The Nation
The Nation is a progressive[2][4] American monthly magazine that covers political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper that closed in 1865, after ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Thereafter, the magazine proceeded to a broader topic, The Nation. An important collaborator of the new magazine was its Literary Editor Wendell Phillips Garrison, son of William. He had at his disposal his father's vast network of contacts.
This article is about the US magazine. For the Thai newspaper, see The Nation (Thailand). For the New Zealand TV programme, see The Nation (TV programme). For other uses, see Nation (disambiguation).Editor
The Nation is published by its namesake owner, The Nation Company, L.P., at 520 8th Ave New York, NY 10018. It has news 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 dropped to 145,000 in print by 2010, although digital subscriptions had risen to over 15,000. By 2021, the total for both print and digital combined was 96,000.[5]
History[edit]
Founding and journalistic roots[edit]
The Nation was established on July 6, 1865, at 130 Nassau Street ("Newspaper Row") in Manhattan. Its founding coincided with the closure of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator,[6] also in 1865, after slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution; a group of abolitionists, led by the architect Frederick Law Olmsted, desired to found a new weekly political magazine. Edwin Lawrence Godkin, who had been considering starting such a magazine for some time, agreed and so became the first editor of The Nation.[7] Wendell Phillips Garrison, son of The Liberator's editor/publisher William Lloyd Garrison, was Literary Editor from 1865 to 1906.
Its founding publisher was Joseph H. Richards; the editor was Godkin, an immigrant from Ireland who had formerly worked as a correspondent of the London Daily News and The New York Times.[8][9] Godkin 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, and which should give its support to parties primarily as representative of these causes."[10]
In its "founding prospectus" the magazine wrote that the publication would have "seven main objects" with the first being "discussion of the topics of the day, and, above all, of legal, economical, and constitutional questions, with greater accuracy and moderation than are now to be found in the daily press."[11] The Nation pledged to "not be the organ of any party, sect or body" but rather to "make an earnest effort to bring to 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."[11]
In the first year of publication, one of the magazine's regular features was The South As It Is,[12] dispatches from a tour of the war-torn region by John Richard Dennett, a recent Harvard graduate and a veteran of the Port Royal Experiment. Dennett interviewed Confederate veterans, freed slaves, agents of the Freedmen's Bureau, and ordinary people he met by the side of the road.
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.[10] 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.[13] 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.[14]
Finances[edit]
Print ad pages declined by 5% from 2009 to 2010, while digital advertising rose 32.8% from 2009 to 2010.[34] Advertising accounts for 10% of total revenue for the magazine, while circulation totals 60%.[35] 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 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.[35] Since late 2012, the Nation Associates program has been called Nation Builders.[36]
In 2023, the magazine had approximately 91,000 subscribers, roughly 80% of whom pay for the print magazine. Adding sales from newsstands, The Nation had a total circulation of 96,000 copies per issue in 2021, earning the majority of its revenue from subscriptions and donations, rather than print advertising.[33]
Poetry[edit]
Since its creation, The Nation has published significant works of American poetry,[37][38] including works by Hart Crane, Eli Siegel, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich,[37] as well as W.S. Merwin, Pablo Neruda, Denise Levertov, and Derek Walcott.[38]
In 2018, the magazine published a poem entitled "How-To" by Anders Carlson-Wee which was written in the voice of a homeless man and used black vernacular. This led to criticism from writers such as Roxane Gay because Carlson-Wee is white. The Nation's two poetry editors, Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith, issued an apology for publishing the poem, the first such action ever taken by the magazine.[37] The apology itself became an object of criticism also. Poet and Nation columnist Katha Pollitt called the apology "craven" and likened it to a letter written from "a reeducation camp".[37] Grace Schulman, The Nation's poetry editor from 1971 to 2006, wrote that the apology represented a disturbing departure from the magazine's traditionally broad conception of artistic freedom.[38]
The magazine runs a number of regular columns:
Regular columns in the past have included: