On The Media

BROOKE GLADSTONE: National Geographic magazine has long captured the imaginations of lay scientists who have never personally tracked wild Bengal tigers or studied Neanderthal language patterns, but thanks to the magazine and its Cambodian Buddhist temples, early human remains and caterpillars that can fire their feces at a rate of 4.3 feet per second, these things have never been so accessible to the common man. In his new book Explorers House: National Geographic and the World It Made, Robert M. Poole chronicles the magazine's 120 year journey from uncertain patrimonial undertaking to glossy commercial success. Robert, welcome to the show.

ROBERT M. POOLE: Thank you, Brooke. Happy to be here.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Could you give me first a quick sketch of the founder of the National Geographic Society?

ROBERT M. POOLE: Actually there were 33 founders, but the, the main one we are interested in, in this book, is Gardiner Greene Hubbard. He was a Yankee blueblood, a Boston lawyer, an entrepreneur, an early officer of the Boston Rubber Shoe Company.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And so this man of all business moved to Washington. He had a great interest in science, and he created this local society.

ROBERT M. POOLE: Originally, the National Geographic Society was just sort of a, a small club -- people sitting around, talking to each other. And when they thought of it, they would publish a magazine.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Then Hubbard died, and his son in law was chosen to run the magazine. I can't quite recall his name.

ROBERT M. POOLE: I believe it was Alexander Graham Bell.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: That was it. Tell me about his impact on the magazine.

ROBERT M. POOLE: Bell was the brilliant inventor. He couldn't focus on anything for more than four seconds. He was just spinning out ideas all the time. The main novelty he seized on was photography. It had been around for quite a few years, but it wasn't very broadly seen by the reading public. Most of the magazines of the day were just words, and Bell had the idea -- let's do words and pictures.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let's talk about National Geographic's great gimmick. You weren't buying a magazine when you were buying National Geographic. You were buying entry into the society.

ROBERT M. POOLE: It was a gimmick. But it was also genuine, in a way. It was, and still is today, a membership organization, so that all the money that comes in goes back into operations, so that the magazine could afford to send out writers and photographers out into the field for a long time and spend a lot of money on ink, printing, you know, the high production values that people associate with the Geographic.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And as far as you can tell, only one member was ever expelled. I think he was serving time at Leavenworth when he was booted off the rolls.

ROBERT M. POOLE: Yes. This was a gentleman from Chicago named Al Capone. [LAUGHTER] He was a faithful member of the National Geographic Society for many years. He got into some difficulty in 1932, and they struck him off the membership list. But-- they were nice enough to let him become a subscriber-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Keep his subscription. [LAUGHTER]

ROBERT M. POOLE: --for an extra 25 cents a year, so...

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Of course, some people were discouraged from signing up all together.

ROBERT M. POOLE: Yes. Through most of the 20th Century, you would not have seen many people of color at the lectures or at the - in the library that National Geographic maintains for Washington area members. Washington itself was, in effect, segregated until the 1940s. The people who ran National Geographic didn't want black members showing up and attending lectures. They thought it might embarrass the, the loyal white members, and this really didn't end until the late '50s, early '60s.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you think that this unenlightened perspective of the National Geographic at the time was reflected in all the coverage that it did of foreign cultures? One issue you don't address at length is the criticism that has for years been leveled at National Geographic that its explicit representations of non-northern peoples can seem racist, or to put it another way, perhaps, there were a lot of brown breasts made available for educational purposes to teenage boys everywhere, but it seemed rather as if they were being put in a class of non-humans.

ROBERT M. POOLE: I think that's a valid criticism, and I think there was a strong element of that in National Geographic for many years -- for most of the 20th Century. I do think it began to change in the '60s and '70s when a newer generation began to take over for the older one. But it was slow to change.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: One of the magazine's earliest credos was something on the order of "if you can't say something nice about a place or a person, then don't say it at all," which is pretty strange for any periodical, including, you know, Modern Bride. [LAUGHTER] But it seemed to fit the times, I guess.

ROBERT M. POOLE: Well, go back to Alexander Graham Bell. I think that was his attitude, and I think he, he, he passed it on to his son in law, Gilbert Grosvenor. They were reacting to the nastiness of the daily press, yellow journalism. Bell had a sort of high-minded optimism that he somehow managed to get into the genetic material of National Geographic. Bell thought the world was a beautiful place, and he wanted the magazine to celebrate that. This approach to journalism, if you want to call it journalism, got him in trouble as the, the grim realities of the 20th Century began to set in.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Right. One place the magazine resolutely declined to criticize was Germany in the early days of Hitler.

ROBERT M. POOLE: Yes. This is one of the most embarrassing moments in the National Geographic's history. A very engaging, very charming fellow named Douglas Chandler wrote a glowing piece in 1937 about Berlin which must be described as a pro-Nazi story. National Geographic published it. They didn't see any problem with it -- until the United States entered the war. Douglas Chandler remained in Germany and began broadcasting for Nazi radio.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, later the National Geographic made amends by offering both information to the FBI and a box seat from which to spy on the Soviet embassy that was located right next door.

ROBERT M. POOLE: Yes. National Geographic didn't really draw a very fine line between media and government, and in the '60s National Geographic provided an office in its 16th Street Headquarters building for the FBI to keep an eye on the Soviet embassy across the street. There were two guys in dark suits who came and went at all hours; kept the door locked. And on the door was the name, the Mid-Atlantic Research Committee.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You spend much of your professional life at National Geographic, and there was a time when you were executive editor, and it wasn't a short time. How does your tenure fit into the history of that magazine?

ROBERT M. POOLE: I, I don't know what to say about my role there except that I came in, in the early '80s, and my primary role was to make the writing as good as the photography. But it was sort of like being a word guy at Playboy magazine. [LAUGHTER] Nobody ever really noticed.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you very, very much.

ROBERT M. POOLE: Brooke, thank you. It's been a pleasure.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Robert M. Poole is author of Explorers House: National Geographic and the World It Made. [THEME MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was directed by Katya Rogers and produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field and Jamie York, and edited-- by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director, and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Anne Kossef and Madeleine Bair. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and get free transcripts and MP3 downloads at onthemedia.org, and email us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media, produced by WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. [THEME MUSIC TAG]