A Journalistic Love-In for The Nation Magazine

I. F. Stone, a contributor, described the magazine as “one of the bright lights of American journalism” and called The Nation “a place where you could say the whole truth, all the time, and not just part of the truth.”

Studs Terkel, another longtime writer for the oldest continuously published weekly in America, lauded the periodical as “the most independent-minded journal in the country, and the most durable.” It has survived these 120 years, Terkel said, “because it respects the intelligence of its reader.”

Abbie Hoffman, a ‘60s radical and fan of the magazine, said The Nation was not only an important publication, it was “the most (important), because it gives you a point of view you’re not going to find if you turn on the TV or the radio or if you open up the pages of a daily newspaper.”

Another loyal reader and one-time Democratic presidential candidate, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, listed the publications he reads without fail: “Jet, Ebony, Black Enterprise, Essence, The Nation, Time, Newsweek and of course the daily newspapers, USA Today, (the New York) Times, (the Washington) Post.” What distinguishes the magazine, said Jackson, “is not sex or ethnicity, but ethics.”

And scurrying up the steps of the 7th Regiment Armory Tuesday night, reader Bella Abzug said she was depending on The Nation “to provide the lyrics to the music for women to create a movement even bigger than before, which we will lead with others for peace, economic justice and equality.”

Inside the huge Park Avenue landmark, fully 4,000 people were alternately dancing to the music of the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band, feasting at a giant red-white-and-blue table groaning with the toniest of gourmet picnic fare, studying portraits of famous Nation contributors, or pausing to listen to Benny Carter, Sweet Honey in the Rock or America’s diva of protest, Joan Baez. “She doesn’t age,” a guest said in amazement, as Baez, in white silk and carrying her guitar, parted the crowd like a female, musical Moses. “How does she do it?”

“Who knew they had this many readers?” said Hoffman, soon to be 50 years old and wearing a button, “AIDS to the Contras, “ he had just printed up. “This is the best subversion in the country.”

It was all a little more than Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation for eight years, was prepared to cope with. Modeled after an old-fashioned political rally, and looking rather like Iowa transplanted to the East Side and packed with fashion-conscious New Yorkers, The Nation’s 120th anniversary-year party was rapidly evolving into a gargantuan journalistic love-in.

‘Stars on the Rise’

Said Terkel, master of ceremonies at a party hosted jointly by (among others) Bill Moyers, E. L. Doctorow, Carl Sagan, Gore Vidal, Margaret Atwood, Cesar Chavez, Mathilde Krim, I. F. Stone, James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Ring Lardner, Larry Rivers, Amy Clampitt and Arthur Miller, “This reminds me of an old spiritual, ‘Oh Lord, what a morning, when the stars begin to fall.’ Tonight, it’s ‘Oh Lord, what an evening, when the stars are on the rise.’ ”

“This is a surprising night for The Nation,” Navasky said. “This is supposed to be a small magazine, and we are in danger of getting mass circulation--and that is worrisome.” Navasky laughed, admitted that he was kidding, conceded that the growth of circulation under his leadership with publisher Hamilton Fish III from 20,000 to 70,000 was really not all that distressing, but noted, “Once you get past the point of critical mass, you get like everyone else.”

Critical was the key word in that particular phrase. Launched July 6, 1865, by a group of young New York intellectuals of liberal and abolitionist persuasion, the magazine stated as its credo then that, “The Nation will not be the organ of any party, sect or body. It will, on the contrary, make an earnest effort to bring to the discussion of political and social questions a really critical spirit, and to wage war upon the vices of violence, exaggeration and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred.”

Not that the first issue was exactly teeming with the indignation and dialogue of opposition that would become The Nation’s trademark. “The week was singularly barren of exciting events,” began the first sentence of the first volume.

Momentum Picks Up

But soon the momentum was picking up. “We profess to supply opinions exactly as we have formed them, and not in the shape in which they will be likely to please or encourage or console,” first editor E. L. Godkin declared in 1867.

In 1865, its first year of existence, The Nation published a series of eyewitness reports on the Reconstruction of the South. In 1909, editor Oswald Garrison Villard used The Nation’s Manhattan offices at 20 Vesey St. to help establish the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. From 1961 to 1966, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote an annual essay on the state of civil rights. And in 1985, U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Mary Frances Berry used the pages of The Nation to chastise the Reagan Administration for turning her commission into “a parody of its former self.”

Nation editors blasted President McKinley in 1899 for annexing the Philippines, condemning the brutality of American troops and predicting that it would lead to a mushrooming military budget.

In 1928, the magazine published an interview by Carleton Beals with Augusto Sandino, rebel leader and forefather of today’s Sandinistas.

In 1957, Fidel Castro told Nation readers “What Cuba’s Rebels Want,” and the following year, the magazine wrote of secret plans to invade Cuba, predicting the Bay of Pigs invasion would fail.

Calling the terms of the Treaty of Versailles too burdensome, The Nation warned in 1919 that dangerous developments would follow in Germany. A 1931 article by Albert Einstein articulated the magazine’s longstanding pacifist tradition and the scientist cautioned that “without disarmament there can be no lasting peace.”

A 1958 Nation article alleged a shocking rise in Strontium-90 in the bones of American children. The next year, a Nation article titled “The Safe Car You Can’t Buy” by a lawyer named Ralph Nader led to his book, “Unsafe at Any Speed.”

List of Contributors

Nation contributors have included the creme de la creme of 19th- and 20th-Century literature. Henry James wrote for the magazine, as did his brother William. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had his byline in The Nation; so did Emily Dickinson, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, James Agee, Willa Cather, Hannah Arendt, Sherwood Anderson, Pearl S. Buck, Bertolt Brecht, W. E. B. DuBois, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Andre Malraux, Thomas Mann, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Margaret Mead, Paul Robeson, Lewis Mumford, W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and H. L. Mencken.

“To an editorial writer The Nation is indispensable,” Mencken wrote in the Baltimore Evening Sun in 1925. “Either he reads it, or he is an idiot.”

Two hundred of the magazine’s closest friends and major supporters had assembled before the $30-per-person public party for a $1,000-a-plate dinner and tribute to the magazine. But out on the crowded floor under the big curved roof of the Armory were many of the magazine’s more recent contributors: people like Kurt Vonnegut, Nicholas von Hoffman, Judith Rossner and George McGovern.

“What am I doing these days?” mused the former Democratic senator from South Dakota and 1972 presidential candidate. “I’m on the lecture circuit. I’m not sure anybody’s listening, but I’m on the circuit.”

Two or three times each week, McGovern said, he is out speaking, monitoring a “conservative mood” in this country that he predicts is temporary.

“These people who are predicting the death of liberalism don’t know any history,” he said, “because the tide will turn.”

Even within the Reagan Administration itself, McGovern said he saw indications of “some tentative steps in the right direction.” There was the “easing out” of Duvalier in Haiti, said McGovern, and the easing out (“however reluctant”) of Marcos in the Philippines. Then, “they gave the label of ‘freedom fighters’ to the anti-apartheid forces, and that’s the highest accolade a Reaganite can give.”

A Change of Heart

On the other hand, as Victor Navasky quipped, “We at the magazine have a joke that Ronald Reagan is bad for the country but good for The Nation.”

After Reagan was first elected, Navasky recounted, “we got a call from the White House saying they were cutting back on their magazine budget and would we be willing to give the President a subscription. We declined because of supply-side economics.” On reflection, however, Navasky said the magazine had a change of heart: “We decided to give him a subscription at our special educational rate.”

Still somewhat dazed by the celebration around him, Navasky allowed that much about the evening, and the magazine, fell under the heading of “remarkable.” “What is remarkable about the history of The Nation magazine,” Navasky said, “is that it has survived for 120 years and has lost money throughout its history.

“We of course,” he said, smiling, “are carrying on in that grand tradition.”

As political temperaments shift, Navasky said, “people are scared. They are looking for writers who are not part of the political/cultural drift to the right. They are trying to get some coherent thinking on the intellectual chaos that is surrounding public policy.” The Nation has always welcomed its watchdog role, publisher Hamilton Fish III said, “and I think the opportunity now is greater than it was before.

“The press,” Fish said, “is not nearly as vigilant as it once was. It seems to be quite captivated by Ronald Reagan’s personality. There’s a real shortage of good quality investigative journalists.”

One legendary investigative journalist, 78-year-old I. F. Stone, recalled that he discovered The Nation as an inquisitive, compulsively reading 12-year-old. “It was an eye-opener,” Stone said. From then on, “every time my mother took me shopping in Philadelphia, she saved 15 cents for a copy of The Nation.”

By age 14, Stone was starting a publication of his own. “It was called The Progress, and The Nation was my inspiration.”

‘Seen Tougher Times’

Once the Washington editor of The Nation, Stone agreed that yes, times were not entirely bright for progressive thinkers, “but I have seen tougher times.” In the ‘20s, for instance, “it was dull. There had been no Vietnam War, no Franklin D. Roosevelt, no New Deal.” Today, Stone said, he felt certain that “the country has not turned its back on social idealism.”

But social idealism--acting, in the case of The Nation, as a journalistic thorn in society’s side--is not cheap or easy, either. “It’s expensive,” publisher Fish said. “You don’t get paid a lot. It takes personal sacrifices.”

But “it’s very entrepreneurial,” Fish said. “And the work is exciting.”

Will The Nation survive another 120 years of frolicking in the muck and the mud?

“I think so, sure,” Fish said. “I can’t imagine that there won’t be people to sustain it.”