THE EDITOR'S UNEASY CHAIR

Home from the Wars

After twenty years of foreign corresponding, Raymond Gram Swing (whose article on Secretary of the Interior Ickes begins on lead-page 15 of this issue) returned to America last summer to become an editor of The Nation. II is European service started in Germany before the War, when he was Berlin correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. One of the two Americans who eyewitnessed the Allied attempt to force the Dardanelles in 1915, he was likewise the only American ever to have been torpedoed by a British submarine—a very enviable piece of good-luck which overtook him in the Sea of Marmora.

Swing was born at Cortland, New York, in 1887. He took up journalism in Cleveland, and lost more and more sleep for newspapers in Cincinnati and Indianapolis, before going abroad in 1913. In the closing year of the Late Unpleasantness he served as Examiner of the U. S. War Labor Board. The New York Sun sent him back to Berlin in 1919, and two years later be crossed to London in behalf of the New York Evening Post and the Philadelphia Public Ledger. From his newly-acquired post at The Nation, Mr. Swing finds America so exciting that be no longer reads about European affairs with anything but the greatest difficulty.

Color-Printing

For this number of VANITY FAIR, Edward Steichen went to Hartford, Connecticut, to snapshoot the American Ballet, toe in air. The magnificent results of his visit appear on pages 38 and 39. So numerous have been the inquiries about the special method of color-photography which Steichen follows, that he has written a summary of it, which explains, in concise terms, the details of color-printing. The summary follows here.

'VANITY FAIR color snap shots are a compromise between the technique of two color and three color photography. The original negatives are made on Defender "Du-pac film." Any type of camera using plate or cut film holders may be employed. A plate or film holder that will hold the pair of "Du-pac film" in close contact is necessary. (The Finley type plate holder is well suited to the purpose.) A Mendelsohn flash bulb synchronizer is used on the camera so that flash-bulb exposures can be made in one one-hundredth to one three-hundredth of a second, depending on the speed the shutter is capable of. The films are developed in the standard developer recommended by the film maker.

'We now have two color separation negatives, one a red and one a blue printer. By choosing the proper printing colors excellent prints can be made in two colors from these two color separation negatives but due to the technical limitations of any two colors chosen the results will all be monotonously alike. For the purpose of magazine illustration we require a more flexible printing medium and a more variable technique.

'For the printing medium we employ the new Eastman "Wash-off film" and their special three color dyes. This film can be used for making color transparencies or imbibition prints.

'To make our two color separation negatives produce results that will reasonably give the effect of a true three color job we use the very simple and ingenious method devised by Hiram Decks. First the usual prints are made, one from the red printer and one from the blue printer. For the third, the yellow printer, the following technique is employed. The "Du-pac" red and blue printer negatives are placed over each other on the glass top of a printing machine and brought into accurate register, then while held firmly in register one negative is taped down to the glass top of the printer on one side and edge with adhesive tape, the other negative taped down on the opposite side so that both negatives are on hinges and in register. A sheet of "Wash-off film" is laid over the negatives in printing position, taped down and thus hinged to the glass on the upper edge so that it can be brought down over either one or both of the negatives at will. Thus the two original negatives flop one to the right and one to the left and the printing film on the top edge flops down towards the operator.

'In making the print the exposure is made during a part of the required time through the blue printer negative and for the balance of the total exposure it is made through the red filter negative. By varying the time of exposure made from each of the two color negatives the resultant yellow printer is changed and the balance and general color of the final picture can thus be varied considerably and in some cases the appearance of a straight three color photograph is satisfactorily achieved.

'This brief resume of the color snap shot technique will enable any experienced color photographer to use it successfully. To photographers inexperienced in color photography the study of one of the standard books on color photography is recommended as a preliminary before attempting any actual color work. These books and the material mentioned can be obtained through any photographic supply concern. Instructions regarding the manipulation and processing of the materials mentioned can be obtained from the makers.'

Wreaders writhed

Unrest grew among readers of VANITY FAIR last month as they perused and tried to digest The Crowing Cruelty of the Law, by Westbrook Pegler. "I have been unable," wrote Blackmer Humphrey, of Williamstown, Mass., "to decide whether it was intended as an earnest diatribe against the criminal system of the United States, or merely as a collection of whimsical fancies. As either," Mr. Blackmer went on to say, "it was a complete failure." In Schenectady, New York, Mr. I). A. Yates was "left in a quandary." Said he, "It seems rather ridiculous to attribute the cause of all criminal action to claustrophobia. . . . If Mr. Pegler is serious, I should say he is very narrow-minded." Upon Mr. B. L. Schueler, of Utica, the simple little thought that Pegler might have intended his piece as satire never dawned at all. "Evidently," he writes, "Mr. Pegler would excuse every criminal on the assumption that he was suffering temporarily from a disease. . . . Rather warped."

Briefly, the Pegler point was this, stripped of its definitely (to some of us) satirical embellishment : that feloniously inclined persons, who comport themselves "against public policy," ought to be shot on sight, and rubbed right off the map, especially when they plead "Insane" to boot.

Forbear

In the fall of 1859, a weekly digest called Vanity Pair began to be read in the fashionable foyers of New York. A poster, advertising No. 75 of this now extinct venture, is shown here, below. Deliberately copied after England's age-old Punch, and edited by Artemus Ward, the best-known humorist of his time, it relieved distress in an era of social darkness, as, in its own way, another VANITY FAIR has attempted to brighten the prospect of living in these troubled times.

Wagnerites beware!

On page 35 of this issue, Adolf Dehn reappears to the devout after a lapse of three years. His immediate target is the opening of Siegfried, Act 111, at the Metropolitan Opera. (Brünhilde, you will recall, has been imprisoned within a circle of fire by a stern parent, and the heroic Siegfried is en route to reclaim her, to the tune of Wagner's immemorial love-lyric, "Through the Smoke and Flame, I've Got to Go Where You Are.") Artist Dehn shows these things, first, as they are rehearsed, and then, as they are performed. And we trust that no Wagner-addict will find his illusions too widely dispersed, after seeing the blooming Brünhilde immersed in a copy of the New York Mirror, during the rehearsal.

Dehn was born in Waterville, Minnesota, forty years ago. His parents had the good sense to respect their son's artistic ambition, and he was sent to an art school in Minneapolis. At twenty-one, lie came to New York and enrolled at the Art Students' League. There was little money and the consequent irritation of small receipts from a world to which he had so much to give. II is drawings began to reflect a satirical outlook; but thanks to his innate good nature, they bespoke an affable, Rabelaisian touch, rather than a relentless hatred of bourgeois institutions, as once nourished by George Grosz.

In 1921, Dehn went abroad. He has studied in Vienna. Berlin, Paris, and London, and only recently returned to make New York his permanent home. Dehn lithographs hang in the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in the Academy of Fine Arts at Honolulu. He says, on the other hand: "I had succeeded in never winning a prize with my prints until the Philadelphia Art Alliance came along last year and spoiled everything with a First Prize."