THE MYTHS OF THE SMALL MAGAZINE
Kirstein, George A.
The Myths of the Small Magazine by GEORGE G. KIRSTEIN "F^rom time to time, there appears somewhere in the American press an assessment of the journals of opinion and other small circulation...
...Reform is not accomplished by holding out rosy hopes of a better tomorrow...
...Peyton Place will sell a million...
...If we were willing and able to lose $150,000 a year, critics would think it a far better magazine...
...Even when it enjoyed its largest circulation, in 1948, its operation resulted in a loss...
...No, my future friends, it is not— and what is more, it never was...
...All I know is that by the time I had finished my exercise, I devoutly wished that those who remembered The Nation's past glories so vividly would take just one more hard look at them...
...We are for all steps, at any level, which will lead toward disarmament of the great powers and which will tend toward rule by international law...
...Many are far longer-lived than their giant cousins, and several have survived through many vicissitudes to ripe old age...
...it is achieved by arousing indignation against an imperfect today...
...I am not comparing the value to our society of Harvard and The New Yorker...
...Articles relating to injustice to Negroes in housing, in the Southern courts, in education, and in job opportunities are a recurring feature of the small magazines...
...But, in truth, were they negative or affirmative...
...But if each week we repeated this catalogue, we would have even fewer readers than we now have...
...Yet it can be bought by subscribers for less than ten cents a copy...
...The catalogue of what we are for could go on for pages...
...What else that is equally excellent makes money...
...To those of the "It's not what it used to be" fraternity, who recall this magazine's Golden Days in the 1920's, it may be of interest to know that the magazine made money in just one year of that decade...
...more than one generation old evokes these wonderful, nostalgic memories in those who, when they were young, glanced through the family copy...
...The American Scholar, a quarterly which frequently publishes articles of extraordinary distinction, is the organ of the Phi Beta Kappa Society...
...America is an intellectual, political, and cultural weekly, edited by Jesuits and read for the most part by Catholic intellectuals...
...The editors of the mass-circulation periodicals, dependent as they are on wide popular support and the resultant advertising revenues, cannot take the risk of initiating new and unpopular ideas or controversial subject matter...
...The critics rarely define just what they mean by "small" magazines, but in this essay I am limiting my discussion to political, intellectual, literary, and cultural journals of under 100,000 circulation...
...I am confident that any magazine GEORGE G. KIRSTEIN is publisher of The Nation...
...The Commonweal, the fine lay Catholic weekly, also receives contributions from many individuals and recently published a list of its supporters...
...That is, the more intelligent of them—the least hopeless minority of them...
...Commentary, for example, the excellent monthly whose deficit is met by the American Jewish Committee, is simply one of the many educational projects that this charitable, tax-exempt organization encourages...
...The Small Magazines Only Reach Those Who Already Agree with Them—They Carry Coals to Newcastle In 1961, at the height of the controversy as to whether this country should embark on a major fallout shelter program, a short article by a priest appeared in the Jesuit publication America (circulation about 60,000...
...The wire services picked it up and sent it all over the world, using extensive quotes...
...The Myths of the Small Magazine by GEORGE G. KIRSTEIN "F^rom time to time, there appears somewhere in the American press an assessment of the journals of opinion and other small circulation magazines...
...The New Yorker pays writers and poets with extreme generosity in comparison with other publications and still makes the highest percentage of profit of any American magazine...
...Compare these bases of support with the dog-eat-dog battles that engage the magazine giants in a never-ending contest for more and more circulation, so that they can achieve more and more advertising revenue...
...At the same time that this criticism is voiced, memories are usually evoked of yesteryear, when one or another of the opinion journals spearheaded a drive for some reform that eventually was adopted...
...But they vividly remember the stimulating discussions at the family dinner table...
...Nor am I comparing the contributions made to our culture, by the institutions I have listed, with those made by the small magazines...
...The Magazine Is Not What It Used to Be Frequently, a person met at some social gathering will tell me in a confidential tone, "I was weaned on The Nation...
...Of course, I haven't seen it in years," and the voice trails off apologetically, begging for sympathetic understanding in view of the undeniable fact, with which certainly I must agree, that the magazine is indeed not what it used to be...
...Most of the letters from those past subscribers needed only to have the dates changed to be identical with those received today...
...Soon after coming to The Nation (but already indoctrinated with the "ain't what it used to be" routine), I studied past volumes of the magazine...
...Compare their economic problems to that of The New York Times, which probably costs at least twenty-five cents a copy to publish...
...A masterly, carefully documented expose, that special issue of The Progressive became the arsenal of factual information for all the forces in the nation fighting McCarthy and McCarthyism...
...The Small Magazines Are Doomed To A Short Life This belief arises directly from the fact that the small magazines are fated to operate at a deficit...
...One of The Nation's early crusades was for the adoption of the civil service system throughout the Federal government...
...His earliest paths of thought had been molded by The Nation under E. L. Godkin's editorship...
...I read H. L. Mencken's attacks on just about everything...
...Perhaps the historian, not the journalist, should try to recapture the excitement of yesterday's controversies...
...Thus, Foreign Affairs, certainly the most distinguished publication in its field, is the organ of the Council on Foreign Relations...
...For it happens that the myths, in their purest and most oft-repeated form, are applied mainly to the under 100,000-circulation group...
...This is true for reasons precisely opposite to the myth—they are read by numbers of people who disagree with them, at least by enough people who disagree with them to cause a re-examination of prevailing doctrine...
...We are for maximum conservation of our national resources, wilderness areas, and wildlife...
...Several times a year, we run stories of some miscarriage of justice or of some case involving capital punishment where the death penalty is patently too severe...
...Whether or not the quality of content would be higher is open to question, but it would certainly be handsomer, more popular, and presumably would receive more praise from its critics...
...These evaluations spring from various sources: sometimes an associate professor gazes down from his perch on Mount Olympus at the inadequate struggles of lesser men...
...Are they negative—printed merely to cast a shadow on the American image...
...It is because popularity and excellence do not necessarily walk hand in hand that the circulation of all the small magazines combined is less than one million...
...They are thoroughly convinced by their own oft-repeated tale that they were "weaned" on The New Republic...
...sometimes the dean of a school of journalism searches for the impact, if any, that these magazines make on the mass press...
...H. L. Mencken years ago summed it up for many of today's small magazines when he said about one of them, "The Nation is unique in American journalism for one thing: it is read by its enemies...
...Then comes the usual refrain...
...We are for treating dope addiction as a medical, not as a criminal, problem...
...It might not be amiss at this point to observe that The New Yorker, now being one generation old, is entering the "It's not what it used to be" phase...
...But as written, Father Mc-Hugh's extraordinary thesis aroused a storm of heated argument across the country...
...Can you imagine one of the mass monsters running the article by Jack Levine which recently appeared in The Nation to the effect that one out of every six members of the American Communist Party was an FBI agent...
...The many university reviews, such as The Antioch Review and The Kenyon Review, either now or in the past have received additional financial sustenance from the the colleges with which they are affiliated...
...Some time many years from now, my ghost is going to wander among the guests at some future cocktail party...
...In my opinion, this article and the storm it raised did more to kill the idea that the United States should turn into a nation of apprehensive moles than any other single factor...
...All of these articles were negative in the sense that the authors contended that justice had been poorly served...
...For many years, the Willard Straight family met the magazine's deficits...
...We are for the reform of state legislatures to assure equivalent voting strength for each individual, whether he lives in the city or on the farm...
...it sells on newsstands for ten cents...
...A book of excellent poetry does well to sell a thousand copies...
...Issue after issue of the magazine carried articles about corruption of government employes, about the evils of the spoils system, about inefficient Federal workers poorly equipped to perform their assigned tasks...
...Harvard has made no profit for years, nor has the Modern Museum of Art, nor the Metropolitan Opera, nor the Philharmonic Ochestra, nor—well, you name it...
...That fact, in turn, is why no one of them gets sufficient advertising to pay its expenses...
...I read Oswald Garrison Villard's attacks on the Versailles Treaty...
...But subscribers, not advertisers, pay for the small magazines, and because prices are set too low, partly as a result of public comparison with their glossy, mass-circulation cousins, almost all of them operate at a deficit...
...The advertising revenue makes up the difference...
...More recently, I went through the correspondence files of Villard, The Nation's editor between 1916 and 1932, which are kept in Harvard's Houghton Library...
...The truth is that they might be judged considerably better if they spent and lost more money...
...An examination of the more persistent of these legends follows...
...Frankly," he wrote to The Nation's most famous editor, "the magazine is not what is used to be...
...But in recent years, the magazine had been slipping...
...This excludes from the discussion Harper's and The Atlantic as well as The Reporter and The Saturday Review (although all of these magazines at one time or another have been included in the critiques of the "small" magazines...
...One subscriber, writing in 1920, declared that he had been a loyal reader for many years...
...The Nation has been publishing for ninety-eight years...
...I remember Heywood Broun's columns and H. L. Mencken's criticism...
...That like-minded people are apt to subscribe to magazines more or less reflecting their viewpoint, marry other like-minded people, and form other social relationships with friends of their own ilk, is doubtless true...
...It was employed with deadly effect in the White House and by Senate investigators whose inquiries ultimately resulted in the censure and fall of the menace from Wisconsin...
...It is to such minorities that The Nation addresses itself, on both sides of the fence...
...Making money in our society has to do with achieving popular appeal...
...We are for the immediate recognition of the equality of all Americans, regardless of race or of where they live...
...But honestly, nowadays that magazine is not what it used to be...
...Why, I can remember it when Denise Levertov was the poetry editor, when W. S. Merwin was doing prose as well as poetry for them, when Fred Cook was doing those wonderful muckraking exposes, when Harold Clurman was the drama critic and Dan Wakefield was doing color stories...
...Life is said to cost fifty cents to sixty cents a copy to create, and some of its glamorous color issues doubtless cost more...
...But examine how the crusade for reform by the adoption of civil service examinations was conducted...
...My God, it was wonderful...
...from all present indications its chances of living to a ripe old age are brighter than those of some of the giants...
...The Nation, for example, tries by a variety of devices to keep its deficit low and has succeeded in bringing it close to the break-even point...
...A variation of the coals to Newcastle theme is, "The small magazines are forever converting the converted...
...The Partisan Review, which many critics believe the best of the literary publications, is supported in part by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, as is Encounter, the excellent English periodical...
...The New Republic has been publishing since 1914, and while I have no access to its records, I doubt that its experience is widely at variance with The Nation...
...The present tribulations of The Saturday Evening Post are a matter of wide public knowledge...
...The Progressive, founded in 1909, solicits modest contributions from all of its readers each year and regularly succeeds in its fund-raising effort...
...The government's tax structure makes support of these small publications relatively painless...
...The article in essence said that in the event of nuclear attack, it was acceptable Christian ethics for the head of the family ensconced in a shelter to gun down less well-prepared neighbors who might try to force entrance and thus endanger the safety of the occupants...
...Carrying coals to Newcastle...
...Sipping at my ectoplasmic martini, I shall pause next to a couple engaged in the following conversation: "You know, I was weaned on The Nation...
...In view of Villard's enormous personal wealth and the magazine's comparatively modest losses, these letters, read in today's context, seem wryly humorous...
...From what I can reconstruct of ancient records, it made a profit or broke even in just three of those years...
...Daedelus, which in the few short years of its life has made a considerable impact on thinking in various fields of American activity from disarmament to education, is the official organ of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences...
...Some of the best of the limited-circulation magazines are the official organs of learned societies which receive support from the membership, either in the form of dues or as contributions...
...The truth is that despite their deficits, and with due consideration to all their other troubles, the small magazines are tenacious...
...Oh, yes, my father subscribed and I read every issue...
...And even readers with short memories can recall the obituaries of Coronet, Woman's Home Companion, and American magazine...
...I am merely pointing out that one criteria of success, namely that of making a profit, is applied by critics of the small magazine and is not applied when examining other cultural institutions...
...This distinguished monthly journal takes pride in the fact that it has many small "angels" rather than a single major supporter...
...In an altogether different category, the literary and cultural magazines, which avoid comment designed to affect legislation, are eligible to receive charitable grants from individuals and foundations...
...It used to be so wonderful...
...The New York City Ballet loses lots of money...
...Collier's, with a huge and growing circulation, failed because it lost favor with the major advertisers...
...It was a great magazine in those days, but I hear it's not what it used to be...
...We are for closing loopholes and eliminating special privilege in our tax structure...
...In those days, Nelson Algren and Terry Southern did book reviews...
...The paper would be glossier, the printing better, there could be colored illustrations and double the number of articles...
...The crusade for reform was conducted through criticism of existing conditions, not by envisioning Utopia...
...They did not read it then, they do not read it now, and they have not read it in between...
...One of our crusades, for example, is to establish life imprisonment as the maximum penalty for any crime, no matter how heinous...
...Hudson Review and the newer but outstanding Massachusettes Review have both received some support from foundations...
...I can still see Henrik Van Loon's cartoons and remember Mark Van Doren's wonderful reviews...
...And I am saying that Poetry magazine, for example, is excellent, and it doubtless loses money, and the one thing has nothing whatever to do with the other...
...In America, activities with primarily an intellectual or cultural appeal are not apt to achieve enough mass attraction to be profitable...
...Editorials appeared from coast to coast, either supporting the good Father's homicidal doctrine or expressing horror that a student of Christ's teachings should go so far astray...
...presumably the legislators are aware that these periodicals make an important contribution to American culture...
...I selected for special attention the period of the 1920's when, according to nostalgic memory, the magazine enjoyed its Golden Age...
...We carried several articles examining the facts and the procedures in the conduct of the Chessman case...
...The difference is paid by advertisers...
...The magazine stood for something in those days—not just against," say the anticarpers...
...In a society in which we are daily being assured, in a ringing chorus by the mass press and television, that America is the best, the most moral, the most unselfish, the most idealistic, the most religious country, with the most successful political and economic system furnishing the highest standards of living of any country in the world, the small magazines should at least furnish the whisper that says over and over, "It should be better—far better...
...Editor Vil-lard's correspondence of the period is replete with appeals to friends and acquaintances to put up money so that the magazine could continue...
...Carrying coals to Newcastle...
...It has penetrated to the capital fact that they alone count—that the ideas sneaked into them today will begin to sweat out of the herd day after tomorrow...
...Indeed, the theory that the small magazines would make money if they were any good is the exact opposite of the truth...
...It is not difficult to list what The Nation is for, nor would the editors of sister publications be harder put to catalogue their goals...
...Some size city, that Newcastle...
...Was America reaching only an audience that already agreed with it...
...Knowing well from experience what is coming, I nod encouragingly, and he continues...
...Yet the magazine continues to publish, and is at the present time growing in circulation...
...I thought at the time, and I still think, that the author, the Reverend L. C. McHugh, S.J., then one of the magazine's editors, had his tongue pretty firmly tucked in his cheek when he set forth this position...
...Only the catalogue of names changes if The New Republic is being discussed "I can remember it when Herbert Croly was the editor...
...The New Yorker, for example, which is often cited as America's best edited magazine, makes money, lots of it...
...No, the small magazines are not talking only to those who agree...
...no local community civil defense meeting could be adjourned before discussing the kind of firearms to be stored in shelters and how best to shoot insistent neighbors seeking succor from the holocaust...
...Our difficulty is we never know what you are for...
...On the day of the magazine's publication, T/jc New York Times played the story on the front page...
...The New Yorker prints the work of America's best poets, its cartoons surpass in quality those found elsewhere, its letters from abroad have distinction, and frequently there are remarkably good feature pieces, of which a recent example was the fine essay by James Baldwin on racial discrimination...
...They seem bland when read today, isolated as we are from the issues which were central to another generation's ferment...
...But the "converting the already converted" doctrine of the small magazine detractors ignores the fact that these small magazines are little giants often carrying an impact that extends far beyond the size of their circulations...
...Journalistically, the most effective method of striving for reform is to point out abuses...
...Malcolm Cowley's book reviews and Stark Young's drama criticism were superb...
...Query: Was the magazine against corruption and inefficiency in Federal employment, or was it for competitive examination in selecting civil servants...
...I read Heywood Broun's blast at Joseph Pulitzer for which the publisher fired Broun from The World...
...Debates in high school auditoriums followed the outpouring of editorials...
...Because any attempt by the small magazines to rebut these critiques is bound to be considered self-serving, the victims remain silent, the myths persist, and not only the journalistic critics but the reading public adopt them as the gospel truth...
...Yet Father Mc-Hugh's article sparked debate among those of every shading of religious faith...
...Excellence, in the sense that I am discussing it, has to do with the maintenance of a high level of cultural standards...
...Yet once it appeared in a small-circulation magazine, and was not denied, it was repeated in Time and Newsweek and on editorial pages across the country...
...It is presumed that, as a business venture, the purpose of publishing in America is to make money, and if profits are not forthcoming, the publication will soon cease...
...People were forcibly reminded that there could not possibly be shelter for all and that the price of survival by the privileged few might well be the murder of neighbors and their children seeking refuge...
...Walter Lippmann did the political essays and Edmund Wilson was the literary editor...
...The New York Times does not enjoy the largest circulation in the...
...Certainly an article in a Catholic publication arguing that it was un-Christian to kill one's neighbor would not have raised a single eyebrow...
...city, and, furthermore, its profit comes from its paper milling, not its publishing operations...
...While it is often difficult, it is by no means impossible to find financial support for these publications...
...The articles, whatever their source, have two features in common: they always find the small magazines wanting in a whole catalogue of particulars, and they always repeat a series of myths on which their subsequent conclusions of inadequacy are based...
...If the Small Magazines Were Any Good, They Would Make Money There are, of course, many good things in America—that is, things involving ideas, culture, the arts, criticism, and the like—which make money...
...Another dramatic example of the wide-ranging impact of the small magazine was The Progressive's celebrated issue on the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, published at the height of that demagogue's career...
...Or are these articles published to arouse the conscience of a country, and encourage it to strive toward realization of its own dream...
...The great majority of Americans rejected this proposition and a major shelter program was dead...
...The Small Magazines Are Forever Carpinc—Always Negative "We know what you are against" chorus the critics of the opinion journals...
...And their exposes sometimes are widely reprinted...
...We re-examine the Sacco-Vanzetti case whenever new light is brought to bear on it...
...Currently, The Nation recommends a number of reforms...
Vol. 27 • June 1963 • No. 6
