19th century The Saturday Evening Post was first published in 1821 While the
Gazette ceased publication in 1800, ten years after Franklin's death, the
Post links its history to the original magazine.
Cyrus H. K. Curtis, publisher of the ''
Ladies' Home Journal, bought the Post
for $1,000 in 1897. Under the ownership of the Curtis Publishing Company, the Post'' grew to become the most widely circulated weekly magazine in the United States. The magazine gained prominent status under the leadership of its longtime editor
George Horace Lorimer (1899–1937).
The Saturday Evening Post published current event articles, editorials, human interest pieces, humor, illustrations, a letter column, poetry with contributions submitted by readers, single-panel gag
cartoons, including
Hazel by
Ted Key, and stories by leading writers of the time. It was known for commissioning lavish illustrations and original works of fiction. Illustrations were featured on the cover and embedded in stories and advertising. Some
Post illustrations continue to be reproduced as posters or prints, especially those by
Norman Rockwell.
20th century In 1929, at the beginning of the
Mexican Repatriation,
The Saturday Evening Post ran a series on the racial inferiority of Mexicans. In 1954, it published its first articles on the role of the U.S. in deposing
Mohammad Mosaddegh,
Prime Minister of Iran, in 1953. The article was based on materials leaked by
CIA director
Allen Dulles. The
Post readership began to decline in the late 1950s and 1960s. In general, the decline of general interest magazines was blamed on television, which competed for advertisers and readers' attention. The
Post had problems retaining readers: the public's taste in fiction was changing, and the
Posts conservative politics and values appealed to a declining number of people. Content by popular writers became harder to obtain. Prominent authors drifted away to newer magazines offering more money and status. As a result, the
Post published more articles on current events and cut costs by replacing illustrations with photographs for covers and advertisements. In 1967, the magazine's publisher,
Curtis Publishing Company, lost a landmark
defamation suit,
Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts,
388 U.S. 130 (1967), resulting from an article, and was ordered to pay in
damages to the
plaintiff. The
Post article implied that
football coaches Paul "Bear" Bryant and
Wally Butts conspired to
fix a game between the
University of Alabama and the
University of Georgia. Both coaches sued Curtis Publishing Co. for defamation, each initially asking for . Bryant eventually settled for while Butts' case went to the
Supreme Court, which held that
libel damages may be recoverable (in this instance against a news organization) when the injured party is a non-public official, if the plaintiff can prove that the defendant was guilty of a reckless lack of professional standards when examining allegations for reasonable credibility. (Butts was eventually awarded .)
William Emerson was promoted to editor-in-chief in 1965 and remained in the position until the magazine's demise in 1969. In 1968,
Martin Ackerman, a specialist in troubled firms, became president of Curtis after lending it . With the magazine still in dire financial straits, Ackerman announced that Curtis would reduce printing costs by cancelling the subscriptions of roughly half of its readers. Those who lost their subscriptions were offered a free transfer to a subscription to
Life magazine;
Life publisher
Time Inc. paid Curtis for the exchange, easing the company's mounting debts. The move was also widely seen as an opportunity for Curtis to abandon older and more rural readers, who were less valuable to the
Post's advertisers. Columnist
Art Buchwald lampooned the decision, suggesting that "if the
Saturday Evening Post considered you a deadbeat, you didn't have much choice but to either pretend you were still getting the magazine and live a lie, or move out of the neighborhood before anyone found out." These last-ditch efforts failed to save the magazine, and Curtis announced in January 1969 that the February 8 issue would be the magazine's last. Ackerman stated that the magazine had lost in 1968 and would lose a projected in 1969. In a meeting with employees after the magazine's closure had been announced, Emerson thanked the staff for their professional work and promised "to stay here and see that everyone finds a job". At a March 1969
post-mortem on the magazine's closing, Emerson stated that
The Post "was a damn good vehicle for advertising" with competitive renewal rates and readership reports and expressed what
The New York Times called "understandable bitterness" in wishing "that all the one-eyed critics will lose their other eye".
Otto Friedrich, the magazine's last managing editor, blamed the death of
The Post on Curtis. In his
Decline and Fall (Harper & Row, 1970), an account of the magazine's final years (1962–69), he argued that corporate management was unimaginative and incompetent. Friedrich acknowledges that
The Post faced challenges while the tastes of American readers changed over the course of the 1960s, but he insisted that the magazine maintained a standard of good quality and was appreciated by readers. In 1970, control of the debilitated Curtis Publishing Company was acquired from the estate of
Cyrus Curtis by Indianapolis industrialist
Beurt SerVaas. The magazine's new logo is an update of a logo it had used beginning in 1942. As of October 2018, the complete archive of the magazine is available online. ==Legacy==