The New York Times ran a short article on page 15 of its Friday, November 28, 1924, issue: “Greet Santa Claus as ‘King of Kiddies’.” Police estimated that at 9:00 in the morning on Thanksgiving Day, about 10,000 people had jammed 34th Street between Sixth and Sevenths Avenues in Manhattan to watch a parade sponsored by Macy’s, one of the city’s big department stores.
The event had been designed to celebrate the opening of Macy’s new store at 34th near Seventh Avenue, but much of the crowd, made up of small children, were there to catch a glimpse of the big man of the holiday season: Santa Claus.
“Santa came in state,” the article reported. “The float upon which he rode was in the form of a sled driven by reindeer over a mountain of ice. Preceding him were men dressed like the knights of old, their spears shining in the sunlight.”
The parade, populated with clowns, animals, marching bands, and floats, began at Convent Avenue and 145th Street and attracted audiences standing some four or five deep along the walk. It concluded at noon at the entrance of the new Macy’s, with Santa’s new nickname, “King of the Kiddies,” lit up on the store’s marquee. “When Santa seated himself on the throne he sounded his trumpet, which was the signal for the unveiling of the store’s Christmas window, showing the ‘Fairy Frolics of Wondertown,’ designed and executed by [puppeteer] Tony Sarg. The police lines gave way and with a rush the enormous crowd flocked to the windows to see Mother Goose characters as marionettes.”
This was, of course, the first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. It has since been immortalized by the 1947 movie Miracle on 34th Street and has been shown on network television since 1948. I’m a big fan of Miracle on 34th Street but not of parades. They don’t hold my attention for more than a few minutes.
But as I cruised through the internet yesterday, an article with a headline about the first Macy’s parade taking place in 1924 did catch my attention.
I immediately wondered if Jane Grant watched any of the parade. She worked on the New York Times city desk in 1924, after logging in some years in the society department, so it would have been within her purview. (And she enjoyed the many fine retail establishments the city had to offer.)
Macy’s advertised in the Times for what was originally called its Christmas parade and placed a full-page ad that ran the day before the event, encouraging “Everybody Be On Hand!” The newspaper ran a brief, two-paragraph article, “Santa to Lead a Parade,” that day, too. A smaller ad appeared on the day of the parade. The day after, the store published a “thank-you” ad and announced this would become an annual event. “We advise you now to make no other engagement for the morning of Thanksgiving Day, 1925.”
But if Jane did not cover the parade, she may not have taken the time to watch it. During the fall of 1924 she was stretched thin. In addition to her full-time job at the Times, she had been writing articles and stories for other publications to boost her income. She and her husband Harold Ross needed the money because, in addition to everything else, Jane was working at all hours that fall with Ross to get the first issue of The New Yorker magazine ready for publication.
That would happen in February 1925. And like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, The New Yorker has thrived into the 21st century.
Wishing you all a peaceful start to the holiday season.
Jane Grant, co-founder of The New Yorker, writer, and newspaperwoman, worked and/or crossed paths with many intelligent, ambitious career women. Like her, most of them were well known in their lifetimes but have since fallen into historical obscurity. As I tell the story of Jane’s involvement with The New Yorker, I weave in bits of those women’s lives, too—to remind the world of their accomplishments and to show how they may have inspired Jane.
Caroline Singer was one. By 1909, when she was still in her early 20s, she worked as a newspaper reporter in San Francisco, the city she grew up in, and had her own byline. Caroline married newspaper man William (“Doc”—he would, for a short time, practice dentistry) Mundell in 1911; two years later he changed careers again and opened a private detective agency.
In 1918, while the United States was involved in what would come to be called the First World War, the couple temporarily lived in Washington, D.C. Mundell was recruited for “secret service work” for one of President Wilson’s cabinet members. Caroline served as a member of the education committee of the War Camp Community Service under Raymond Fosdick, chair of the Committee on Training Camp Activities.
The American Red Cross then hired Caroline to go to France as part of its news service and to assist with publicity. She arrived during the last weeks of the war in 1918. She quickly found the Stars and Stripes office in Paris, where she made an immediate impression on its all-male staff. Caroline was not only a smart, seasoned journalist, she also commanded attention, standing at six feet tall, with inquisitive hazel eyes and cropped brown hair, all of which later earned her the nickname “the Goddess.”
Jane Grant, who also frequented The Stars and Stripes office, made fast friends with Caroline. The two women spent time together when free from their other obligations—Jane performing with the YMCA and Caroline gathering information for a book she would co-write about the history of the Red Cross during the war. Jane later remembered how “Caroline and I were called the Stars and Stripes camp followers by this mad crowd.” The women surely understood the double entendre.
Cyrus Leroy (known as Roy) Baldridge, the artist-illustrator for the newspaper whose own height surpassed six feet, was particularly captivated by Caroline Singer. A romance ensued. But when her Red Cross work wrapped up in 1919, Caroline returned to San Francisco and, presumably at least for a while, Mundell. The marriage did not last; Caroline and Baldridge wed in November 1921 and settled in Harmon, an area of Croton-on-Hudson, New York, about an hour north of New York City.
They built a blue stone cottage on a hill overlooking the Hudson River. A reporter noted a few years later that the locals, “more or less accustomed by now to the queer ways of bohemians, still watch them, wide eyed,” and “can’t tell Caroline from Roy at a distance, for they both wear flannel sport shirts, riding breeches, and her hair is cropped as close as his.”
[Caroline Singer, c. 1920s]
Every Sunday for about three years, visitors from New York City—mostly editors, publishers, writers, painters—made the trek north to spend the day soaking in the natural beauty of the place and having fun. It is likely that Jane Grant and Harold Ross were among them.
In the summer of 1924, Caroline Singer and Roy Baldridge rented out the cottage and headed off to Asia for six months. The result was a book, Turn to the East (1926), written by Caroline and illustrated by Baldridge. They continued this professional partnership as they traveled widely during the rest of the 1920s and into the 1930s, producing White Africans and Black (1929) and Half the World is Isfahan (1936). The books earned positive reviews, both for Caroline’s narrative style and Baldridge’s artistic talent.
International travel became more dangerous by the end of the 1930s, and the couple adjusted their careers accordingly. Caroline wrote children’s books (she also volunteered for children’s organizations in New York), which Baldridge illustrated. They both became involved with liberal political causes. Caroline may have attended meetings of the feminist group, Heterodoxy, and she joined the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the League of Women Voters.
Caroline also continued to write articles, mostly for magazines, including Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, published by the National Urban League. A reporter for the Black weekly newspaper the New York Age described her in 1941 as “one of America’s better known white writers.” The article highlighted a piece Caroline had recently written for Opportunity, in which she asked white women to “make real democracy work here in America.” Caroline labeled “Anti-Negroism the most deeply-rooted and the most wide-spread of our Anti-Democratic and Anti-Social prejudices.” She believed they were a “national vice.” Caroline called on white women to admit Black women into their clubs and organizations, especially—and crucially now that it was wartime—those involving civilian defense.
Caroline Singer and Roy Baldridge left New York in 1952 and settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Baldridge joined the faculty of the Hill and Canyon School of the Arts. Caroline apparently stopped writing, perhaps due to ill health. She died in 1963.
“Mrs. Baldridge, Noted Writer, Dies After Illness” announced the obituary that ran in the local paper. It identified, with little elaboration, that Caroline was an “author and artist of renown in her own right,” and acknowledged that “her name before her marriage was Caroline Singer.” Such a cursory nod to such a remarkable career for an American white woman in the first half of the twentieth century.
After Caroline’s death, Baldridge donated to the University of Chicago, his alma mater, some of his drawings and copies of the books they published. His papers are also there, a modest accumulation amounting to four boxes, probably bequeathed after his death in 1977. Traces of his wife can be found in the collection’s Series III, labeled Caroline Singer, containing pieces of her published and unpublished work, portraits, and photographs from 1920 to 1943. They comprise three file folders.
The Chicago art critic, poet, and world traveler Blanche Coates Matthias, a friend of the couple, saved many of the letters she received from Caroline Singer. Those are located in the Blanche Matthias Papers (17 boxes, 2 file folders of Caroline’s letters that have been digitized and make fascinating reading) at the Yale University Archives.
That is what remains of Caroline Singer: her books and articles, plus some modest archival holdings.
In 1927, the journalist and critic Alexander Woollcott, who had been one of Jane Grant’s first friends at the New York Times, wrote about Caroline Singer and Roy Baldridge for a newspaper piece. Woollcott was particularly fascinated by Baldridge’s “penchant” for traveling, and pointed out that “Caroline Singer is far from his silent partner in vagrancy. She goes along and helps.” According to Woollcott, how did this wife help her husband? When Baldridge decided, while out on one of their adventures, to make a sketch, Caroline “pitches in” to arrange the subject. “Or they come out of Japan with a book in mind, and, as in the case of their beautiful Turn to the East, she will write its text.”
How is writing the text of a book—actually writing a book—considered helping? The title page lists Caroline’s name first, as it was on the couple’s subsequent books. Caroline was not “far from” being Baldridge’s silent partner; she was not silent at all. She was an equal partner and deserved, in all situations, to be recognized as such. Yet despite her accomplishments, because Caroline was married, many people like Woollcott assumed she was the helpmate of her husband.
Jane Grant faced the same assumption about her role with The New Yorker. This is one of the ways in which women disappear from or are obscured in the historical record. Uncovering and restoring these women’s lives is essential to documenting and understanding a complete history of any given society. (And “complete,” these days, is especially important.) This is why Women’s History Month remains crucial.
Since I’ve been thinking of 2025 as the year of Jane Grant, I’ve been finding reminders of her in unexpected places.
Including episode 6, “Meet Michael Vanderkellen,” which originally aired on November 13, 1989 in the eighth and final season of the 1980s sitcom Newhart.*
The episode centers on newlyweds Michael Harris (Peter Scolari) and his wife Stephanie Vanderkellen (Julia Duffy) who are expecting their first child. Michael is unemployed. Stephanie, heiress to a huge fortune but, unable to independently access any of those funds, has been working as a maid at Dick (Bob Newhart) and Joanna (Mary Frann) Loudon’s Stratford Inn in Vermont. Now her room at the inn is not big enough for her growing family.
So Stephanie asks her mother to buy them a mansion in town. Mrs. Vanderkellen (Priscilla Morrill) agrees, but only if Michael changes his last name to Vanderkellen. Because Stephanie is an only child—and a woman—the elder Vanderkellens want insurance that their family name will go on.
Michael, the epitome of a materialistic Yuppie, asks for clarification. “You want me to sell my name, my legacy, my very being, for a house?” Then he immediately agrees.
No one suggests that Stephanie simply continue using her birth name and have the child use it, too.
Instead, Dick points out to Michael, “You sold your soul for a lot of closet space. Don’t you get it? When you give away your name, you’re giving away your identity, your integrity.”
Joanna interjects.
“Of course not,” he replies.
“Why is that?”
[You all know what’s coming.]
“You’re a woman.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you’re not a man.”
“So?”
“So it’s different.”
“What do you mean, it’s different?”
“It’s not the same.”
“Dick, I know what different means.”
“Good. I’m glad we cleared that up.”
Nothing is in fact cleared up. Dick is perfectly happy with the logic of his explanation, Joanna doesn’t buy it, and Stephanie simply doesn’t care.
Jane Grant faced the same range of responses more than sixty years earlier when she decided that marriage should not require her to give away her identity.
She married Harold Ross in New York City in March of 1920, not long after they both returned from France, where she had worked for the YMCA and he had been serving in the U.S. army. It was a quick, no-frills wedding at the Church of the Transfiguration. After the ceremony, the church secretary startled Jane with, “Congratulations, Mrs. Ross.”
“Never for a moment had I considered the possibility of losing my name,” Jane later wrote. The secretary’s comment “jolted me into the realization that my very own name might have been dissolved when the minister finished the ceremony.” She decided to remain Jane Grant.
In terms of legalities, this was not a simple thing to do, so in 1921, Jane and her friend Ruth Hale launched the Lucy Stone League, an organization that helped married women retain their birth names. (The State Department, for instance, would not allow a married woman to use her birth name on her passport.) The league’s goal attracted the attention of the National Woman’s Party, led by the charismatic suffragist Alice Paul, who would soon begin the long battle to secure the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.
The two organizations joined forces on some projects, and many women belonged to both groups. The Lucy Stone League attracted much media attention, and soon any married woman who was known by her birth name was described as a Lucy Stoner.
The league operated as an official organization through the mid-1920s. Jane Grant revived it in 1950, along with Doris Fleischman, expanding its purpose to include pursuing “all civil and social rights of women” and serving as a center for research and information about the status of women. As such, the Lucy Stone League became a foundation for the so-called second wave of feminism that surfaced in the 1960s.
Yet in terms of the league’s original goal, appeals to equal rights proved no match for tradition. Over the next decades, only a small percentage of married women opted to retain their birth names. The 1989 airing date of that Newhart episode marked a kind of high point in a slight uptick of women doing so.
In “Making a Name: Women’s Surnames at Marriage and Beyond,” published in the spring 2004 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Claudia Goldin and Maria Shim speculated that by the 1990s, “Perhaps surname-keeping seems less salient as a way of publicly supporting equality for women than it did in the late 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps a general drift to more conservative social values has made surname-keeping less attractive.”
Nearly twenty years later, a 2023 study by the Pew Research Center found, “Most women in opposite-sex marriages (79%) say they took their spouse’s last name when they got married. Another 14% kept their last name, and 5% hyphenated both their name and their spouse’s name.”
“Women’s rights” has always been capacious. Jane Grant’s interest began with a small slice that quickly allowed her to see larger connections. Her commitment to gender equality issues likely played a big part in her divorce from Harold Ross. It also likely enriched and strengthened her relationship with William Harris, her second husband. Jane remained Jane Grant after their marriage, too. She never wavered.
* During season 8, Newhart spun out of control as it headed for its now famous finale.
[**spoiler alert**]
The whole thing—all eight seasons—had been the dream of Chicago psychologist Bob Hartley, the main character of Bob Newhart’s eponymous (and much better) 1970s sitcom.
Here on the blog, I have designated 2025 as the year of Jane Grant, mostly because it marks the centennial of The New Yorker, the magazine Jane co-founded with her first husband, Harold Ross.
(Jane Grant, c. 1917. Jane Grant Photograph Collection, PH141, University of Oregon Libraries Special Collections)
Also, because for more than a year, I have been engrossed with writing the (very) rough draft of a book about her. I hope this is the year I finish the draft and start reworking it into a less messy version, with a clearer shape, sharper writing, and more vivid story arcs.
My Jane Grant book is not a cradle-to-grave biography. It focuses instead on how Jane got The New Yorker off the ground in 1925 and kept it going. To accomplish this, I explore her journalism career in New York City in the 1910s and 1920s, plus her marriage and subsequent divorce from Harold Ross. All bolstered by an unwavering dedication to the pursuit of gender equality.
Other books have told The New Yorker’s story, but they have been, predictably, male centered. Jane Grant’s presence is sidelined in them, her role largely subsumed under that of “wife.”
As Amy Reading points out in The World She Edited, her marvelous 2024 biography of the magazine’s long-time fiction editor Katharine White:
“But there’s another way to tell the magazine’s origin story: by traveling along the networks forged by the women who were there from the beginning and who have been barely mentioned in histories of the magazine.” Reading’s book traces how White’s tenure at The New Yorker (like Jane Grant’s involvement, as I will demonstrate) “shows quite simply that so many of The New Yorker’s early successes were due to the efforts of feminist women who interpreted the magazine’s obsession with sophistication in a way guaranteed to appeal to readers like themselves—educated, active participants in the city’s cultural life.”
Reading’s book has proved a good resource for my project. It is also an inspirational model of writing, as is Debby Applegate’s biographyMadam, about Polly Adler. I anticipate that Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s forthcoming book, The Aviator and the Showman, about Amelia Earhart, will form the third point of that inspirational model triangle.
I will be touching on these books (and others) plus exploring fascinating primary sources as I write my way through 2025 and the year of Jane Grant. Some of the more interesting findings will appear on the blog during the year, most likely at irregular intervals (Writing history is challenging, and, for me, writing about writing history is even more so.) Hope you will follow along.
Back in the summer of 2024, I started reading Debby Applegate’s biography of Polly Adler, the (in)famous Manhattan madam of the 1920s. It was an obvious choice for me: a story about a little-known woman—today, not back then—written by a woman who turned what she learned in graduate school into a Pulitzer Prize winning writing career. Applegate won that award for her first book, The Most Famous Man in America, a biography of the nineteenth-century minister Henry Ward Beecher.
(That book also serves as the sample proposal in the extraordinarily useful Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction—and Get It Published by Susan Rabiner (Applegate’s literary agent) and Alfred Fortunato. My copy is dog-eared now. It is the resource I turn to when I need to write a book proposal. Now I am reading Tilar Mazzeo’s How to Write a Bestseller: An Insider’s Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction for General Audiences, which may prove to be equally valuable.)
Madam is Applegate’s second book. (I admire an author who takes their time to conduct quality research.) I knew going in that it would be good. My interest in Madam extended beyond character to setting. Right now I want to read as much as I can about New York City in the 1920s to get background information for my current book-in-progress about Jane Grant, co-founder of The New Yorker.
Polly Adler was born around 1900; Jane in 1891. When Polly arrived in New York City from Russia in 1913, Jane had already been there (from Kansas) for five years. Both changed their first names to make a break with their pasts. The two young women struggled to gain a foothold in the city so they could live the life of their dreams. Each got what she wanted, mostly, in some way.
It is not unreasonable to think their paths may have crossed in New York in the 1920s, though trying to imagine that encounter makes my head spin. Polly opened her first brothel at the beginning of that decade that was known for its roar. By 1924, as Applegate writes, “her house had become an after-hours clubhouse for the adventurous Broadway bohemians who gathered at the Algonquin Hotel for lunch.” Jane Grant was a member of the legendary Round Table that met at the Algonquin. As was her husband, the talented editor Harold Ross. Their home was another “after-hours clubhouse” for the Round Tablers, though the entertainment they provided did not include Polly’s specialty.
(I have come to think of Jane as the anti-Polly.)
With some trepidation, I looked for Harold Ross’s name in the index of Madam and found it. (Jane’s is not there.) I could hardly bring myself to read what was on the corresponding page—would he turn out to be a rat or a super rat? But according to Applegate, Ross was “one of the few who failed to fall for Polly’s charms.” The lone time friends dragged him to her brothel, he carried along a stack of manuscripts, which he read “while the fun eddied around him.” This left me with a lot to think about.
I read about a quarter of Madam before I set it aside. It had nothing to do with the quality of the biography, which is as excellent as I anticipated, but rather because I started to consider it an ideal model for my book on Jane Grant. Too ideal. I am still very much at the beginning of my project, and I started to worry that I would imitate Applegate’s style. I do not want to cross the line between modeling and imitating. I need space, considerable space right now, to identify that boundary, to develop my own style and voice based on how I think Jane’s story needs to be told.
This is not the way I typically respond to the secondary (or published) sources I read for my book research. Every so often, though, I encounter a book—whether during leisure reading or work reading—I admire so much that I am overwhelmed by a sense of futility. (Also known, perhaps, as imposter syndrome.) As in, why should I continue to do what I do when someone has already published the perfect gem of a book. (Rebecca Donner’s All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, about Mildred Harnack, was the last book to strike me like that.)
The feeling eventually passes, and, of course, I go on to do what I do, because what I write ends up different than what anyone else writes. And maybe it is as good, maybe not. But that is what happens. I write the best book I can.
When I’m ready for my first round of revisions on the (still in progress) rough draft, I might pick up Debby Applegate’s book again. Or maybe I will wait for the second round. But I know I will finish reading that biography. I need to find out what happened to Polly Adler. And I need to pay close attention to how Applegate makes me care.
Theresa Kaminski 
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