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 exposés 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.