Evening star., 1940-04-28
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WHAT THE Public WANTS
BY CHANN|NG POLLOCK

responsibility citizens and that their enterprises can
combine atruism with profit:
The worth while citizen and eternal success think,
is the who tries to give the public little
better than what it is supposed to want and 50 slowly
perhaps but steadily - lifts the quality of its demands.
few years ago. who would have said that enormous
number of average Americans would tune in on Toscanni
or the Town Meeting of the Air? The networks have
created the demand for good music and good sense.
1t seems to me that else knows little of what
the public the purveyors who that phrase as
cynical justification. They should talk to the concert
managers about the multtudes that attend recas every
city and town in the United States and learn from lecture
bureaus that speakers literature, art government and
foreign affairs are paid about five million dollars year.
LAST season. something like seventy million of us
attended more than 25OOOO amateur theatrical perform
perhaps not of them in questionable taste -
ranging from the highly intellectual and sempofessonal
productions the Pasadena and Cleveland Payhouses,
to Peg O. My Heart" at Odd Fellows Hall in Pumpkin
Center. Even the funseekng crowds at the New York
Worlds Fair turned neat profit for the gallery of famous
paintings and all the catch penny shows in the amuse
section put together did not attract the throngs
that waited for admission to the Futurama.
During the 1905, which an ERA of rusty souls
such as follows every great publishers made money
on some pretty raw stuff; but the most prosperous
houses even then the old timers who went selling
educational works and the classics Hardheaded publish
ers found it good business to publish such volumes
H. G.. Wells's Outline of History" and Will Durant's
History of Philosophy.
Today one of the most reliable lists of best sellers
includes forty works of the highest moral and mental
quality which means that enormous number of us
are reading the best we can obtain.
No public can be expected to want what is not made
readily available and all progress in civilization atrbut
able to the who supply the superior things - mer
chants and manufacturers we'll artists and scientists
We climb because there stairs ahead of U.s.
Shakespeare's public almost wholly illterate -
and he gave it the most miraculous poetry that has
been written In age of physical dirt and poverty and
crime, Dickens gave the nobility of Sydney Carton
and David Copperfeld His novels published seraly
when the last insallment of The Old Curiosity Shop
reached New York by clipper ship, there four thou
sand people at the dock who unwilling to wait until the
vessel tied up called the water to her captain,
rs Little Nell dead?"
When four thousand people wait on dock to learn
what happened to the drab and aspirationess figures
some of current literature flock to the preacher
of loose living and selfndugence to the mart of the
dealer in the shoddy and dishonest l shall be first to
admit that these the artists and teachers and traders
who give the public what it wants But at the moment,
and throughout of recorded history they who have
won the greatest and enduring triumphs those
whose work. ethics and ideals have pointed and up