A Lasting Heritage
James Parton wasn't a direct marketer — he was a journalist by trade — but as co-founder of American Heritage he did a great deal to further the art of direct mail.
For example, the magazine “did the first merge/purge and, I believe, the first four-color brochure,” noted the late direct mail consultant Richard Benson in 1995.
Of course, that's not why we celebrate Parton, who died in April at age 88. He is remembered because he acquainted a generation of Americans with their own history.
Born in Massachusetts in 1912, Parton graduated from Harvard in 1934 and went into journalism, which he saw as history on the fly. “In the news shops where I have worked — mostly at Time Inc. and the [New York] Herald-Tribune — I know most of the hard work and most of the pride in our jobs came from our efforts to write the best possible clay tablets, both for our current readers and future historians,” he remembered later.
He interrupted his career to serve as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Air Force during World War II, then jumped back into the news business.
In 1954, Parton and his fellow Time Inc. alumni Joe Thorndyke and Oliver Jensen founded American Heritage. They believed, without any research to back it up, that there was an audience for a popular history magazine. “An awful lot of Americans are both intellectually and viscerally aware of their heritage, curious about it, anxious to sense it and perhaps lean upon it,” Parton said in 1956 (in a speech apparently co-written by the copywriter Frank Johnson).
And what did American Heritage offer these readers?
“Bruce Catton, our editor, asks one question — ‘What did men do there?’ — and then tries to find out enough about what they did to clothe the story in words and pictures, which make the men and their deeds come alive again,” Parton remarked. “This is frankly a journalistic technique. You could properly call American Heritage ‘a news magazine of the past.’”
Along the way, the trio broke many rules of publishing. The bimonthly magazine was bound in hard covers, carried no advertising and was sold almost entirely by direct mail.
“They started that magazine for $64,000 and didn't borrow any money for five years,” observed Benson, who cut his teeth as a magazine circulator at American Heritage.
Soon the publication had 250,000 subscribers, and a survey showed that “less than 2% of our subscribers and readers had failed to keep every single one of our copies,” said Parton. Moreover, the book broke the “publishers' sonic barrier, the $10-a-year price that no one has cracked successfully.”
That success was largely due to direct mail copy written by the moonlighting Frank Johnson, and to the sheer extravagance of the mailing packages. “We did the first four-color envelopes, putting the picture on the address side and addressing on the flap side,” Benson noted.
How did they get away with packages that cost as much as $110/M?
“We were the first to understand cost per order vs. cost per thousand,” he said.
As president and publisher, Parton also oversaw the creation of products like the Pulitzer-prize winning “American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War” and Horizon magazine. However, he recognized that the economics were changing, and he sold the company to McGraw-Hill in 1969. The magazine moved to soft covers in 1978, and began accepting advertising in 1982. But it survived.
Parton, whose grandfather James Parton wrote biographies of figures like Aaron Burr and Andrew Jackson, never strayed far from his vocation. He served as president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corp. and as assistant librarian of Congress for public education before retiring to New Hampshire.
Parton started American Heritage during the early days of the Cold War. But he lived to see the History Channel and our increased fascination with the American past. That must have pleased him.
