Can an assassin blow a magazine’s cover? One did, in 1933. Françoise Mouly, The New Yorker’s covers editor, has a new book out, of “New Yorker covers you were never meant to see”—because they were a little too far on the scandalous side, or just a bit too far out.
An image that didn’t make it into the book is what would have been the cover for the issue of March 4, 1933, imagining Franklin D. Roosevelt driving to his inauguration in an open car, grinning. (In those days, the inauguration was in March.) Herbert Hoover, his predecessor, is regarding him sullenly and passively, which also happens to have been Hoover's approach to the Great Depression. But on February 15th, Giuseppe Zangara fired a gun he’d bought at a Miami pawn shop for eight dollars at Roosevelt, and instead killed Anton Cermak, the Mayor of Chicago, who was shaking F.D.R.’s hand. As Jean Edward Smith wrote in his biography of Roosevelt, “an alert spectator, Mrs. Lillian Cross, had hit the assassin’s arm with her handbag and spoiled his aim.” She blew the assassination, and saved us all from the Presidency of John Nance Garner, the Vice-President-elect and Texas representative, who, in terms of temperament and capability, was the Rick Perry of 1932.
(What would have happened if she hadn’t swung that handbag? Philip K. Dick explored that question in a 1962 novel, “The Man in the High Castle,” which involves Nazis heading to Mars. Scandalously, it’s never been made into a movie; but Ridley Scott is supposed to be working on an adaptation for the BBC.)
Cermak lay dying for a couple of weeks, and the magazine’s editors determined that the cover didn’t look right. They decided to substitute a scene from daily life. That cover is below. To the modern eye, it is awful—a caricature of immigrants working as shoeshine men. It was typical of the time, of course; but still. The workings of history can play tricks with the eyes. The cover that was too contentious to run looks placid; its harmless substitute is painfully provocative.
What about when Roosevelt actually died, in April, 1945? That is hard to say. Is the cover that ran on April 28, 1945—the first available after his death—showing the people of Europe emerging from darkness with the flags of the Allies an homage to Roosevelt or to the Armies converging on Berlin, liberating lands on the way? How about the children looking at the Declaration and Constitution? There is hardly a period in the magazine’s history when the covers were as topical as in the weeks and months after Roosevelt’s death; several of them are in the slide show below. In contrast, there is no clue, in the covers around November, 1963, that anything has gone wrong in the world. Between April and October, 1945, there were more than a dozen, including one of a soldier as a paper doll, surrounded by civilian outfits; that one ran in June, before Japan had even surrendered, and yet pretty much sums up the nineteen-fifties. (There is also one of a woman soldier that shares some of the problems of the shoeshine cover.) In another, factory managers, with armaments on an assembly line behind them, are considering the manufacture of a children’s toy.
And on the cover of August 11, 1945, a soldier bends to read the inscriptions carved in a small town’s honor roll. His eyes are wide—his calm, if not his cover, has been blown. Has he just seen the name of a friend? Any number of alternative images can be on a cover; an entirely different combination of names might have been on that wall.
April 28, 1945
June 16, 1945
June 30, 1945
July 7, 1945
August 11, 1945
September 8, 1945
September 15, 1945
September 29, 1945
October 6, 1945