FIFTY YEARS

...growing needs of an expanding, industrialized, Twentieth Century economy and society...

...On this base, The Progressive hoped that there might be built "a peace which would strengthen the hands of progressive forces everywhere, a program based on freedom for all peoples of all colors and races...

...So too was George Middleton's column, "Books, Art, and Drama," a series he continued for many years...

...One—Those who called themselves by the new name, "progressive," believed first that there must be greater governmental authority—local, state, and national—over the means of life...

...We have just begun to fight," he wrote in his first editorial after the election...

...Indeed, as World War I had proved all too well, liberalism always suffered in wartime...

...The mutterings of unrest in the cities and on the farms against the "interests" had already brought Bryan, Granger-ism, Populism, Greenbackism, and the other isms that dotted the decades after the Civil War...

...It was to be, he continued, "a magazine of progress, social, intellectual, institutional . . . founded in the belief that it can aid in making government represent with more fidelity the will of the people...

...Young Robert LaFollette served as president of the publishing corporation, Evjue as vice-president, Philip LaFollette as secretary...

...Milton Mayer first began to needle Progressive readers in 1942...

...Liberal political thinkers and writers, in and out of politics, simply had no place to go for an audience...

...Uppermost of all, as The Progressive noted during the long days of cold war and international tension, there was always "the old, old problem of giving all peoples enough to live on and enough to live for...

...LaFollette was listed as Editor, but a great deal of the editorial work was done by Associate Editor Herbert Quick, a young Iowa newspaperman who had already won a wide reputation as a reform journalist...

...So long as there are Americans who believe that modern man can harness, by his own will and volition, the complex government systems and technological machines he has created— that he may have food and freedom, security and significance, bread and ballots—there will be those who read The Progressive and write for it...

...The Senator, like the majority of the progressives of his day, had concentrated his energy on domestic problems, paying less attention to major issues of foreign policy or international affairs...

...Isabel Bacon LaFollette's column, "A Room of Our Own," reminded readers of the elder Mrs...

...Some of his followers urged him to jettison the publication, but LaFollette, saying that "he'd rather quit politics altogether than give it up," borrowed money to keep it alive...

...One of his editorials, "The Right of the Citizen to Oppose the War and the Right of Congress to Shape the War Policy," went through two extra reprints...

...Michael Am-rine's articles on atomic energy, serialized in 1955, marked another high point in the magazine's coverage of major contemporary issues...

...Another, "Pork, Patriotism, and Profits," created a national stir...

...in Washington frequently differed with Roosevelt's program...

...The elder LaFollette's experiences during World War I were fresh in the minds of the LaFollette family and of many of the magazine's readers...

...There was not much room for pre-war liberalism in the party of Harding and Coolidge, or for that matter in the party of Cox and Davis...

...LaFollette's Magazine in its early issues devoted a good deal of space to the efforts of the so-called "insurgents" in Congress to break the power of those twin pillars of reaction, "Uncle Joe" Cannon in the House and Nelson Aldrich in the Senate...

...As the Times grew and LaFollette's languished, an alliance between the two seemed logical...

...At the same time, the magazine faced a serious financial problem...

...LaFollette's Magazine sprang out of the vortex of this new, energetic kind of experimentation in politics...

...In the summer of 1908 he called together a group at his farm on the outskirts of Madison to discuss how it might be done...

...Its role for the next 50 years seems as clear as its past...

...Three—Progressives believed that the functions of government must be increased and extended to meet the RUSSEL B. NYE, chairman of the department of English at Michigan State University, is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian...

...It added a number of regular features, opened its pages to broad free-wheeling discussions, and steered a determinedly independent course in partisan politics...

...At the same time, The Progressive reached far out into public life for timely authors and special articles...

...When American economic stakes in Europe seemed likely to draw the United States into the conflict, LaFollette's Magazine declared for strict neutrality and warned of the dangers of foreign involvements...

...LaFollette's Magazine appeared in the midst of this great burgeoning of early Twentieth Century progressivism, reflected much of its central philosophy, and helped to shape its course...

...When the Wisconsin progressives in 1934 formed a third party of their own, The Progressive fought for its principles...

...Evans, all of whom held strong feelings against war, opposed the involvement of the United States from the beginning, a stand that became increasingly unpopular as American sympathies with the Allies grew...

...But there was gradually gathering a number of younger men whose ideas, like Rubin's, had been shaped in the turbulent Thirties and war-torn Forties —products of second-generation progressivism forged out in depression and war...

...LaFollette, his wife, and Mrs...

...LaFollette, the logical progressive candidate who was shouldered aside by clever maneuvering, promptly repudiated both Taft and Roosevelt, and LaFollette's Magazine endorsed no candidate in 1912...

...Evans' articles on labor, suffrage for women, the peace movement, and social work were welcome additions to LaFollette's pages...

...when Wilson, after his re-election in 1916, seemed to be retreating from his pledge, the Senator broke with him and with both major parties...

...The Progressive cannot—and will not—cease so long as there still exists an American faith in the people's ability to devise truly representative ways of governing themselves, and truly democratic methods of living together...

...The Senator had always been impressed by the usefulness of Bryan's magazine, The Commoner...

...Volume 1, Number 1 The magazine that first appeared 50 years ago in Madison, Wisconsin, was, its Editor wrote, "a publication that will not mince words or suppress facts, when public utterance demands plain talk...

...LaFollette wrote, "regarded as a personal friend...

...Nevertheless the magazine performed a valuable service as a point about which scattered liberals might regroup...

...There were many who did not like such things...

...For Editor, the LaFollettes chose Morris H. Rubin, only recently graduated from the University of Wisconsin but already a knowledgeable political writer and a convinced progressive of broad liberal interests...

...Yet it had 31,000 subscribers by 1910 and by 1911 more than 50,000, "every one of them," Mrs...

...Lincoln Stef-fens, John R. Commons, William Allen White, William Hard, E. A. Ross, Frederic Howe, Ernest Poole, Charles Zueblin (a group of contributors any editor would give his eye-teeth for), and others offered to write for it...

...The ultimate aim, therefore, of the progressive, was to make government representative of that popular will and responsible to it...

...Month after month the magazine published lists, unpublished elsewhere, of rising prices, tables of profits in steel, oil, coal, rubber, food, and other industries, names of "new millionaires" created by wartime industries, graphs of rigged tax bills, and so on...

...The most notable trait of The Progressive that emerged in the Forties, however, was the formation of a nucleus of "regulars" whose articles and features, month after month, projected a new kind of liberalism into its pages...

...During the Forties The Progressive gradually took on its present format and personality...

...That same year The Progressive itself ran into heavy difficulties...

...LaFollette's famed woman's page...

...LaFollette, with the help of Caroline Hunt of the home economics staff at the University of Wisconsin, edited the department of "Home and Education...

...The public simply refused to believe that The Progressive was dead, and within a few months its readers expressed their disbelief by contributing $40,000 for a new start...

...Generally favorable to the New Deal through the Thirties, The Progressive never accepted it, Roosevelt, or the Democratic Party wholly uncritically, always reserving and often exercising its right to criticize...

...Elizabeth Glendower Evans, a wealthy Boston feminist with a deep interest in political reform, came to its aid...

...There was talk of barring LaFollette's Magazine from the mails...

...Thus the new Progressive and its loyal readers re-enlisted for the duration...

...Out of this struggle there took shape the National Progressive Republican League, which counted among its members the great majority of influential liberal politicians and laymen in the country...

...On the national scene, Theodore Roosevelt (who, for all his faults, made progressivism popular) was just leaving the White House...

...Belle Case LaFollette, Isabel Bacon LaFollette, Fola LaFollette, and Philip F. LaFollette were listed among the editorial staff, and Fred Holmes as Managing Editor...

...Robert LaFollette said it well a half-century ago: "We must recognize that democracy is a life, and involves continual struggle...

...who "pledged themselves to liberal principles...

...The roster of contributors during these early years is highly impressive...

...to hold high the great doctrine that freedom for the individual and planning for the general welfare are not contradictory aspirations...

...These were hard years, but eventually, as peace and sanity returned, the magazine gained back some of its following and assumed once more its historic task of gathering support for progressive principles...

...the magazine LaFol-lette's Magazine, the lineal ancestor of The Progressive...

...We are enlisted for life in the struggle to bring government back to the people...

...During the Harding Administrations, and through the riot of prosperity that marked the early Twenties, LaFollette's Magazine had hard going to find an audience...

...American life from 1900 to the close of World War I was strongly affected by the Progressive movement...

...Its aim, as Rubin wrote in its first monthly issue, was to "interpret and advance the progressive American role in the developing contest of ideas and ideology...

...Although it had a steady circulation of approximately 40,000, it also ran at an equally steady deficit of nearly $10,000 each year, propped up by the Senator's lecture fees and a few generous angels...

...The cover usually carried a short quotation from a prominent liberal or a photograph of some personage currently in the news...

...As the NPRL gathered momentum, marshaling support for progressive-minded candidates in the state elections, LaFollette's came to be considered its organ and the Senator its spokesman...

...The roster of contributors reads like a Who's Who of recent history—Charles Beard, Harry S. Truman, Francis Biddle, Elmer Davis, George Kennan, Thurman Arnold, Roger Baldwin, Chester Bowles, David Lilienthal, George Orwell, William O. Douglas, Henry Kaiser, Walter Reuther, Max C. Otto, Lin Yutang, Learned Hand, Robert M. Hutchins, Aneurin Bevan, Howard K. Smith, Estes Kefauver, Paul H. Douglas, Wayne Morse, Ralph J. Bunche, Philip Murray, Hubert Humphrey, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter White, Dorothy Thompson, Rexford Guy Tug-well, Lillian Smith, James Forrestal —and many, many more...

...There were still those who were concerned about corruption, monopoly, special privilege, and cynical time-serving in government— enough of them to unite in an organization called the People's Legislative Service in order "to drive special privilege out of control of government and to restore it to the people...

...Where the Wisconsin progressives led, others followed...

...For more than a year, as events pushed the United States ever closer to the brink of hostilities, The Progressive's writers argued among themselves in the pages of the magazine...

...From the time that the shadow of McCarthy appeared no larger than a man's hand on the political horizon, The Progressive saw the loyalty-security argument for the thing it was...

...In domestic politics The Progressive chose an independent path, supporting liberal candidates wherever and whenever they appeared, committing its allegiances to no party...

...Finally, in 1940, The Progressive and Evjue decided to part company, leaving the magazine in control of the LaFollette brothers, and on June 29, 1940, a wholly new Progressive appeared...

...The heart of this great political movement lay in three distinctive principles...

...LaFollette's Magazine deserved every bit of its circulation, for it was an informative, provocative, and well-edited publication...

...To these ancient problems of modern times The Progressive has since constantly addressed itself...

...Progressives of the older stamp were not always happy with the liberal-New Deal-Democratic coalition, which left them now and then with some strange bedfellows...

...Skimming through the files today, one finds almost every important liberal name, or notice of nearly every contemporary liberal movement, of the entire Progressive era...

...M. LaFollette, Jr., who succeeded to his father's Senate seat, as Editor...

...Two—They held a deep, lasting faith in the essential Tightness of popular majority...

...The great issue of the times, he wrote, was "how to keep the nation out of the maelstrom of war," and his magazine was in the front of the opposition to Wilsonian diplomatic policy...

...LaFollette and Miss Hunt, was something more than a potpourri of recipes and gossip...

...Though the Progressive Party in Wisconsin often found support in its pages, the magazine was never its organ...

...In January, 1948, a new monthly Progressive appeared, like its predecessor dedicated to the task of being "a first-rate publication which will express, interpret, and lead the fight for a genuine program of progressive democracy, a pubThe Oak Is Gone but the Roots Remain lication whose roots lie deep in the soil of this country...

...Most of the "regulars" remained in their familiar places, and new faces appeared now and then as the months passed—Arthur Schles-inger, Jr.'s brilliant reviews, Robert Bendiner's and Richard Rovere's incisive portraits of persons and trends, Fitzpatrick's and Herblock's great cartoons, Robert Lasch's shrewd analyses of the daily press, Martin Dworkin's movie criticism, and many others...

...But eight months later the old Wisconsin lion was dead, and the great crusade of 1924 was interred with him...

...There was but one big issue, in LaFollette's view—"to break the combined power of the private monopoly system over the political and economic life of the American people...

...On January 9, 1909, the first issue of the magazine appeared, with the motto at its masthead, "Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free...

...As it was in 1909, so still it is only the truth that makes men free...

...Rising production costs and growing inflation made each issue a crisis, until finally, in October, 1947, the editorial board announced the magazine's demise...

...With Wilson's victory, however, LaFollette and the NPRL formed a working alliance with the liberal Democrats and lent their support to the New Freedom...

...The debate over foreign policy continued in the magazine, of course, but in 1940 it supported Roosevelt again, feeling that despite its disagreement with his attitudes toward the foreign conflict, progressive measures still had a better chance of survival under his regime than under any Republican administration...

...Whatever its criticisms of the Administration up to December 7, 1941, The Progressive joined the nation in asking all America to "unite wholeheartedly in support of the war effort until a just peace can be obtained...

...For several years a "Washington Calling" column and "Names and Notes in the News" brought capsule political gossip and comment to readers...

...It must resist the corroding effects of propaganda...

...So LaFollette, as his wife told the story in her biography of him, wanted to found a magazine of national scope for progressives everywhere...

...Long-time liberal columnists Oswald Garrison Villard and Ernest L. Meyer, both men of powerful pacifist leanings, were deeply suspicious of the Rooseveltian course in regard to European affairs...

...LaFollette's Magazine, naturally, spearheaded the Progressives' campaign, which, though unsuccessful, still drew almost five million votes to LaFollette and lent hope to the future...

...Though the war clouds gathered blacker each month, The Progressive expressed the hope that the United States might stay out, feeling that it must "resist, by every honorable means, those steps of the Administration that might lead the nation into total war...

...Among his books are "Midwestern Progressive Politics" and "A Baker's Dozen: Thirteen Unusual Americans...

...The Wisconsin press (no less so than the great city newspapers across the nation) was almost solidly conservative...

...In 1946, however, Bob LaFollette lost his Senate seat after 20 years of service to the state and nation...

...The magazine continued with Robert...

...And LaFollette himself, of course, by his record in Wisconsin and Washington, was known the nation over as a progressive leader...

...In 1929, as the national economy slowed down, so did the magazine—but, fortunately for the future of liberal politics, not to extinction...

...Like Wilson, LaFollette campaigned to "keep the country out of war...

...When World War II finally blazed in Europe, The Progressive editorialized: "The United States must keep out of this war...

...The spirit of The Progressive changed not at all, though its cover colors were brighter and its type face new...

...Mary Sheridan's "Your Money's Worth," a consumer service, and Angelo Patri's "Our Children" were favorite fixtures of the women's page...

...In addition to the customary letters, notes, and comments, each issue usually contained one or two major articles, either on specific issues, current bills in Congress, or news of the reform movement...

...Reformers" were already appearing in city and state politics—William Allen White of Kansas, Tom Johnson of Cleveland, Albert Cummins of Iowa, young Woodrow Wilson in New Jersey, William U'Ren in Oregon, Pingree in Michigan, Johnson in Minnesota, and others...

...Thus on December 7, 1929, the first issue of The Progressive appeared as a four-page weekly paper to replace the old LaFollette's Magazine...

...There were arguments in and out of the pages of The Progressive over the character of Rooseveltian liberalism, just as Senator Robert M. LaFollette, Jr...

...so too did Rubin's special supplement, "The New Soviet Challenge," in 1956, and his study of Richard Nixon—a minor classic—that same year...

...Throughout the war years LaFol-lette's Magazine served as the Senator's personal weapon in his fight against wartime inflation, profiteering, unequal taxation, infringements on personal and civil liberties, and the apparent lack of national plans for eventual peace...

...Yet while Senator Robert M. LaFollette, Jr...

...Belle Case LaFollette remembered that her husband's "minimum budget" was always far too minimum, and that the magazine absorbed nearly all of the Senator's lecture fees and a good deal of his spare cash for many years...

...LaFollette himself, in 1917, was nearly expelled from his Senate seat...

...With this goal in view, The Progressive's deepest concern beyond winning the war itself, as Editor Rubin summarized it, was not to "evolve a specific blueprint of postwar perfection," but to "promote the right frame of mind in which to consider peace...

...Fred MacKenzie was Managing Editor, and Mrs...

...True to its policy of having no party, but rather of endorsing those people and parties who "held out the greater hopes for effectuating progressive principles," whether favored to win or not, The Progressive supported Norman Thomas in 1948, Stevenson in 1952, and Stevenson again in 1956...

...Later, in 1948, when the followers of Henry Wallace chose to call themselves Progressive, The Progressive disinherited them in a stinging editorial by Rubin that ranks, along with the elder LaFollette's disavowal of Communist support in 1924, as a classic statement of native American liberalism...

...when in 1946 the Progressives returned to the Republican Party The Progressive did not follow...

...Wisconsin, from the turn of the century to the close of World War I, was both the proving ground and the laboratory of progressivism...

...And after American entrance into the war, LaFollette stoutly maintained the right of his magazine to criticize the Administration, the Allies, American war aims, and the war itself, which added little to his popularity...

...The old guard—Ernest L. Meyer, John Haynes Holmes, Oswald Garrison Villard, McAlister Coleman, Norman Thomas, Oscar Ameringer-— was still there, men whose roots reached back into 1924 and 1912...

...The split between Taft and Roosevelt divided the Republican Party and led to the sudden creation of T. R.'s Bull Moosers...

...led the fight in Washington against the repeal of the arms embargo, and Philip, then governor of Wisconsin, spoke out sharply against Roosevelt's "foreign entanglements," Editor Evjue supported F.D.R.'s program as the only feasible "stay-out-of-war" policy...

...Evans listed as Contributing Editors...

...The writer, of course, was Robert M. LaFollette, Sr...

...Its great service to progressivism during the Roosevelt years was as a sort of yardstick against which to measure New Deal programs and policies...

...Sometimes they came up to expectation, sometimes not...

...The Roll Call" was an extremely effective political weapon, and reprints of it were widely circulated in many states during the progressive-stalwart battles of 1909-1912...

...The Progressives nominated LaFollette for President, Burton Wheeler for Vice President, and put up slates of candidates in several states...

...The composite judgment," LaFollette wrote, "is always safer and wiser and stronger and more unselfish than the judgment of any one individual...

...He is really a progressive," an early contributor of La-Follette's Magazine wrote, "who first discovers the people's needs and suggests the appropriate governmental action to meet them...

...The Progressives will close ranks for the next battle...

...Despite the unpopularity of some of LaFollette's views, people listened to him...

...Among them were such names as William Allen White, Lincoln Steffens, Jane Addams, Gif-ford Pinchot, John Mitchell, William U'Ren, Louis Brandeis, George Nor-ris, Ben Lindsay, Richard T. Ely, Brand Whitlock, and many more...

...Pearl Harbor, of course, settled the matter...

...Letters from readers, long a feature of the old magazine, provided material for an expanded "People's Forum" of knocks and nosegays...

...It could also be bought by "club subscription" with such publications as Bryan's Commoner, Tom Watson's Jeffersonian, Hoard's Dairyman, Women's Work, The Fruit Grower, or Brann's Iconoclast, among others, so that nearly any combination of readers' tastes could be satisfied...

...The years from 1917 to 1920 were the most difficult that Senator LaFollette and the magazine had yet endured...

...Its pages were dedicated, LaFollette wrote, to the task of "aiding the people in the struggle between Special Privilege and Equal Rights," so that they might "win back the complete power over government—national, state and municipal—which has been lost to them by the encroachments of party machines, corporate and unincorporated monopolies, and by the rapid growth of immense populations...

...Though "Young Bob," as millions of his father's admirers knew him, wrote excellent editorials and served progressivism with distinction in the Senate, LaFollette's declined in influence and gradually narrowed its field of interest to state politics...

...The new magazine was 9 by 12 inches in size, with a two-column page...

...Out of this came, in 1924, the National Progressive Party, gathering old warhorses and young crusaders alike to the cause...

...The great crusade of insurgent days, along with Wilson's own program of The New Freedom, had long since foundered in the storm of war...

...We will not quit and we will not compromise...

...During World War II The Progressive urged, as LaFollette's had also urged in the earlier war, that it be fought for "a just and durable peace," that even while fighting it the nation "come to grips with the causes of war themselves—racial discrimination, imperialism, militarism, excessive nationalism, poverty, famine, and injustice...

...Since then, for a half-century, American progressive thought has found a voice in its pages, through 12 Presidential campaigns, two world wars and two lesser conflicts, depression and recession, through times of hope and times of gloom—a record of continuity and consistency almost unmatched in the history of liberal journalism...

...The aims of the new publication, Evjue wrote, were the same as that of the old—to advance the social good, to eliminate profit from war, to promote cooperatives and public ownership of natural resources, to help in the development of a strong labor movement, and in general, "to be journalistic spokesman for the progressive forces of the country...

...Advertising revenue was practically nil...

...And in the nervous, edgy world of the Fifties there were always new issues to discuss and channels to explore—atomic bombs, nuclear energy, technological advances, industrial automation, new alignments of labor and management, shifts of party power, new personalities in the news...

...several newspapers and magazines refused to accept its advertising...

...James A. Wechsler, William B. Hes-seltine, Richard L. Neuberger, Miles McMillin, Fred Rodell, Stuart Chase, Carleton Beals, Frank Hanighen, Quincy Howe, Harry Elmer Barnes, John Chamberlain and Louis Fischer, among others, were soon Progressive regulars...

...LaFollette and his group, during his governorship from 1900 to 1906 and during his subsequent lifetime service as Senator, made "The Wisconsin Idea" into a liberal government that worked, making it "an efficient, reliable and honest means," he said, "of insuring a more direct expression of the people's will...

...It rambled into art, theater, politics, and economics as well as home-making, providing a forum for the kind of discussion that appealed to thinking women...

...Now, after 50 years of serving America as the voice and the conscience of its liberal political tradition, what lies ahead for The Progressive...

...In 1917 a militant young newspaperman, William T. Evjue, had launched a new daily newspaper in Madison, The Capital Times, enlisting himself and his newspaper in the progressive cause...

...The postwar period was not encouraging to progressives...

...Its April 1954 special issue on McCarthy still remains one of the most important political documents of our era...

...Evjue was Editor, with Fola LaFollette, Belle Case LaFollette, Isabel Bacon LaFollette, and Mrs...

...as the tide of progressivism swept across the states, its waves lapped at the doors of the national capitol in Washington...

...In 1932, The Progressive chose to support Franklin D. Roosevelt against Hoover, though it warned that it would "not assume responsibility for administrations in Washington and Wisconsin that do not square with the progressive philosophy," and that it would support only those Democrats (including F.D.R...

...LaFollette usually sent an editorial from Washington for every issue, along with "The Roll Call," which listed and discussed the voting record of various Senators and Representatives on current key issues...

...The "Home and Education" section, edited by Mrs...

...There can be no compromise on the fundamental issues for which we stand...

...The book page, initiated in 1942 by Mary Sheridan, soon turned into a lively forum of literary news and criticism...

...In the nick of time Mrs...

...It is only as those of every generation who love democracy resist with all their might the encroachments of its enemies that the ideals of representative government can ever be nearly approximated...

...The rise of fascism in Europe in the late Thirties, combined with urgent developments in American foreign policy, revealed a basic division of opinion within Progressive ranks...

...The departure of MacKenzie, after eight years as Managing Editor, left a gap in the staff that was not filled until the appointment of Fred L. Holmes in 1920...

...Since so much power, they believed, had already been concentrated in the hands of the self-interested few, they demanded that greater measures of social and economic control be lodged in government in order to counteract the forces of special interest and to preserve liberal democracy...

...Charles R. Crane of Chicago offered financial help...

...The outbreak of World War I in Europe marked the beginning of the magazine's second phase...

...Evjue's powerful pen and personality dominated The Progressive throughout the Thirties, until the magazine seemed at times to be little more than an out-state edition of The Capital Times...

...Published weekly until 1912, when it changed to a monthly tabloid, the magazine originally sold for five cents a copy at newsstands or $1 a year to subscribers...

...What happened then is unique in the annals of American journalism...