has a penthouse in Manhattan, an estate in Westchester, wears the most sophisticatedly simple gowns, speaks with tenderness and delicacy. The two of them can pool their takings and run away to a better life, somewhere far from the sewers of Manhattan.
But Julia has been corrupted, too, and by the same force: money. “I was very broke,” she confesses, “and thinking a great deal about money. I was thinking, you need money, you must have money, real money, wealth, to live at all.” When she meets Craig, a man of wealth, power, and dubious associates, she agrees to become his mistress. Craig is the one paying for the penthouse, the gowns, the evenings in clubs. “You make up your mind to let things go — dignity, decency, that kind of thing.”
The night before Julia and Murdock plan to marry, Craig summons her to the estate. Knowing Julia’s desire to get away from him, he offers to give her $100,000 — in return for seducing his wife while he watches. The next morning, Julia is found dead in the garage, a victim of carbon monoxide poisoning. Callahan’s right-hand man, George Oval (a fictional counterpart of Liberty magazine editor Fulton Oursler) recognizes a lurid story when he sees one and quickly overrides any concerns to protect Murdock’s feelings — especially when investigators come across Julia’s candid and detail-filled diary. He makes sure, of course, to clothe his actions in a crusader’s tunic:
Our paper can wage, through that diary, the greatest fight ever waged against loose living. Every man and every woman will want to know what Julia O’Day gave for the money she got. Every man and every woman…
Carneal even includes samples of the Evening Truth’s coverage of Julia’s death.
Carneal portrays Murdock as a victim of self-delusion. She saves her sharpest instruments, however, for her portrait of George Oval and his second wife, June (the fictional counterpart of Grace Perkins, the author of No More Orchids, featured here recently. Where Murdock has misgivings about drinking the Kool-Aid of filthy lucre, Oval and his wife have the fervor — indeed, the joy — of true believers. Oval is not only the editor over all of Callahan’s editors but the author of six novels, each more acclaimed than its predecessors. No longer does he sense people whispering as he walks down the aisle in a Broadway theater, “There goes George Oval. He runs those magazines for ‘people whose lips move when they read.'” Now, he is — in the words of a review he reads three times to savor each superlative — “one of the outstanding literary figures of America and of the world.” He lives surrounded by “the signs and symbols of his success,” even as he continues to approve — hell, to orchestrate — the Truth’s most flagrant assaults on individual dignity.
The Great Day is certainly one of the most savage satires of American mass media and the American success myth ever published. And with its subplot involving pedophilia, it’s natural to find parallels between Carneal’s novel and what’s going on in the White House today. There are, around President Trump, counterparts to George Oval, men like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought who truly believe themselves to be crusaders of only the purest motives as they undertake the most craven actions. But the larger population comprises people like Murdock, who perhaps think they can escape the moral consequences of their work or kid themselves that its corruption can be papered over with an impressive job title, or a step upwards to more lucrative jobs. The message of Georgette Carneal’s The Great Day is that one can no more be a little bit compromised than a woman can be a little bit pregnant. The world is full of Faustian bargains.