Nation's 75th

Three months after General Lee surrendered at Appomattox in 1865, the first issue of a new liberal weekly called The Nation appeared in Manhattan. Founder and editor was a shy, 33-year-old, Irish Presbyterian, Edwin Lawrence Godkin, who had emigrated to the U. S. nine years earlier. His associate editor, Wendell Phillips Garrison, was the son of Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. The Nation (named after a fiery Dublin weekly) announced that its purpose was to defend "free inquiry and free endeavor."

Last week The Nation celebrated its 75th birthday (five months prematurely) with a 96-page anniversary issue. Still a champion of one particular kind of inquiry--i.e., by-line exposes and rascal-kicking--The Nation proudly printed a message from Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Wrote the President: "I think no one would ever accuse The Nation of seeking to become a popular organ. . . ." But Founder Godkin would have suffered a severe shock could he have seen last week how far The Nation had gone along the road on which he started it. For Godkin's politics were fairly spongy compared to The Nation's present devout and single-minded Leftism.

Of the movement for an eight-hour day, The Nation in 1865 uttered a gloomy warning: "The time is not far distant when all things will be in common and grass grow in Broadway."

Editor Godkin attacked just about everything: trade unions, trusts, Populists, single-taxers, Socialists, railway barons, all kinds of political chicanery. Bankers called him a dangerous radical, labor leaders de nounced him as a dangerous reactionary.

More solid was The Nation as a critic of letters. Literary Editor Wendell Phillips Garrison was a stickler for scholarship and accuracy. Henry James the Elder tore into Thomas Carlyle's life of Frederick the Great; Henry James Jr. at 22 took a lofty view of the works of Charles Dickens ("the greatest of superficial novelists"), sneered at Henry Kingsley ("the author leaps astride of a half-broken fancy . . . and trusts to Providence for the rest. . . ."), was appalled by Walt Whitman ("You talk entirely too much about your self."). Longfellow, Whittier, James Rus sell Lowell contributed to The Nation.

Henry Villard bought The Nation in 1 88 1. Villard was a native of Bavaria; his name was Ferdinand Heinrich Gustav Hilgard, but he changed it when he quarreled with his father and fled to the U. S. A reporter, Civil War correspondent, railway promoter, financier, Villard married Gar rison's sister Fanny. He left The Nation to his son, Oswald Garrison Villard, when he died in 1900.

Not until 1918 did The Nation blossom out into a full-blown crusading radical weekly. Publisher Villard had opposed U. S. entry into the war, and in The Nation he set out to blast imperialism, war, monopoly, reaction. The Nation campaigned to have U. S. troops recalled from Santo Domingo, Haiti, Nicaragua, denounced the Treaty of Versailles, fulminated against lynching, helped to uncover the Teapot Dome oil scandals.

Some of the most notable Leftist writers of the day wrote for Villard: Norman Thomas, Stuart Chase, Paul Y. Anderson, Heywood Broun, Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, Carl Van Doren. By 1935 they had far outstripped Villard's radical leanings, and he sold The Nation. Maurice Wertheim, a Manhattan financier and philanthropist, owned it for a brief spell, then passed it on in 1937 to Freda Kirchwey.

Publisher Kirchwey was a young woman three years out of Barnard College when she joined The Nation in 1918. In 1922 she became managing editor, in 1932 edi tor. At 43 she is gracious, handsome, sincerely Leftist in sympathy. With a circulation around 40,000, Freda Kirchwey manages to make The Nation pay its own way on a Spartan budget. Approximately a fourth of its revenue comes from advertising. Editor Kirchwey believes that with 15,000 more subscribers, The Nation could get along without any advertisers at all.

According to a recent survey compiled for The Nation by Elmo Roper, over 63% of its readers are well-to-do, less than 37% belong to the underprivileged classes for whose sake it is edited. The average Nation reader is Jewish (46%) or Protestant (43 1/2%), lives in the industrial East, favors Government control of some or all business, voted for La Follette in 1924, for Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936.

By last week it seemed that The Nation after 75 years had passed its radical peak, was headed back toward Godkin. Wrote Max Lerner in a survey of U. S. reform: ". . . Marxian influence . . . led to an ac cent on faith which . . . could result only in a drastic disillusionment. . . . The only possible focus for an American Left is America. . . . We must re-examine Marxism. . . ."

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