COMM 353: In class, Hiroshima, the spirit of the age and long-form journalism

At least two turn-of-the-century surveys identified the atomic bombing of Japan as the most significant news story of the 20th century. And the definitive account, a 31,000-word article on the destruction of Hiroshima by foreign correspondent John Hersey, appeared in The New Yorker. It relates to what I've been asking you to think about - how does a magazine refelct its Zeitgeist? and how can you as budding writers, publishers and communications professionals refect the spirit of our new age.

Hersey's Hiroshima took up the whole New Yorker issue of ____ 00, 1946, and it has come out as a bood. A very good introduction to Hiroshima by Harvard graduate Steve Rothman of Arlington, Mass., who began his website (linked below) as a grad school term paper at Harvard, sets the stage:

The article, written by John Hersey, created a blast of its own in the publishing world. The New Yorker sold out immediately, and requests for reprints poured in from all over the world. Following publication, "Hiroshima" was read on the radio in the United States and abroad. Other magazines reviewed the article and referred their readers to it. The Book-of-the-Month Club sent a copy of the article in book form to its entire membership as a free selection. Later that fall, "Hiroshima" was published as a book by Alfred A. Knopf and has remained in print ever since.

One of the surveys, I think the most significant, was conducted by the journalism school at New York University. It lists "The Top 100 Works of Journalism in the United States in the 20th Century" ... Hersey's Hiroshima is first. (The second, to give you some context, was Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), and the third was Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's Watergate investigations for the Washington Post in 1972-73. Fourth was Edward R. Murrow's "This is London . . ." radio reports for CBS on the German bombing of London in 1940.) The other survey, by the Newseum in Washington, D.C. The museum's historian Eric Newton said, "Americans have by a provocatively close margin picked the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima as the top news story of the 20th century." Some 30,000 members of the public ranked the atomic bomb as the most important, as did a sample of professional journalists. Men and the journalists ranked it most important, while women ranked it in fourth place, tied with the 1969 moon landing.

By any measure, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a big story. One measure of its importance was a Time magazine essay by James Agee Aug. 20, 1945. It must seem badly overwritten today, but in its time it expressed how people felt. Agee later wrote the novel A Death in the Family, a book on Depression-era sharecroppers called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the screenplay for The African Queen starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn. In an on-deadline essay the week after the bombs fell, he said:

e greatest and most terrible of wars ended, this week, in the echoes of an enormous event—an event so much more enormous that, relative to it, the war itself shrank to minor significance. The knowledge of victory was as charged with sorrow and doubt as with joy and gratitude. More fearful responsibilities, more crucial liabilities rested on the victors even than on the vanquished.

And this, as he concluded:

The promise of good and of evil bordered alike on the infinite— with this further, terrible split in the fact: that upon a people already so nearly drowned in materialism even in peacetime, the good uses of this power might easily bring disaster as prodigious as the evil. The bomb rendered all decisions made [during meetings of the leaders of the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union] so far, at Yalta and at Potsdam, mere trivial dams across tributary rivulets. When the bomb split open the universe and revealed the prospect of the infinitely extraordinary, it also revealed the oldest, simplest, commonest, most neglected and most important of facts: that each man is eternally and above all else responsible for his own soul, and, in the terrible words of the Psalmist, that no man may deliver his brother, nor make agreement unto God for him.

Agee is all but forgotten today, and he was more a competent journalist than a great writer, but I think he captured the spirit of age.

How did The New Yorker respond to the biggest story of the 20th century? What does James Thurber say about it in Years With Ross? Surf Steve Rothman's website at http://www.herseyhiroshima.com/ - be sure to click on the link where Rothman says, "You can see the first page of the article" and click again the enlarge it so you can get a taste of Hersey's writing). What do you think of it? What would you say the biggest story of our time is? How would you cover it if you were editing a magazine?