Review of Public Address (Speech):  “Read – – and Grow Up” [Be More Than a Specialist], Given by Nicholas Samstag, Time, Inc., New York City.  Delivered to the Minneapolis Advertising Club, Minneapolis, Minnesota, January 21, 1960

Published In: Vital Speeches of the Day, March 1, 1960, Vol. 26 Issue 10, pp. 305-308

(Check with your local educational institution or local public library on how to get a copy of the speech through their research databases; or use your access privileges from your local educational institution or local public library to research their databases to find the article).

Subjects:  Devote Time to Being a General Reader and the Importance of Immersive Reading

Background Information:  Nicholas Samstag lived from 1904-1968.  He was a recognized advertising executive and a published writer.  Many of his published writings (books) pertained to his profession, but his published writings went beyond his profession to poetry published in magazines and to a published children’s book that met with critical acclaim.  Note that in his speech Samstag uses “men” as the generic noun for men and women; and this is also true of pronoun “he” and possessive pronoun, “his.”  This was the convention of usage for writing at that time and should not reflect on the content of Samstag’s speech, which can apply beyond his audience of business people to anyone reading his speech.

REVIEW OF NICHOLAS SAMSTAG’S SPEECH

Nicholas Samstag’s speech is direct, and at times wry.  He makes no bones about his contention that engaging in general reading is gaining greater perspectives on matters and events; and he finds that many readers are “under-generalized” from their reading and therefore in their development as persons.

He realizes that the title of his speech, “Read – – and Grow Up,” is offensive.  This does not brother him for the point he has to make about the lack of general reading done by people.  To quote him:

 “And when I titled this talk ‘Read – – and Grow Up’, I wanted to suggest  that a certain immaturity characterizes the man who allows himself to become under-read; and if this got him mad that was all right with me.  Because I truly believe that men who are under-read tend to be under generalized-and that the under-generalized man is a case of arrested development.”[i]

Before going further into Samstag’s contention, some background needs to be established.

Samstag spoke before the Minneapolis Advertising Club (Minneapolis, Minnesota) in 1960.  He spoke to them previously about advertising and was invited back to speak.  In being invited back, he chose to speak about books and reading, which is important to him, and in fact is his avocation with a passion to the bone, which will be seen near the end of his speech when he touches upon what he would like to speak about related to reading if he had the time.

He believes his professional standing of working in the advertising business for thirty-five years and his being a brother in Phi Beta Sigma qualify him to speak more pertinently on the subject books and reading than a teacher of English.  Further, he states:  “…I have hundreds and hundreds of books all over my house, ninety-seven per cent of which I have read and twenty-two-and-a-half percent of which I have read twice or more often.”[ii]

He notes, however, his biggest qualification for speaking on reading is his somewhat disliking the company of others, which led him to start reading at a young age.  To quote him:  “…my greatest qualification is that I have always had a slight distaste for the companionship of my fellow men.  And this has predilected me toward solitude and thrust me, if I may use the phrase, into the bosom of the printed page where I have been luxuriating from a very early age indeed.”[iii]

Now to move from Samstag’s audience and his qualifications to his speaking about reading and his speech’s contention.

Samstag, in chastising the under-generalized reader, quickly qualifies that he is not speaking of the over-specialized reader, since in modern complex society specialists are important.  But he says the ideal specialist should be more than a specialist and uses a quote he takes from Floyd Bond of Pomona College’s Economics Department to justify this as follows:  “What we want is not lawyers, but men practicing law, not doctors, but men practicing medicine.  For a good society we must not have specialists and board gauged people, but specialists who are broad-gauged people.”[iv]

Samstag states that modern society with its expansion of educational opportunities has created specialists and has increased leisure time that leads to creating specialties such as clubs and organizations.  Further, in business the trend is to create more products that create the need for more consumers and more groups to sell and service the increased number of products.  This in turn spawns professional affiliations such as business associations and other affiliations, with people living within the confines of particular subject of their work and affiliations on a daily basis.  Samstag takes to task the undesirability of this trend:  “A word for all this is ‘provincialism’-and it’s an unpleasant word.  But practically all of us deserve it-because we continuously to spiral in on the things we know best and avoid the unfamiliar.”[v]

In a Geo-political context, provincialism fails to understand cultures and countries.  Samstag says that other areas of the world are ascending such as Asia and America is ill equipped to understand Asia with America’s emphasis on the history of Western Civilization.[vi]  And then America’s failure to understand countries that are antagonists to America, such as Russia, leads to barriers in communication with those countries.

Samstag then homes in on the professions and businesses and finds that technical reading, though necessary to stay abreast of one’s profession and business, is reading is done at a cost.  To quote Samstag:  “…I am not here concerned with technical reading-reading about your business or your profession.  That is necessary kind of reading and we must all do some of it, but it does nothing to make us ‘a full man’; it intensifies rather than ameliorates our natural provincialism.”[vii]

He looks to his own profession of advertising where there is an over emphasis on reading for information on the profession that will increasingly yield diminishing returns.  He says that one or two advertising trade journals to read is sufficient, and is to be supplemented by reading the advertising column of the New York Times and taking business news from Time and the Wall Street Journal.  This is enough reading and to go beyond would be an excessive quantity of professional reading.

He takes aim at his audience of people in the business of advertising on how they can better themselves and their vocation by being more general readers.  He states:

“At this point it can, I think, be truly said that becoming more general makes us better at the special. With the advertising and business reading I’ve suggested already under your mental belt, you’ll become a better advertising man quicker by reading Thomas Mann, Henry James, or even Jack Keroac, the beatnik novelist, than by adding another trade or business paper to your diet.”[viii]

This leads to the dilemma of whether to focus on reading contemporary works or on reading the classics, the great books.  The later focuses on the Great Books program of the Great Books Foundation, which among other things published an extensive multi-volume set of the great books and generated a reading list of the 100 greatest classics to read.   Robert Hutchins (1899-1977), a noted educator, was the Chairman of the Board of the Great Books Foundation.

Samstag finds that there is no ultimate answer for the dilemma of favoring either contemporary books or classic books for reading.  How the dilemma centers upon him and his reading he states:  “I regret to say that I haven’t read all or even most of Mr. Hutchins’ hundred great books, but I would have hated to have missed the short stories of Isak Dinesen, or the novels of Vladimir Nabokov while trying to complete the one hundred.” [ix]

This leads to Samstag stating the basic reasons for reading as he sees them.  To quote Samstag, there are three reasons as follows:  “We may read for information; we may read for entertainment; we may read for immersion.”[x]

It is reading for immersion that Samstag believes is most important for its impact and is the kind of reading that should be done more of.  In reading for immersion, which is focused and intense reading on a subject, author, country, etc., he is not advocating being a purist in that one has a formal bibliography of book titles to be read and that one is to extract precisely all the meanings of the books being read.  He is interested in the ultimate outcome of immersion reading.

To quote Samstag extensively on reading for immersion, which contains quite a vivid description of how immersion reading can affect a person:

“It’s this immersion matter I’d like to dwell on for a minute.  Reading for immersion is what people don’t do enough of.  Reading to become immersed in a style, reading to become immersed in a period of history, in a mood, in a style of thinking, in an old or new point of view, in a noble or comical setting.

One of the most important features of reading for immersion is that it can be (perhaps even ought to be) unfocused or half attentive reading.  If you forget names of characters or don’t understand certain literary allusions, just keep on going.  If it’s a piece of high brow or tough thinking and you haven’t the special knowledge to understand it all, go on anyway.  Keep ploughing ahead and odds are, you will come out at the other side with something you didn’t start with.

Some of the most enjoyable and rewarding reading that I do is what I call immersion reading.  It is as if you were a shrimp and the book is a cup of cocktail sauce.  You dip yourself into the sauce, you immerse yourself, and see how you feel.  If it’s a spicy sauce you tingle; if it’s a foreign, exotic sort of sauce, you may be disturbed and perhaps even upset-but in either case you are changed-and broadened and deepened.  This is also the way to see and experience foreign cities-become immersed in them and, when you leave, a little of them stays on in your blood.”[xi]

Samstag, in closing out his speech, does so on two notes.

The first note he strikes is touching on a number of matters that he would like to speak about related to reading if he had more time.  Some of these matters are as follows:

• Writing in a book’s margin to argue with an author.
• Finding time to read, to which he states, “I wish there were time to tell you what an enemy ‘Togetherness’ is to reading-and how hard I have had to fight and how ruthless I think you have to get and hold two or three hour a day for yourself and for your reading. The family, gentlemen, is the enemy of the book.”[xii]
• Moving to the content of reading, he states, “…I wish I could take at least a half hour to inveigh against the Calvinistic attitude that reading you enjoy is in some way inferior to reading you have to wrestle with-or that fiction and poetry are somehow inferior to history, biography, fact and philosophy-or to puncture the illusion that being able to name authors and titles in great profusion is the sign of the well-read man-or to destroy with gleeful malevolence the nonsensical theory that there is any such thing as a ‘right way’ to write a novel.”[xiii]

And the second note he strikes is a more urgent one-a Geo-political one- about the how countries are ruled and the result of that power of ruling on people’s freedom, which includes people’s reading.

He speaks of the advantages and disadvantages of the West’s clash with the East.  The West’s one great advantage is its freedom to speak and to criticize.  In the East the great advantage is its swift decision making and action because of a powerful person’s rule over a country.  This powerful person makes all the decisions (presses the buttons for what will happen) and is not likely to be criticized by others when wrong.

The West’s apparent fumbling at times in its decisions making is not fumbling when seen from the dynamics behind the decision making.  To quote Samstag:

“Here we blunder and bargle and argue and delay but when the buttons are pushed, the results should-if we have kept the channels clear-represent a consensus of the best ideas of the best men.

And these best men communicate-they exchange their best ideas-and they draw on all the ideas of the best men of the past-through reading.

In the end it may be well be reading, that will make men free.”[xiv]

That is quite a closing sentence by Samstag.  He is balancing out at the end of his speech the societal impact of reading; that reading in the balance contributes to a society’s freedom by having access to ideas and to be able debate and criticize those ideas for decisions.

The next blog entry on October 25, 2023 will consider Dr. Monroe Deutsch’s speech, “A Life Without Books,” given in 1943, during World War II.  Deutsch,who gives a far reaching speech, will cover among other things the importance of a free society and the importance of the choices of books one makes to read.

FOOTNOTES

[i] “Read – – and Grow Up,” Vital Speeches of the Day, March 1, 1960, 305-307

[ii] Ibid, 305

[iii] Ibid, 305

[iv] Ibid, 305

[v] Ibid, 305

[vi] Samstag in his speech uses a quote from the preface of historian Will Durant’s multi-volume work, the Story of Civilization, for substantiation.  He quotes Durant in his speech as follows:  “At this historic moment-when the ascendancy of Europe is so rapidly coming to an end, when Asia is swelling with resurrected life … the provincialism of our traditional histories, which began with Greece and summed up Asia in a line, has become no mere academic error, but a possibly fatal failure of perspective and intelligence.  The future faces into the Pacific-and understanding must follow there.”  This is on page 306 of his speech.

[vii] Read – – and Grow Up, Vital Speeches of the Day, March 1960, 306

[viii] Ibid, 306

[ix] Ibid, 306

[x] Ibid, 306

[xi] Ibid, 307

[xii] Ibid, 307

[xiii] Ibid, 307

[xiv] Ibid, 307