EsquireIn revoking Esquire’s second-class mailing
privileges the Postmaster General of the United
States charged that the magazine was obscene
and that its content was not “information of a
public character.” Although this sounds like the
kind of detour around the First Amendment
that Senator Jesse Helms might try, this action
was actually taken in 1943 against a ten-year-old
magazine whose reputation for taboo breaking
was at that time more accidental than deliberate.
Publisher David Smart never intended for
Esquireto be revolutionary when he founded it
in 1933 , but rather to serve as a deluxe men’s
companion of literature, fashion, art, and
women. It was the latter, specifically the sultry
“pinups” painted by Alberto Vargas, creator of
the Vargas Girl, that prompted the official action.Esquireimmediately
appealed its case to the Supreme Court, which in 1946 ruled that the
Postmaster General had no discretion to withhold any privileges simply
because it failed to live up to some vague standards of public morality.
Justice William O. Douglas wrote that such an act would be “a power of
censorship abhorrent to our traditions.”
This wasn’t the last time Esquireignited public controversy or
challenged public taste. Indeed for many of its almost six decades Esquire
has been an American publishing institution without equal in the realms of
art and literature, and sometimes politics. It has been alternately a
trendsetter and bellwether. It has at times rocked the foundations of
propriety, challenged cultural traditions, and has itself been shaken under
the pressures of public opinion.
Henry Wolf (b. 1925 ) was hired as graphics editor of Esquirein
1952 , five months after he joined the promotion art department as a junior
designer. He was twenty-six, one of the youngest design stewards at any
national magazine. Not only his age but also his elevation from the chorus
line, or art bullpen, to a leading role on the masthead was the stuff of
publishing industry legend. Arnold Gingrich,Esquire’s founding editor—
who set the tone of the magazine in the 1930 s with an entertaining mixture94