Girl Sleuth (15 page)

“He has probably influenced youth more than any writer in America today, and in 30 years he has amassed a sales distribution of between 15 and 20 millions of copies,” sighed one admiring journalist. Nevertheless, Stratemeyer worked as hard as ever to sell more books. Competition with the five-cent nickelodeons that were attracting children in swarms sparked his latest revolutionary scheme: He priced his books at a mere fifty cents. The days of books costing a dollar or more had passed, in his opinion, like a plague. Parents could afford fifty-centers, and children with a reasonable allowance or an after-school job could, too. Boys had paper routes and flower carts; they blacked shoes and carried telegrams. Girls, who did not have jobs outside the home for the
most part, also had their methods, as one of them confessed: “It is so easy for a girl, when sent to the corner grocery for 15 cents worth of coal oil, to get a dime's worth and save a nickel.” No matter where they were getting their cash, children gladly spent it on series books.

Stratemeyer didn't hesitate to spend his, either. Unwilling to settle for what the publishing houses called “publicity,” he routinely put up his own money to buy mailing lists of children's names and addresses from various youth organizations and then helped his publishers create booklets packed with teasers, color pictures, and intriguing tidbits of plot and adventure, which were soon winging their way through the mail to every corner of the country. On the back page of these catalogs was a form that could be used to write down “the names and Addresses of other boys and girls to whom you want us to send catalogs.” It was a clever way to appeal to modern children, who, with all their newfound leisure time and social status, were often, as one assessment put it, “too busy shooting marbles to look at book announcements.” It was also pure marketing genius. One kid empowered with a pen and a catalog was enough to make an entire neighborhood crazy for fifty-centers, and the numbers bore it out. By 1934 Cupples & Leon, one of the big three juvenile series book publishers, estimated that their mailing list was half a million names long. Whole gangs of children were comparing notes about what they were saving up for and what they were prepared to swap, and they frequently wrote letters to publishers with comments and suggestions and demands. The catalogs had done the trick, functioning, in the words of one disapproving writer, like “an insidious narcotic with the habit-forming properties of opium.”

The result was that while series books were viewed darkly by many parents and educators, they soon acquired the highest stamp of childhood approval: Over back fences and during school
recesses, they served as private black-market currency. Two Tom Swifts might be worth a baseball bat or a bag of marbles. Tales of boys in fast cars and rocket ships offered an escape from reality in thrilling, page-turning prose, and their reach was seemingly limitless. “No matter where you are, there is a [series] book,” one pleased young writer from Kentucky mentioned in his fan letter to a publisher. “If I had enough money saved up, I would get the rest,” wrote another, from Milford, Illinois, referring to the Rover Boys series. Not only the characters, but their fake, pseudonymous authors had become friends to the youth of America. “During adolescence Roy Rockwood had always been one of my favorite people,” confessed one of Stratemeyer's eventual ghostwriters, about the famous “author” of the Bomba the Jungle Boy series. “I pictured him seated at his desk, pen in hand, white shirt open at the throat, a bulldog pipe in his teeth.” Children wrote in to the Syndicate and their favorite authors by the dozens. They asked for autographs and for information about the authors for book reports; they inquired as to whether or not the characters were real people, hoping to resolve arguments about the books that cropped up in their circles of friends by going straight to the source; they requested replacement dust jackets for their well-worn books, which the Syndicate provided without a fuss; they sent in suggestions for plots (“Write a mystery about a ferret”) and asked to star in the books themselves as a way to break in to a future as a movie star.

By 1926 Stratemeyer was more prosperous than ever. His offices on fashionable Madison Square Park in Manhattan were buzzing, and his secretary, Harriet Otis Smith, had become an integral part of the Syndicate, reading manuscripts and making suggestions. Certainly Stratemeyer needed the help, for by this time he had twenty-four series running, and the Syndicate had
sold somewhere between three and four million books the previous year. Stratemeyer, knowing he had yet more to offer his publishers, was also busy making plans for the future.

But first a few changes had to be made. Writing to one of his biggest publishers, Cupples & Leon, he berated them for what he considered to be an inferior jacket on a recent title in one of his series and then went on: “You will perhaps be interested to know that during the past two months my Syndicate has been conducting a campaign for new writers and out of the great number who applied I have found several magazine authors who are crackerjacks. So I am expecting better manuscripts than ever in the future.” The response to his ad in the
Editor
magazine had been immediate and overwhelming; letters came from New York and Nebraska; from a hopeful town called Fertile, Minnesota; from Washington, D.C.; Waynesboro, Virginia; Framingham, Massachusetts; and Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. A missive also arrived from 730 Ninth Avenue, in Clinton, Iowa. “Dear Sirs,” it began:

 

I understand that the Stratemeyer Syndicate can use the services of writers in the preparation of books for boys and girls and also in the short story field. Will you kindly furnish me with information concerning this work and your terms?

I have sold twenty-eight stories in the past two years to St. Nicholas Magazine, Lutheran Young Folks, Young People, Youth's Comrade, and similar magazines and papers. In addition, I have sold a number of articles, feature stories and fiction, and have turned out about six hundred printed inches of newspaper material each week for the last year.

In September I am planning to change my location to New York City.

Yours very truly
,
Mildred Augustine

 

Before entering Iowa's journalism program, Mildred had apparently been laboring on a scheme to move to the big city. Perhaps her newspaper job in Iowa, with her duties on the society pages, had not been all she had hoped for; certainly she longed for a more cosmopolitan existence than could be had in smalltown America. No doubt she thought it would make sense to have some contacts in New York before throwing herself on its mercies like so many young women before her had, and, as she was eager to break into books, Stratemeyer's ad had seemed just the thing. He responded immediately, asking her to send stories if she wanted. She did.

“I have looked over these stories with a great deal of interest,” he wrote to her in May, “and it is just possible that in the future I may be able to use your services, provided we can come to terms.” It was enough to encourage her. That July, on her way home from a tour through Europe (which she paid for with money she had earned at the
Clinton Herald),
Mildred stopped off in New York and met with Stratemeyer. His impression of her in person must have solidified his belief in her as a fresh new voice for his books, for she came away with a promise of eventual work. When she went back to the University of Iowa for her master's degree—clearly her backup plan when no immediate job was offered—she made sure to send Stratemeyer her new address in Iowa City so that he would be able to find her easily. Just a few days later, he wrote to ask her if she would undertake the next title in his Ruth Fielding series, which was about to lose its originating writer.

Of all the girls' series Stratemeyer started in the early part of the century, Ruth Fielding (1913) was his greatest success, centered on one bold young movie star/director heroine who knew what she wanted and how to get it, even in the male-dominated,
fast-paced world of Hollywood. By the time Edward sent Mildred a two-and-a-half-page outline for
Ruth Fielding and Her Great Scenario; or, Striving for the Motion Picture Prize
—scenario meaning screenplay—Ruth had been established as a go-getter and had made the shift from solving tame crimes at her boarding school to cracking Hollywood cases, even as she kept up a back-breaking workload in the movie industry. The basic plot of Mildred's first effort for the Stratemeyer Syndicate, as described by Edward, was “a bitter rival learned that Ruth was writing a prize scenario and laid a plot to rob the girl of the rewards of her labor. A fascinating tale of mystifying adventures.” But in spite of being all of that, set at a summer resort and replete with explosions, theft, and suspense of all kinds, the story was also about the more mundane, if no less important, aspects of Ruth's existence: namely, her love life.

For Ruth Fielding, like her predecessors Dorothy Dale and Cora Kimball, is nothing if not a thoroughly modern girl—and not always in the most reassuring way. Just as Cora had put up with being harassed about driving a car fifteen years earlier, Ruth has to cope with Americans' slowly regressing ideas about women and work, which manifest in her relationship with long-time beau, Tom Cameron. “Through all her exultation and excitement, Ruth felt a tiny ache of conscience when she thought of Tom. He was being such a sport about it—as indeed he had been all along.” Eventually, she gives in to Tom's fondest desire, albeit with some ambivalence. Not twenty pages of
Ruth Fielding and Her Great Scenario
go by before we learn that “the engagement ring on her finger . . . told Ruth's friends that the girl did not always intend to remain a single business woman. But Ruth wanted a career as well as love.”

This inexorable, newly resurgent pull of domesticity was drawn straight from the daily headlines. As one historian notes,
thanks to the flash and frivolity of the Jazz Age, “Many Americans had begun to fear that the family was being destroyed. If women were free to vote and live in apartments on their own, and if wives were working outside the home in increasing numbers, then who would keep the home fires burning?” Perhaps some of the fear was also economic; the last decade had introduced many women to the rewards of the workplace, but having made an enormous effort to educate women, society now had no careers to offer them. Though more women were working, fewer were entering the male-dominated fields like science and academia, and employers began to prefer hiring women who did not have college degrees. Mostly they held clerical jobs at which their bosses invariably called them “girl” regardless of their ages, or else they did work from their homes. They also did not earn nearly as much as their male counterparts.

Not getting married had become a pitiable social faux pas, and once a woman succumbed, chances were her husband wanted her at home taking care of the children, who were supposed to be bright and fresh and pressed at all times lest they should cast doubt on their parents. “What do the neighbors think of her children?” read one 1928 detergent ad's copy in the
Ladies' Home Journal.
The number of women who never married, which had once been as high as 20 percent, dropped to 5 percent by the end of the decade, and even education seemed to have very little effect. According to one study, “Most college women surveyed claimed they aspired above all else to the role of wife.” Vassar College went so far as to invent a school of “Euthenics” that ran courses like “Husband and Wife,” “Motherhood,” and “The Family as Economic Unit.” The issue was no less pressing for lower-class women, who, while they needed to work, could not escape the prevailing sentiment that they were hurting their children by doing so. “Can the devoted wife and mother conduct a successful business outside the home?” questioned another ad in the
Ladies' Home Journal.

As always, Stratemeyer's books took reality and made it tidier.
Ruth Fielding and Her Great Scenario
is filled with moments in which the pliable Tom Cameron not only pledges wholeheartedly to take a backseat to Ruth's brains and brilliant professional life, but also would never dream of making her change her ways to keep him. Unlike her real-life counterparts, she would not have to give up a thing to achieve both peace of mind and a career. “Ruth, I'll never say a word about your career,” he says at one point. “Not even if you decide to open a moving picture studio on the moon! I only want you to know that when you're ready for a home, I'll be right at your doorstep—waiting.” When one rather backward—but actually completely au courant—suitor in another of her stories protests that “woman's place is in the home,” Ruth's closest chum Helen flies into a rage and puts him in his place once and for all: “Bosh! Let me tell you, the modern woman can do something besides wash dishes and darn socks.” The enraged indignation practically flew off the page.

Perhaps this was because the young woman who was ghostwriting the book was facing the same issues in her own life. She was on the verge of matrimony, but like Ruth Fielding, she did not intend to enter into it without embarking on a career of her own. Though many women were once again working, as Harriet Adams had, for only the short period of time between school and marriage, Mildred was determined to learn the business of book writing before she settled down, and to have something of her own even after she married. Her intentions ran absolutely counter to what America expected of its young women at the end of the 1920s. The tide had shifted, and she was going against it. “What
had looked like vigorous independence and strong-mindedness in the flapper now seemed careless, selfish, and superficial,” writes one historian of the period. “Now family was about self-fulfillment, consumption, and nurturing the newly discovered psyche of the child . . . A whole generation was tempted by an older, comforting vision of mom as a plump, slightly frazzled woman who could be relied on to sacrifice herself . . . and make it all better.”