Foreword
JR, ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER
Foreword By Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Historically "small" magazines—small in their circulation, small in their life expectancy—have played an influential role in the whirligig known as...
...Godkin, a British journalist who had settled in America...
...In the winter of 1950-51, Clement Greenberg, the art critic of the Nation, sent Freda Kirchwey, the Nation's editor, a long, documented letter exposing the pro-Soviet sentiments of Alvarez del Vayo, a former foreign minister of the Spanish Republic who was the Nation's foreign editor...
...The New Leader believed Justice Louis D. Brandeis' dictum: "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence...
...In 1865, after Appomattox, three prewar abolitionists established a weekly journal called the Nation and gave the editorship to EX...
...Godkin used the magazine for the rest of the 19th century to define liberalism in laissez-faire, Manchester terms—limited government, free trade, civil service reform...
...Kirchwey, instead of debating the issue, sued for libel...
...The Nation and the New Republic, despite political and intellectual wobbles and reversals, are extant today, which makes them exceptions to the smallmagazine, short-life-expectancy rule...
...The New Yorker maybesaidtobea small magazine writ large...
...After four years, when Carey McWilliams made dropping the suit a condition for assuming the Nation's editorship, Kirchwey withdrew the case...
...Nor were the 20th-century small magazines confined to the arts...
...Alas, this is the final issue, after 82 years, of The New Leader...
...This did not discourage the founding of small magazines...
...Greenberg sent it to The New Leader, which printed it...
...In 1914 Willard Straight, a diplomat, and his wife Dorothy Whitney, an heiress/reformer, established a new progressive magazine and appointed Herbert Croly, author of The Promise of American Life and aproponent of affirmative government, to edit the New Republic...
...Although its influence was vivid when O'Sullivan was editor, he lost control and on the eve of the Civil War the Democratic Review was turned into a proslavery journal...
...The Nation, thanks to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and its editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, now claims to have 200,000 subscribers and to be approaching a profit for the first time in its history...
...Historically "small" magazines—small in their circulation, small in their life expectancy—have played an influential role in the whirligig known as the United States of America...
...Myron Kolatch, the last and exceedingly able editor, contributes his own farewell address...
...But its editors were Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Dial established the basis for the transcendentalist impact on American thought...
...Classical isolationist conservatism has its own small magazine in Patrick J. Buchanan's The American Conservative...
...but authentic small magazines—Harriet Monroe's Poetry, Lincoln Kirstein's Hound and Horn, Philip Rahv and William Phillips' Partisan Review, John Crowe Ransom's Kenyon Review, Stephen Graubard's Daedalus— introduced America to the ideas and techniques of Modernism...
...At the start of the 20th century, the Progressive era found such terms oldfashioned...
...Many liberals, I among them, criticized Kirchwey for publishing del Vayo's "wretched apologies for Soviet despotism' and suppressing Greenberg's letter of complaint...
...Kirchwey—who, accordingto Victor Navasky, a subsequent Nation publisher, "either was or wasn't having an affair with her foreign affairs editor"— refused to print the letter...
...An episode lingers in my mind...
...But neither one has made much money through the long years...
...The 20th century was culturally dominated by small magazines...
...The Democratic Review (1837-1859), under the editorship of John L. O'Sullivan, enlisted Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, William Cullen Bryant, and George Bancroft in a celebration of Jacksonian democracy and an appointment with America's Manifest Destiny...
...But I may be permitted my personal memories of the straight and honorable course his predecessor, Samuel M. ("Sol") Levitas, pursued during the Cold War...
...It is impossible to contemplate the rise of the modem conservative movement in America without discussing William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review and William Kristol's Weekly Standard...
...The Dial (1840-1844), for example, hardly attained 300 subscribers and lasted four years...
Vol. 89 • January 2006 • No. 1
