The core group of checkers first met in a second-floor restaurant near the magazine’s offices. They figured no one else at the magazine would be going to a second-floor restaurant. They debated about whether to try to join the Newspaper Guild or District 65, an independent union associated with the United Auto Workers that had organized the Village Voice. The UAW connection held a certain proletarian appeal for those whom one of the checkers, Evan Cornog, now dean of the School of Communication at Hofstra University, has called “some of us baby Marxists.” But the Guild won out, and when the checkers’ small revolutionary cell contacted them, the Guild people told them how to go about organizing, how to inform management about the drive, and so on. The checkers proceeded to speak, very quietly, at lunches and in apartments on the then-seedy Upper West Side, to other members of the staff who the rebels thought were safe solidarity bets. Ultimately, twenty-two members of the magazine’s one-hundred-plus editorial staff joined the Organizing Committee that the Guild had instructed the rebels to form.

I and many others didn’t believe that Shawn ever wanted to pass his mantle on to Bingham, or to anyone else. As a college English major, graduate student in literature, and English teacher in prep school, I had a mind too filled with Greek and Shakespearean tragic heroes, Dickensian manipulators, and Dostoevskian monomaniacs not to see Shawn in that kind of literary light almost right from the beginning. His personality contained a combination of qualities anathematic to the graceful relinquishing of power: genius, industry, a martyr’s demeanor, and a fanaticism about the New Yorker that he proclaimed so loudly and so tiresomely that it convinced others — and maybe even himself — that actions he might be taking to preserve his own preeminence were merely actions taken to preserve the preeminence of the publication. And that he was right about this for so many years — that his own best interests and those of the magazine seemed in many crucial respects indistinguishable, because the magazine was such a great cultural and commercial success under Shawn’s rule — made it hard for others to tell when he stopped being right, or to speak up when he stopped being right, or to take measures against the time when he would stop being right.

If there is any one general theme here, besides the usual apocalyptic warnings about destruction of the magazine, it is the disavowal of ordinariness, as if ordinariness were the eighth deadly sin. The company is profit-making “but not in any orthodox way.” The publishers “went counter to almost every normal business impulse.” The New Yorker is a “miracle.” And so forth. To someone so convinced that those under him shared the ideals he wanted to believe he represented — gentility, fairness, modesty, self-sacrifice, antimaterialism, humanity, and above all a devotion to truth as expressed through the written word — it must have come as quite a shock to see that a lot of his employees also considered putting out the New Yorker to be a job, one for which they were increasingly poorly paid.

I played and sang those songs that evening with two or three kinds of embarrassment. First of all, it seemed merely socially a silly thing to be doing. Then there was the fact that we had been moved, we had not rolled the union on or stuck to it, we had not kept our hand upon the dollar and our eye upon the scale, none of us would, that night, dream of Joe Hill, standing there as big as life and smiling with his eyes. I was embarrassed about the ineffectuality and yes, ordinariness of the Guild people we’d come in contact with. I was embarrassed for Shawn and the rest of the magazine’s management, because they appeared to have not the faintest inkling that much of what they’d said and done to fight off the union was typical of any management fighting off any union — unremarkable, unmiraculous. Again, ordinary. The union would destroy what we had all worked so hard to achieve. The New Yorker is different. We are above the crudity and coerciveness of bargaining and strikes. We are so very generous. There are no “sides” to be on. You will really suffer if you get the union. And so on. And, finally, I was embarrassed that I had looked so condescendingly on the political and economic values and ideas of many members of my own family, however romantic and oversimplified those ideas and values might have been. For here were liberals like Shawn and Jonathan Schell turning to the right when the capitalist chips were down — just as I had been told, from my childhood on, liberals usually do, often with no embarrassment at all. Just as I was doing myself, at least passively, by backing down, by not keeping the courage of what I thought were my convictions.

[...] The institution itself mirrored the famous paradox of the contents of the magazine it put out: preponderantly liberal — or antimaterialistic, or spiritual, or muckraking, or even vaporously socialistic — writing physically sandwiched and financially supported by fancy advertising for extravagant goods like Tiffany diamond necklaces, Mercedes-Benz automobiles, entire islands up for sale. Shawn either did not want to admit or could not see that it is the obligation of capitalistic enterprises to maximize profits and that part of doing so is, with varying degrees of ruthlessness, holding down costs, and that he was, willy-nilly, wittingly or unwittingly, sitting on the salary lid. The situation tied him into knots of anger and illogic and mired him in a swamp of self-contradictions. In my opinion, he bought the magazine’s much-vaunted editorial independence partly by running an aesthetically respected and commercially successful magazine whose stock value rose and rose and partly by acceding to Milton Greenstein’s advice to pinch salary pennies.