he Atlantic Monthly celebrates its 150th birthday this fall. In and of itself, this is a remarkable achievement. The failure rate of American magazines is notorious, rivaling big-city restaurants, network television pilots, and Internet startups for claimant to the title of world’s riskiest venture. Since the first general interest publication, The American Magazine, came into existence in the United States, in 1741, there has been a consistent pattern: few magazines survive their first issues, and, even today, in this cautious, safety-net age of focus groups and other prepublication marketing hedges, the average life expectancy of a new magazine is something closer to 150 days—not 150 years.
Exactly how The Atlantic managed to avoid the fate of so many other magazines is an open question, but its longevity seems attributable, at least in part, to the circumstances of its creation. While most magazines owe their start to editors, publishers, businesspeople, or investors, The Atlantic was founded largely by writers—an illustrious group that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell—and it has always been, at its core, a writers’ magazine. What does it mean to be “a writers’ magazine”? For one thing, writers who work for The Atlantic know that they have entrée to a highly educated audience that is in the habit of devoting serious blocks of time to reading its articles, essays, columns, and poems. For another, writers who work for The Atlantic know that they will be given the time and space to tell their stories dramatically and in depth, and that they will have a forum to develop their arguments in all their nuance and complexity. And finally, writers who work for The Atlantic know that their prose will never be subjected to ideological litmus tests or homogenizing, voice-eviscerating editing.
All of which may begin to explain how The Atlantic has managed to attract so many of the most revered writers and thinkers of the last century and a half: from novelists (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton,William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth) to scientists (Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, James D. Watson, Stephen Jay Gould, Edward O. Wilson); from economists (John Maynard Keynes, John Kenneth Galbraith, Milton Friedman) to humorists (Mark Twain, H. L.Mencken, Garrison Keillor, lan Frazier); from muckrakers (Jacob Riis, Lincoln Steffens, Henry Demarest Lloyd) to philosophers (William James, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead); from poets (William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath,W. H. Auden) to future presidents (Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John Fitzgerald Kennedy).
The long roll call of marquee names that have appeared between the magazine’s covers is, naturally, a source of pride for those who work at The Atlantic. But another test of a magazine is its ability to recognize and discover unknown talent, and here The Atlantic has posted an impressive track record of finding, recruiting, and mentoring writers whose reputations have not yet taken flight. The magazine provided an early and important publishing home for the work of Henry James, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway, and it published Walt Whitman, Vladimir Nabokov, Dylan Thomas, Eudora Welty, and Joyce Carol Oates when they were all relatively obscure. More recent discoveries have encompassed many of contemporary nonfiction’s leading lights, including James Fallows, William Langewiesche, Tracy Kidder, Nicholas Lemann, Eric Schlosser, Robert D. Kaplan, and Samantha Power.
And yet it would be a mistake to think of The Atlantic as merely a pantheon, a hilltop Hall of Fame one visits to commune with the august. When I started work on this book, in early 2006, I was keenly aware of the premium that the magazine has always placed on cutting through the tangle of daily headlines and digging down to the larger and longer-lasting stories that lie beneath.What I hadn’t expected was that my trip through the magazine’s leather-bound and online archives would afford such a splendid view of many of the major events and currents of American history.
For example, The Atlantic published some of the landmark documents of the abolitionist movement (Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “American Civilization,” James Russell Lowell’s “The Election in November”); of the progressive movement (Jacob Riis’s “The Battle with the Slum,” Jane Addams’s “The Devil-Baby at Hull House”); of the environmental movement (Henry David Thoreau’s “Walking,” John Muir’s “The American Forests,” John Burroughs’s “The Divine Soil”); of the nuclear nonproliferation movement (Albert Einstein’s “Atomic War and Peace,” J. Robert Oppenheimer’s “The Open Mind”); of the civil rights movement (W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Souls of Black Folk,”Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”); of the feminist movement (Margaret Deland’s “The Change in the Feminine Ideal,” Nora Johnson’s “The Captivity of Marriage”); of the gay rights movement (Chandler Burr’s “Homosexuality and Biology”); of the victims’ rights movement (Eric Schlosser’s “A Grief Like No Other”); and of the human rights movement (Samantha Power’s “Bystanders to Genocide”).
If The Atlantic has a long history of wading into turbulent waters, it has an equally persistent one of challenging the reigning orthodoxy. At the time of the magazine’s birth, slavery was still legal in parts of the United States, and The Atlantic’s founders—all ardent abolitionists— made the emancipation cause the fulcrum of their new publication. The Atlantic endorsed Abraham Lincoln for president in October 1860, a time when many abolitionists were still wary of him and impatient with his moderate views on ending slavery. The support of an important antislavery periodical just weeks before the election was considered crucial to Lincoln’s victory.
The Atlantic was the first American magazine to recognize the importance of Charles Darwin and to champion his theories. Seventy-five years before “diversity” and “multiculturalism” became household words, it was the first magazine to denounce prevailing tendencies to foist Anglo-Saxon culture on America’s growing, increasingly heterogeneous immigrant population. In 1890, The Atlantic published a seminal essay by the military theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan that called for an end to American isolationism and proclaimed the need for the United States to transform itself into a sea power, particularly in the Pacific. One avid reader of that article was a future Atlantic contributor named Theodore Roosevelt, then a member of the U.S. Civil Service Commission. Ten years later, Roosevelt would adapt many of Mahan’s key ideas into policy cornerstones of his presidency. Roosevelt also fell under the spell of another frequent contributor, John Muir, whose impassioned essays on the necessity of preserving the American wilderness helped persuade the president to place millions of acres of woodlands under federal protection.
The Atlantic virtually invented a whole new genre—the “big idea” piece that challenges conventional belief about, or awakens public interest in, a significant political or social issue. Emblematic of such pioneering, and often uncannily prophetic, articles was the 1945 essay “As We May Think,” by Vannevar Bush, an engineer, military research and development expert, and high-tech visionary. A half century before anybody had heard the term “online,” Bush’s essay presaged not only the coming of the Internet but also its dominant role in global communications. In 1982, the magazine published what many criminologists contend was one of the twentieth century’s most influential articles on law enforcement; that cover story, “Broken Windows,” by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, introduced to a national audience the concept of “community policing” and changed the face of police departments around the country. A full two decades before the attacks of 9/11, The Atlantic published V. S. Naipaul’s excoriating chronicle of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, “Among the Believers” (the opening chapter from his famously controversial book of the same name), and a decade later followed up with a much-discussed cover story by the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis (“The Roots of Muslim Rage”) explaining why the growing radical Muslim movement, fueled by virulent anti-Americanism, was becoming a powerful and dangerous force in the world. And in 2002, when most of the American media seemed to be operating in lockstep with the Bush administration’s preparations for invading Iraq, The Atlantic’s longtime correspondent James Fallows was one of the few voices to call into question the war’s official rationales and long-range planning. Published six months before the war even began, Fallows’s cover story “The Fifty-first State” spelled out in elaborate detail nearly every one of the major problems that has bedeviled the occupation over the ensuing years.
All this is not to suggest that there have been no missteps along the way. Indeed, some of the gaffes have bordered on the spectacular. In the nineteenth century, The Atlantic repeatedly rejected the submissions of a subscriber and aspiring poet from Amherst, Massachusetts, named Emily Dickinson—a failure of judgment that would not be rectified until five years after her death. And the magazine is still trying to live down its September 1999 cover story, which fearlessly and ditzily forecasted an imminent, astronomical rise in stock prices—“Dow 36,000”—just six months before the dot-com bubble burst and the market began a precipitous descent. But to dwell on the scorecard of highs and lows is to obscure an essential point about The Atlantic Monthly: its unusually strong sense of institutional mission. To properly understand this feeling of collective purpose, whose roots trace directly back to the founding of the magazine, requires a brief exercise in time travel.
hen The Atlantic’s founding brain trust gathered at the elegant
Parker House Hotel in Boston to hash out final plans for their new magazine,
on May 5, 1857, there was no shortage at the table of social connection,
cultural cachet, or sheer literary candlepower. Among those in attendance
for that now-legendary dinner, in the hotel’s main dining room, were four
of the leading writers and intellectuals of their day: Ralph Waldo Emerson,
the celebrated philosopher whose insistence upon the sanctity of individual
conscience had reverberated through the halls of academia and organized
religion; Oliver Wendell Holmes, the preternaturally gifted essayist,
poet, and Harvard Medical School professor, who seemed to have all of
Western literature and scientific knowledge on the tip of his tongue; Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, the inventor of the American epic poem and the
most popular poet in the United States; and James Russell Lowell, the next
generation’s brightest star in the literary firmament. Despite their Brahmin
pedigrees and tripartite names, these men did not always see eye to eye on
matters of politics and art. What drew them together, aside from a genuine
affection for each other’s company, was an intellectual intrepidity across a
great range of subjects, a deep-seated conviction that the written word had
an almost religious duty to instruct and inspire, and a collective ambition
to scale the heights of philosophy, political thought, and poetry.
And yet for all their eminence and accomplishments, each of these four men, like the four other planners who would join them for dinner that spring afternoon, was painfully aware—some from firsthand experience— of the difficulties of starting and sustaining a magazine. Emerson, for one, had suffered a serious disappointment in the magazine business with The Dial, a spirited monthly publication that he had cofounded in 1840 in order to give voice to the transcendentalist cause. Although The Dial had managed to lure some of the best-known writers in Emerson’s close-knit Concord circle, the magazine drew criticism for being too narrowly focused and, enfeebled by circulation problems, folded in 1844. Lowell, for his part, had had his own misadventures in the magazine world, incurring substantial personal debts when The Pioneer, a brash literary monthly he cofounded in 1843, failed after only three issues—a victim, by common consent, of acute undercapitalization. Indeed, the number of magazine meltdowns in and around Boston at that time had prompted Emerson to question in his journal whether any publication of true quality could make it financially in New England, and, in an 1850 letter to a friend, he compared trying to launch a magazine with “the measles, the influenza, and . . .[other] periodic distempers.”
In the months leading up to the Parker House conclave, the magazine bug was going around again. The prime carrier on this occasion was Francis Underwood, whose age (thirty-two) and position (publisher’s assistant) made him the youngest and most junior-level participant at the meeting but belied the crucial role that he would play in the magazine’s founding. Underwood is the unsung hero of The Atlantic’s early years. Overcoming an impoverished upbringing in western Massachusetts and a faltering start at college, he had eventually managed to earn a law degree in Kentucky—where he came to abhor the institution of slavery—and later found work as a law clerk to the Massachusetts state senate. Underwood’s heart, however, was not in the legal profession. A passionate reader of poetry, fiction, and essays, he was particularly enamored of the writings of the men who had assembled, at his invitation, at the Parker House to brainstorm a new magazine that would, in Underwood’s words, “bring the literary influence of New England letters to the anti-slavery cause.”
The men seated around the table tended to view their prospective magazine as part of a revolution that was taking place in American literature. In an explosion of artistic innovation, American writers were breaking free of the old ties that had bound them for decades to Europe and creating works with a distinctly American voice, a distinctly American point of view, and distinctly American themes. Emerson himself had first sounded the call to arms for a liberated, indigenous literature in his celebrated 1837 address “The American Scholar,” which Holmes would later call “our intellectual Declaration of Independence.” And in the first half of the 1850s, writers in the United States responded with an outpouring of literary brilliance the likes of which the country has seldom seen: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850),Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855). The epicenter of this new movement was in New England, particularly in the fertile literary soil in and around Boston. To Underwood and the others gathered around the table, the time seemed finally ripe, both editorially and commercially, for an ambitious national magazine of politics, science, literature, and the arts that would mirror and draw sustenance from the larger literary culture.
The kind of magazine these men wanted to read and to write for was nowhere to be found in America. Of the handful of successful publications, both national and regional, then in operation, most were heavily dependent on reprints (often pirated) from periodicals abroad, particularly in the realm of fiction. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, which had been founded in 1850, did publish some original essays by American writers, but Emerson,Holmes, Longfellow, and Lowell regarded its editorial content, at least in the early years, as more than a little shallow and overly beholden to popular taste. (Lowell once referred to Harper’s owners as “those Scribes and Pharisees.”) The four belletrists had been contributing for years to The North American Review, a small literary quarterly that had begun publishing out of Boston in 1815, but they had grown frustrated with its tiny readership and commensurately low pay. The Atlantic’s founders, it should be said, were motivated by more than moral outrage over slavery or high-minded thoughts of reinventing the American magazine. Like freelancers of any era, they hungered for a dependable and remunerative outlet for their essays, fiction, and poems.
Their best hope for making these dreams reality resided in Underwood, who had risen through the ranks of the prestigious Boston publishing house of Phillips, Sampson & Co., to become chief assistant to the publisher, Moses Phillips. For three years, Underwood had been lobbying his boss to underwrite his magazine project. At first, Phillips was skeptical—he had seen too many publications come to grief. But at the urging of his most popular writer, Harriet Beecher Stowe, whom Underwood had enlisted in his campaign, Phillips slowly began to warm to the idea. He had agreed to host this Parker House dinner, to listen carefully to the arguments, and to render his final decision.
Unfortunately, many of the details of the dinner are lost to history and to us. What we do know is that it lasted well into the evening (for five hours the participants dined on fresh oysters and thick cuts of beef and consumed prodigious quantities of champagne and brandy) and that by the end of the proceedings, Phillips had embraced the concept of the new magazine with a convert’s zeal. In a letter to his niece written soon after the event, the publisher made no secret of the exhilaration he felt merely to be in such exalted company. “We sat down at three p.m. and arose at eight,” he reported. “The time occupied was longer by about four hours and thirty minutes than I am in the habit of consuming in that kind of occupation, but it was the richest time intellectually by all odds that I have ever had.”
The dinner also settled the question of who would be the magazine’s first editor-in-chief. Toward the end of the evening, Underwood had placed one name in nomination, which was immediately seconded around the table. The overwhelming consensus was that the man for the job was James Russell Lowell. A popular poet, a respected scholar, an accomplished essayist, a commanding critic, a caustic satirist, and a fierce opponent of slavery, Lowell was already, at thirty-eight, one of the grandees of nineteenth-century American letters. Despite his earlier setback with the short-lived Pioneer, the presence of his name atop the magazine’s masthead conferred instant credibility and prestige.
In the weeks following the fateful Parker House meeting, the naturally gregarious Lowell went on a charm offensive, capitalizing on his large network of relationships in both the literary and the antislavery communities. He was a man with a Rolodex of golden names in his head, and he was soon generating assignments and reeling in manuscripts not only from Emerson, Holmes, and Longfellow but also from Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Harriet Beecher Stowe (whose novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was outselling everything but the Holy Bible). In these recruiting efforts, he was ably assisted by his good friend Underwood, who had assumed the title of “office editor” to serve at Lowell’s right hand. In the meantime, Holmes had proposed a name for the magazine—The Atlantic Monthly—that struck a euphonious chord with Lowell and the others. By invoking the vast body of water separating them from Europe, the title seemed to contain within itself at once an acknowledgment of their indebtedness to the Old World and an assertion of autonomy from it.
The magazine was an immediate hit with readers. The first-issue print run of twenty thousand sold out within days, and within a couple of years, circulation had climbed above thirty thousand. These numbers are a far cry from the subscription and newsstand totals of today, but the new publication’s rapid rise and high visibility were the envy of the mid-nineteenth-century magazine world. The Atlantic became a must-read among educated Americans—primarily in New England but also, unexpectedly, in far-flung pockets of the country. On a lecture tour of the hinterlands, one of the magazine’s frequent contributors, the literary critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, reported back to the home office how wonderful it was “to dip down into these little western towns and find an audience . . . of readers of the Atlantic, so glad to see me. . . . One man told me of a village [Casper, Iowa] with fifty houses and a club of twenty-five subscribers to The Atlantic Monthly.”
The centrality of Lowell not only to the early success but also to the enduring editorial direction of The Atlantic cannot be overstated. His outsized character and passion, as well as his remarkable breadth of interests, left an imprint on the magazine that continues to be felt to this day. Lowell was a scholar—a Harvard professor of Romance languages—but he wore his learning lightly, and his intellectual sights were trained intently on the modern world in all its complexity. He was a Boston Brahmin with strong opinions but without a hint of holier-than-thou, a man of deeply held democratic principles but also one of acerbically irreverent impulses, a genuine moralist who distrusted official pieties. He had pinpoint instincts about the subjects and genres that would appeal to a general audience, but he was not afraid, as Emerson put it, “to defy the public,” by which Emerson meant that Lowell would neither lower his standards to enlarge his readership nor hesitate, when the spirit moved him, to storm the battlements of established institutions and received wisdom.
Yet despite the magazine’s fast start, most members of the official Atlantic family tended to downplay the good news of the moment and to take the long view. One of these was Charles Eliot Norton, an early contributor and eminent Harvard art historian who, in a letter to Lowell, articulated a hope that has only now, a century and a half later, been fulfilled.
“Of course, it will succeed with you as its Editor,” Norton wrote. “But such things are never permanent in our country. They burn brightly for a while, and then burn out—and some other light takes their place. It would be a great thing for us if any undertaking of this kind could live long enough to get affections and associations connected with it, whose steady glow should take the place of, and more than supply, the shine of novelty, and the dazzle of the first go-off. I wish we had a Sylvanus Urban,* a hundred and fifty years old. I wish, indeed, we had something so old in America; I would give a thousand of our new lamps for the one old, battered, but true magical light.”
y own hope is that readers will find the selections in this anthology to be
suffused with the “steady glow” of “true magical light” to which Norton
gives such eloquent expression. Making the final choices has been no easy
task. Although the book is substantial, many worthy candidates have had
to be left out, either because of space limitations or because they didn’t fit the anthology’s thematic structure. I would love to have included such stellar works as Anna Leonowens’s “The English Governess at the Siamese
Court” (which inspired the musical The King and I), Sarah Orne Jewett’s “River Driftwood,” Felix Frankfurter’s “The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti,” Edmund Wilson’s “The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles,” Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,” “One Woman’s Abortion,” by “Mrs. X.”
(who can now shed her cloak of anonymity and be identified by her real
name, Lou Ashworth), Tracy Kidder’s “House,” Edward O. Wilson’s “The
Biological Basis of Morality,” David Brooks’s “The Organization Kid,” Benjamin R. Barber’s “Jihad vs. McWorld,” and Ron Rosenbaum’s “Sex Week
at Yale.”
But in the end, from the more than 150 million words that The Atlantic has published over approximately eighteen hundred issues, the selection process has found its way to some seventy-eight articles, essays, short stories, and poems. Each of these offerings has been chosen for its literary or rhetorical merit, of course, but candidates have also been judged on the basis of the reaction they stirred, the long-term impact they had, and the aura of timelessness they continue to project—their inherent appeal to contemporary readers. Like small pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, each part—whether on-scene report, character study, or lyric poem—is intended to serve the whole, to be structurally and thematically in harmony with the other parts, so that a coherent and vivid picture of the last 150 years can emerge.
Three points about editorial format:
First, in order to accommodate the book’s large number of selections, it was necessary to make cuts, especially among the lengthier essays, narratives, and firsthand reports. In these cases, I have made every effort to be as true to the original work as possible. Although I recognize that these abridgments may raise hackles in some precincts, I would contend that, taken as a whole, they constitute a compromise worth making—the best way to conjure the magazine’s cornucopia of interests and enthusiasms.
Second, in studying previous magazine collections, I was surprised to find that, more often than not, they failed to furnish their entries with introductory setup commentaries, or “headnotes,” as they’re sometimes called. Anthologies devoid of headnotes strike me as a strange and unnecessary exercise in flying blind, turning all but the most expert readers into first-time pilots trying to locate the landing strip without benefit of runway lights, control towers, or instrumentation. Every offering here is ushered in by a comprehensively researched headnote that tries to tell readers something intriguing about the piece at hand: how, for example, a glowing review of Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad (written by The Atlantic’s third editor-in-chief, William Dean Howells) lured the elusive author to the magazine’s offices, and eventually into its pages; how Martin Luther King, Jr., writing perfervidly from an Alabama prison cell, succeeded in smuggling out a handwritten draft that would become the classic “Letter from Birmingham Jail”; how the journalist William Langewiesche, in the chaotic days after 9/11, managed to persuade New York City officials to sanction his becoming the only writer with round-the-clock access to the devastated World Trade Center site—a reportorial coup that would help pave the way for “American Ground,” his remarkable three-part series about the rescue-and-recovery operation; or how the 1862 submission of a little-known poet named Julia Ward Howe became the ubiquitous anthem “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—in the words of one former Atlantic editor, “the best four dollars we ever spent.”
Third, I have taken the liberty of setting this anthology free of a strict chronological organization in favor of a structure that is essentially thematic—grouping the material into a series of categories, defined by subjects, genres, and ideas, that have loomed large for the magazine over the past century and a half. By identifying and highlighting The Atlantic’s principal and perennial areas of interest, this structure itself becomes a kind of narrative device for telling the story of the magazine and the parallel story of the world it has been covering for fifteen decades. And by enabling readers to immerse themselves in one subject at a time, it encourages them to make their own connections, to compare and contrast what different authors have said in different eras about such topics as corporate chicanery, the challenge of race, and America’s proper place in the world.
The anthonlogy is divided into ten sections:FIRSTS
The leadoff section highlights The Atlantic’s performance history of being ahead of the curve—paying tribute not just to the literary giants whose early reputations were fired in the crucible of the magazine’s pages but also to the visionaries of science and technology who were able to direct their gaze beyond the horizon and foresee the immense significance of such developments as evolution, photography, and the Internet (Asa Gray, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Vannevar Bush). This section also pulls together a sampling of the magazine’s breakthrough pieces of geopolitical analysis, public affairs commentary, and investigative reporting that helped reconfigure popular perceptions of national and global issues. In addition to a number of articles already cited—Lowell on Lincoln’s election, Muir on wilderness conservation, Wilson and Kelling on crime, Lewis on Islam, and Fallows on the Iraq War—“Firsts” showcases Governor Al Smith’s historic affirmation of the compatibility of public service and Catholicism; James Mann’s eerily prescient speculations about one of American journalism’s most enduring mysteries, the identity of “Deep Throat”; and Robert D. Kaplan’s dystopian vision of imminent institutional collapse in the Third World.
BLACK AND WHITE
The second section focuses on the fraught problem of race relations in America. The Atlantic’s birth as an antislavery publication marked only the beginning of its passionate preoccupation with this subject. More than any other magazine of its kind, The Atlantic has provided a stage for the towering figures of African American history—Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King are all represented here— and it has indelibly shaped historical debates about racial equality and black identity. This section also features a short story by Flannery O’Connor on the dangers of even talking about race and a groundbreaking article by Nicholas Lemann on the forces behind the making of the black underclass.
GODS AND MONSTERS
The third section presents a portrait gallery of some of the most prominent heroes and villains of the past 150 years. From George Bancroft’s elegant encomium to Abraham Lincoln to Mark Bowden’s chillingly detailed picture of the workaday life of Saddam Hussein, this section puts on full display the magazine’s long commitment to capturing the essential character of history’s larger-than-life figures. Starting with Emerson’s eulogy for his close friend Thoreau, a prototype of the modern profile in its attention to both defects and virtues, and ending with Walter Kirn’s provocative depiction of Warren Buffett as a great communicator in the tradition of Mark Twain and Will Rogers, this section seeks to show how the magazine has turned the crafts of profile writing and essayistic portraiture into high art.
BEHIND THE SCENES
The arrival of Michael Kelly as The Atlantic’s twelfth editor-in-chief, in 2000, set in motion an era of unprecedented enthusiasm at the magazine for the genre known as narrative nonfiction. Kelly, himself an outstanding practitioner of the form, dedicated vast tracts of editorial space to articles that combined storytelling and journalism, that harnessed the techniques of fiction to the force of facts. Yet as the anthology’s fourth section reveals, narrative-driven journalism of one kind or another has always had a place in the magazine’s pages. Bookended by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s vibrant dispatches from the Civil War and William Langewiesche’s terrifying reenactment of the mysterious crash of an Egyptian passenger jet, this section represents some of The Atlantic’s proudest moments in narrative nonfiction writing.
STATES OF WAR
The portents of civil war were already hovering over a deeply divided nation when The Atlantic made its debut in late 1857. After extensively covering the bloodiest conflict in American history, the magazine would return to the front lines, over the next century and a half, in seven other major wars and innumerable minor ones. The fifth section recaptures a mythopoetic moment of the Revolutionary War (Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride”) and offers one U.S.Marine’s brutally honest account of fighting the Japanese in World War II (Studs Terkel’s “‘The Good War’”). But the spirit of this section is less reportorial than it is philosophical. William James, Albert Einstein, and the journalist Thomas Powers all raise urgent questions about the nature of war—its psychological origins, its capacity for global destruction, and its tendency to persist long after initial causes have either faded from memory or lost credibility.
CONTROVERSIES
The sixth section zeroes in on conflict of a different kind. Early on, Lowell had expressed his determination “to have a free magazine in its true sense”—by which he meant that his Atlantic would attempt to avoid the political timidity and intellectual faintheartedness he found in other magazines. Although The Atlantic has never courted controversy for its own sake, it has made a habit of diving headlong into thorny cultural issues of religion, gender, sexual orientation, the family, abortion, drugs, ethnicity, and color. This section brings together four strikingly disparate writers—Saul Bellow, V. S. Naipaul, Robert Lowell, and the sociologist Barbara Dafoe Whitehead—whose work provoked political firestorms.
CAPITALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Through tumultuous periods of boom and bust, The Atlantic has sought to penetrate the fog of confusion that all too often enshrouds the realms of economics and markets. In the depths of the Great Depression, the renowned British economist John Maynard Keynes chose the magazine as his platform to criticize the policies of governments he believed were exacerbating the crisis by keeping a tight rein on spending. Three decades later, at the height of the Cold War, the Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith defied deepening mistrust of centralized economies by arguing forcefully in our pages for more governmental oversight of financial markets. But with the selections in this seventh section, I’ve opted to put the spotlight on three of the most fascinating and rigorously reported examples of corporate investigative journalism the magazine has ever published: the trailblazing muckraker Henry Demarest Lloyd’s “Story of a Great Monopoly,” Eric Schlosser’s “Why McDonald’s Fries Taste So Good,” and Edward Jay Epstein’s “Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?”
THE NATURAL WORLD
Among a growing number of people in the United States and around the world, there are few issues of greater moment today than that of climate change. Reports of looming planetary peril have brought new questions and fears about the environment to the forefront of public consciousness and regenerated a hunger for writing that explores, in an ambitious and original way, the complex relationship between man and nature. The Atlantic pioneered this kind of writing, particularly with the work of Thoreau, who is represented in this section by his canonical essay “Walking,” and of John Muir, whose “The American Forests” appears in “Firsts.” These writers, as the journalist and environmental activist Bill McKibben has pointed out, “gave rise to movements.” The selections of this eighth section show the magazine endeavoring to look beyond the familiar political and social issues of environmentalism to larger questions of beauty, morality, and belief.
CROWD PLEASERS
Mark Twain once said that he relished writing humor for The Atlantic because its editors did not ask him to stand on his head to get laughs. From Twain to H. L. Mencken to Ian Frazier, the magazine has a rich, if sometimes underrecognized, tradition of publishing humor that inclines toward the trenchant and the cerebral and shuns the obvious and the broad. At the beginning of this project, I had intended to devote a section exclusively to the magazine’s most memorable humor writing. But as the process unfolded—and wonderful suggestions came pouring in from Atlantic colleagues—I realized that the original concept of the section needed to evolve and expand. The ninth section of the book is an attempt to gather together in one place an unabashedly eclectic group of pieces that seem on the surface to have little in common other than literary distinction. The decisive quality that runs through all of these selections is that they are, from every indication, truly beloved—not just by people inside the magazine but by readers as well.
THE AMERICAN IDEA
If there is a single section of this anthology that stands above the rest in importance, it is the tenth and final one. From the beginning, The Atlantic has reserved a special place for writing that grapples with the larger questions of our national life: What does it mean to be American? What constitutes the national interest? What should be America’s role in the world? The answers to these questions vary, of course, according to the time and place in which they are asked, and no matter how much they are disxxvi cussed, debated, and dilated upon, precise definitions prove frustratingly elusive. Nevertheless, the questions continue to exert a strong magnetic pull on many of our best minds, including the distinguished writers and thinkers represented in this section.
The term “The American Idea” emanates from The Atlantic’s inaugural issue. On the back cover of the magazine, the founding editors published an unsigned Declaration of Purpose that described their publication’s broad objectives in a few muted sentences. The Atlantic, its editors wrote, “will be the organ of no party or clique. . . . It will not rank itself with any sect of antis: but with that body of men which is in favor of Freedom, National Progress, and Honor, whether public or private.”
But at the heart of the magazine’s mission, according to the Declaration, was an explicit commitment to exploring, monitoring, and promoting what the editors called “the American idea.” Exactly what they meant by that three-word phrase they never made clear, either in the Declaration itself or anywhere else in their public statements or private journals. Were they pledging themselves to advancing political democracy? Personal freedom? Social justice? Economic progress? Some ineffable combination of all of the above? It is intriguing, and also a little baffling, that the founders would give such weight to a term that does not appear to have been in common currency at the time. In retrospect, they seem to have been expressing a quiet confidence that their readers would know instinctively what they had in mind.
Even if the term “the American idea” was not part of the lingua franca of the mid-1850s, concerns about national identity were then very much on the minds of many Americans. Waves of westward expansion had stoked nationalistic sentiments, setting off a groundswell of support for a stronger federal government to supplant the loose and decentralized confederation of states that had been in place for decades. At the same time, antagonisms between the North and the South were intensifying over widening economic disparity and the corrosive issue of slavery. The collision of these two powerful forces would soon lead to the Civil War, four years of almost unimaginable carnage that would tear the country apart. The Atlantic Monthly was born into a world in which the very idea of America seemed imperiled.
Americans today doubtless have somewhat different associations with the term. For better or worse, we are far more engaged than our mid-nineteenth-century forebears were with spreading democracy and consumer capitalism to the rest of the world, and yet we are increasingly aware of the dangers of our messianism and fearful of our power’s boomerang ef- fects. Many (but by no means all) of our citizens are blessed with unparalleled wealth, comfort, and material choice, and yet we still feel the pangs of instability, disharmony, and spiritual emptiness. “The American idea” continues to represent not only great opportunity but also grave risk.
As this final section of the book demonstrates, The Atlantic remains singularly preoccupied with trying to define the changing character of the country and the country’s changing relations with the world. This preoccupation is at the core of who we are as a magazine, a major part of our genetic heritage. It connects our labors with the work of the founders—and with that of all the other contributors to the magazine over the course of its history.
One hundred and forty-nine years after the founders first invoked their unembellished phrase, a latter-day group of Atlantic editors, preparing for the magazine’s relocation to Washington, D.C., from Boston, put forward their own definition. One thing “the American idea” was not, proclaimed an editors’ note that appeared in the magazine’s January/February 2006 issue, was “some saccharine notion of American exceptionalism or a hyper-patriotic boosterism. It was a recognition that America was an experiment, based on certain principles—an experiment that could fail, but would if successful offer a rare kind of hope.”
“What is ‘the American idea’?” the editors’ note concluded. “It is the fractious, maddening approach to the conduct of human affairs that values equality despite its elusiveness, that values democracy despite its debasement, that values pluralism despite its messiness, that values the institutions of civic culture despite their flaws, and that values public life as something higher and greater than the sum of all our private lives. The founders of the magazine valued these things—and they valued the immense amount of effort it takes to preserve them from generation to generation.”
Robert VareLitchfield, Connecticut
June 2007
About the Editor
Robert Vare is the editor at large of The Atlantic Monthly. He is a former editor at The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times Magazine, where he edited the Pulitzer Prize–winning cover story “Grady’s Gift,” in 1991. In 2004, he was the editor of Things Worth Fighting For, a posthumously published collection of writings by Michael Kelly, the former Atlantic editor-in-chief who was killed while covering the war in Iraq. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, he has taught nonfiction writing at Yale and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
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*The pen name of Edward Cave (1691–1754), the editor and publisher of The Gentleman’s Magazine, which was founded in London in 1731 and is widely considered to be the world’s first general interest magazine. Following Cave’s death, the pseudonym continued to be used by subsequent editors of the magazine. (Return to the text).
