The Nation

• 1. Introduction

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  The Nation was born on the 6th of July, 1865, at a building on Nassau Street in Manhattan known as Newspaper Row. The timing was not accidental. Just months earlier, the Thirteenth Amendment had abolished slavery, and the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator had published its final issue. A group of reformers, led by the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, wanted a new kind of publication. Not a daily paper grinding out partisan dispatches, but something more deliberate. A magazine that would wage war, as it put it in its own founding prospectus, on "the vices of violence, exaggeration and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred".

  The man they found to lead it was Edwin Lawrence Godkin, an immigrant from Ireland who had reported for the London Daily News and The New York Times. Godkin's ambition was to create, as one admirer later put it, "an organ of opinion characterized in its utterance by breadth and deliberation" - an organ that would back parties only when those parties stood for causes worth backing. That founding vision set a tone the magazine would carry, fight over, and periodically betray across the next century and a half.

  What followed was not a simple story of principled consistency. The Nation would endorse socialist presidential candidates, then pivot to backing Franklin Roosevelt three elections running. It would call for American entry into World War II before Pearl Harbor, while backing détente with Stalin afterward. Its editors would buy and sell ownership among themselves, move offices, and watch circulation peak, collapse, and stabilize in digital form. A 2018 poetry controversy would produce the first editorial apology in the magazine's history. And in 2023, Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara would announce its shift from a biweekly format to a larger monthly publication. The question the rest of this documentary pursues is how a magazine born in the wreckage of the Civil War became what it still calls itself today: "the flagship of the left".

• 2. Godkin's Vision

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  Edwin Lawrence Godkin arrived at The Nation with a very specific idea of what a political publication should do. His founding prospectus listed seven objectives for the new magazine, with the first being discussion of "legal, economical, and constitutional questions, with greater accuracy and moderation than are now to be found in the daily press". That phrasing was a direct rebuke to the journalism of the day.

  Joseph H. Richards served as the founding publisher, but the editorial sensibility belonged entirely to Godkin. His first hires included Wendell Phillips Garrison, son of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who served as the magazine's Literary Editor. The younger Garrison brought with him his father's vast network of contacts built over decades of reform organizing. That network gave The Nation an immediate reach into the circles of Reconstruction-era politics.

  In its first year, one of the magazine's regular features was called "The South as It Is", a series of eyewitness accounts from the Reconstruction South. The magazine's early editorial causes were tightly linked: civil service reform, meaning a shift from political patronage to merit-based hiring; the restoration of a stable national currency after the Civil War; and the elimination of protective tariffs in favor of lower consumer prices through free trade. These positions shared an underlying logic rooted in classical liberal economics, the idea that sound institutions and open markets were the basis of a healthy republic.

  The magazine pledged it would "not be the organ of any party, sect or body" - a promise its later editors would test repeatedly.

• 3. The Villard Years

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  In June 1881, the journalist Henry Villard purchased The Nation, and the magazine entered a new phase by printing in conjunction with the New York Evening Post, which at the time shared its broadly liberal outlook. When Villard died, ownership passed to his son Oswald Garrison Villard, whose politics ran toward racial equality and isolationism.

  Oswald Villard grew increasingly uneasy with the arrangement between The Nation and the Post. In July 1918, he announced that the magazine would stop reprinting the newspaper's articles, explaining that the practice had given readers the false impression that The Nation was simply a weekly version of the Evening Post. The separation clarified the magazine's identity at a moment when that identity was shifting fast.

  As the 1932 presidential election approached, The Nation took an unusual position. Oswald Villard saw no real choice between Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, and the magazine urged its readers to vote instead for Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party of America candidate. Villard wrote that the person who voted for either major-party candidate was "throwing away his vote" and postponing what Woodrow Wilson had called in 1912 a "peaceful revolution". The magazine reversed course in the three elections that followed, endorsing Roosevelt each time.

  Villard eventually sold the magazine in 1935 to a nonprofit entity called "The Nation Fund, Inc", established by banker Maurice Wertheim. Two years later, in 1937, Wertheim sold it to editor Freda Kirchwey, who was direct about her intentions: she bought it because she wanted to turn it into what she called a "voice of leftism". The term "liberalism" was shifting under The Nation's feet. Villard had moved the magazine from the founders' belief in a smaller government toward support for the New Deal and nationalization of industries, and in doing so changed what the word meant in its pages.

• 4. War, Censorship, and the Holocaust

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  Freda Kirchwey ran The Nation through some of the most consequential years in its history. Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the magazine repeatedly called on the United States to enter World War II to resist fascism. Notably, it took this position before the Soviet Union itself became a target of Germany. Most leftist publications at the time were following a Stalinist line consistent with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; The Nation broke from that line, supporting American intervention even before Operation Barbarossa began in 1941.

  In January 1942, when the Holocaust was receiving almost no attention from the global media, The Nation was among the few publications reporting on Nazi Germany's crimes against Jews. It published multiple articles by Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein, who described what was happening in the concentration camps run by the Schutzstaffel. The magazine advocated for the United States to offer refuge to German Jewry.

  Kirchwey also supported the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Her advocacy for banning the fascist press brought her into conflict with her long-time friend Norman Thomas, who told her plainly: "In ten years or less it won't be the people you want to suppress now who will be suppressed and stay suppressed by your theory; it will be yourselves along with many others".

  Earlier in the magazine's history, a brush with the state had already illustrated Thomas's point. When writer Albert Jay Nock published a column criticizing Samuel Gompers and trade unions for complicity in the war machine of the First World War, The Nation was briefly suspended from the US mail. Kirchwey's own financial difficulties during the early 1940s led her to sell her individual ownership of the magazine in 1943, creating a nonprofit organization called Nation Associates, funded by a recruiting drive among sponsors. Nation Associates became responsible for the magazine's operations, with Kirchwey serving as both its president and editor.

• 5. The Red Scare and After

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  In the 1950s, The Nation drew criticism from across the political spectrum for its stance on the Soviet Union. The magazine advocated for détente with Stalin's expansionist USSR and openly criticized McCarthyism. Critics labeled it "pro-communist". One of its own writers, Louis Fischer, resigned, saying the foreign coverage had become too sympathetic to the Soviet position.

  Diana Trilling, however, noted that Kirchwey did allow anti-Soviet voices, including Trilling herself, to publish criticism of Russia in the magazine's arts section. The distinction between the editorial and cultural pages was real, even if critics outside the magazine rarely made it.

  The consequences were concrete. The Nation was banned from several school libraries in New York City and Newark. In 1950, a librarian named Ruth Brown was fired from her job in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, after a citizens committee complained that she had given shelf space to the magazine.

  In 1957, Fidel Castro contributed an article to The Nation titled "What Cuba's Rebels Want". A year later, the magazine published a piece that predicted the Bay of Pigs invasion, discussing the possibility of a US incursion into Cuba before it happened.

  Ownership changed hands again after the early Cold War years. In 1955, George Kirstein replaced Freda Kirchwey as magazine owner. James J. Storrow Jr. acquired it from Kirstein in 1965, and in 1977 a group organized by Hamilton Fish V bought it from the Storrow family. Hamilton Fish moved the magazine's offices in June 1979 to 72 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

• 6. Poetry, Controversy, and Culture

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  Since its founding, The Nation has published poetry by figures including Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, W. S. Merwin, Pablo Neruda, Denise Levertov, and Derek Walcott. Grace Schulman served as the magazine's poetry editor from 1971 to 2006.

  In 2018, the magazine published a poem called "How-To" by Anders Carlson-Wee, written in the voice of a homeless man using black vernacular. Because Carlson-Wee is white, the poem drew criticism from writers including Roxane Gay. The two poetry editors at the time, Stephanie Burt and Carmen Gimenez Smith, issued a public apology for publishing the poem. It was the first apology of its kind in the magazine's history.

  The apology itself became the subject of a second controversy. Katha Pollitt, a poet and regular Nation columnist, called the apology "craven" and compared it to a letter written from "a reeducation camp". Grace Schulman, looking back on her decades as poetry editor, wrote that the apology marked a troubling departure from the magazine's longstanding commitment to broad artistic freedom.

  The magazine's regular columns have provided another dimension of its cultural presence. Christopher Hitchens wrote "Minority Report" from 1982 to 2002. Alexander Cockburn contributed "Beat the Devil" from 1984 until 2012. Calvin Trillin's "Deadline Poet" and Naomi Klein's "Look Out" have each brought distinct voices to the publication's range. The cryptic crossword, introduced by Frank W. Lewis in 1947, ran under his authorship until 2009 and continued under new editors until 2020, when it moved to a subscription format.

• 7. Circulation, Finances, and the Digital Age

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  Circulation at The Nation peaked at 187,000 in 2006, then dropped to 145,000 in print by 2010. That decline coincided with digital subscriptions rising to over 15,000. By 2021, total circulation across print and digital combined stood at 96,000.

  The financial structure of the magazine has always been unusual. Advertising accounts for only 10% of total revenue, while circulation accounts for 60%. The remaining 30% comes from a donor program called Nation Associates, which counts more than 30,000 contributors who give beyond their subscription fees. An annual cruise generates an additional $200,000 for the magazine. The Nation has lost money in all but three or four years of its entire operation.

  Print advertising pages fell 5% between 2009 and 2010, while digital advertising rose 32.8% in the same period. As of 2023, the magazine had approximately 91,000 subscribers, with roughly 80% paying for the print edition.

  In 1995, veteran editor Victor Navasky and a group of investors that included Paul Newman acquired the magazine. Katrina vanden Heuvel succeeded Navasky as editor that same year, and became both editor and publisher in 2005. She stepped down on the 15th of June, 2019, when D. D. Guttenplan, the editor-at-large, took her place.

  On the 23rd of February, 2022, Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of Jacobin, was named president of The Nation. He told interviewers that he believes liberalism and socialism need to form a coalition to ensure progress, and saw his role at The Nation as one path toward that goal. In December 2023, Sunkara announced the magazine would shift from a biweekly format to a larger monthly publication, a structural change that closes one chapter in the life of a magazine now in its second century.

• 8. The 150th Anniversary

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  In 2015, The Nation reached its 150th anniversary. To mark the occasion, Academy Award-winning director Barbara Kopple produced a documentary film examining the magazine's history. The celebration also included an event at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, attended by Tony Kushner, Bill de Blasio, Walter Mosley, and Michael Moore.

  Former US President Barack Obama wrote a letter for the anniversary. He praised The Nation while noting that he disagreed with some of its positions - a formulation that neatly captured the magazine's relationship with mainstream Democratic politics over the decades.

  D. D. Guttenplan, who would later become editor, wrote a biography of the magazine for the occasion titled "The Nation: A Biography (The First 150 Years)". The History News Network wrote that the biography demonstrated how the magazine "has played, and continues to play, an important role in U.S. history, society, and politics".

  In January 2016, The Nation endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for the presidency, the third time in its history it had backed Sanders. The editorial board wrote that voters could trust Sanders because, in their words, he "doesn't owe his political career to the financial overlords of the status quo". That endorsement, coming just months after the 150th anniversary celebration, tied the magazine's past to the political realignment then taking shape - and to the coalition that Sunkara, arriving six years later, would make the explicit project of his presidency.