The Values of the Saturday Evening Post and America
Due to its success, the Saturday Evening Post achieved what few magazines can: it could lay claim to representing within its pages the broad spectrum of American society. "For the Post became not only the preeminent medium of its day but finally itself an artifact of American mass culture" (Cohn p6). According to Cohn, the Post set out to create America in and through its pages. To do this the Post used article, story, editorial and illustration. An article or story in the Post not only had to be entertaining, it also had to have values. These values were rooted in the idea of the American dream: hard work, fair play, personal responsibility, individual initiative, common sense. Browsing through copies of the magazine in the first half of the twentienth century, it is easy to see what image of America the Saturday Evening Post had in mind: prosperous, responsible, white, Republican.
Besides the SEP's emphasis on traditional "Protestant work ethic"
values, the magazine made a visible attempt to forge an American national
consciousness which previously did not exist. "The creation and
dissemination of a transcendent American consciousness was the overriding
mission of the Post" (Cohn p9). One way the Post strove to achieve this
was to offer a common education in facts and in values through its
political and business articles, its life stories of successful men, its
informational pieces on science and technology, and editorial page. But
Cohn argues that even more effective in achieving a national audience, and
national consciousness, were the SEP's storytellers and artists. "Readers
became a national community as they came to know, to share in, and to talk
about familiar characters - Father Brown, Lawyer Tutt, Letitia Carberry,
or Alexander W. Botts. The very appearance of another Rockwell or
Leyendecker cover enriched and confirmed the culture of Post readership.
To read the Post was to become American, to participate in the American
experience" (Cohn p10).