The Bahá’í Faith in the New Yorker

The New Yorker began publication in 1925. It has referred to or mentioned the Baha'is usually in passing in a story or social anecdote as early as 1933. However it has occasionally gone to some some length in the mention of the Faith.

Major mentions

Almost all the mentions are in passing as part of the story or social anecdote. Two are relatively extended, amounting to more than a paragraph, and one is a page long advertisement by Israeli tourism showing the Baha'i Terraces however:

• "Israel - No one belongs here more than you", a special advertising section which included a full page picture of the Baha'i Terraces on p. 53, Sep 18, 2000.

• Talk of the Town; "The Bahais of Iran…", p. 31–2, Feb 04, 1985. The letter, a page length across two pages, is a description of the persecution of the Baha'is in Iran but culminates with an observation that the Senate's refusal to approve the genocide convention means that the US is not bound to do anything about it but should consider now signing it.

• "Onward and Upward with the Arts", by E. J. Kahn Jr, p. 78, Oct 05, 1946. It is about Webster's New International Dictionary, and was "stuck" on page xxi which was a list of fifteen contributors being thanked. The list includes the "National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is New York NY". The main query was about how each got listed but Mirriam had recently died and not provided documentation. Kahn ended up contacting each contributor asking what was contributed. On page 78 most of the column is about the Baha'i contribution:

"It remained for the secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá'ís of the United States and Canada, of Wilmette, Illinois - replying to the letter the dictionary had told me to address to the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is in New York - to send me some facts. The secretary wrote:

I have gone over our records and can give you the following information.

During the month of March, 1928, we had correspondence with the G. & C. Merriam Company in what we pointed out that Webester's New International Dictionary gave an erroneous impression of the Bahá'í faith in its definition of Babism and Baha'i.

We sent literature giving them sources of correct information, for which we received their courteous thanks. The fact that this correspondence took place some eighteen years ago is obviously the reason why the Merriam Company is not able at present to give you these simple details.

It appeared, then, that the "information of great value" furnished by the Bahá'ís for my dictionary had been merely a letter of protest about a mistake in an earlier edition, sent in 1928. (2 - footnoted - Despite this ancient plea of the Bahá'ís for accuracy, neither they nor the Merriam Company seem to be able to make up their minds about the acute-accented vowels. The Bahá'ís' secretary ignored these accents in the body of his letter, though they appeared several times in his letterhead. The dictionary ignores the accents on page xxi, and then on page 204, in defining "Bahai" omits not only the accents but also the apostrophe which it used on page xxi.) (and then continues in other issues.)

Minor mentions

Eight stories have brief sections amounting to a couple lines related to the Baha'i Faith.

• "The David Kelley Affair", by John Cassidy, (p. 107, 111), Dec 8, 2003:

"The Kellys' marriage, like many others, is hard to fathom. He didn't discuss his work with Janice; he rarely mentioned his conversion to Baha'i to her; and he was away a lot, sometimes in the company of female friends, such as Mai Pederson, an Arab-American military linguist, whom he had met in iraq. One of Pederson's ex-husbands told a British newspaper that she was a spy working for American military intelligence, a charge she refutes. It was Pederson who introduced Kelly to the Baha'i faith, an offshoot of Islam that preaches the value of spirituality, truth, and universal peace. He spent time in Monterey, California, where she as attached to the Defense Language Institute, and it was there, in 1999, that be became a Baha'i.…
More than seventy witnesses testified at the inquiry. They included… an expert on the Baha'i faith.…"

• "Letter from Iran", by Joseph Kraft, (p. 137), Dec 18, 1978. The section mentioning the Faith is about an interview with 76 yr old Ayatollah Shariatmadari , successor to Khomeini in Qum in Iraq, (and refers to Michael Fischer's research on Qum), to whom questions had been submitted and negotiated before the interview:

  "I asked him whether there was equality in Islam for people of other religions. He said, "In Islam, Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians are all accepted as equal - unless they become a Fifth Column for foreign meddling in this country. Jews are accepted as Jews but not as defenders of Zionist aggression." He then referred to the Baha'i sect, which began as a reform offshoot of Shiite Islam, and has ben popular in Iran, particularly among educated people who have done well in business and politics. He said, "Baha'i is accepted as Baha'i per se but not as a clique dividing up government posts among themselves and working for the foreign interests."

• Profiles; "Ridiculous", by Calvin Tompkin, (p. 56), Nov 15, 1976: (a profle of Charls Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Company):

  "Fuelled by moderate grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts, the company took a lease in 1973 on the Evergreen Theatre, on East Eleventh Street. They gave it a home, a stage, a space to rehearse in, and even a slight sense of permanence; but last fall, while the company was rehearsing "Caprice," the building housing the theatre was sold to the Bahai religious organization, and the Ridiculous was forced to vacate on short notice. Vacate it did, after putting on a fund-raising one night gala performance for its own benefit…"

• "A pilgrimage to Israel…", p. 136, Dec 01, 1975:

  "A pilgrimage to Israel with a group of Bahais was the exciting experience of Mrs. William Nixon of Wheaton. The Bahai Pilgrims spent nine days in Haifa, which is the world headquarters of the Bahai religion and the remainder of the two-weeks trip visiting Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Armageddon and other historical sites. - Wheaton (Ill.) Sunday Journal.
  We've never like Armageddon - the food is terrible.

• Talk of the Town; "Hemingway inks $1 M Pact with Fabergé", (p. 32), Jun 02, 1975:

  "Reénter Errol, now Margaux's fiancé and manager. Follow big modeling spreads in…. The other shows her hosting a cocktail-hoedown party for musicians Seals & Crofts. "She praised both their music," People reports, "and commitment to the Bahai faIth." "

• "The Art Galleries - A Risk for the Intelligence", by Harold Rosenberg, (p. 162), Oct 27, 1962:

  "An adherent of Bahai, Tobey, like Davies, (Arthur B Davies) projects his imagination beyond the temporal. But while Davies' canvases are closed gardens, Tobey's are porous to all kinds of time phenomena. Bahai searches for the underlying Reality at the same time that it hails "the new day" and the twentieth century; for Tobey, immersion in time is therefore a matter of religious conviction."

• Talk of the Town; "Windsor's Friends", p. 16, May 27, 1939. (about Mirza Sohrab):

"… He claims direct descent from Mohammed and once served as secretary to Abdul Baha, son of the Persian prophet Bahaullah, on whose teachings the Bahai religion was founded. Eleven years ago, at a tea, he was introduced to Mrs. Chanler by Valeska Surrat, a siren of the silent movies. He encouraged Mrs Chanler to renounce Society - she is of Colonial ancestry and her husband is a fret-great-grandson of John Jacob Astor - and become a convert to Bahaism. Shortly after conversion they organized the New History Society and began to work for such Bahai objectives as… "

• Talk of the Town; "Frequently one hears…", p. 13, Mar 22, 1930:

  "A few weeks ago Elsie Benkard married Charles Clarke, using the Bahai rites. "Verily we are satisfied with the will of God," they said. "Verily," they should have added, "we are dissatisfied with the deputy city clerk's civil ceremony" - which they had just gone through with. The difficulty seems to be to invent rites that are both lyrical and binding. Our opinion is that the English church ceremony is probably more beautiful than the Persian."

Mentioned in passing

The majority of the mentions of the religion, some thirteen, in the New Yorker are in stories or anecdotes in passing.

• "Soon", by anonymous, (p. 154), June 14, 2004: "Sara had at one time been interested in the Baha'i faith, but Juliet believed that this interest had waned."

• "Persia on the Pacific", by Tara Bahrampour, (p. 54), Nov 11, 2003: "Of course, most L.A. Iranians were never ministers. Like Iranians anywhere they are rich or poor, Muslim, Jewish Baha'i, Christian, or Zoroastrian, secular or religious, conservative or leftist, highly educated or less so."

• "Annals of religion - Cold Sanctuary", by Thomas Keneally, (p. 66), Jun 17, 2002: "She had been visiting the refugees - Muslims, Baha'i, Assyrian Christians - for years, helping them manage their immigration cases, doing errands for them when she could."

• "233,000 Acres, Ocean views; The former Panama Canal Zone is being shown to prospective tenants", by Jon Lee Anderson, (p. 52), Nov 29, 1999: "Santería, Catholicism, Pentecostalism, Bahai, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam are all well represented in Panama, and coexist in perfect ignorance of one another."

• Life and Letters; "The Life and Early Death of Bruce Chatwin - iii. Welsh at the End of the Earth", by Susannah Clapp, (p. 93), Dec 23, 1996: "(Bruce) Chatwin later recalled, "the traveller could expect to encounter a Welshman, an English gentleman-farmer, a Haight-Ashbury Flower Child, a Montenegrin nationalist, an Afrikaaner, a Persian missionary for the Bahai religion, or the Archdeacon of Buenos Aires on his round of Anglican baptisms."

• "American Chronicles - Stranger in Town", by Calvin Trillin, (p. 82), Feb 01, 1988: "As a teenager, Anna (Anton) became involved with the Bahai faith, and when she went to work for Sylvia Nelson, …. Bahai turned out to be the first of a number of religious interests.…"

• "The Mandelbaum Gate, Barbara Vaughan's Identity", by Muriel Spark, (p. 29), Jul 10, 1965: "The guide continued, on his right hand, "I gave her, then, the Persian Garden and the Temple of the Bahai Faith."
  "Ah yes, I've heard of the Bahai faith. Very interesting. Very decent people, I hear. Founded some time last century. Money to burn."
  "In this the lady was not interested. She did not wish to visit the Bahai Temple."

• "Oh, I am a cook and a houseboy bland", by S. J. Pearlman, (p. 34), Feb 18, 1961: A character named Ngong is clarifying about his list of references for a new job: " "I forgot to include Mrs. Kluckholm, in Flintridge," I said. "I worked there two months last summer. She teaches one of the Indian religions - Bahai, I think - at Occidental College. (at UCLA)" "

• Profiles; "Yea Verily ~ II" (second of three articles on Colonel Stings), by A. J. Liebling, (page 64–65), Sep 20, 1952: "It was one of her yogi cronies, no doubt, if not through a Bahai, that she had learned of Dr. Sykes' prowess, for the old boy ranked high in the mystic confraternity."

• Profiles; "Second City - I so proud to be Jammy-Jammy" (first in a series of articles on Chicago), by A. J. Leibling, (p. 36), Jan 12, 1952: "Chicago was amusing for one year, she said, but after the arrival of the baby she was expecting, they would move to Evanston, which has a Bahai temple, Northwestern University, and no saloons."

• "Memoirs of a Master" by "M. R. A.", (p. 30), Dec 23, 1939: "I see the thin, competent form of Mrs. Farrell, whom Antoinette always called Farola and who in turn called me Dearie. I think of Minnie, the Bahai, whose piety allowed her to partake of food only before sunrise and after sundown, and whose abstinence so weakened her that she used to run the egg-beater in the kitchen to drown out the house of her lamentation.…"

• Talk of the Town; "The Newspaper Guild…", p. 7, Jul 10, 1937: "His (a newspaperman's) attachment and devotion should be singular. An Elk may write of an Elk convention, a Bahai may report his cult; but unless newspapermen in the aggregate are disorganized in their personal life and devoted to history, they are valueless to society…"

• Books; "Has Anyone here seen Kelly?", by Clifton Fadiman, (p. 51), Jul 22, 1933: "Irish mysticism, at least as one finds it in Yeats or AF, has always seemed to me either phony or dull. Mr. Stuart's contrives to be both, which shows how a literary tradition can develop. His characters are straight out of Maeterinck (about halfway out, anyway) and his message is hot news for any openminded Bahai-worshiper."

See also

• Bahá'í Period of Historical mentions
• Coverage of the Baha'i Faith in New York City via the New York Age newspaper
• Coverage of the Baha'i Faith in the Columbia Spectator, (student run newspaper of the Columbia University of New York)
• Mention of the Babi and Baha'i Faiths in the New York Times - 1852 - 1922, by the New Hampshire Bahá’í Cluster