OCR Text |
Show THE MIDDLEBROW He used to be "the man in the street." Now he is. "the middlebrow." middle-brow." He doesn't trouble his negatives nor eat with a knife, but neither does he care much for Ibsen or rush from his business to spend the hour before dinner in the Metropolitan museum. He creates a demand for best sellers by buying and reading them and asking when the next one will be out. He is not a snappy dresser nor a slovenly one. He wears "what they are wearing" and pays good money for it. Now and then a politician probes his innermost thoughts and gets elected four or five times handrunning in consequence. Once or twice in a season a theatrical manager gives him what he wants and the ticket speculators do a thriving business for a year or so afterward. af-terward. Outspoken enough as an individual, he is singularly in- i articulate in the mass. You must poll a million or two of him before be-fore you can find out what he really thinks about legislation or religion re-ligion or the Volstead act, and then he may be dissembling. His claim to his title is not based on education nor heredity. He may have begun as a newsboy and progressed by keeping his eyes and ears open. He may be a college graduate. He may have a mortgage on his own house or a far bigger mortgage on -somebody else's house. He is not to be distinguished by his speech nor by his appearance, save that his neck is not abraded and that he pronounces no words with a broad "a." If he has any rule of life it is expressed in, the phrase, "I'll try anything once." He is the customer of the merchant, the patron of the politician, politi-cian, the director of the destinies of the nation. Occasionally he is wrong, but he is quic kto set himself right again. The car of liberty lib-erty will never go far off the road while he is at the steering wheel. New York Herald-Tribune. |