The Rudder: Chronicle of an Era
The Rudder Magazine was America’s foremost yachting journal in the post-war years. Credit: The Rudder
This feature article originally appeared in AFLOAT Magazine and forms part of our latest edition of boating features exploring maritime history, classic yachting and the stories that shaped the sport.
David Salter outlines the life and death of a legendary boating magazine.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was working in his private study at the White House on December 7, 1941 when a phone call alerted him to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. FDR was a keen sailor from childhood, had a huge collection of ship models and paintings and often escaped the pressures of the presidency by taking family and friends cruising in his yacht Amberjack. So, chances were that among the papers on his desk that fateful day was the latest edition of The Rudder, then America’s foremost yachting journal.
Knowing my weakness for hoarding old sailing magazines, a friend at the club recently unloaded on me a pile of Rudder editions spanning the 1940-1950 decades. They are incomplete, and in poor condition, but the collective insights they provide into US boating through those turbulent years are fascinating. In the days of laborious hot-metal typesetting and the expensive photo-engraving process required for every illustration, The Rudder must have been a costly magazine to produce. Yet an annual subscription was just $3 for 12 issues – posted to your home.
By 1940 the self-styled “Magazine for Yachtsmen” had established itself as an influential maritime publication. While its main US competitor, Yachting, tended to lean towards big-boat sailing and lucrative brokerage advertising The Rudder was more ecumenical, devoting plenty of attention to power boats. It established an editorial emphasis on smaller craft, amateur builds, and leisurely accounts of extended cruises. Practical advice was offered on everything from “the proper use of the fog horn”, to how to rig a bosun’s chair or tie a decorative turk’s head.
There was regular prominence given to reports of offshore racing. This was hardly surprising, as the magazine’s founder in 1890, Thomas Fleming Day, had championed the first New York to Bermuda race. Other blue-water events regularly covered by the magazine included the Miami-Nassau, St. Petersburg-Havana and Chicago-Mackinac. By modern standards fleets for those ocean passages were small but The Rudder reported their exploits with confidence that the sport would grow.
WWII
America on the eve of WWII was still emerging from the Great Depression yet the recreational boating sector of the economy was flourishing. The May 1940 edition (price 35 cents) listed no fewer than 30 local manufacturers of marine diesels and 37 of auxiliaries that ran on “gasoline”. Those lists contained exhaustive details for every motor and model, including bore and stroke, piston displacement, weight, type of ignition system, gear ratios, length, height, and price. Assembling that data was an extraordinary feat of research by the magazine’s staff. There was a matching diversity of suppliers for every conceivable niche in the marine market. The H.M. Harper Company of Chicago advertised “Bolts for Uncle Sam’s Navy” – boasting an astonishing 4,320 stock items in monel, brass, copper, bronze and stainless. But the advertising material was always concentrated in the opening and closing pages of the magazine; the main editorial content was never sullied by “trade”.
The heart of The Rudder was its monthly selection of yacht designs. Some editions contained more than a dozen, each complete with extensive supporting notes. The line drawings reproduced were so comprehensive and detailed that countless boats must have been built directly off those pages without any payment to the naval architects. These ranged from tiny runabouts to lofty schooners. The “How to Build a Sabot” feature included wonderfully fussy plans, right down to noting the appropriate distance to leave between the pintles. And what could the home builder expect to outlay for his Sabot? “The boat should cost between $12 and $15 – sail, centreboard and spars extra.”
L. Francis Herreshoff was a consultant editor to The Rudder and contributed a wealth of features, both practical and historical. Among these was a fascinating 12-part series outlining the education, ideas and methods of his famous father, ‘Cap’n Nat’. It revealed that Nat acquired his legendary manual skills after his older brother, J.B, who became blind. Aged just 10, young Nat guided his brother’s hands as he operated lathes and other machine tools. Those articles also corrected the popular misconception that Nat was an instinctive, self-taught naval architect. In fact, he’d completed a three-year course in mechanical engineering at MIT and served long years in junior roles acquiring experience. Herreshoff was still working at his lathe aged 88. For The Rudder to publish those lengthy features showed a commitment to recording yachting history that no contemporary magazine can match.
Photography
Visually, the tone of Rudder was set by the unique yachting photography always simply credited to “Rosenfeld”. These high-contrast action images were the work of Morris Rosenfeld and his son Stanley. Together, they documented recreational boating in America for more than 70 years. The Rosenfelds were to US yachting what Beken & Sons are to the British. From their chase boat Foto they amassed an extraordinary collection of images ranging from modest speedboat races to the America’s Cup (they covered every challenge from 1920 to 1992). Readers who might be daunted by lengthy articles – 5,000-word features were not uncommon – enjoyed the magazine for its photographs alone. Fortunately, the Rosenfelds stored their output in chronological order and an archive of around one million of these priceless photographs is now held at the Mystic Seaport Museum.
More than a year before Japan declared war on the United States, The Rudder was already urging the navy to order a rapid construction program of smaller, high-speed “mosquito fleet” boats to support its warships. Whether this was simply patriotic, or done with an eye to the commercial interests of advertisers is difficult to say. Chris-Craft took full pages to declare they were now “100% on war work” but that there were still “a few new Runabouts and Cruisers available for purchase”. A supplier of marine plywood for the massive PT boat construction program could claim that their product was “doubly-proved in wartime” but “one fine day when Victory comes, it will be available to you again.”
When peace did come, the post-war mania for mergers and acquisitions would eventually seal The Rudder‘s fate. What had been a flourishing diversity of manufacturers and suppliers was consolidated into just a few dominant corporations. Cheap fibreglass mass production drove many wooden boat builders out of business. Advertising sales dwindled. Home construction projects were uneconomic and people no longer had the time or patience to build wholesome boats from The Rudder‘s plans. The magazine slowly succumbed to those realities and finally ceased publication in 1977. Flashier colour publications like Sail partly filled the gap but America had lost a much-loved outlet for readers loyal to the traditional spirit of sailing and the sea.
Legacy
The magazine’s tangible legacy is the countless boats that were built to designs it featured. In the early 1950s they proudly claimed that after they published the original plans for the Snipe class close to 8,000 of those craft were built, and that “more boats have been built from these plans than were ever built from any plan in the history of yacht design”. (No doubt that honour has now passed to the Laser.)
But perhaps the more lasting legacy of The Rudder was its uncompromising editorial standpoint. It was never afraid to take strong positions. In a 1940s attack on rule-bending they foresaw what has become a blight on the sport of yacht racing: “The most complicated formula could, in the hands of a clever naval architect, be broken down and the resultant yacht would win everything in sight. This year’s clever yacht would become obsolete next year. If the rule beaters and chiselers can be kept down it is the greatest sport on earth.”
Yet, there was also optimism. Eighty-five years ago the editor, William F. Crosby, nailed his colours to the mast when he wrote: “The policy of proselytising to secure new yachtsmen and to further the building of more boats is still a worthy idea. The policy of telling the truth in plain, unvarnished language, even when it hurts, is still good for the soul.” And so say all of us.
This feature article originally appeared in AFLOAT Magazine. To explore more stories like this, browse the AFLOAT Magazine archive or view the latest edition of AFLOAT Magazine.
