Beyond the party, Atlantic Monthly shows it matters

“America is a dream, a vision, a miracle based on one noble idea . . . “

” . . . it is the responsibility of each generation to make America a better place . .. “

” . . . Republicans and Democrats coming together to create new ideas to meet the challenges we face . . . “

No! Wait! Stop!

Is this hideous blather, page after page of it, any way to celebrate the 150th birthday of the Atlantic Monthly, one of the best magazines ever published in this great land of ours? Of course not. It’s like celebrating Van Gogh’s birthday with an exhibit of velvet Elvis paintings. What were the editors thinking?

This month, the Atlantic turns 150, which is a stupendous feat. The life span of the average magazine is somewhere between that of a fruit fly and a dachshund. Magazines that live 150 years are almost as rare as humans who live 150 years. And the venerable Atlantic, which seemed old and stodgy a decade ago, is plenty vigorous these days in its new home in Washington.

It was born in Boston in 1857, created by a group of earnest Yankees with three names -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell. They were very serious fellows, probably not the best drinking buddies you could find, but they had good instincts. In 1860, they endorsed their first presidential candidate -- a fella by the name of Lincoln. Two years later, they published a poem called “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Somebody made a song out of it; you may have heard it once or twice.

The Atlantic also published most of the great names of American literature -- Twain, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Nabokov, Bellow. Plus Frederick Douglass on Reconstruction, John Muir on the American wilderness, Albert Einstein on the atomic bomb and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.”

Of course, not every Atlantic article was a gem. Many were long, dull slogs into the swamp of wonkery. By the 1990s, if truth be told, it was the Michael Dukakis of magazines -- smart and serious but about as much fun as a term paper.

But in 1999, Washington media baron David Bradley bought the Atlantic and hired veteran newsman Michael Kelly as editor. Kelly injected new life into the magazine, publishing pieces you actually enjoyed reading, including an amazing 2002 profile of Saddam Hussein by Mark Bowden, the author of “Black Hawk Down.”

After Kelly died covering the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Cullen Murphy took over and continued publishing great reporting -- including James Fallows’ excellent exposes on the botching of the war in Iraq -- while creating a back-of-the-book section of reviews that is as excellent as you’ll find in any American magazine, including the New Yorker.

A couple of years ago, Bradley moved the magazine from its ancestral home in Boston to Washington and hired a new editor, James Bennet, who has kept up the good work.

And now it has turned 150. To celebrate, the Atlantic has published a special “150th anniversary issue.” And that, alas, is where things went horribly wrong.

The Atlantic’s editors got one of these bright ideas that editors get when they spend too much time in meetings. They knew that the magazine’s motto, published in the first issue in 1857, promised to defend “the American idea.” So they asked a bunch of writers and politicians to describe what “the American idea” means to them -- in 300 words. It probably sounded like a great idea at the time, but reading these 34 mini-essays is like being locked in an airless auditorium and forced to listen to an endless panel discussion entitled “Whither America?: Democracy in the New Millennium.”

Fortunately, if you start reading after Page 62, you’ll find a typically excellent issue of the Atlantic. There’s “I Sing of Fizzy Fluid Retention,” P.J. O’Rourke’s comic review of the 5,286-page “Historical Statistics of the United States.” And an essay by Fallows on what he’s learned about America by living in England, Japan and China. And a devastatingly deft dissection of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton by Caitlin Flanagan.

Reading this stuff, you realize why the Atlantic has lasted for 150 years -- and why that’s a good reason for celebration.