Just across Union Square from The Nation’s headquarters on Irving Place there stands a hole-in-the-wall falafel joint that some of the magazine’s employees— including, rumor has it, the author of this blog post — are known to frequent. Habitually. Like, every day. Sometimes twice. Like salmon swimming home.
Until recently, this behavior had long puzzled scholars — defying, it seems, all we think we know about the instinct to self-preservation. But actually it makes eminent good sense: the falafel joint’s address — 26 East 17th Street — once belonged to the first headquarters of the Union League Club, and it was there, one fateful night in the early summer of 1863, just days before the Battle of Gettysburg, at a clap of divine lightning, at the end of an eternal drum-roll, for good or for ill, depending on whom you ask, the magazine now known the world over as America’s oldest weekly was summoned from the ether and was born.
A Paper With No Rival
It is the evening of June 25. A 41-year-old landscape architect and occasional journalist named Frederick Law Olmsted is addressing a group of high-society gentlemen, who established the club earlier in the year to secure a space for earnest pro-Union sentiment in a city whose establishment has long been intimately tied with Southern cotton interests and therefore seems only lackadaisically committed to prosecuting the Civil War and repairing the fractured Union. (The draft riots are only two and a half weeks away.) Unsure yet what the postwar scene will look like, Olmsted thinks there is great need for a publication committed to “secur[ing] a more careful, accurate and elaborate discussion of political, economical and commercial topics.”
“Such a paper would have no rival,” Olmsted argues in a pamphlet he has circulated among the attendees. “There is nothing in the field which, in the least, resembles what is now proposed.” The weekly rhythm would be just right:
To keep the attention of the people fixed upon the remote consequences of apparently insignificant occurrences, the daily press is too superficial, while the monthly and quarterly magazines necessarily lag behind the period of popular interest in the various events of which they treat.
“There is no way in which capital can be so well invested,” Olmsted concludes his pitch, than through a publication devoted to the promotion of “careful, candid and conscientious study of the deeper nature and remoter bearings of the leading events of each passing week.”
The next day Olmsted writes to his wife — he actually dedicates the letter, “Dear Wife” — about the meeting: “The thing starts so favorably, I shall go into it strong, meaning to succeed.” But actually, he quickly drops it: A mining scheme near Yosemite Valley in California beckons and promises lots of loot (spoiler: it doesn’t deliver), and Olmsted tasks his friend, the immigrant Anglo-Irish journalist E.L. Godkin, with getting the publication off the ground. One thing he does do for Godkin before shipping off is to give him an introduction to his friend in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Charles Eliot Norton, editor of the North American Review and arguably the most highly-esteemed intellectual of the day. Norton encourages Godkin, who nonetheless goes home empty-handed and soon gives up the whole idea.
If you have your remote, fast-forward twenty-two months. The city and the country have changed dramatically. Lee has surrendered, Lincoln has been assassinated, the slaves are free — though many remain on their plantations for lack of means or ideas about what else to do. The abolitionist movement is beginning to fracture, unsure whether its aims have been accomplished. A faction led by William Lloyd Garrison is satisfied to move on to other projects like women’s suffrage, while Wendell Phillips and his followers believe there is much more work to be done, that it would be criminal to free the slaves and leave them to their own devices in a land where much of the rest of the population was until recently willing to die to maintain their subjugation.
Meanwhile, the previously Garrison-aligned Philadelphia abolitionist, preacher and Underground Railroad activist James Miller McKim is thinking about starting a publication to carry on the work of the abolitionist papers, the Anti-Slavery Standard and Garrison’s The Liberator, “devoted,” he writes to Norton, “to the national questions and interests involved in the condition and position of the black race on a broader ground than that of the old papers.” Basically, McKim wants the mission of the new publication to be the continuation of the abolitionist spirit into the post-emancipation era.
Knowing of the previous Olmsted scheme, Norton hooks McKim up with the floundering Godkin, who has been considering going back to the Old World for lack of direction. After tentatively convincing the principals — hardcore egalitarians if ever there were any — that an essay he has just submitted to North American Review arguing against black male suffrage isn’t quite what it seems, Godkin gets the job.
When Olmsted, still in the Sierras, hears about the hiring, he climbs a mountain and toasts Godkin with “good Rhine wine.”
McKim’s daughter has recently married Wendell Phillips Garrison, the son of one of the leading abolitionists and the namesake of the other, who signs on as literary editor of the new publication — a position he ends up holding for more than forty years. After raising more money from abolitionists in Boston and Philadelphia — the magazine’s home turf, New York, proves infertile ground for such radical ideas — the paper is given a name as ambitious as its ideals: The Nation.
Its first home is at 130 Nassau Street, in the building of the American Freedmen’s Aid Union, a newly-formed amalgamation of several societies devoted to assisting ex-slaves, the first of which was founded in early 1862 with the stated purpose of helping “the industrial, intellectual, moral and religious improvement of persons released from slavery in the course of the war for the Union.” (Spoiler again: Early in the next century, The Nation’s owner and later editor Oswald Garrison Villard will return the favor by donating space in the magazine’s then-headquarters on Park Row to a new organization he has helped found, the National Negro Committee, soon renamed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or the NAACP.)
But back to 1865: “No. 1 is afloat,” Godkin writes to Norton when the first issue is published in early July, “and the tranquility which still reigns in this city, under the circumstances, I confess amazes me.”
One hundred fifty years later, The Nation remains committed to documenting and taking sides in what an editorial in the very first issue called “the conflict of ages, the great strife between the few and the many, between privilege and equality, between law and power, between opinion and the sword.” It has striven to ensure that as long as that conflict continues there will be no more tranquil days. As for whether it has succeeded at that mission, or at the one described 152 years ago at the location of what is now a beloved falafel joint, that is for its readers to judge. It may be, as Zhou Enlai said (but did not mean) about the importance of the French Revolution, too early to judge.
Note: The first issue of The Nation hit the streets 150 years ago today.
An enjoyable and informative read. I particularly liked the newspaper clipping (click on it to enlarge) and the 2nd objective. ” . . . to promote a more equal distribution of the fruits of progress and civilization.” Another good reason to know your history and see how humanity continues to struggle with issues and how important it is to keep the light on.