A Blackout Pastime
The New York Times was the last major metropolitan daily in America to print a crossword. It was not late by accident. It was late on principle, and it said so repeatedly.
Eighteen years of contempt
In November 1924, at the height of the craze, the paper devoted a leader to the subject. Crosswords were a "sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern." Solvers got "nothing out of it except a primitive sort of mental exercise," and - the paper was careful to add - "success or failure in any given attempt is equally irrelevant to mental development."
It kept at it. In 1925 it decided the question of whether puzzles were beneficial or harmful was "in no urgent need of an answer," the craze being obviously about to die out. By the end of 1929 it was satisfied that the crossword "has gone the way of all fads." A book reviewer in 1934 remarked that anyone possessed of considerable low cunning would be foolish to waste his time on them.
Meanwhile every other paper in New York was printing one.
Eleven days after Pearl Harbor
On 18 December 1941, the Sunday editor Lester Markel wrote to his publisher. The United States had been at war for eleven days.
"We ought to proceed with the puzzle, especially in view of the fact it is possible there will now be bleak blackout hours - or if not that then certainly a need for relaxation of some kind or other."
The blackout he means is the American one - civil defence, darkened windows in New York, long evenings at home with nothing to do. Not the Blitz.
Attached to that memo was a note from Margaret Petherbridge Farrar, the woman who had spent the 1920s turning the World's chaotic puzzle page into something with rules. Her pitch is better than his:
"I don't think I have to sell you on the increased demand for this type of pastime in an increasingly worried world… You can't think of your troubles while solving a crossword."
The first one
The first New York Times crossword appeared on Sunday 15 February 1942, in the Magazine, with Farrar as founding editor. The construction of that first puzzle is credited to Charles Erlenkotter - though some accounts instead have Farrar signing it herself under the pseudonym "Anna Gram", and the records disagree.
It was a Sunday feature only. The daily puzzle didn't begin until 1950 - a point worth holding on to, because a great deal of writing about the paper's crossword quietly compresses the two.
Farrar edited it until the end of the 1960s and set the conventions that still govern American grids: rotational symmetry, a three-letter minimum, a ceiling on black squares, and no unchecked letters - every white square answering to both an Across and a Down. Asked once why symmetry mattered, she is said to have replied: because it is prettier.
Meanwhile, in Britain
The British experience of the war ran the other way: not a paper deciding it could afford a crossword, but papers with almost nothing left to print keeping theirs anyway.
Newsprint was rationed from September 1939, initially to sixty per cent of pre-war consumption. When Germany invaded Norway in April 1940, Britain lost its principal source of wood pulp overnight, and within days the allowance was cut to thirty per cent. A Hertfordshire weekly told its readers that "drastic reductions in the number of pages per issue appear inevitable" and that "reports must be definitely limited in length."
The numbers are stark. The Daily Telegraph went from over thirty pages to fourteen on the outbreak of war. The Daily Mirror fell to twelve pages in July 1940 and to eight by April 1941. By 1945 newspapers were down to a quarter of their pre-war paper. Restrictions weren't lifted until 1953 - eight years after the fighting stopped.
At eight pages, every column inch was contested. The crossword kept its place. No editor appears to have left a record of deciding that it should, which is its own kind of answer: by 1940 the puzzle was no longer a novelty to be justified. It was part of the paper, like the weather.