The Nation
THE NATION
The first number of The Nation—"A Weekly Journal Devoted to Politics, Literature, Science, and Art"—was issued on 6 July 1865. Though half of its early contributors lived in New England, its planners chose its name and based it in New York City to signal its reaching beyond regionalism. Though half of its capital likewise came from the Boston area, backers in New York and Philadelphia raised the other $50,000. Its dominant backers, former abolitionists, wanted to protect the rights and improve the welfare of the emancipated slaves. The founding editor, Edwin Lawrence Godkin (1831–1902), agreed to those goals, and the prospectus luring subscribers declared a special concern for "the laboring class at the South" (Vanden Heuvel, pp. 1–2). Godkin cared most, however, about elevating current politics and also literature, approached primarily not as belles lettres but as scholarship pertaining to the high culture of the world. Most important, The Nation promised to apply a "really critical spirit," an independence that would distinguish it from partisan newspapers and the religious weeklies. Its barebones format excluded illustrations, which competing weeklies kept increasing along with their circulation.
After quickly attracting 5,000 subscribers, The Nation grew slowly to more than 12,000, then sank below 10,000 until after World War I and a radical change of viewpoint. Godkin's inner circle discounted the low circulation against their confidence that The Nation spoke for the ethically elite and, as universities developed out of the colleges for training ministers, for a professoriat aiming to raise standards of judgment. Many reminiscences confirm The Nation's self-image as the base camp for leading the public toward "sweeter manners and better laws," toward finer political and aesthetic taste. As a graduate student Woodrow Wilson preserved his copies after making notes in the margins. In 1907 William Dean Howells recalled that, in the Cambridge-Harvard circle, "we looked eagerly for it every week" ("A Great New York Journalist," North American Review 185 [3 May 1907]: 50). Naturally The Nation's writers, dropping in Latin phrases or classical allusions, aimed at the "highly cultivated classes." Academics eagerly accepted offers to review a book, to function, they hoped, as "public intellectuals" before the concept had a name. Their word-of-mouth approval brought The Nation far more support than its reserved self-promotion.
Fundamentally The Nation imported British progressivism, sometimes labeled Manchester liberalism. For its adherents its principles were as indisputable as the laws that science was announcing and technology was putting to impressive use. Both the source and the agent of those principles, "human nature" was immutably self-interested yet gradually improvable under educated leadership. The most valued principle was freedom, defined by the "science" of political economy as the right to hold private property and make contracts, thus rewarding but also safeguarding democracy. Since economic man (naturally masculine) embodied that right, government must clear the road for his enterprise; otherwise it must operate minimally, thriftily, and impartially toward any creed of person; it must enforce free trade, which brings not only prosperity but interdependence that outmodes expensive, bureaucratic militarism. While Christianity is God-given, fanaticism is disruptive. Privately, the Golden Rule will solve most problems; socially, the utilitarian calculus will choose the greatest good for the greatest number in an inherently moral universe. Now that the United States had exorcised the sin of slavery, it was fittest for leading democratic, entrepreneurial man to always greater progress.
E. L. GODKIN'S POLICIES
A political weekly had to apply these principles to current events, which continually shifted their perplexities. Though The Nation had set out to support the freed persons, their northern patrons started backing away from radical Reconstruction, and The Nation decided that "carpetbaggers" were undermining property holders, the base of stable society. Though Ulysses S. Grant's first term as president had drifted into corruption, no rival promoting laissez-faire business emerged in 1872. But The Nation proved its independence (and lost almost 3,000 subscribers) by criticizing the Republican tactics for counting electoral votes in 1876, and in 1884 it helped rally the Mugwumps, who defected to Grover Cleveland. Against the recurring schemes (such as the "silver craze") to make credit more affordable, it held up the gold standard as practically a natural law. Still more positive about free trade, it railed against the tariffs that special interests erected through the Republican Party. Because voters and their favorites so often disappointed The Nation, it started to doubt the working results of democracy. It supported reform of the civil service, for example, because such reform could at least claim to select for efficiency and honesty rather than WASP power, but The Nation explicitly indicted the wisdom of a come-all electorate. Popular criteria had already created what Godkin called a "chromo-civilization," that is, a culture prone to "mediocrity" (24 September 1874).
"THE PARADISE OF MEDIOCRITIES"
This essay was well known, even notorious in its day. It irritated public opinion, sensitive about its antidemocratic undertones and its similarity to criticisms that British visitors had been making and would continue making, with Matthew Arnold soon to come. But it also appealed to the intelligentsia's sense of mission and to the self-improvement, culturally, of the rising middle class. Soon insiders knew that Charles Eliot Norton had written the essay. They worried that it might help competitors pin the label of "snobbish" or "elitist" on The Nation, but they hoped it would strengthen The Nation's reputation for fearless candor, for exacting sociocultural standards, and for learning gracefully worn (here with a Latinate vocabulary). As Norton's authorship became better known, the essay deepened the public's sense that The Nation had close ties with a Boston-Cambridge coterie.
Nowhere is mediocrity more successful . . . than in America; and were it the fashion to erect temples, after the Roman manner, to personified qualities, the shrines erected by her grateful votaries to the goddess Mediocritas would not be less numerous than those of Fortuna Virilis or Conservatrix.
"The Paradise of Mediocrities," The Nation, 13 July 1865.
As the United States filled up, as workshops swelled into heavy industry, and as finance combined into trusts mightier than the federal treasury, The Nation, more badly even than its competitors, failed to comprehend the pace and scale of change. Though it at least tried to understand the producerist rationale of the Grangers, who pressed for political-economic reform justified by the centrality of agriculture for feeding the country, for actually creating wealth through labor, it eventually judged their demands close to "communistic." It condemned wage earners, perhaps not speaking English, who tried to put organized pressure on how an employer managed his capital. It berated labor activists and actions including the Great Strike of 1877, the Knights of Labor, the Homestead militants, and the Pullman boycotters. Shaken by the economic turmoil it branded the quasi-Populist, "free silver" campaign of William Jennings Bryan in 1896 as a threat to national stability. Its founding zeal for reform had hardened into Social Darwinism that opposed antitrust laws, regulating the railroads, income taxes (especially if graduated), and any other policy that interfered with economic man. It decided early that Theodore Roosevelt was too activist, too retro-populist, and badgered his presidency. While conceding that much, very much, had gone wrong with contemporary America, it appealed to the individual conscience. Godkin's successors, cool toward the Progressive movement while appreciating its elitist core, stayed wary of legislated programs. The liberal, visionary Nation did seem to have revived with its anti-imperialism centered on the Filipino-American war of 1899–1902. However, both foes and some friends argued that it was still appealing to an obsolescent ideology.
Besides the austere truth about current affairs, The Nation had promised in its first issue "to promote and develop a higher standard of criticism" (p. 10). Concretely, it promised to push beyond "geniality"—that is, eagerness to please authors and publishers—by using not slapdash drudges but reviewers qualified to evaluate a particular book. Though its reviews, like its other columns, went unsigned, a pattern of stern judgment soon formed. Mark Twain comforted himself that "the Nation always snarls. It would think it was impairing its reputation as our first critical authority if it failed to do that" (Letters, ed. Michael B. Frank and Harriet Elinor Smith, p. 359). He continued to subscribe, however, even when abroad. As late as the mid-1920s the book review editor of the reoriented Nation invoked its tradition of using demonstrable expertise. In practice it had narrowed toward having scholars sift monographs in their specialty. In 1915 an admirer claimed that "to enumerate the most noteworthy articles in The Nation on subjects connected with the natural sciences, philosophy, jurisprudence, history, Biblical criticism, philology, and. . . . belles lettres is to tell the great names of the last fifty years" (Gustav Pollak, "The Nation and Its Contributors, Nation, 8 July 1915, p. 61). Fittingly this inventory put literature last. Because The Nation's reviews, with the "classics" as the touchstone, favored "healthy" poetry and morally edifying fiction, only dogged literary historians now reread them. Of course, allowed independence, reviewers occasionally sprang a surprise like the favorable commentary on Stephen Crane's avant-gardist, often cryptic display of free verse, The Black Riders.
Godkin himself wrote some of the reviews. Readers who took every word in The Nation as his were right in principle until he shifted his office to the New York Evening Post in 1881. Well educated and widely experienced as an Irish-English journalist, he could penetrate many subjects from fiction to war. Keenly intelligent, focused, energetic, and self-assured, he dominated any public contact that he allowed. As he aged he became more dogmatic more openly. He also became more snobbish, openly enough that complaints about his Anglophilia increased. Friends summing up his career decided he had written primarily as a moralist, even in his political columns. The elegies from the old guard also praised his humor, less evident to later tastes. His readers on campuses recalled him as conducting the "Weekly Day of Judgment."
GODKIN'S SUCCESSORS
When Wendell Phillips Garrison (1840–1907), son of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, assumed management of The Nation in 1881—rising from (founding) literary editor—he aimed to carry on in Godkin's groove when not simply reprinting Godkin's editorials from the Evening Post. Still, The Nation grew less polemical and gave still more space to scholarly essays. Each of the three editors after 1906—all, like Garrison, with a Harvard background—followed its bookish drift, creating few enemies but losing subscribers. When Oswald Garrison Villard (1872–1949) took over as editor in January 1918, only 7,200 were paid up. In a tumultuous time he attracted 38,000 by 1920, having already reshaped a Nation that feels familiar to its present-day readers.
"CHROMO-CIVILIZATION"
With the title of this essay E. L. Godkin launched an epithet echoed by intellectuals and considered typical of The Nation's loftiness toward popular taste and ideas. It meant to encapsulate Godkin's contempt for mass journalism—especially by his competitors trying to increase their large lead over the Nation in circulation—and for the mass-produced chromolithographs offered to lure subscribers. Not incidentally, The Nation shunned any illustrations as essentially subordinating words and literacy to superficial images and helping to dull discriminating and knowledgeable taste. The passage quoted typifies The Nation's attitude toward the mass of citizenry, who would be happier and more prosperous if they let themselves be governed, literally, by the opinions of educated and impartial mentors. Typical also is the use of a classical allusion.
A society of ignoramuses who know they are ignoramuses, might lead a tolerably happy and useful existence, but a society of ignoramuses each of whom thinks he is a Solon, would be an approach to Bedlam let loose, and something analogous to this may really be seen to-day in some parts of this country.
"Chromo-Civilization," The Nation, 24 September 1874.
Godkin's spirit had glowered over The Nation into the twentieth century. Until 1908 Charles Eliot Norton exerted leverage as a founding investor, confidant of Godkin to the end and a contributor of reviews and essays. Norton exemplified the worst and the best sides of The Nation—its didactic elitism later vilified as the genteel tradition and its commitment to civic duty and intellectual pleasures. Among the lesser devotees who later shone elsewhere were Frederick Law Olmsted, briefly but influentially an assistant editor, and William Dean Howells, hired when just back from Venice. Later fame also picks out Henry James, a frequent reviewer and essayist until ready for his major fiction, and William James, an infrequent but loyal contributor. Godkin, intent on impact, lined up a cadre of certified personages—not just professors but presidents of Ivy League campuses, not just venerable American poets but British authorities on legal theory. Inevitably the next cohort came on slowly; in 1910 Stuart Pratt Sherman's essay on Mark Twain almost looked misplaced.
Because The Nation lasted in the slippery parade of magazines, it can demonstrate either continuity or change. The question of how long it stayed ideologically fixed while the economy moved from small-scale enterprise into corporate finance neglects the fact that any weekly leading off with three or four pages of topical analysis had to keep up somewhat with the ongoing realities. By 1886, nevertheless, nimbler minds conceived the monthly Forum, also focused on broadcloth-suited opinion while committed to policies more effective than appealing to the conscience of the rich. In 1914 the New Republic began building on the forthright principle that reforms would come not from enlightened laissez-faire but from planning through a centralizing government. Perhaps in rejoinder, The Nation advertised itself in 1916 as "the exponent of sane progress, of wise Conservatism."
In spite of its political stodginess, Garrison's successors made its format more inviting, allowed a few signatures on essays, and reviewed more American instead of foreign books. Villard, while respectful of The Nation's past, moved to review more books of "wider current interest" (Carl Van Doren, "Books and the Nation", The Nation 121 [1 July 1925]: 11). Likewise he favored immediate causes rather than "deep political knowledge" or the "laws" of economics (Oswald Garrison Villard, "The Nation 1865–1925," The Nation 121 [1 July 1925]: 7–9). For the first time The Nation sounded pro-labor. Riskier still, it opposed U.S. troops for the First World War, pleaded against a punitive peace, and condemned violating civil liberties at home. By September 1918 the Postmaster General tried to ban it from his system. By 1919, bolder than Godkin's prospectus of 1865, it billed itself as "the foremost exponent of uncompromising liberalism in America."
While intellectuals may have overrated the influence of The Nation, it keeps bobbing up in biographies, personal letters (those of Theodore Roosevelt, for instance), and memoirs. At the least, its history helps to pin down one phase of that protean term "liberalism." It documents how some professed liberals reacted to specific crises in the postbellum United States and how awkwardly their abstract system fitted concrete problems, as when they had to choose between the demands of the labor unions and the owning classes. Knowing the recorded pattern of The Nation can orient us more generally toward the attitudes of its readers. It is more dependable still as a guide to the cultural-political values of its insiders.
see alsoEditors; Periodicals
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Secondary Works
Armstrong, William. M. E. L. Godkin: A Biography. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1978.
Cohen, Nancy. The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1914. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Grimes, Alan P. The Political Liberalism of the New York "Nation," 1865–1932. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953.
Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines. Vol. 3, 1865–1885. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938.
Sterne, Richard Clark. Political, Social, and Literary Criticism in the New York "Nation," 1865–1881. New York: Garland, 1987.
Tebbel, John, and May Ellen Zuckerman. The Magazine in America, 1741–1990. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Vanden Heuvel, Katrina, ed. The Nation 1865–1990: Selections from the Independent Magazine of Politics and Culture. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1990.
Louis J. Budd