The `Village Voice' Newspaper's Hidden 20th-Century History Revisited: (Pt. 1)
"As J. Kirk Sale noted in a Dec. 1969 article in...`Evergreen Review' magazine: `The `Voice' was square, patriotic, safe, liberal, and middle class. Still is…'”
“The Village Voice became not something there because of the need for it, to give a voice to voiceless people, but a prize of booty on the battlefield of venture capitalism, something to be looked at and fought over, put into the portfolio of a corporation, used by one individual on the make after another…As of 1977, it had become part of a super-empire…”
--Kevin McAuliffe in The Great American Newspaper: The Rise and Fall of the `Village Voice’ in 1978
Downtown Manhattan’s eventually corporatized newspaper of the last half of the 20th-century, The Village Voice, was launched, historically, on October 26, 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher and Norman Mailer—using money from Mailer’s bank account and from Fancher’s inheritance.
Voice co-founder Wolf was the husband of a social worker. After his involvement in the world of Manhattan alternative journalism enabled him to become a millionaire by the early 1970s, Wolf turned neoconservative and eventually moved into a City Hall office in 1977 to be an aide and close adviser to then-New York City Mayor Ed Koch.
Voice co-founder Fancher was a Lake Placid, New York prep school graduate who had become a Manhattan doctor. He had also inherited $30,000 (in 1950s money) worth of Orange County Telephone Company stock from his grandfather.
Fancher used part of his inherited utility company stock to come up with the $5,000 that he initially contributed to launch the Voice. The now-deceased 1950s novelist Mailer also put up $5,000. In exchange for his $5,000 investment, Mailer and his lawyer received 40 percent of the Voice’s stock. In exchange for his $5,000 investment, Fancher and his close friend, Dan Wolf, received 60 percent of the Voice’s stock.
The idea of naming their Manhattan alternative newspaper, “The Village Voice,” however, was apparently not thought up by either Mailer, Wolf or Fancher, but by a woman named Patricia Woods, who worked as an English teacher during the 1950s. Wolf took the title of Voice editor-in-chief, but a hip guy named John Wilcock was named the Voice’s first news editor. Other editorial employees initially included Florence Ellerbert and Jerry Tallmer, who was a former editor of Dartmouth College’s student newspaper. Although Wolf was approaching his 40th birthday when the Voice was first published, “in the first issue he would lie and say he was only 33,” according to The Great American Newspaper: The Rise and Fall of the `Village Voice’ book by Kevin McAuliffe.
Before the 1962 newspaper strike by local unionized workersshut down all of Manhattan’s daily major newspapers for 114 days, the Voice was not much of a success, financially. In 1955, it only had a circulation of about 3,000, sold for 5 cents and lost up to $1,000 a week in 1950s money. It didn’t publish many classified ads, though, in those days and, therefore, consisted of only 12 pages.
To keep the Voice from going bankrupt in 1956, Mailer had to pour in about $10,000 more from his literary profits and Fancher had to shovel in another $10,000 from his utility company stock inheritance. But the Voice still had difficulty making money until the 1962 newspaper strike. Between October 1955 and the start of this strike, about $60,000 was lost by the then-alternative newspaper and then-Voice editor-in-chief Wolf had to be “supported by the income brought in by his wife, Rhoda, a social worker,” according to The Great American Newspaper: The Rise and Fall of the `Village Voice’ book. The Voice’s circulation, though, had risen to about 17,000 on the eve of the big Manhattan daily newspaper strike.
Even in its early days, the Voice was not considered hip enough by some people in Downtown Manhattan. Initially, Voice co-founder Mailer wrote a column for the newspaper which he owned. But, as J. Kirk Sale noted in a December 1969 article in the now-defunct counter-cultural Evergreen Review magazine:
“Norman Mailer quit after 13 columns because `the Voice was square, not hip.’…Mailer was…right. The Voice was square, patriotic, safe, liberal, and middle class. Still is…”
The Voice’s initial news editor, John Wilcock, also told Evergreen Review the following in 1969:
“The Voice was never far out. I was on to things before they heard of them, and they wouldn’t touch them till they became legitimized somehow, someone else picked them up and said they were OK…It’s become really, a part of the `establishment.’” (end of part 1. To be continued.)