The American Mercury
Encyclopedia
The American Mercury was an American
magazine
published from 1924 to 1981. It was founded as the brainchild of H. L. Mencken
and drama critic George Jean Nathan
. The magazine featured writing by some of the most important writers in the United States
through the 1920s
and 1930s
. The magazine went out of print in 1981, having spent the last 25 years of its existence in decline and controversy.
literary magazine
together, when not producing their own books and, in Mencken's case, regular journalism for The Baltimore Sun
. With their mutual book publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Sr., serving as the publisher, Mencken and Nathan created The American Mercury as "a serious review, the gaudiest and damnedest ever seen in the Republic," as Mencken explained the name (derived from a 19th-century publication) to his old friend and contributor, Theodore Dreiser
:
And, from 1924 through 1933, Mencken — Nathan was forced to resign as his co-editor a year after the magazine was born — provided precisely what he promised: elegantly irreverent observations of America, aimed at what he called "Americans realistically," those of sophisticated skepticism of enough that was popular and much that threatened to be. Simeon Strunsky
in The New York Times
observed that, "The dead hand of the yokelry on the instinct for beauty cannot be so heavy if the handsome green and black cover of The American Mercury exists." The quote was used on the subscription form for the magazine during its heyday.
The January 1924 issue sold more than 15,000 copies and by the end of that first year the circulation was over 42,000. In early 1928 the circulation reached a height of over 84,000, but declined steadily after the stock market crash. The magazine published writing by Conrad Aiken
, Sherwood Anderson
, W. J. Cash
, Clarence Darrow
, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Fante
, William Faulkner
, F. Scott Fitzgerald
, Albert Halper
, Langston Hughes
, James Weldon Johnson
, Sinclair Lewis
, Edgar Lee Masters
, Albert Jay Nock
, Eugene O'Neill
, Carl Sandburg
and William Saroyan
. Nathan provided theater criticism, and Mencken wrote the "Editorial Notes" and "The Library," the last being book reviews and social critique, placed at the back of each volume. The magazine published others, from newspapermen and academics to convicts and taxi drivers, but its primary emphasis soon became non-fiction and usually satirical essays. Its "Americana" section—containing items clipped from newspapers and other magazines nationwide—became a much-imitated feature, and Mencken further spiced the package with aphorisms printed in the magazine's margins whenever space allowed.
's Up From Methodism. The chapter described a reputedly true story: a prostitute in Asbury's childhood in Farmington, Missouri
, nicknamed Hatrack because of her angular physique, and a regular churchgoer seeking genuine forgiveness but, shunned by the town's reputed good people, returning to her sinful life.
If that seems a straightforward and uncontroversial enough description, consider that in 1926 it was just enough at the edge that the Rev. J. Frank Chase of the Watch and Ward Society
, which monitored material sold in Boston, Mass., for obscenity, decided "Hatrack" was immoral and had a Harvard Square
magazine peddler arrested for selling a copy of the issue. That provoked Mencken himself to visit Boston and sell Chase himself a copy, the better to be arrested for the cameras. Tried and acquitted, Mencken's courageous stance for freedom of the press
cost him regardless: over $20,000 in legal fees, lost revenue, and lost advertising.
Mencken sued Chase and won, a federal judge ruling the prelate's organization committed an illegal restraint of trade and prosecutors, not private activists, should censor literature, assuming anyone should. But following the trial, the Solicitor of the U.S. Post Office Department
Donnelly ruled the April 1926 American Mercury was obscene — the federal Comstock Law, he ruled, barred the issue from delivery through the U.S. Post Office. Mencken challenged Donnelly, aroused the prospect of a landmark free speech case before the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
and legendary Judge Learned Hand
. But because the April 1926 Mercury had already been mailed, an injunction was no longer an appropriate remedy.
. Differences with the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, Sr., however, led Hazlitt to resign after only four months as editor. The American Mercury was then edited by Mencken's former assistant, Charles Angoff. At first, the magazine was seen as moving to the Left, but a year after Mencken's departure Knopf sold the Mercury to Paul A. Palmer, a former Mencken colleague at The Baltimore Sun
. By 1936, Palmer had continued the Mencken standard in its content but changed its appearance: It now had the same pocket size
as Reader's Digest
. Three years later, the magazine changed hands again, Palmer selling to the Mercury's business manager, Lawrence E. Spivak
, and, soon, the magazine experienced a dramatic change.
, and soon the company began publishing other magazines, including Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
(1941) and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
in 1949. But perhaps in new financial difficulty, the Mercury merged with Common Sense in 1946, and by 1950 the new Mercury owner was Clendenin J. Ryan
, who changed the name to The New American Mercury. Ryan was the financial angel for Ulius Amoss, the publisher of International Services of Information in Baltimore, and a former Office of Strategic Services
colonel who specialized in operating spy networks behind the Iron Curtain
for the purpose of destabilization of communist
governments and the neutralization of their leadership. Ryan's son, Clendenin J. Ryan, Jr. was one of the financial sponsors of Young Americans for Freedom
started by William F. Buckley, Jr.
, according to Doug Caddy, Ryan's Georgetown University
roommate. Ryan began yet another transformation of The American Mercury toward another direction.
In 1945, while editing the magazine, Lawrence Spivak created a radio program called American Mercury Presents "Meet the Press." It was brought to television on November 6, 1947, as Meet the Press
, which is the single longest-running news program in television history, a fixture on NBC every Sunday.
—whose work had appeared in the magazine before—had gleaned the beginning of a new, post-World War II
American conservative intellectual movement. He sensed correctly that Ryan had begun to guide The American Mercury toward that direction. He also opened the magazine's pages to more mass-appeal writing, by the likes of the Reverend Billy Graham
and Federal Bureau of Investigation
director J. Edgar Hoover
. With boldness if anything, Huie seemed en route to producing what one of his staffers would have an easier time producing a few years later—the young William F. Buckley, Jr.
, whose God and Man at Yale
was a best seller, worked for Huie's Mercury, invaluable experience for his 1955 creation of the longer-living and widely respected National Review
. Buckley would succeed at what Huie was unable to realise: a periodical that brought together the nascent but already differing strands of this new conservative movement.
Company, in August 1952. George Lincoln Rockwell
, later head of the American Nazi Party
, who had previously worked for Maguire, became editor. To the disgust of Huie, within a very short time Maguire steered the magazine “toward the fever swamps of anti-Semitism," as National Review publisher William A. Rusher
would describe it. The new owners then took a periodical which had once been published by Alfred A. Knopf
and had once featured the work of W.E.B. Du Bois
and Langston Hughes
on a journey into the nether world of national socialism. The sale to Maguire spelled the end of The American Mercury as a mainstream magazine, though it survived, steadily declining, for nearly 30 more years.
Various interest groups, beginning with the Anti-Defamation League
, accused Maguire's Mercury of ongoing and increasing Jew-baiting, particularly when it drew a number of purportedly anti-Jewish comments from the writings of Mencken himself back for reprint. The influences of Rockwell, and later the Rev. Gerald B. Winrod
and General Edwin A. Walker, on the editorial policy of the Mercury resulted in anti-Semitic, White Supremacist
, and pro-fascist
articles becoming commonplace in the magazine. Control of the American Mercury had passed from the traditional journalistic anti-establishment, into the domain of extremist factions, and the editorial policy never attempted to regain credibility within mainstream intellectual circles.
Maguire did not remain long as the magazine's owner/publisher, but what he started other owners continued for the rest of the magazine's life. Maguire sold the Mercury to the Defenders of the Christian Faith, Inc. (DCF), owned by Reverend Winrod and located in Wichita, Kansas
, in 1961. Reverend Winrod was known as "The Jayhawk Nazi" during World War II, and was once tried and convicted for violations of the Sedition Act of 1918
.
The DCF sold it to the Legion for the Survival of Freedom of Jason Matthews in 1963, and the LSF cut a deal in June 1966 with the Washington Observer, that telegraphed a merger with Western Destiny. Western Destiny was a Liberty Lobby
publication owned by Willis Carto
and Roger Pearson
, the largest recipient of Pioneer Fund
grants in history. Pearson was well known neo-Nazi and pro-Fascist who headed up the World Anti-Communist League
during its most blatantly pro-Fascist periods. Pearson was a close associate of Wickliffe Draper
, founder of the Pioneer Fund. By then The American Mercury was a quarterly with a circulation of barely 7,000, and its editorial content was composed almost entirely of attacks upon Jews
, African Americans, and other minorities.
A 1978 article praised Adolf Hitler
as the "greatest Spenglerian
." Another new ownership for the troubled magazine was announced in the autumn of 1979, and the spring 1980 issue celebrated Mencken's centennial, and lamented the passage of his era, "before the virus of social, racial, and sexual equality" grew in "fertile soil in the minds of most Americans." The last issue concluded with a plea for contributions to build a computer index — with information about the 15,000 most dangerous political activists, actual or alleged, in the United States.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
magazine
Magazine
Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...
published from 1924 to 1981. It was founded as the brainchild of H. L. Mencken
H. L. Mencken
Henry Louis "H. L." Mencken was an American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, acerbic critic of American life and culture, and a scholar of American English. Known as the "Sage of Baltimore", he is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the...
and drama critic George Jean Nathan
George Jean Nathan
George Jean Nathan was an American drama critic and editor.-Early life:Nathan was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana...
. The magazine featured writing by some of the most important writers in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
through the 1920s
1920s
File:1920s decade montage.png|From left, clockwise: Third Tipperary Brigade Flying Column No. 2 under Sean Hogan during the Irish Civil War; Prohibition agents destroying barrels of alcohol in accordance to the 18th amendment, which made alcoholic beverages illegal throughout the entire decade; In...
and 1930s
1930s
File:1930s decade montage.png|From left, clockwise: Dorothea Lange's photo of the homeless Florence Thompson show the effects of the Great Depression; Due to the economic collapse, the farms become dry and the Dust Bowl spreads through America; The Battle of Wuhan during the Second Sino-Japanese...
. The magazine went out of print in 1981, having spent the last 25 years of its existence in decline and controversy.
History
Mencken and Nathan had previously edited The Smart SetThe Smart Set
The Smart Set was a literary magazine founded in America in March 1900 by Colonel William d'Alton Mann.-History:Mann had previously published Town Topics, a gossip rag which he used for political and social gain among New York City's infamous elite known as "The Four Hundred." With The Smart Set,...
literary magazine
Literary magazine
A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry and essays along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letters...
together, when not producing their own books and, in Mencken's case, regular journalism for The Baltimore Sun
The Baltimore Sun
The Baltimore Sun is the U.S. state of Maryland’s largest general circulation daily newspaper and provides coverage of local and regional news, events, issues, people, and industries....
. With their mutual book publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Sr., serving as the publisher, Mencken and Nathan created The American Mercury as "a serious review, the gaudiest and damnedest ever seen in the Republic," as Mencken explained the name (derived from a 19th-century publication) to his old friend and contributor, Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of...
:
- What we need is something that looks highly respectable outwardly. The American Mercury is almost perfect for that purpose. What will go on inside the tent is another story. You will recall that the late P. T. BarnumP. T. BarnumPhineas Taylor Barnum was an American showman, businessman, scam artist and entertainer, remembered for promoting celebrated hoaxes and for founding the circus that became the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus....
got away with burlesque shows by calling them moral lectures.
And, from 1924 through 1933, Mencken — Nathan was forced to resign as his co-editor a year after the magazine was born — provided precisely what he promised: elegantly irreverent observations of America, aimed at what he called "Americans realistically," those of sophisticated skepticism of enough that was popular and much that threatened to be. Simeon Strunsky
Simeon Strunsky
Simeon Strunsky, A.B. was a Jewish American essayist, born in Vitebsk, Russian Empire . His parents are Isidor S. and Perl Wainstein. He graduated from Columbia University in 1900...
in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
observed that, "The dead hand of the yokelry on the instinct for beauty cannot be so heavy if the handsome green and black cover of The American Mercury exists." The quote was used on the subscription form for the magazine during its heyday.
The January 1924 issue sold more than 15,000 copies and by the end of that first year the circulation was over 42,000. In early 1928 the circulation reached a height of over 84,000, but declined steadily after the stock market crash. The magazine published writing by Conrad Aiken
Conrad Aiken
Conrad Potter Aiken was an American novelist and poet, whose work includes poetry, short stories, novels, a play and an autobiography.-Early years:...
, Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson was an American novelist and short story writer. His most enduring work is the short story sequence Winesburg, Ohio. Writers he has influenced include Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, J. D. Salinger, and Amos Oz.-Early life:Anderson was born in Clyde, Ohio,...
, W. J. Cash
W. J. Cash
W.J. Cash, or Joseph Wilbur Cash, was an American author and journalist known primarily for his works about the American South.-Early life:...
, Clarence Darrow
Clarence Darrow
Clarence Seward Darrow was an American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union, best known for defending teenage thrill killers Leopold and Loeb in their trial for murdering 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks and defending John T...
, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Fante
John Fante
John Fante was an American novelist, short story writer and screenwriter of Italian descent. He is perhaps best known for his work, Ask the Dust, a semi-autobiograpical novel about life in and around Los Angeles, California, which was the third in a series of four novels, published between 1938...
, William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
, F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...
, Albert Halper
Albert Halper
-Life:Born in 1904 and raised in Chicago, Halper went to live and work in New York City in 1929. His work came to the attention of Elliot E. Cohen, who published him in his magazine, the Menorah Journal...
, Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance...
, James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson was an American author, politician, diplomat, critic, journalist, poet, anthologist, educator, lawyer, songwriter, and early civil rights activist. Johnson is remembered best for his leadership within the NAACP, as well as for his writing, which includes novels, poems, and...
, Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis
Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of...
, Edgar Lee Masters
Edgar Lee Masters
Edgar Lee Masters was an American poet, biographer, and dramatist...
, Albert Jay Nock
Albert Jay Nock
Albert Jay Nock was an influential United States libertarian author, educational theorist, and social critic of the early and middle 20th century.- Life and work :...
, Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish...
, Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Carl Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat."-Biography:Sandburg was born in Galesburg,...
and William Saroyan
William Saroyan
William Saroyan was an Armenian American dramatist and author. The setting of many of his stories and plays is the center of Armenian-American life in California in his native Fresno.-Early years:...
. Nathan provided theater criticism, and Mencken wrote the "Editorial Notes" and "The Library," the last being book reviews and social critique, placed at the back of each volume. The magazine published others, from newspapermen and academics to convicts and taxi drivers, but its primary emphasis soon became non-fiction and usually satirical essays. Its "Americana" section—containing items clipped from newspapers and other magazines nationwide—became a much-imitated feature, and Mencken further spiced the package with aphorisms printed in the magazine's margins whenever space allowed.
Controversy
H.L. Mencken rarely if ever flinched from controversy, and he found himself in the thick of it when The American Mercury was just over two years old, when the April 1926 issue published "Hatrack," a chapter from Herbert AsburyHerbert Asbury
Herbert Asbury was an American journalist and writer who is best known for his true crime books detailing crime during the 19th and early 20th century such as Gem of the Prairie, Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld and The Gangs of New York...
's Up From Methodism. The chapter described a reputedly true story: a prostitute in Asbury's childhood in Farmington, Missouri
Farmington, Missouri
Farmington is a city in St. Francois County located south of St. Louis in the Lead Belt region in Missouri in the United States. As of the 2010 U.S. Census, the population was 16,240. It is the county seat of St. Francois County. The Farmington Micropolitan Statistical Area embraces St...
, nicknamed Hatrack because of her angular physique, and a regular churchgoer seeking genuine forgiveness but, shunned by the town's reputed good people, returning to her sinful life.
If that seems a straightforward and uncontroversial enough description, consider that in 1926 it was just enough at the edge that the Rev. J. Frank Chase of the Watch and Ward Society
Watch and Ward Society
The New England Watch and Ward Society was a Boston, Massachusetts organization involved in the censorship of books and the performing arts from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. After the 1920s, its emphasis changed to combating the spread of gambling...
, which monitored material sold in Boston, Mass., for obscenity, decided "Hatrack" was immoral and had a Harvard Square
Harvard Square
Harvard Square is a large triangular area in the center of Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue, Brattle Street, and John F. Kennedy Street. It is the historic center of Cambridge...
magazine peddler arrested for selling a copy of the issue. That provoked Mencken himself to visit Boston and sell Chase himself a copy, the better to be arrested for the cameras. Tried and acquitted, Mencken's courageous stance for freedom of the press
Freedom of the press
Freedom of the press or freedom of the media is the freedom of communication and expression through vehicles including various electronic media and published materials...
cost him regardless: over $20,000 in legal fees, lost revenue, and lost advertising.
Mencken sued Chase and won, a federal judge ruling the prelate's organization committed an illegal restraint of trade and prosecutors, not private activists, should censor literature, assuming anyone should. But following the trial, the Solicitor of the U.S. Post Office Department
United States Postal Service
The United States Postal Service is an independent agency of the United States government responsible for providing postal service in the United States...
Donnelly ruled the April 1926 American Mercury was obscene — the federal Comstock Law, he ruled, barred the issue from delivery through the U.S. Post Office. Mencken challenged Donnelly, aroused the prospect of a landmark free speech case before the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is one of the thirteen United States Courts of Appeals...
and legendary Judge Learned Hand
Learned Hand
Billings Learned Hand was a United States judge and judicial philosopher. He served on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and later the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit...
. But because the April 1926 Mercury had already been mailed, an injunction was no longer an appropriate remedy.
Exit Mencken
Mencken resigned as editor of his creation at the end of 1933, and his chosen successor was economist and literary critic Henry HazlittHenry Hazlitt
Henry Stuart Hazlitt was an American economist, philosopher, literary critic and journalist for such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The American Mercury, Newsweek, and The New York Times...
. Differences with the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, Sr., however, led Hazlitt to resign after only four months as editor. The American Mercury was then edited by Mencken's former assistant, Charles Angoff. At first, the magazine was seen as moving to the Left, but a year after Mencken's departure Knopf sold the Mercury to Paul A. Palmer, a former Mencken colleague at The Baltimore Sun
The Baltimore Sun
The Baltimore Sun is the U.S. state of Maryland’s largest general circulation daily newspaper and provides coverage of local and regional news, events, issues, people, and industries....
. By 1936, Palmer had continued the Mencken standard in its content but changed its appearance: It now had the same pocket size
Digest size
Digest size is a magazine size, smaller than a conventional or "journal size" magazine but larger than a standard paperback book, approximately 5½ x 8¼ inches, but can also be 5⅜ x 8⅜ inches and 5½ x 7½ inches. These sizes have evolved from the printing press operation end...
as Reader's Digest
Reader's Digest
Reader's Digest is a general interest family magazine, published ten times annually. Formerly based in Chappaqua, New York, its headquarters is now in New York City. It was founded in 1922, by DeWitt Wallace and Lila Bell Wallace...
. Three years later, the magazine changed hands again, Palmer selling to the Mercury's business manager, Lawrence E. Spivak
Lawrence E. Spivak
Lawrence Edmund Spivak was an American publisher and journalist who was best known as the co-founder, producer and host of the prestigious public affairs program Meet the Press...
, and, soon, the magazine experienced a dramatic change.
Radio and television
Spivak even more than Palmer revived the Mercury for a brief but vigorous period — Mencken, Nathan, and Angoff themselves contributed essays to the magazine again. From there, Spivak created a company to publish the magazine, Mercury PublicationsMercury Publications
Mercury Publications was a magazine publishing company, owned and operated by Lawrence E. Spivak, which mainly published genre fiction in digest-sized formats. The focus of Spivak's line was on detective and mystery stories and novels, but it also included magazines about humor, fantasy, and true...
, and soon the company began publishing other magazines, including Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine is an American monthly digest size fiction magazine specializing in crime fiction, particularly detective fiction...
(1941) and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is a digest-size American fantasy and science fiction magazine first published in 1949 by Mystery House and then by Fantasy House. Both were subsidiaries of Lawrence Spivak's Mercury Publications, which took over as publisher in 1958. Spilogale, Inc...
in 1949. But perhaps in new financial difficulty, the Mercury merged with Common Sense in 1946, and by 1950 the new Mercury owner was Clendenin J. Ryan
Clendenin J. Ryan
Clendenin James Ryan, Jr. was an American businessman best known as the publisher and owner of The American Mercury magazine, published in Baltimore, Maryland in the early 1950s when McCarthyism was at it strongest....
, who changed the name to The New American Mercury. Ryan was the financial angel for Ulius Amoss, the publisher of International Services of Information in Baltimore, and a former Office of Strategic Services
Office of Strategic Services
The Office of Strategic Services was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime intelligence agency, and it was a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency...
colonel who specialized in operating spy networks behind the Iron Curtain
Iron Curtain
The concept of the Iron Curtain symbolized the ideological fighting and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1989...
for the purpose of destabilization of communist
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
governments and the neutralization of their leadership. Ryan's son, Clendenin J. Ryan, Jr. was one of the financial sponsors of Young Americans for Freedom
Young Americans for Freedom
Young Americans for Freedom is a 501 non-profit organization and is now a project of Young America's Foundation. YAF is an ideologically conservative youth activism organization that was founded in 1960, as a coalition between traditional conservatives and libertarians...
started by William F. Buckley, Jr.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
William Frank Buckley, Jr. was an American conservative author and commentator. He founded the political magazine National Review in 1955, hosted 1,429 episodes of the television show Firing Line from 1966 until 1999, and was a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist. His writing was noted for...
, according to Doug Caddy, Ryan's Georgetown University
Georgetown University
Georgetown University is a private, Jesuit, research university whose main campus is in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded in 1789, it is the oldest Catholic university in the United States...
roommate. Ryan began yet another transformation of The American Mercury toward another direction.
In 1945, while editing the magazine, Lawrence Spivak created a radio program called American Mercury Presents "Meet the Press." It was brought to television on November 6, 1947, as Meet the Press
Meet the Press
Meet the Press is a weekly American television news/interview program produced by NBC. It is the longest-running television series in American broadcasting history, despite bearing little resemblance to the original format of the program seen in its television debut on November 6, 1947. It has been...
, which is the single longest-running news program in television history, a fixture on NBC every Sunday.
Huie's experiment
William Bradford HuieWilliam Bradford Huie
William Bradford "Bill" Huie was an American journalist, editor, publisher, television interviewer, screenwriter, lecturer, and novelist.-Biography:...
—whose work had appeared in the magazine before—had gleaned the beginning of a new, post-World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
American conservative intellectual movement. He sensed correctly that Ryan had begun to guide The American Mercury toward that direction. He also opened the magazine's pages to more mass-appeal writing, by the likes of the Reverend Billy Graham
Billy Graham
William Franklin "Billy" Graham, Jr. is an American evangelical Christian evangelist. As of April 25, 2010, when he met with Barack Obama, Graham has spent personal time with twelve United States Presidents dating back to Harry S. Truman, and is number seven on Gallup's list of admired people for...
and Federal Bureau of Investigation
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
director J. Edgar Hoover
J. Edgar Hoover
John Edgar Hoover was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States. Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation—predecessor to the FBI—in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972...
. With boldness if anything, Huie seemed en route to producing what one of his staffers would have an easier time producing a few years later—the young William F. Buckley, Jr.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
William Frank Buckley, Jr. was an American conservative author and commentator. He founded the political magazine National Review in 1955, hosted 1,429 episodes of the television show Firing Line from 1966 until 1999, and was a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist. His writing was noted for...
, whose God and Man at Yale
God and Man at Yale
God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom” is a book published in 1951 by William F. Buckley, Jr., who eventually became a leading voice in the American conservative movement in the latter half of the twentieth century....
was a best seller, worked for Huie's Mercury, invaluable experience for his 1955 creation of the longer-living and widely respected National Review
National Review
National Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
. Buckley would succeed at what Huie was unable to realise: a periodical that brought together the nascent but already differing strands of this new conservative movement.
Antisemitic and racist takeover
Huie found himself facing financial difficulties sustaining the Mercury as he pursued the new direction, and was forced to sell to a sometime financial contributor, Russell Maguire, owner of the Thompson Submachine GunThompson submachine gun
The Thompson is an American submachine gun, invented by John T. Thompson in 1919, that became infamous during the Prohibition era. It was a common sight in the media of the time, being used by both law enforcement officers and criminals...
Company, in August 1952. George Lincoln Rockwell
George Lincoln Rockwell
George Lincoln Rockwell was the founder of the American Nazi Party. Rockwell was a major figure in the neo-Nazi movement in the United States, and his beliefs and writings have continued to be influential among white nationalists and neo-Nazis.-Early life:Rockwell was born in Bloomington,...
, later head of the American Nazi Party
American Nazi Party
The American Nazi Party was an American political party founded by discharged U.S. Navy Commander George Lincoln Rockwell. Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, Rockwell initially called it the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists , but later renamed it the American Nazi Party in...
, who had previously worked for Maguire, became editor. To the disgust of Huie, within a very short time Maguire steered the magazine “toward the fever swamps of anti-Semitism," as National Review publisher William A. Rusher
William A. Rusher
William Allen Rusher was an American lawyer, author, activist, speaker, debater, and conservative syndicated columnist. He was one of the founders of the conservative movement and was one of its most prominent spokesmen for thirty years.- Early life :Rusher was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1923...
would describe it. The new owners then took a periodical which had once been published by Alfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. is a New York publishing house, founded by Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. in 1915. It was acquired by Random House in 1960 and is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group at Random House. The publishing house is known for its borzoi trademark , which was designed by co-founder...
and had once featured the work of W.E.B. Du Bois
W.E.B. Du Bois
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, and editor. Born in Massachusetts, Du Bois attended Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate...
and Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance...
on a journey into the nether world of national socialism. The sale to Maguire spelled the end of The American Mercury as a mainstream magazine, though it survived, steadily declining, for nearly 30 more years.
Various interest groups, beginning with the Anti-Defamation League
Anti-Defamation League
The Anti-Defamation League is an international non-governmental organization based in the United States. Describing itself as "the nation's premier civil rights/human relations agency", the ADL states that it "fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects...
, accused Maguire's Mercury of ongoing and increasing Jew-baiting, particularly when it drew a number of purportedly anti-Jewish comments from the writings of Mencken himself back for reprint. The influences of Rockwell, and later the Rev. Gerald B. Winrod
Gerald B. Winrod
Gerald Burton Winrod was a pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic evangelist, author, and political activist.-Biography:...
and General Edwin A. Walker, on the editorial policy of the Mercury resulted in anti-Semitic, White Supremacist
White supremacy
White supremacy is the belief, and promotion of the belief, that white people are superior to people of other racial backgrounds. The term is sometimes used specifically to describe a political ideology that advocates the social and political dominance by whites.White supremacy, as with racial...
, and pro-fascist
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
articles becoming commonplace in the magazine. Control of the American Mercury had passed from the traditional journalistic anti-establishment, into the domain of extremist factions, and the editorial policy never attempted to regain credibility within mainstream intellectual circles.
Maguire did not remain long as the magazine's owner/publisher, but what he started other owners continued for the rest of the magazine's life. Maguire sold the Mercury to the Defenders of the Christian Faith, Inc. (DCF), owned by Reverend Winrod and located in Wichita, Kansas
Wichita, Kansas
Wichita is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kansas.As of the 2010 census, the city population was 382,368. Located in south-central Kansas on the Arkansas River, Wichita is the county seat of Sedgwick County and the principal city of the Wichita metropolitan area...
, in 1961. Reverend Winrod was known as "The Jayhawk Nazi" during World War II, and was once tried and convicted for violations of the Sedition Act of 1918
Sedition Act of 1918
The Sedition Act of 1918 was an Act of the United States Congress that extended the Espionage Act of 1917 to cover a broader range of offenses, notably speech and the expression of opinion that cast the government or the war effort in a negative light or interfered with the sale of government bonds...
.
The DCF sold it to the Legion for the Survival of Freedom of Jason Matthews in 1963, and the LSF cut a deal in June 1966 with the Washington Observer, that telegraphed a merger with Western Destiny. Western Destiny was a Liberty Lobby
Liberty Lobby
Liberty Lobby was an American political advocacy organization founded in 1958 that went bankrupt in 2001. It was founded by Willis Carto. In their own words,-Antisemitic world-view:...
publication owned by Willis Carto
Willis Carto
Willis Allison Carto is a longtime figure on the American far right. He describes himself as Jeffersonian and populist, but is primarily known for his promotion of antisemitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial.-Influences on Carto:...
and Roger Pearson
Roger Pearson
Roger Pearson is a British anthropologist, conservationist, eugenics advocate, founder of the Neo Nazi organization Northern League, and publisher of several journals.-Life and work:...
, the largest recipient of Pioneer Fund
Pioneer Fund
The Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences." Currently headed by psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton, the fund states that it focuses on projects it perceives will not be easily funded due to...
grants in history. Pearson was well known neo-Nazi and pro-Fascist who headed up the World Anti-Communist League
World Anti-Communist League
The World League for Freedom and Democracy is an international anti-communist political organization founded in 1966 in Taipei, Republic of China , under the initiative of Chiang Kai-shek. It was founded with the aim of opposing Communism around the world through "unconventional" methods...
during its most blatantly pro-Fascist periods. Pearson was a close associate of Wickliffe Draper
Wickliffe Draper
Wickliffe Preston Draper was an American multimillionaire and an ardent eugenicist and lifelong advocate of strict racial segregation...
, founder of the Pioneer Fund. By then The American Mercury was a quarterly with a circulation of barely 7,000, and its editorial content was composed almost entirely of attacks upon Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
, African Americans, and other minorities.
A 1978 article praised Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
as the "greatest Spenglerian
Oswald Spengler
Oswald Manuel Arnold Gottfried Spengler was a German historian and philosopher whose interests also included mathematics, science, and art. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West , published in 1918, which puts forth a cyclical theory of the rise and decline of civilizations...
." Another new ownership for the troubled magazine was announced in the autumn of 1979, and the spring 1980 issue celebrated Mencken's centennial, and lamented the passage of his era, "before the virus of social, racial, and sexual equality" grew in "fertile soil in the minds of most Americans." The last issue concluded with a plea for contributions to build a computer index — with information about the 15,000 most dangerous political activists, actual or alleged, in the United States.
Revival
In 2010:The new American Mercury was created in 2010 by a group of volunteer writers and editors, among whom are some who collectively worked with the contributors and management of the print Mercury for over 40 years.The publishers refer to themselves as the "Jefferson-Mencken Group."
External links
- The American Mercury (revival)
- Blowup at the Mercury Time, October 3, 1955.
- Number Three for Mercury Time, December 15, 1952
- Trouble for the Mercury Time, December 8, 1952.