The checking origin story goes like this: In 1927, The New Yorker published a Profile of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay that was, to a large extent, made up. Millay’s mother stormed into the office, threatening a lawsuit. Harold Ross, the magazine’s founder, dispatched the editor Katharine Angell to pacify her. Millay’s mother was “a rather small, angry woman,” Angell recalled, and left only after being promised that a detailed correction would be issued. Ross, embarrassed, and worried about libel exposure, decided that what he needed were fact checkers. This creation myth has been repeated through the years in books, news stories, and the magazine itself. Alas, it is one of those slippery facts. Who knows what made Ross do anything.
If it weren’t Millay, it would’ve been something else. Ross had a literal mind. He once complained to E. B. White that Stuart Little should have been adopted by the Littles, rather than born to them, since, obviously, humans can’t conceive mouse-boys. He revered facts. He’d been gathering them and checking them long before there was a checking department. John Cheever recalled that Ross made two small but brilliant suggestions on the story “The Enormous Radio.” Cheever added, “Then there were twenty-nine other suggestions like, ‘This story has gone on for twenty-four hours and no one has eaten anything.’ ”
Fact checking, as a formal concept, was a product of nineteen-twenties New York, with all its energy and hubris. There was a sense that, with enough attention, you could get the world down accurately on the page. In 1923, two years before The New Yorker’s founding, Henry Luce began to employ checkers at Time, a magazine he’d almost named Facts. Ross despised and envied Luce. Perhaps checking was an area in which he could outdo him.
Ross was a high-school dropout and an itinerant newspaperman, who liked shouting things like “By God!” and “You can’t win!” Facts gave him something to lord over the Ivy boys. When a fact roused his suspicion, he’d write up a memo with comments like “bushwah,” “nuts,” or “transcends credulence.” A favored note was “Given facts will fix.” According to the writer Brendan Gill, “The impression conveyed by these words was, and was intended to be, that a sorely tired man of superior skills was consenting to improve the work of someone who was at best lazy and at worst an imbecile.” Ross wrote to a writer who’d committed a minor fact error, “I regard this as a personal slight.” (The writer had mixed up the geography of some locks in the Panama Canal.) While preparing John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” Ross couldn’t get past Hersey’s description of a man using a “slender bamboo pole” to row a boat. “By God, if it’s very slender he couldn’t have rowed this boat with it,” Ross wrote. “Seems kind of ridiculous.” The line ran as “thick bamboo pole,” and Ross moved on to other facts, such as the name Hiroshima itself, “which I can now pronounce in a new and fancy way,” he wrote ecstatically to White.