The Nation
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(Wikipedia) - The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left. " Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P. , at 33 Irving Place, New York City. The Nation has bureaus in Washington, D.C. , London and South Africa, with departments covering architecture, art, corporations, defense, environment, films, legal affairs, music, peace and disarmament, poetry and the United Nations. Circulation peaked at 187,000 in 2006 but by 2010 had dropped back to 145,000 in print, though digital subscriptions had risen to over 15,000. Print ad pages declined by 5% from 2009 to 2010, while digital advertising rose 32.8% from 2009-10. Advertising accounts for 10% of total revenue for the magazine, while circulation totals 60%. The Nation has lost money in all but three or four years of operation and is sustained in part by a group of more than 30,000 donors called The Nation Associates, who donate funds to the periodical above and beyond their annual subscription fees. This program accounts for 30% of the total revenue for the magazine. An annual cruise also generates $200,000 for the magazine. The Nation This article is about the U.S. magazine. For other uses, see Nation (disambiguation).
The Nation is the oldest continuously-published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, it is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.
The Nation has bureaus in Washington, D.C., London and South Africa, with departments covering architecture, art, corporations, defense, environment, films, legal affairs, music, peace and disarmament, poetry and the United Nations. Circulation peaked at 187,000 in 2006 but by 2010 had dropped back to 145,000 in print, though digital subscriptions had risen to over 15,000. Print ad pages declined by 5% from 2009 to 2010, while digital advertising rose 32.8% from 2009–10. Advertising accounts for 10% of total revenue for the magazine, while circulation totals 60%. The Nation has lost money in all but three or four years of operation and is sustained in part by a group of more than 30,000 donors called The Nation Associates, who donate funds to the periodical above and beyond their annual subscription fees. This program accounts for 30% of the total revenue for the magazine. An annual cruise also generates $200,000 for the magazine.
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According to The Nation's founding prospectus of 1865, "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."
HistoryThe Nation was established in July 1865 on "Newspaper Row" at 130 Nassau Street in Manhattan. The publisher was Joseph H. Richards, and the editor was Edwin Lawrence Godkin, an immigrant from England who had formerly worked as a correspondent of the London Daily News. Godkin, a classical liberal, sought to establish what one sympathetic commentator later characterized as "an organ of opinion characterized in its utterance by breadth and deliberation, an organ which should identify itself with causes, an which should give its support to parties primarily as representative of these causes."
Among the causes supported by the publication in its earliest days was civil service reform — moving the basis of government employment from a political patronage system to a professional bureaucracy based upon meritocracy. The Nation also was preoccupied with the reestablishment of a sound national currency in the years after the American Civil War, arguing that a stable currency was necessary to restore the economic stability of the nation. Closely related to this was the publication's advocacy of the elimination of protective tariffs in favor of lower prices of consumer goods associated with a free trade system.
Wendell Phillips Garrison, son of William Lloyd Garrison, was Literary Editor from 1865 to 1906. The magazine would stay at Newspaper Row for 90 years.
In 1881, newspaperman-turned-railroad-baron Henry Villard acquired The Nation and converted it into a weekly literary supplement for his daily newspaper the New York Evening Post. The offices of the magazine were moved to the Evening Post's headquarters at 210 Broadway. The New York Evening Post would later morph into a tabloid; the New York Post was a left-leaning afternoon tabloid under owner Dorothy Schiff from 1939 to 1976 and, since then, has been a conservative tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, while The Nation became known for its markedly liberal (and sometimes leftist) politics.
In 1900, Henry Villard's son, Oswald Garrison Villard, inherited the magazine and the Evening Post, selling off the latter in 1918. Thereafter, he remade The Nation into a current affairs publication and gave it an anti-classical liberal orientation: Oswald Villard welcomed the New Deal and supported the nationalization of industries – thus reversing the meaning of "liberalism" as the founders of "The Nation" would have understood the term, from a belief in a smaller and more restricted government to a belief in a larger and less restricted government. Villard's takeover prompted the FBI to monitor the magazine for roughly 50 years. The FBI had a file on Villard from 1915. Villard sold the magazine in 1935. It became a nonprofit in 1943.
Almost every editor of The Nation from Villard's time to the 1970s was looked at for "subversive" activities and ties. When Albert Jay Nock, not long later, published a column criticizing Samuel Gompers and trade unions for being complicit in the war machine of the First World War, The Nation was briefly suspended from the U.S. mail.
During the late 1940s and again in the early 1950s, a merger was discussed by The Nation's Freda Kirchwey (later Carey McWilliams) and The New Republic's Michael Straight. The two magazines were very similar at that time—both were left of center, The Nation further left than TNR; both had circulations around 100,000, TNR had a slightly higher circulation; and both lost money—and it was thought that the two magazines could unite and make the most powerful journal of opinion.
During this period, Paul Blanshard was an Associate Editor of The Nation and served during the 1950s as its Special Correspondent in Uzbekistan. His most famous writing was a series of articles attacking the Roman Catholic Church in America as a dangerous, powerful, and undemocratic institution.
The new publication would have been called The Nation and New Republic. Kirchwey was the most hesitant, and both attempts to merge failed. The two magazines would later take very different paths, with The Nation having a higher circulation and The New Republic moving more to the right.
In June 1979, new Nation publisher Hamilton Fish and then-editor Victor Navasky moved the weekly to 72 Fifth Avenue. In June 1998, the periodical had to move to make way for condominium development. The offices of The Nation are now at 33 Irving Place in the Gramercy neighborhood.
In 1977, Hamilton Fish V bought the magazine and, in 1985, sold it to Arthur L. Carter, who had made a fortune as a founding partner of Cogan, Berlind, Weill & Levitt.
In 1995, Victor Navasky bought the magazine and, in 1996, became publisher.
Katrina vanden Heuvel is the editor and publisher of the Nation as of 2010.
ControversyIn 1989 The Nation published an article by the novelist Herbert Gold describing child sex slavery in Haiti which Mary Eberstadt criticized in 2009 as "nonchalant reportage" and "pedophilia chic" in her review "How Pedophilia Lost Its Cool".
Advertising policyIn 2004 the Anti-Defamation League criticized the journal for allowing advertisements from the Institute for Historical Review, which promotes Holocaust denial; The Nation vowed to not let it happen again.
The appearance in The Nation of advertisements from the organization Facts and Logic About the Middle East (FLAME) was criticized by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. In response, The Nation stated: "From our point of view, purveys one of the most destructive myths of Israel‘s right wing, namely, that Palestinians have no legitimate national rights ... We run it because The Nation‘s ad policy starts with the presumption that "we will accept advertising even if the views expressed are repugnant to those of the editors" .... Ads that present a political point of view are considered to fall under our editorial commitment to freedom of speech and, perforce, we grant them the same latitude we claim for our own views. But we do reserve the right to denounce the content of such ads".
Notable contributorsThe publisher and editor is Katrina vanden Heuvel. Former editors include Victor Navasky, Norman Thomas (associate editor), Carey McWilliams, and Freda Kirchwey, the subject of a biography by the feminist historian Sara Alpern.
Notable contributors have included Albert Einstein, Albert J. Nock, Franz Boas, Patrick Buchanan, Martin Luther King Jr., Bertrand Russell, Barbara Garson, H. L. Mencken, Gore Vidal, Edward Said, Arthur Danto, Christopher Hitchens, Hunter S. Thompson, Langston Hughes, Ralph Nader, James Baldwin, Kai Bird, Clement Greenberg, Tom Hayden, Daniel Singer, I.F. Stone, Studs Terkel, Leon Trotsky, George Orwell, Henry Miller, Franklin D. Roosevelt, James K. Galbraith, John Steinbeck, Barbara Tuchman, T. S. Eliot, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Frost, Frank Lloyd Wright, Hannah Arendt, Ezra Pound, Henry James, Charles Sanders Peirce, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Maynard Keynes, Naomi Klein, Alexander Cockburn, Tariq Ali, Michael Naumann, Stuart Chase, and poet John Beecher.
Regular columnsThe magazine runs a number of regular columns.
- Beneath the Radar by Gary Younge
- Deadline Poet by Calvin Trillin
- Diary of a Mad Law Professor by Patricia J. Williams
- The Liberal Media by Eric Alterman
- Look Out by Naomi Klein
- Sister Citizen by Melissa Harris-Perry
- Subject to Debate by Katha Pollitt
- The Nation cryptic crossword by Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto (by Frank W. Lewis from 1947-2009)
Regular columns in the past have included:
- Beat the Devil (1984–2012) by Alexander Cockburn
- Dispatches (1984–87) by Max Holland and Kai Bird
- Minority Report (1982–2002) by Christopher Hitchens
In 2008, The Nation editorial board was composed of Deepak Bhargava, Norman Birnbaum, Barbara Ehrenreich, Richard Falk, Frances FitzGerald, Eric Foner, Philip Green, Lani Guinier, Tom Hayden, Randall Kennedy, Tony Kushner, Elinor Langer, Deborah Meier, Toni Morrison, Victor Navasky, Pedro Antonio Noguera, Richard Parker, Michael Pertschuk, Elizabeth Pochoda, Marcus G. Raskin, Andrea Batista Schlesinger, David Weir, and Roger Wilkins.
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| Journalism portal |
- The American Prospect
- The Atlantic
- Commentary (magazine)
- Dissent (magazine)
- Mother Jones (magazine)
- The New Republic
- The Nation website
- The Nation digital archive
- The Nation masthead
- The Nation Associates home page
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