What this country really needs is a good five-cent nickel

I start with a review of a collection of books about Dorothy Parker, Brilliant, Troubled Dorothy Parker by Robert Gottlieb. Gottlieb describes Parker's literary beginnings.

In 1915, Parker, aged twenty-two, went to work at Vogue (for ten dollars a week), writing captions, proofreading, fact-checking, etc., and after a while moved over to the very young Vanity Fair; her first poem to be published had recently appeared there. She happily functioned as a kind of scribe-of-all-work until three years later she was chosen to replace the departing P.G. Wodehouse as the magazine’s drama critic. She was not only the youngest by far of New York’s theater critics, she was the only female one.

It was at the magazine that she met the lovable and sympathetic Robert Benchley, who would become the closest friend of her life, as well as Robert Sherwood, long before his four Pulitzer Prizes (three for drama, one for biography). They became a threesome, and started eating lunch together at the nearby Algonquin Hotel because it was affordable and the food was okay. At about the same time, another threesome drifted in, graduates of Stars and Stripes, the overseas army’s weekly newspaper. They were Alexander Woollcott, Harold Ross, and Franklin Pierce Adams, who as “F.P.A.” was the most influential newspaper columnist of the day. Soon Adams was quoting Parker’s Vanity Fair verses and, even more effectively, her bon mots. Quickly “Dorothy Parker” was a celebrity.

Parker, Benchley, Woolcott, Ross. I have read works by all these. Sherwood I recognize but have not read any of his works.

But who is this FPA. I have been familiar with the Algonquin Round Table since at least college. I must have come across his name before. Apparently it never quite registered.

This seems to be one of those temporal ironies. At the time of the Algonquin Round Table, Franklin Pierce Adams was probably the best known and most popular writer in the group. He started his column The Conning Tower in 1914. Wikipedia notes:

During World War I, Adams was in the U.S. Army, serving in military intelligence and also writing a column, "The Listening Post", for Stars and Stripes editor Harold Ross. After the war, the so-called "comma-hunter of Park Row" (for his knowledge of the language) returned to New York and the Tribune. He moved to the New York World in 1922, and his column appeared there until the paper merged with the inferior New York Telegram in 1931. He returned to his old paper, by then called the New York Herald Tribune, until 1937, and finally moved to the New York Post, where he ended his column in September 1941.

During its long run, "The Conning Tower" featured contributions from such writers as Robert Benchley, Edna Ferber, Moss Hart, George S. Kaufman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John O'Hara, Dorothy Parker and Deems Taylor. Having one's work published in "The Conning Tower" was enough to launch a career, as in the case of Dorothy Parker and James Thurber. Parker quipped, "He raised me from a couplet." Parker dedicated her 1936 publication of collected poems, Not So Deep as a Well, to F.P.A. Many of the poems in that collection were originally published in "The Conning Tower".

Much later, the writer E. B. White freely admitted his sense of awe: "I used to walk quickly past the house in West 13th Street between Sixth and Seventh where F.P.A. lived, and the block seemed to tremble under my feet—the way Park Avenue trembles when a train leaves Grand Central."

The irony is that, aside from a few media history majors or American literature majors, who might recognize FBA as a household (college educated household) name today?

I am guessing virtually no-one. But among the people who held him in high esteem and who benefitted from his mentorship? E.B. White, Dorothy Parker certainly would be recognizable and perhaps Woollcott, Ross and Benchley.

Time is a cruel winnower of past reputations.

For all that, FPA's words may be forgotten by most but they have a certain contemporary pertinence.

Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.

Digging a little further, I find that there is an FPA quote I recognize.

There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in the country. The trouble is they cost a quarter. What this country really needs is a good five-cent nickel.
- Reported in Jacob Morton Braude, Complete Speaker's and Toastmaster's Library: Remarks of famous people (1965), p. 53.

Almost certainly from my economic reading rather than from my literary reading.