The Nation - History

History

The 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.