Here’s another post by my Pi Beta Phi sister, Penny Proctor.
Quick – which writer from Indiana published six novels and over 200 short stories in popular magazines between 1924 and the early 1950s? Drawing a blank? Here’s a hint: she was a charter member of the legendary “Fifty Club” of The Saturday Evening Post, meaning that no fewer than fifty of her stories were published in that magazine. Still no guess? Allow me to introduce you to Margaret Weymouth Jackson, whose fifteen minutes of fame lasted nearly twenty-five years, but who now has vanished from the popular culture.
The daughter of a magazine editor, Margaret – sometimes called “Margery” in her youth – was born with the figurative pencil in her hand. She learned the foundation of good writing and editing from helping her father, especially during his years at the editor of Farm Life. She spent her later childhood years in Spencer, Indiana while her father worked from the family home. In the fall of 1913 she matriculated at Hillsdale College in southern Michigan and in 1914 became an initiated member of Pi Beta Phi. She left before graduating to try her luck in the publishing business and by 1918 was the associate editor of the Chicago-based magazine, Better Farming. Her first short stories were published there.
In 1920 she married Charles Jackson, then a fellow boarder at her rooming house in Chicago. Although born in the United States, he had been raised in England and joined the Canadian Army to fight in World War I. As a reward for his service, the Canadian government gifted him with several hundred acres of land near Brandon, Manitoba, so he and his bride moved there.
Their two daughters were born there, but Margaret could not completely abandon her passion for writing. She bought a typewriter and offered her services to the local newspaper. What began as a factual article on a local livestock fair transformed into a short story, the first of several published in the Brandon paper.
Manitoba winters proved too much for them, and the Jackson family returned to Spencer, Indiana in 1924. Along with having her third child and raising Charles’ orphaned nephew, Margaret wrote, and wrote. While some of her stories were published in Better Farming, she tried to branch out and submitted stories to some of the best-known magazines in the country. After eighteen rejections in a row, she considered giving up, but her agent encouraged her to keep trying. Once the first story sold, she rarely had to cope with rejections again.
For the next 25 years or so, Margaret became a regular contributor to magazines that literally were in nearly every American home: The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, McCalls, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Women’s Home Companion, and American Mercury as well as a few more niche magazines such as Country Gentleman and of course, Better Farming. Many of her stories were serialized and published in daily newspapers around the country, including the New York Daily News.
Margaret’s writing stood apart from other popular writers of the day. She eschewed over-sentimentality, moralistic tropes, or improbable adventures of the rich. Her focus was on the drama of daily life as experienced by ordinary, everyday people. As she described it, “America is a place of work and business, and I wrote a lot about “businessmen” – policemen, plumbers, firemen, factory workers, electricians – because we are all businessmen and business is America’s preoccupation.” (i)
Her first novel, Elizabeth’s Tower, was published in 1926 to generally favorable reviews, although the enthusiasm of the reviewer seemed to differ based on the size of the area served by the reviewer. For example, the critic of the paper in Rochester, New York, opened with this statement: “In Elizabeth’s Tower, the author has so skillfully blended romance and realism that the reader accepts the fairy tale element almost unquestioningly. The book is a veritable poem in prose and carries its reader into a new realm of dreams and ideal beauty.” (ii)
On the other hand, the reviewer from Chicago had this to say: “It is a ‘triumph of true love’ story. For this kind of thing, it is better than most.” (iii)
By 1930, Margaret’s output was astonishing. The February 1930 edition of The Arrow of Pi Beta Phi noted that she had no fewer than 10 stories published or set to be published between December 1929 and the autumn of 1930. “Whew! – where does she get the time to eat, with all that writing? And that isn’t all of her writing, either, but it isn’t to be told for an issue or two.”(iv)
With her career and reputation firmly established, Margaret began to make her political views known through essays and articles and the occasional heated debate. A Roosevelt Democrat, she abhorred anything which she viewed as exploiting hard-working people. In the late 1930s, with another world war looming on the horizon, she tried to get people to understand that war was about killing, not glory, and those urging men to go to war were not the ones who would be fighting it. Her editors asked her to stop, but she replied, “When I get a phone call from President Roosevelt and he tells me to stop talking about war, maybe then I’ll stop.”(v)
Despite this outspokenness, Margaret was thoroughly likeable. A reporter interviewed her in 1930 after the publication of her second novel and provided this report: “You will like her …. [S]he makes you think of wholesome salt-rising bread and other plain Hoosier substantialities. She disarms you immediately with her downrightness.”(vi)
After World War II, people’s tastes began to shift and demand for her work began to dwindle. By 1955, she and Charles were forced to “downsize” to live within their reduced means. When Margaret decided to retire from writing, she and Charles (who usually read Margaret’s drafts and offered critiques) tutored student athletes at Indiana University, primarily from the basketball and football teams. She was credited with helping these athletes achieve and sustain academic eligibility.(vii)
By the time of her death in 1974, Margaret’s 200 stories and six novels had faded from popular culture; yet even then, some English teachers were using her stories as examples of good writing.(viii)
She received accolades for her accomplishments during her lifetime, including a honorary Doctor of Literary Humanities in 1940 from Hillsdale College; induction into the Owen County (Indiana) Hall of Fame in 1969; and induction into the Indiana Academy in 1971, for her general contributions to literature and general culture. In 1996, she was posthumously inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame.
