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—AND OVER HALF A CENTURY LATER
The date: April 8, 1967. New Republic covers are still in about the same pattern of the earlier issues. They continue to display a generalized table of contents, but a block background of bright color makes them more striking in appearance.
continuous consultation,” wrote one of the editors later. “All our differences of opinion, however,” he added, “ironed themselves out in the staff discussions.” 24 In their office building they had a kitchen and dining room, and there the staff, often with visitors and contributors, commonly ate luncheon and sometimes dinner with all the intimacy of a big family. 25
A member of the editorial staff who must not be forgotten was Charlotte Rudyard, invaluable office editor and copy- reader, who had been associate editor of Harper’s Magazine. In 1916 she married Robert Hallowell, who was the paper’s business manager, but who “doubled in brass” as its art critic. 26 She was succeeded as office editor by Signe Toksvig, who also married within the New Republic editorial family. She wed Francis Hackett and in 1922 took him off to Denmark with her. 27 Alvin S. Johnson was a contributor to the New Republic from the first; he joined the editorial board in 1915 and served longer than any of the others except Croly himself. Johnson had been a professor of economics at Stanford and at other universities. 28 Also sharing in the planning for the new magazine and a frequent contributor to the early numbers was Felix Frankfurter, 29 newly appointed professor of law at Harvard. Prominently associated with the early numbers as contributors, if not as advisors, were John Dewey and Charles A. Beard.
And so, after long gestation, the New Republic was born November 7, 1914. It was a good-looking weekly of thirty-two pages quarto including self-cover, with typographic design by Ingalls Kimball. 30 The cover displayed the leading titles and authors of the issue. There were no illustrations. The journal opened with some three pages of fairly short editorial comment, and these were followed by four or five headed editorial articles that occupied five or six pages. Then came the signed articles
24 Johnson, Pioneer’s Progress, pp. 241, 242.
25 Lovett, All Our Years, p. 174; Francis Hackett, I Chose Denmark (New York, 1940), p. 1.
26 Johnson, Pioneer’s Progress, p. 234; Lippmann, “Notes,” p. 250.
27 Hackett, Denmark, pp. 1-3, 38.
28 Johnson, Pioneer’s Progress, pp. 233-34, 240-70.
29 Felix Frankfurter, “Herbert Croly and American Public Opinion,” New Republic, v. 63, July 16, 1930, Part 2, pp. 247-50.
30 New Republic, v. 131, Nov. 22, 1954, p. 10.
known in the office as “light middles”; 31 though by no means all of them were light, they had more variety in style and topic than the editorial section, and most of them were “outside” contributions. Each of these ran for a page or two in length, and there were five or six of them. “Communications” was the heading of an interesting and often distinguished department of two or three pages. Book reviews, including LittelPs “Books and Things” department, commonly occupied four or five pages. Then there were a few pages of advertising, chiefly of books. The paper sold for ten cents on the newsstands, or four dollars a year by subscription.
The magazine was advertised by its subtitle as “A Journal of Opinion,” and that it was. Its editorials and articles expressed the collective opinion of the editors, mainly on the political, economic, and social problems of the day. Music, art, and drama were occasionally touched upon; and somewhat later these subjects had their own departments. Poetry was introduced into the journaPs pages auspiciously with Robert Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man,” February 6, 1915; but it appeared rarely at first and never with regularity and abundance. William Faulkner’s first published work, a poem—“L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune”—was printed in August 1919.
The New Republic began with a circulation of 875. 32 At the end of the first year it had reached only about 15,000; some retrenchment in size seemed to be indicated, and for the next few years it was cut to about twenty-six pages an issue. The former size was restored, however, when a modest boom ensued upon the journal’s support of the Wilson war policy—perhaps the most affirmative position of its early history. In 1917-1920 it circulated well over 30,000 and for some issues up to 43,000. 33
At its highest point, this was a small distribution for a national
31 Johnson, Pioneer’s Progress, p. 242.
32 Frederick L. Paxson, American Democracy and the World War (Boston, 1936), v. 1, p. 189.
33 New Republic, v. 40, Oct. 29, 1924, p. ii. N.W. Ayer & Son’s Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals is helpful for these early years. See also William H. Attwood, “Pathfinders of American Liberalism: The Story of the New Republic,” senior thesis in history, Princeton University, 1941, pp. 11-13. This is a good study, chiefly concerned with the magazine’s political and economic policy, 1914-40.
magazine. It was, in fact, not truly national either in respect to its topical purview or the range of its contributors. Forcey’s analysis brings him to the conclusion that “the New Republic for the first few years was largely^an organ of eastern intellectuals and of the New York wing of the progressive movement.” 34 Perhaps its influence was out of all proportion to its circulation. With its Hamiltonian theories of government, fired by Jeffersonian idealism, it undoubtedly aspired to affect political leadership; and we shall note presently its relations with Roosevelt and Wilson. But Bruce Bliven wrote, at the time of Croly’s death: “I should be surprised if there were ever in the 14 years of his active editorship as many as 10 percent of the national House of Representatives and 20 percent of the Senate capable of following his discussion of public affairs. . . .” 35 Indeed, many critics felt a kind of “inspired vagueness” and “intellectual dilettanteism” in the New Republic editorials. 36 The more radical Freeman was whimsical but severe in its criticism: “The chimaera bombinans in vacuo is ten times more easily reconstructible from a cat’s thigh-bone, as far as our poor abilities go, than Mr. Croly’s ideas, or pseudo-ideas, are reconstructible from his phraseology.” 37 And a satirist in the New York Tribune expressed his impressions “On Reading the New Republic ” in verse:
Ah, pause, Appreciation, here Sophistication doubly nice is,
See polished paragraphs appear Anent some cataclysmic crisis.
Note raw-boned, rude, impulsive thought Arrested here and subtly twitted;
Note youth comporting as he ought,
And naked truth correctly fitted.
And here beyond the stir of strife,
Where distant drones the blatant babble,
34 Forcey, “Intellectuals,” pp. 418-22.
*5 New Republic, v. 63, July 16, 1930, Part 2, p. 259.
36 These epithets are taken from an article in the Catholic World, v. 116, March 1923, p. 787.
37 Freeman, v. 2, Dec. 22, 1920, p. 344.
THE NEW REPUBLIC
203
Ah, tread the promenade of life,
A pace behind the vulgar rabble . 38
*
Even Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was irked by this superior attitude. “It riles me,” he wrote to Harold Laski, “to note the air of having it all for the first time that is so common in the contributors to that noble sheet.” 39 And someone, perhaps Albert J. Nock of the Freeman, punned: “The paper always has a Crolier than thou air! ” 40
The early New Republic not only repelled the general reader by its style and its superior air, but it offended both the popular audience and many of the radicals by its failure to support current reform movements aggressively. Max Eastman, who had greeted the editors of the new journal on its first appearance as “mighty, young bronze beasts,” soon changed his mind and, after two years of reading their essays, wrote in his Masses: “They still live in a world in which fundamental democratic progress comes by telling, and persuading, and showing how, and propagating reasonable opinions, and better social feeling. The real world is a world in which privilege can only be uprooted by power.” 41 And the brilliant Amos Pinchot, aggravated because “the New Republic does not take sides on the fundamental issues in the larger struggle between privilege and democracy,” burst out irascibly: “If the editors of the New Republic had been called upon to write the Book of Genesis, I believe that the story of the creation would have begun with the sixth day when God saw everything he had made, and, behold, it was very good—except the Sherman Law and the Democratic administration.” 42
The New Republic’s real object, as Croly once said, was “less to inform and entertain its readers than to start little insurrections in the realm of their convictions.” “Little insurrections” were not enough for the radicals, and they were too much for
38 Seymour Barnard, in the New York Tribune, Dec. 7, 1917, p. 10, col. 3, reprinted in Bookman, v. 46, Jan. 1918, p. 554.
39 Holmes-Laski Letters, v. 1, p. 114, Holmes to Laski, Nov. 30, 1917. Johnson, in Pioneer’s Progress, p. 243, called Laski “almost a member of the staff.”
40 Lovett, All Our Years, pp. 178-79.
41 Masses, quoted in New Republic, v. 3, May 29, 1915, p. 95, and Masses, v. 9, Dec. 1916, p. 12.
42 New Republic, v. 3, May 29, 1915, p. 96.
the popular audience. Perhaps the best apologia for the New Republic negativism came not from the editors themselves but from a contributor, James Harvey Robinson, who wrote a letter for the magazine at the end of its first six months containing
the following acute observations:
*
[The editors] dreamed, I suspect, not of adhesion but of detachment; not of loyalty to principle but of serious and persistent criticism; not of conclusions but of discussion. . . . May it not be that the chief distinction and importance of the New Republic consists precisely in not “standing for” anything? . . . The great opportunity of the New Republic seems to be that it proposes to introduce scientific doubt into human affairs on a larger scale than any other journal of opinion. . . , 43
It would be wrong, however, to give the impression that the New Republic was always general and vague, and that it was attached to no “causes.” Its attachments were always critical and never quite stable; it was committed to independent examination, both on the plane of philosophical generalization and that of mere nipping. But it was not wholly negative, nor always in the clouds. Its adherence to the instrumentalism of pragmatic theory 44 led it to the aggressive support, from time to time, of definite policies.
Indeed, the New Republic was in some sense born of a reform movement. Though it came two years after the defeat of the “Bull Moose” party at the polls, it was a Progressive partisan. Lippmann wrote in the Croly memorial supplement: “The New Republic was founded to explore and develop and apply the ideas which had been advertised by Theodore Roosevelt when he was the leader of the Progressive party.” 45 In the same issue Felix Frankfurter asserted that both Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” and Wilson’s “New Freedom” were “derived from Croly.” 46 In a contemporary issue of the American Magazine Croly was called “the man from whom Col. Roosevelt got his ‘New Nationalism.’ ” 47 These may be overstate-
43 New Republic, v. 3, May 8, 1915, pp. 9-10.
44 See Forcey, “Intellectuals,” pp. 2 7-37.
45 Lippmann, “Notes,” p. 250.
46 New Republic, v. 63, July 16, 1930, Part 2, p. 247.
47 American Magazine, v. 75, Nov. 1912, p. 23. The words appear in a “cutline” under a portrait of Croly.
ments, but most students of Roosevelt and the Progressive movement give Croly more or less definite credit for the ideas promulgated in the “New Nationalism” address at Ossawato- mie, Kansas, in August 1910. 48 Certainly the two had exchanged laudatory compliments. Wrote Croly in The Promise oj American Life: “More than any other American political leader, except Lincoln, his [Roosevelt’s] devotion both to the national and to the democratic ideas is thorough-going and absolute.” 49 Wrote T. R. in the Outlook: Croly’s Promise of American Life is “the most profound and illuminating study of our National conditions which has appeared for many years.
. . .” 50 Both Croly’s Promise and Lippmann’s Preface to Politics were accepted as manifestoes of Progressivism; they were part of that stream of thought and performed an important service in helping crystallize the ideas of the movement.
This alliance is writ large in the pages of the early New Republic. Readers became well aware of the journal’s support of such specific “causes” as labor unionism, the eight-hour day, workmen’s compensation, the nationalization of railroads, the short ballot, women’s suffrage, birth control, prison reform, and academic freedom. 51
It is true that political maneuvers in support of these reforms were often criticized by the New Republic , whose directors early laid down the axiom: “An editor too friendly with a politician has mortgaged his integrity.” 52 From its very first number the journal began to print some strictures on Progressive Party measures, and it was not long before certain criticism of Roosevelt himself so angered that leader that he never forgave the editors of the magazine from which he had expected so much. 53 The criticism that caused the break with T. R. grew out of a debate on Wilson’s foreign policy. New Republic editors had at first distrusted Wilson; he was not enough of an innovator or agitator to suit them. 54 But as the weeks wore on,
48 See Forcey, “Intellectuals,” pp. 252-73, also see Bolquerin, “The Crolys,” where there is a resume of these commentaries.
49 Croly, Promise, p. 170.
50 Outlook, v. 97, Jan. 21, 1911, p. 97.
51 See Attwood, “Story of the New Republic,” pp. 31-32.
52 New Republic, v. 2, Feb. 13, 1915, p. 34.
53 Lippmann, “Notes,” p. 251.
54 New Republic, v. 4, Sept. 4, 1915, p. 111.
206 THE NEW REPUBLIC
they found more to approve and defend in his unfolding program.
The New Republic was first planned without prophetic intimations of approaching war. v How impregnable seemed the American position of security and peace in 1913! But the day the staff of the proposed journal moved into its new offices, August 1, 1914, Germany declared war on Russia and touched off the European conflagration. Even then, wrote the editors later, they still saw nationalism, placed so high on the Crolian scale, “in innocent terms” and “unsaturated with the menace” that it carried later. 55
Through the first year or more of the war, the editors advocated the policy of American neutrality. They took the sinking of the “Lusitania” calmly, heading their editorial about it, “Not Our War.” 56 But later in 1915 they were printing pieces by Harold Laski and Norman Angell supporting the British cause, in December they were nagging Wilson over his “moral suasion” diplomacy, 57 and early the next year they urged American entry into the war. The “Communications” department was for a time a forum for pro-war and anti-war advocates; then after the editors were beating the war drums, groups of pacifists and the peace societies sometimes took paid advertising space to air their views. Thus the editors in their own columns and such publicists as Max Eastman, Amos Pinchot, Joseph H. Choate, Alton B. Parker, and Randolph S. Bourne in the advertising pages carried on a joint debate. Bourne, that brilliant mind in a distorted body, who had been happy to contribute to the initial numbers of the New Republic , was now especially bitter against it. 58
The editors supported Wilson in the presidential campaign of 1916. As one critic observed, they had “arrived at the support of Wilson’s policies by a long and painful exercise in logistics”; 59 but they did arrive. For more than two years the
55 Ibid., v. 4, Sept. 11, 1915, pp. 143-44.
56 Ibid., v. 3, June 5, 1915, pp. 108-10.
57 Ibid., v. 4, Sept. 4, 1915, pp. 128-30; v. 5, Dec. 11, 1915, p. 133, and Dec. 25, 1915, p. 198.
58 Goldman, Rendezvous, pp. 220-22, 237-38; Lovett, All Our Years, p. 151.
59 Beulah Amidon, “The Nation and the New Republic,” Survey Graphic, v. 29, Jan. 1940, p. 25. See the thirty-page supplement to New Republic, v. 10,
THE NEW REPUBLIC 207
journal then occupied perhaps the most positive and concretely constructive position of its history.
“A war patronized by the New Republic could not but turn out to be a better war than any one had hoped/’ remarked Floyd Dell ironically. 60 A martial alliance between the shy and thoughtful Croly and the scholarly, professorial Wilson did appear, on the surface, to be incongruous. But the historian Wilson knew about the necessities of war, and Croly had made his apprehension of such an eventuality clear in a macabre sentence in his Promise: “Indeed, the probabilities are that in America as in Europe the road to any permanent international settlement will be piled mountain high with dead bodies, . . .” 61 By the spring of 1917 there was a kind of holy enthusiasm about the war in the pages of the New Republic. Democracy seemed to the editors to be globally infectious: “It is now as certain as anything human can be that the war . . . will dissolve into democratic revolution the world over.” 62
These were the times in which the New Republic was looked upon by many as a White House spokesman, and stock market operators rushed to the newsstands to get early copies. 63 Circulation doubled. Oswald Garrison Villard, then editor of the rival Nation, later wrote in his autobiography: “For a time during the war and immediately afterwards the New Republic was regarded by many as the mouthpiece of Woodrow Wilson; it was considered bad form in some official circles to be seen without it and its circulation climbed to about 45,000. It was believed that Walter Lippmann and the New Republic had won the President to our participation in the war in order to shape the peace and that Lippmann had written the fourteen peace points.” 64 This last idea was false, as Lippmann himself
March 10, 1917, entitled “The Evolution of a National Policy in Relation to The Great War,” a series of reprints from the paper. For a comprehensive study of the paper’s attitudes toward Wilson, see Attwood, “Story of the New Republic,” pp. 35-103. Straight’s article supporting Hughes against Wilson for the presidency was printed in the New Republic, v. 8, Oct. 28, 1916, pp. 313-14.
60 Quoted in Granville Hicks, John Reed: The Making of a Revolutionary (New York, 1936), p. 231.
61 Croly, Promise, p. 307.
62 New Republic, v. 10, April 7, 1917, p. 280.
63 Lippmann, “Notes,” p. 251.
64 Oswald Garrison Villard, Fighting Years (New York, 1939), p. 361.
pointed out; but Wilson did take over, as he admitted in a letter to Croly, the slogan “Peace Without Victory.” 65
But even in these years of affirmation, the New Republic did not go along evenly with American popular opinion or public policy. It was severely critical of war hysteria and international hatreds. Long before the entry of the United States into the war, it had planned a League of Neutrals which might some day negotiate a League of All Nations to end all wars. 66 It was firmly committed to the doctrine that peace was possible only if a world view was taken, Germany was not humiliated in defeat, and general disarmament was realized. Now it began to lose faith in the aims of our British allies toward such an ideal. Laski was exasperated. “They give us sage advice,” he wrote to Justice Holmes, “with the air of people who have private information about the constitution of the universe—and their moral hyperbolas grow at times nauseating.” 67 All this led to the cry of Anglophobia being raised against the journal, and to wild accusations of disloyalty. 68 It seems at this distance, however, that Norman Hapgood was right when he described the New Republic’s course in the war years as pulling a strong oar for victory, but, it “has the courage to reflect a world point of view in the midst of national chauvinism.” 69
The Treaty of Versailles fulfilled the worst fears of the New Republic. “A Punic peace of annihilation!” cried the editors. 70 Moreover, they were convinced that the League of Nations would perpetuate rather than correct the evils of the treaty. In short, the debacle of Versailles and the League brought a heartbreaking collapse of their hopes to Croly and his fellow editors. In an astute analysis of the early years of the New Republic,
65 Lippmann, “Notes,” p. 252; Weingast, Lippmann, pp. 14-17; Forcey, “Intellectuals,” pp. 352-58. Col. E. M. House’s diary shows confidential relations with both Lippmann and Croly (Jan. 15, 22, 30; Feb. 5, 27; March 9, 26, 1917), but with many other journalists as well. As to the Wilson use of the “Peace Without Victory” phrase, see Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson, v. 6 (New York, 1939), p. 425.
66 New Republic, v. 1, Jan. 2, 1915, pp. 7-9.
67 Holmes-Laski Letters, v. 1, p. 43. Laski to Holmes, Dec. 16, 1916.
68 The Outlook was the chief spokesman of this attack on the New Republic. See, for example, Outlook, v. 116, Aug. 29, 1917, p. 645; v. 117, Oct. 3, 1917, pp. 164-65.
69 New Republic, v. 13, Jan. 26, 1918, p. 380.
70 New Republic, v. 19, May 17, 1919, pp. 71-74.
David W. Noble thus sums up the abortion of the editors’ plans for a brave new world: “. . . these war years undermined their vision of a better America by destroying the intellectual and emotional assumptions on which they had based their faith in progress. Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl, and Walter Lippmann, who were instrumental in the establishment of the New Republic in 1914 as the harbinger of an actual new republic, could leave no dynamic legacy of liberalism to the next generation because the heart of their philosophy—the culmination of progress in an evolutionary, middle-class Utopia, created by rational and good men—was shattered.” 71
And it was more than ideological failure that confronted the New Republic at the beginning of the 1920’s. Straight had died in 1918, having been stricken with the “flu” while in military service in France. Weyl had resigned from the editorial board to enter government service shortly before the United States entered the war. Lippmann left it in 1921 to write editorials for the New York World, exchanging the more philosophic attitudes of the weekly for daily commentary on the hurly-burly of public affairs. Charles Merz, an associate editor, transferred to the World about the same time. The next year Hackett, of whom Justice Holmes (a faithful reader of the New Republic ) once said that “in literary matters he has more power to utter the unutterable than anyone I can think of,” resigned to travel in his native Ireland and his wife’s native Denmark. 72 Laski and Angell, staff contributors, returned to England after the war.
The circulation of the New Republic began a slow decline in the early twenties. It was a decade of inflation, and a reform journal flourishes best in hard times. The price was raised to fifteen cents in 1919, or five dollars a year, and the size was decreased again to twenty-six pages. A paper stock of mechanical woodpulp was adopted; twenty-five years later, the pages of the New Republic printed in the twenties were cracking and falling apart when the bound volumes were used in libraries. But despite retrenchments, there were probably few years in the
71 David W. Noble, “The New Republic and the Idea of Progress, 1914- 1920,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, v. 38, Dec. 1951, p. 388.
72 Mark DeWolfe Howe, ed., Holmes-? ollock Letters, v. 2 (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), p. 96; Hackett, Denmark, passim.
decade when the journal’s deficit was less than $75,000. 73 Nevertheless, liberal salaries and payments were continued, the staff’s dining room still dispensed hospitality, and Dorothy Straight footed the bills without complaint.
And Croly still held his banner high, though chastened in spirit and emphasizing more and more the religious side of his philosophy. Vacancies in the staff were filled by new editors who maintained the journal’s reputation for good writing —George Soule, economist and sociologist who had really been associated with the paper almost from its beginning; Robert Morss Lovett, University of Chicago professor of English; Stark Young, playwright and critic; Bruce Bliven, journalist, and others. Johnson stayed on until 1926, although he had become director of the New School for Social Research in 1923. Daniel Mebane, a young instructor on the faculty of Indiana University, having tried to use the New Republic as supplementary reading for his classes, encountered objection from his superiors to the use of such incendiary material; he packed up in 1920 and came to New York to become for many years a business manager for the journal. 74
Some change took place in the nature of the New Republic’s materials. There was rather less of political theory and more about books, music, the theater, and contemporary customs and trends. There was more poetry—by Conrad Aiken, Amy Lowell, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edgar Lee Masters, Elinor Wylie, Vachel Lindsay, Archibald MacLeish. From the first, there had been occasional supplements, such as those on “Sweated Labor” (March 27, 1915) and “Labor and the New Social Order, A Report on Reconstruction by the Sub-Committee of the British Labor Party” (February 16, 1918), and the seasonal book review sections. 75 These continued in the twenties, and there were also some articles in series, such as Bliven’s muckraking “The Ohio Gang” (May 1924) and Waldo Frank’s biting “Re-Discovery of America” (1927-1928).
73 See the article by Beulah Amidon, a New Republic contributor, in Survey Graphic, v. 29, Jan. 1940, p. 24; also the circular soliciting subscriptions quoted by Forcey, “Intellectuals,” p. 357.
74 New Republic, v. 116, March 3, 1947, p. 44.
75 The seasonal book sections were later incorporated into the regular numbers.
There was also a Washington column of the “Merry-Go- Round” type, signed by the cryptic initials T.R.B. 76
The New Republic had published some English writers, such as Henry N. Brailsford, extensively in early numbers. During the war H. G. Wells and Rebecca West, as well as Laski and Angell, were prominent. But in the twenties about a fourth of the journal’s contributors were English. Two chapters of Lyt- ton Strachey’s Queen Victoria were published in June 1921, and sixteen of his short biographical studies appeared in the New Republic. Virginia Woolf contributed many literary essays and reviews in the twenties. Bertrand Russell’s 1920 series on Bolshevism began his connection with the journal; this was followed by essays on various topics. John Maynard Keynes was a frequent contributor on fiscal matters.
Among American writers, John Dewey kept a certain prominence that he had held in the pages of the New Republic from its first months. Then he had been an advocate of vocational education; later he had written much about China, Russia, the Near East, and Mexico. It is easy to forget the contributors whose work was somewhat less philosophical, and more in the nature of brilliant reporting—like William Hard, who wrote on strikes and other matters; and Frank H. Simonds, who wrote the military articles during the First World War. American contributors who were appearing more and more frequently in the twenties were Lewis Mumford, Gilbert Seldes, Edmund Wilson, Jane Addams, Eduard C. Lindeman, Leo Wolman, Van Wyck Brooks, Robert Herrick, and Rexford G. Tugwell.
Though diversity characterized the New Republic of the twenties more markedly than during its beginning years, the chief subjects remained politics, economics, and social problems. But so far as party adherence was concerned, Croly gee’d and haw’d a good deal. He was against the American party system anyway; he believed primarily in “executive leadership, administrative independence, and direct legislation.” 77 In the presidential campaign of 1920, he abandoned middle-class progres-
76 New Republic Anthology, p. 551.
77 See his editorial “The vuture of the Two-Party System,” New Republic, v. 1, Nov. 14, 1914, pp. 10-11.
sivism for the labor movement as a better instrument for his nationalism and declared for the Farmer-Labor nominee. Four years later, however, he was enthusiastic in the support of La Follette, who in the end disappointed him by failing to make much impression in the entrenched Republican and Democratic positions. He had helped start a boom for Hoover back in 1919, thinking he had found a leader of liberal social outlook; but by 1928 he had lost faith in his hero and gave his support to Smith.
The years immediately following the peace offered plenty of editorial fuel—strikes, the I.W.W., the great “Red Scare,” the renewed activity of the Ku Klux Klan, and the Volstead Act. The New Republic was constant in its testimony for organized labor and against oppressive movements, whether popular or governmental. It attacked Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer with vigor and persistence as he tried to suppress strikes, Communist activities, and free speech in the years 1919-1920. The paper stated its position in regard to Russia clearly:
Its ideals are not ours; its objectives do not inspire us with confidence; its methods cannot be approved. . . . That the Soviet Republic, by its example or by propaganda, can actually menace our own institutions appears to us absurd. . . . Let Soviet Russia alone. Let her failure as far as she must fail be upon her own head, not upon ours . 78
The New Republic was always a severe critic of the American daily press, and at this juncture it attacked the New York Times especially for its mishandling of the Russian story. These attacks were summarized in a supplement to the number for August 4, 1920, edited by Lippmann and Merz, then both on the New Republic’s editorial board, but later to be editors respectively of the World and the Times itself. That this criticism was effective is indicated by the fact that in 1921 the Times sent Walter Duranty to Russia to write with “complete freedom” 79 a series of articles that undoubtedly helped to bring about a better understanding in America of the Soviet experiment. The New Republic itself, throughout this decade and
78 New Republic, v. 19, July 2, 1919, p. 267.
79 Duranty Reports Russia, compiled by Gustavus Tuckerman (New York, 1934), p. ix.
later, watched the adventure of Soviet communism with sympathetic interest, followed the,Five Year Plan closely, and set the Russian system against capitalism as comparative ideologies.
The New Republic was much concerned about the Sacco- Vanzetti case throughout its long progress. 80 Shortly before the execution, New Republic editors paid out of their own pockets for a full-page advertisement in the New York Times reviewing details of the defense. 81
Worst of the Harding administration scandals was the one involving the Teapot Dome oil lease. The New Republic gave this breakdown of good government many columns, but it could scarcely have been surprised by the event. It had commented months before that the Dougherty and Fall cabinet appointments were “unspeakably bad”; these men, it had averred, “are full blown specimens of the manipulating politician who serves private and predatory interests . . . they are to operate the two departments of government—Justice and the Interior, that are the most rich in spoils.” 82
In the fall of 1928, Croly suffered a paralytic stroke, and he died on May 17, 1930. His friends and associates contributed to a memorial supplement (July 16, 1930) of the paper he had edited with so much fervor and sincerity. Bruce Bliven, who had come to the New Republic in 1923, took over the chief editorship on Croly’s death. He had been trained in the newspaper school and was a more incisive writer than his predecessor.
The circulation of the New Republic had declined by the late twenties to an all-time low of ten thousand; but in keeping with the aforementioned principle that radical reform journals flourish better in hard times than good, it more than doubled in 1930 and seems to have been maintained at about 25,000 throughout the following decade. 83 When Dorothy Straight
80 See Attwood, “Story of the New Republic,” pp. 124-27.
81 New Republic, v. 131, Nov. 22, 1954, p. 8.
82 Ibid., v. 26, March 2, 1921, p. 3.
83 Attwood, who had special information from Mebane, says it dropped to 10,000 in 1925 (“Story of the New Republic,” p. 11). Ayer gives an estimated circulation for 1929 ( Directory, 1930) as 12,000, and a sworn circulation the next year at 25,000.
married the young English student of sociology, Leonard Elm- hirst, in 1935 (Willard Straight having died in 1918), 84 she renounced her American citizenship; but she set up a trust for the support of the four magazines in which she was interested—the New Republic, Asia, Theatre Arts, and Antiques. Under this arrangement the New Republic subsidies, though steady, were not quite as liberal as before. 85 The journal derived, however, some income from the sale of its dollar books on social and economic problems, issued in paper covers; these numbered thirty-eight titles by 1935 and had sold some 250,000 copies. 86 New typography and make-up changed the appearance of the paper somewhat, and the trend toward variety of content was a little more marked in the thirties. Heywood Broun came over from the Nation to edit an outspoken column called “Shoot the Works,” John T. Flynn wrote regularly on “Other People’s Money,” and “The Bandwagon” related absurdities from public speeches and newspapers.
Under Bliven and Soule the journal was less philosophical and more practical in its politics: as one acute observer said, it “plumped more and more for specific liberal reforms, and hammered less and less at the old Croly vision of liberalism as a basic, unifying, cultural belief.” 87 Also it meandered again and again into the camp of the avowed anticapitalists, most notably in an article by Associate Editor Edmund Wilson. In the midst of the economic confusion following the great crash of 1929 Wilson wrote the famous indictment of a capitalistic society that was later so strongly attacked both within and without the pages of the New Republic. 88 A headnote declared that this article and some others to follow were “the outcome of conversations among the editors of the New Republic which have been occurring for several months, and the gist of which may be of interest as raw material for thought and discussion.” The arti-
84 Villard, Fighting Years, p. 361, n. 4, tells of having introduced Elmhirst to Mrs. Straight when the former was “an impecunious English student at Cornell.”
85 Amidon, Survey Graphic, v. 29, Jan. 1940, p. 25.
86 Publishers’ Weekly, v. 128, Sept. 28, 1935, pp. 1175-76.
87 Time, v. 34, Nov. 13, 1939, p. 22.
88 Wilson, “An Appeal to Progressives,” New Republic, v. 65, Jan. 14, 1931, pp. 234-38.
cle began with some analysis of the Croly political philosophy, but its thesis is that this has all been superseded and that the country is at the end of an era. Capitalism has collapsed. “Who in the United States really loves our meaningless life?” Wilson asked. “We liberals have professed not to love it”; but he admitted, “we have tried to believe in it none the less.” Now that is all over; we “must openly confess that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are due to be supplanted by some new manifesto and some new bill of rights.” Soule’s reply in the next number did indeed find in this “raw material” many points for discussion and for disagreement as well. Soule and others who followed him in subsequent numbers 89 were not ready to scrap the American system, much as they might criticize it. Wilson resigned from the staff later that year.
But throughout most of the thirties the New Republic maintained its testimony against capitalism with much constancy. Early in 1935 it published an editorial called “Liberalism Twenty Years After” in which it looked back at Crolyology with nostalgic fondness, but again insisted firmly that capitalism had reached the end of the road: “The New Republic when it was founded twenty years ago was, like the American nation itself, the inheritor of a liberal tradition. But nothing is more obvious than that the economic and social order to which a liberal philosophy gave birth and in which it flourished is rapidly disintegrating and must in the course of time give way to some other.” Even in the realignment which they foresaw, the editors preferred not to take sides. “Our general direction, our main policies are clear enough,” they wrote, “but as to the rest we should rather present the varied points of view of those who are in the same large procession; we should rather exercise the privilege of criticism, favorable or the reverse; we prefer to mediate, as well as possible, among the many schools of radical thought and between them and the people who have not yet made up their minds. ... We hope to participate, within the ranks of those who believe as we do that capitalism has outlived
89 Soule, “Hard-Boiled Radicalism,” New Republic, v. 65, Jan. 21, 1931, pp. 261-65. Robert Hallowell and Kenneth Burke wrote articles in the series, v. 65, Feb. 4, 1931, pp. 324-29; Matthew Josephson and Benjamin Ginzburg, v. 66, Feb. 18, 1931, pp. 13-17.
its usefulness, in the difficult search tor objective truth.” 90
Realistically, however, the editors were willing to work within the capitalistic framework, not only in receiving the Straight largesse, but in supporting the effort to shore up the crumbling national structure by economic planning. “Nearly all the members of the Roosevelt Brain Trust had been collaborators of the N.R. before they began to work with President Roosevelt,” wrote Bliven many years later, “and most of the ideas of the New Deal first saw the light in its pages.” 91 There is much truth in this claim, and there is some reason for thinking that the watchword “New Deal” was suggested by an article in the New Republic? 2
But the paper was at first no ally of the Roosevelt administration. It declared for Norman Thomas in the presidential canvass of 1932, though with reservations. Four years later it came out for Roosevelt, but characteristically it advised its readers who lived in the Democratic strongholds to give a testimonial vote for Thomas or Browder. In the midst of that campaign it issued a supplement (June 10, 1936) entitled “The Balance Sheet of the New Deal” in which it found some actions to palliate and somewhat even to praise. In 1940 it was for Roosevelt and Wallace. By that time such factors as the apparent success of the New Deal and the further development of the dictatorship in Russia had drawn the magazine away from the “extreme” left and about as near a conformist policy as it could ever allow itself to come. It was almost as close to the Roosevelt course by the end of the thirties as it had been to that of Wilson fifteen years earlier.
Important in the thirties was the journal’s planned economy program. Soule’s “Chaos or Control” appeared in March and April 1932; it was later enlarged in his book, A Planned Society. Elements in the New Republic's blueprint for recovery were unemployment insurance, a public works program, and higher income, inheritance, and surplus profits taxes. But the editors were careful to specify that “the agitation for national
90 New Republic, v. 81, Jan. 23, 1935, pp. 290-92.
91 Ibid., v. 131, Nov. 22, 1954, p. 9.
92 See Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933, v. 1 of The Age of Roosevelt (Boston, 1957), pp. 403, 532.
economic planning is, of course, not agitation for the preservation of capitalism, but a movement toward an eventually socialized society, no matter what terminology may be used in describing it.” 93 However, as the depression decade drew to a close and the Second World War seemed imminent, the paper’s editorial emphasis seemed to change. It would be wrong to say that its campaign against capitalism had fizzled, because it had never really conducted such a campaign, and it had never renounced its antipathy; but what it did, almost inevitably, was to turn to the more workable reforms of the day and to the approaching storm of war.
Like most American magazines, the New Republic was slow to advocate intervention in the Second World War. On August 25, 1941, however, it placarded its cover: “For a Declaration of War.” In its lead editorial it reminded its readers that “for a long time” it had assumed that the United States could do what was necessary without “a shooting war,” but now that time was past. Armed intervention in Europe was now imperative, and the editors warned against waiting to be “precipitated into the fighting by a trick or an accident.” 94
As in the First World War, the New Republic was concerned early in the conflict with plans for the peace and for postwar reforms. The keynote of a series of articles on the war written by young Michael Straight in 1942, was that “a rising structure of world unity, worked for the purposes of democracy . . . must be the war aim of the United States.” 95 But the editors were skeptical, and on the cover of the issue that contained Straight’s statement they displayed the ominous query, “Will We Lose the Peace Again?” They followed the Dumbarton Oaks conference with distrustful eyes. They seemed to echo the admonitions of the editors in the other war when they demanded that the peace settlement should “open a channel for German energies which may benefit themselves and the world.” 96 But their vision in 1944 was more truly worldwide; they urged the Dumbarton Oaks delegates not to forget that “wise economic policies” have more to do with halting aggres-
93 New Republic, v. 69, Feb. 10, 1932, p. 337.
94 Ibid., v. 105, Aug. 25, 1941, p. 238.
95 Ibid., v. 107, Nov. 23, 1942, p. 666.
96 Ibid., v. Ill, Oct. 30, 1944, p. 552.
sion than anything else, and they feared the expansion of international cartels after the war. 97
The New Republic’s chief commentary on the wartime race riots was embodied in a constructive and comprehensive “special section” for October 18, 1943, entitled “The Negro: His Future in America.” One of its leading contributions to the great debate on postwar economics in the United States was its continuing argument to the effect that government should retain wartime controls, especially in industrial operations. 98
Russia, its problems, policies, and actions were treated sympathetically in these years. Time, no New Republic fan, said that its left-wing contemporary was “firmly on a ‘my ally, right or wrong’ policy toward Russia.” 99 “The basic aim of Soviet foreign policy,” said Heinz H. F. Eulau, who often wrote on Soviet matters for the New Republic, was the “maintenance of peace.” This primary aim had never changed “and is unlikely to be changed in the future.” 100 Week after week the defense of Russia continued.
In the forties “special sections” and supplements became more frequent. They were mostly devoted to politics, social and economic questions, and new books. The seasonal literary numbers were attractive. Book reviewing in the New Republic was frequently brilliant and acute; also it was often governed by the “liberal” point of view. “Voters’ Handbooks,” giving the records of congressmen and senators, became a feature of the journal’s service to its readers. Special supplements on candidates Willkie (September 2, 1940) and Dewey (September 25, 1945) were issued; and a memorial number on Franklin D. Roosevelt appeared on April 15, 1946.
Newcomers to the lists of “contributing editors” in the forties were Van Wyck Brooks, Julian Huxley, Max Lerner, Thomas Sancton, Alfred Kazin, Harold L. Ickes, Joseph P. Lash, Gus Tyler, and John Farrally. Ten installments from Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s The Age of Jackson appeared in 1946.
97 Ibid., v. Ill, Sept. 4, 1944, p. 264; and v. 109, Oct. 11, 1943, pp. 476-78.
98 See especially H. S. Person, “Postwar Control of Monopolies,” Ibid., Dec. 2 7, 1943, pp. 907-9.
99 Time, v. 45, June 11, 1945, p. 49.
100 New Republic, v. 109, Oct. 18, 1943, p. 509.
About a year after the end of World War II, Michael Whitney Straight took over as publisher of the New Republic. “Mike” was the son of the founders of the journal, had been educated in England, had served as a U.S. State Department economist, and had done a stint with the U.S. Air Force. He had been a contributor to the paper which was still supported by his family since the beginning of the war, and now, at twenty- nine, he was ready to throw himself into the task of remaking it along the lines that would bring it more circulation, influence, and prestige.
Cartoons appeared on the covers for a while, some color was used, and the paper, if not more attractive, was at least more striking on the newsstands. An occasional cartoon had been printed in the early years of the New Republic, and in the forties portraits and political caricatures had become somewhat more frequent. Now they were used systematically.
George Soule and Stark Young retired as associate editors; William Harlan Hale and Helen Fuller came in. Content became more diversified, with departments and columns. Radio commercials called attention to each new issue. 101 Average paid circulation went over forty thousand for 1946. One of the paper’s chief features that year was a series of six articles about Russia by Earl Browder, recently returned from a visit to Moscow. “Needless to say,” said an advertisement, “the New Republic, which stands for liberal democracy, does not share Mr. Browder’s communist philosophy.” 102
Then in October 1946 began one of the most exciting episodes in the history of the New Republic . 103 Henry Agard Wallace was appointed editor. Wallace had been Vice-President during Roosevelt’s third term, and had later served as Secretary of Commerce. President Truman had asked for his resignation because of his public utterances criticizing American foreign policy, especially regarding Russia. There was talk of a new party to be headed by Wallace in the 1948 presidential campaign.
101 Time, v. 47, April 22, 1946, pp. 71-72.
102 New Republic, v. 115, July 29, 1946, p. 112.
103 Announcement was made in New Republic, v. 115, Oct. 21, 1946, pp. 499-501; Wallace took over office duties in mid-November; his first number as editor was that of Dec. 16.
“Today, we pick up our soapbox and move over to another corner/’ wrote Bliven the week before the new editor came in. “The old pitch was a good one,” he added. “But the traffic has changed. ... We still can’t help feeling some twinges of nostalgia.” 104 The tone of Wallace’s first editorial was different. It was plain he did not regard the New Republic as a mere soapbox; he took the man-of-destiny approach. “My field is the world,” he wrote. “My friends are all who believe in true democracy. . . . My master is the common man.” Regarding Russia, the new editor was in step with the old paper: “I prefer to accept the willingness of the Soviet leaders to think more and more in democratic terms.” 105
For a few months Wallace was a fairly industrious editor, writing not only on international policy, but on living costs in the United States, labor disputes, and so on. But after a short time his attention seemed more and more diverted by his political activities, he was absent from the editorial conferences that were the very tradition of New Republic editing, and he took little part in the daily work that belonged to his job. Then he went on a tour of Europe, and on his return “was rarely seen around the New Republic offices.” 106
During the Wallace regime, however, the paper boomed. It was not merely that Wallace followers were supporting their leader: the magazine was larger and more varied than ever before. Straight filled forty-eight pages with sketches, cartoons (some with dabs of color), a United Nations column, labor and farm departments, theater and art criticism, and so on. He even advertised a short story contest, but that came to naught. Publisher Mebane’s campaigns brought the circulation to nearly a hundred thousand by the end of 1947—an all-time high for the N.R.
But when Wallace decided in December 1947 to run for the presidency, Straight objected to making his paper a political organ and suggested that Wallace exchange the editorial chair for a contributing editorship, he himself becoming editor. That
104 New Republic, v. 115, Dec. 9, 1946, p. 774.
105 Ibid., Dec. 16, 1946, pp. 787-89.
106 William Harlan Hale, in “What Makes Wallace Run,” Harper’s Magazine, v. 196, March 1948, pp. 243-44.
did not work much better and after another six months the New Republic cut loose from, Wallace entirely. Straight declared for Justice William O. Douglas for President six weeks before he dropped Wallace’s name from the paper’s masthead. 107
Doubtless its adherence to its old principle of critical detachment in this case cost the New Republic dearly, but the management crisis that ensued was not altogether the result of the parting with Wallace. The journal had embarked on a program of expansion that was not supported either by new advertising or by the development of a national circulation. It was reported that it had lost half a million dollars during its Wallace year. Then its circulation had dropped off sharply when Wallace retired as editor, and even more precipitously after he wrote his long thirteen-column farewell to his New Republic readers for the July 19, 1948, number. The decline did not stop until, by the end of the decade, circulation was only a fourth of what it was in the palmy Wallace months. Retrenchment was, of course, necessary. Amid confusion and bitterness, the staff was severely reduced to match a cut in the number of pages. Press- work declined in quality, many features were abandoned, morale suffered. 108 The price was raised to twenty cents a number, $6.50 a year, in 1949.
Editorially, the New Republic leaned toward the Fair Deal after the 1948 election. Immediately after that event, it had rejoiced that “we have in the White House a man with the most radical platform in presidential history.” 109 But it eventually lost what faith it had seemed to have in Truman, and early in 1952 it was urging him to withdraw his name from consideration for a third term. 110 It urged the nomination of Eisenhower upon the Republican party, but eventually declared for Stevenson in the ensuing campaign.
As early as October 1950 the magazine’s publication office had been transferred from New York to Washington, D.C., and
107 New Republic, v. 118, June 14, 1948, p. 10.
108 For circulation and staff reductions and losses, see Time, v. 51, Feb. 23, 1948, pp. 62, 64. See also Ayer’s Directory, and Standard Rate and Data Service.
109 New Republic, v. 119, Nov. 15, 1948, p. 3.
110 Ibid., v. 126, Feb. 4, 1952, p. 5.
two years later it moved its editorial base to the capital. Helen Fuller, who had been in charge of the Washington bureau since 1946, now became managing editor. But these changes did not mean that there was more emphasis on politics; the new shift in content was toward the proportions that had brought it a certain eclat in the twenties—more criticism of the arts, the cultural scene, the new mass culture. Listed as “contributing editors” were Malcolm Cowley for literary criticism, Robert Evett for music, and Eric Bentley for drama. Classified as “contributing critics” were many others, including W. H. Auden, Bruce Bliven, Gerald W. Johnson, Max Lerner, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate. On the whole, the magazine’s content was more attractive; but its format made obvious sacrifices to economy, and its circulation advanced only a few thousand.
Then in March 1953 came a rude shock. The trustees of the Straight fund announced that “in the interest of beneficiaries who are minors” they would no longer advance the money to meet the New Republic’s deficits. 111 But Mike Straight scurried around among “businessmen, bankers, and lawyers” 112 and raised funds to keep publication going for another year. Best of all, he found a new publisher with hope and enthusiasm. Gilbert Harrison, of about the same age as Straight, had been associated with him in the leadership of the American Veterans Committee and shared his interest in liberal causes. A year later the funds raised from “businessmen, bankers, and lawyers ” were gone, the weekly deficit was $1,600, and the New Republic was again on the brink. Just then the publisher’s wife, Anne Blaine Harrison, not unexpectedly fell heir to well over ten million dollars of International Harvester money. 113
And thus the paper was saved. It was not only saved, but it was improved in appearance and its quality maintained. A modest twenty-four page journal, it divided its main interests between the domestic politico-economic scene and international affairs. Book reviews were still important, there were glances at
111 Time, v. 61, March 16, 1953, p. 95.
112 It was later revealed that two of these backers were political leaders (Adlai E. Stevenson, Paul Douglas), one the president of the Studebaker Corporation (Paul G. Hoffman), and another the owner of a newspaper group (John S. Knight). See New Republic > v. 131, Nov. 22, 1954, p. 10.
113 Time, v. 63, March 1, 1954, p. 44.
the theater and the new movies, and a concern with social problems was pervasive. The old special pleading for the Soviets was gone, but not the old urgent call for a liberal foreign policy.
Eisenhower was under a fairly steady fire during his administrations. In the “Voters’ Guide” of 1954, in which the New Republic, honoring its long custom, summed up political records, it offered “friendly criticism” of the President on broad grounds, but chiefly because “with few exceptions the President’s domestic program records concessions made to the predominant business group. ... It was the abdication by President Eisenhower of his responsibilities that was a principal inducement to McCarthy to set himself up, in effect, as a second President on Capitol Hill.” 114
Frank Gorrel was a leading European correspondent of the paper in the fifties, Gerald Johnson was a leading commentator on domestic matters, and Malcolm Cowley continued to be a leading literary critic. In 1956, Michael Straight, who had been a hard-working editor and contributor, resigned in favor of Gilbert Harrison, who then became both editor and publisher.
It was a blow to the management when the American News Company refused at the beginning of 1957 to handle the New Republic any longer, declaring that its newsstand sales had fallen to an unprofitable two thousand. 115 Its net paid circulation through the fifties was somewhat under thirty thousand. An unkind commentator of 1958 called it “that faint voice of the left.” 116
The history of the New Republic cannot be summarized in a sentence or in a paragraph. It has traveled an uneven road. Never a worshiper of consistency, perhaps its only well- observed rule has been the one enunciated by Croly when he declared its purpose to be “to start little insurrections” in its readers’ established convictions. But it is one of the most difficult things in the world to maintain for a long time the rebel’s attitude without being taken for a chronic scold. Moreover, the crusading spirit does not always make for the best reporting or the best criticism. For example, there have been periods in the
114 New Republic, v. 131, Oct. 11, 1954, Part 2, pp. 3-4.
115 Time, v. 69, Jan. 14, 1957, p. 61.
116 Raymond Moley, in a column syndicated by Associated Newspapers, Sept. 27, 1958.
journal’s history when it seemed, on the whole, more doctrinaire than constructively helpful; and in respect to books that have not squared with its current concept of liberalism, its reviewers have at times been supercilious or summary, or both. On the other hand, it has printed some of the soundest and most brilliant criticism produced in America during its period.
The New Republic has doubtless tended to “overemphasize the interests (and the prejudices) of urban intellectuals” 117 at the expense of national appeal; but its insistence on hard thinking has made it important in our intellectual history for half a century. Early in its career, its editors wrote:
At this period of wreck and ruin, the one power that can save, can heal, can fortify, is clear and intelligent thought. Opinion is no longer a parlor game, a matter of dinner-table conversation; it is a relentless necessity if we are to keep flying the flag of sanity above a tortured world . 118
These words seem even more applicable today than when they were written. Less eloquent, but apt and rather pleasantly unassuming is the characterization in a remark of Bruce Bliven’s (1954): “A paper like the N.R. is badly needed, if only to be the egg-heads’ Committee of Correspondence.” 119 *
117 Amidon, Survey Graphic, v. 29, Jan. 1940, p. 26.
118 From a promotion sheet included in the number for Nov. 13, 1915.
119 New Republic, v. 131, Nov. 22, 1954, p. 10.
* This historical sketch was written in the late 1950’s. Since that time, another resurgence in the fortunes of the New Republic has occurred, correlating with Robert Luce’s term as publisher, and stimulated by a lively editorial staff. A circulation of over 100,000 in the mid-1960’s has resulted. The magazine is, of course, currently sold at newsstands. Editorial changes that have taken place since this history was written are listed in n. 1.
16
POETRY 1
H ARRIET MONROE, the Chicago poet, returned early in 1911 from a trip around the world. She found the “Chicago Plan” humming, with its emphasis on boulevards, parks, architecture, the Art Institute, the Symphony Orchestra—on everything but poetry. Miss Monroe was not only a poet, but a devotee of poetry, and she was continually irked by the contemporary neglect of the muse in America.
Miss Monroe belonged to a respected Chicago family; it was not wealthy, but it was prominent in the arts and was accepted in the city’s best society. Twenty years earlier, as a young woman of thirty, Miss Monroe had raised her voice in protest against the neglect of the Committee on Ceremonies of the Columbian Exposition in failing to make a place on its opening program for a commemoration ode. Indeed, she had suggested herself as the poet, had been accepted, and had written for the occasion her “Columbian Ode.” Thereafter she had written an art column for the Chicago Tribune, contributed some verse to magazines, had found a volume or two of her poems well enough received, and had lectured and traveled. But all the time she had dreamed of a magazine to be devoted to “the Cinderella of the arts.” 2
1 Title: Poetry, A Magazine of Verse.
First issue: Oct. 1912. Current.
Periodicity: Monthly (except Qct.-Nov., 1963; April-May, 1965). Regular semiannual volumes.
Publishers: Harriet Monroe, 1912-36 (Ralph Fletcher Seymour was printer for several years and his name sometimes appears as “publisher”) ; Harriet Monroe Estate, 1936-45; Modern Poetry Association, 1945-current.
Editors: Harriet Monroe, 1912-36; Morton Dauwen Zabel, 1936-37; George Dillon, 1938-42, 1946-49; Peter De Vries, 1942-46; Jessica Nelson North, 1942-43; Marion Strobel, 1943-49; Margedant Peters, 1946-47; John Frederick Nims, 1946-48; Hayden Carruth, 1949-50; Karl Shapiro, 1950-55; Henry Rago, 1955-current.
Indexes: Fifty Years of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse—Index to vols. 1-100 (Oct. 1912-1962), compiled by Elizabeth Wright (New York, 1963); Readers’ Guide.
2 Harriet Monroe, A Poet’s Life (New York, 1938), p. 247. The epithet is one that Miss Monroe often used. The volume here cited is useful for all of its author’s life, with chaps, xxiv-xxxvi for the story of Poetry.
225
In the summer of 1911, Miss Monroe'discussed the idea with several friends, of whom she found Hobart C. Chatfield-Taylor, novelist and patron of the arts, quite the most enthusiastic and helpful. The plan evolved was to ask for “an audacious advance vote of confidence” 3 —a subsidy of $5,000 a year for five years. This amount was to be obtained from one hundred donors of fifty dollars each. Miss Monroe made the solicitation herself. Some of those on whom she called thought the idea of a magazine of poetry funny, and she laughed with them, but finally got their names on the dotted line; some were genuinely interested, and others were irritated by the request. The first third of the required number of guarantors came easily, the next third was more difficult, but the last came with a rush; and the campaign ended by an over-subscription of about $1,000. 4 What had happened at the last was that it had become fashionable to be one of Miss Monroe’s guarantors, along with Mrs. Potter Palmer, Cyrus H. McCormick, Rufus G. Dawes, and so on.
The next step was to write to the poets and win their interest, for Miss Monroe had no thought of publishing merely a fashionable journal for a Chicago coterie. She wrote to friends in England, and to respected writers East, South, and West. Best of all, she offered to pay for contributions by checks that could be cashed at a bank. What the magazine paid, and what it continued to pay for many years, was about fifty cents a line, or ten dollars a small page. 5
The first number was hurried a little, in order to anticipate the publication of a Boston periodical, which threatened to take the name Miss Monroe had chosen, and which later appeared as the Poetry Journal. The first number of Miss Monroe’s Poetry was dated October 1912. As a later editor observed, the magazine “found, by some miracle of anticipation, the exact psychological moment for its appearance on the scene.” 6 There was a
3 Poetry, v. 4, May 1914, p. 61.
4 Ibid,., v. 40, April 1932, p. 30. An account of the solicitation campaign is in Monroe, Poet’s Life, pp. 243-48.
5 Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton, N.J., 1946), p. 43. This information was received from Morton Zabel, a later editor. See also Time, v. 50, Oct. 2 7, 1947, pp. 74-75. The Hoffman volume cited contains a good short history of Poetry, pp. 34-44.
6 Poetry, v. 51, Oct. 1937, p. 31.
HARRIET MONROE, 1860-1936
Miss Monroe was the founder of Poetry in 1912 and its editor and publisher for 24 years, until her death at age 75. Photograph by John Young.
228 POETRY
ferment of poetry in new forms and with new ideas that seemed to be awaiting a catalyst.
That first number contained thirty-two small pages of verse and prose, with a pleasant typographical design by Ralph Fletcher Seymour. The price was $1.50 a year, or 15 cents a monthly number; the subscription rate was to be raised to $2.00 (with forty-eight pages) by 1917, and to $3.00 (with sixty pages) in 1920. The print order for the first number was one thousand; but forms fortunately were held, and another thousand was called for later. 7
In her introduction for the new magazine Miss Monroe wrote: “The present venture is a modest effort to give to poetry her own place, her own voice. The popular magazines can afford her but scant courtesy—a Cinderella corner in the ashes —because they seek a large public which is not hers. . . . We believe that there is a public for poetry. . . .” 8 The poets represented in this historic first number were William Vaughan Moody (posthumously), Ezra Pound, Arthur Davison Ficke, Helen Dudley, Grace Hazard Conkling, and Emilia Stuart Lorimer. As in later issues, there were a dozen or more pages of editorial articles, criticism, book reviews, and news—always crisp, acute, informed.
The chief poets of Poetry’s first four exciting years were W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, Ezra Pound, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson, T. S. Eliot, Amy Lowell, and Edgar Lee Masters. Yeats, with his established reputation, encouraged the new project from its beginning and was a contributor to the third number. Tagore was introduced to the English-speaking world by Poetry. Pound became the magazine’s “foreign correspondent” for a few years, and his letters enlivened its critical pages. Lindsay marched into the magazine’s pages with General William Booth’s big bass drum in January 1913, and Miss Lowell’s first Poetry contribution soon followed. Sandburg’s group of Chicago poems startled readers in March 1914. Frost and Robinson also appeared in 1914, as did the first Poetry contributions of Masters. In the next year came Eliot’s “Prufrock.” Here
7 Monroe, Poet’s Life, p. 286.
8 Poetry, v. 1, Oct. 1912, p. 27.
POETRY 229
were the leaders of what came to be called the “poetry renaissance”; here were the “new poets.”
In 1914 Yeats visited America, and Poetry’s guarantors gave a dinner for him on March 1 at the Cliff Dwellers’ Club in Chicago. It was a distinguished social and literary occasion. After dinner, there were brief talks by the editor and others and a poetical greeting to the guest of honor by Ficke. Then, when Yeats rose, he began by saying that he was going to address his remarks “especially to a fellow craftsman.” He continued: “For since coming to Chicago I have read several times a poem by Mr. Lindsay, one which will be in the anthologies, ‘General Booth Enters Into Heaven.’ This poem is stripped bare of ornament; it has an earnest simplicity, a strange beauty. . . .” 9 As Yeats proceeded in his address, however, he read some simple but definitely unoriginal verse by Mary E. Coleridge and Walter de la Mare, and he had much to say about Paris as the center of “all the great influences in art and literature.”
After Yeats had finished, Lindsay was called upon to read “a new poem, which will soon appear in the Metropolitan Magazine ”■—a popular magazine, forsooth! Lindsay read “The Congo,” and it made a sensation. As an encore, the Springfield poet read the “Booth.” Writing about the occasion some months later, Alice Corbin Henderson, assistant editor of Poetry, exulted in Lindsay’s success. “Nothing could have afforded greater contrast at the recent dinner given in Chicago than the reading by Mr. Yeats and Mr. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay of their poems,” wrote Mrs. Henderson. Yeats had dwelt on “poetic fixities,” so it was a great shock when Lindsay “broke the spell” with the primitive noise and vigor of “his newly quarried ‘Congo.’ ” And Mrs. Henderson slyly mentioned the fact that these poems were produced as far away from Paris as Springfield, Illinois. 10
Poetry was a kind of sponsor for Illinois-born Lindsay and Sandburg, whose first important poems it published. Its unswerving support of Frost and Robinson was somewhat different: they were less boisterous, they were eastern, and they had
their other outlets. But there was another group welcomed by Poetry that did much to save it from provincialism and give color to its early volumes; this was the small poetic fellowship that adopted the name “imagistes,” later usually anglicized as “imagists.”
Let Miss Monroe describe in brief the imagist episode:
During Poetry’s first years . . . the imagists and other vers lib- rists were “stripping the art bare” of rhetoric, eloquence, grandiloquence, poetic diction—of all the frills and furbelows which had over-draped, over-ornamented its beauty. They brought it closer to life, to modern subjects, people and interests; they rebelled against its traditional prosody; they made it sing in new rhythms, and in the English of modern speech . 11
It was Ezra Pound, then living in London, who brought the imagists into Poetry. Besides Pound, the original group consisted of T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, Richard Aldington, and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.). These were later joined by Amy Lowell, John Gould Fletcher, and D. H. Lawrence. Most of them contributed many poems over many years to Miss Monroe’s magazine. It cannot be said that imagism, as a movement, produced any great poems; but it exerted a real influence on the current of verse, which was already moving in the direction of abandonment of the older poetic diction and the adoption of the language of everyday speech, the use of newer and freer rhythms, and an emphasis on clear images (ideas). The group of English-American imagists broke up after publishing a few anthologies, and a reaction set in during the late twenties; but a certain liberating effect continued.
That creature of enthusiasms and antagonisms, Ezra Pound, skilled in poetics but lost in the hallucinations of the modern world scene, quarreled bitterly at times with Miss Monroe; but he remained as “foreign correspondent” for the magazine’s first six years, and many years later the editor testified that he had been “the most dynamic and stimulating of our early correspondents.” 12 Even after he deserted the imagists for the “vorticists” and other strange gods, Pound kept coming back to
11 Poetry, v. 33, Oct. 1928, p. 34.
12 Monroe, Poet’s Life, p. 258. See ^.lso Miss Monroe’s tribute to Pound in Poetry, v. 26, May 1925, pp. 90-97.
Poetry at intervals with letters and some of his “Cantos.” It was in a review of the latter that Allen Tate wrote of him: “We know that what Mr. Pound understands, as no other living man, is the craftsmanship of verse . . but Tate complains of the “logical confusion of his intellect” when discussing both poetry and life. 13 Later another Poetry critic admitted the great influence of Pound, despite “the ineffable jargon of his public epistles.” 14 “Why not laugh at Ezra Pound and all the other exiles and their rages?” Harriet Monroe once asked, 15 but after Pound’s pro-Fascist broadcasts from Italy during the Second World War, there was no more laughing at him. Eunice Tietjens, associate editor of Poetry, issued a kind of formal anathema in 1942. “The time has come,” she wrote, “to put a formal end to the countenancing of Ezra Pound. ... In the name of American poetry, and of all who practise the art, let us hope that this is the end of Ezra Pound.” 16
[It was not quite the end, however.* In February 1949, Pound—then in prison under accusation of treason for his broadcasts—was given the Bollingen Prize for Poetry ($1,000) by the Fellows of American Letters of the Library of Congress, for his Pisan Cantos. The award immediately aroused controversy and drew vigorous editorial comment in newspapers. In the issue of Poetry for April of that year, the “News Notes” department included a brief unsigned comment noting the award and the controversy. It praised Pound for his influence on other poets, including Yeats, and—essentially endorsing the award—remarked: “. . . nothing is more understandable than that he should have adopted a rather cross attitude towards America. This has proved itself, however, to be in his case the creative and therefore the right attitude, and one
13 Poetry, v. 41, Nov. 1932, p. 108.
14 Ibid,., v. 51, March 1938, p. 325.
15 Ibid., v. 33, Jan. 1929, p. 207.
16 Ibid., v. 60, April 1942, pp. 38-40.
* This section enclosed in brackets was written by John T. Frederick to carry out the intention of the author as indicated in a note to himself appended to the Poetry sketch. Dr. Mott wanted to add material that related to the controversy resulting from the presentation of the Bollingen Award to Ezra Pound. The bracketed section ends on p. 235. Concerning Frederick see asterisk footnote on pp. 172-73.
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Vol.XIH No. Vi