The American Mercury
ISSN 0002-998X | |
The American Mercury was an American magazine published from 1924[1] to 1981. It was founded as the brainchild of H. L. Mencken and drama critic George Jean Nathan.[2] The magazine featured writing by some of the most important writers in the United States through the 1920s and 1930s.
After a change in ownership in the 1940s, the magazine attracted conservative writers, including William F. Buckley. A second change in ownership in the 1950s turned the magazine into a far-right and virulently anti-Semitic publication.[3]
It was published monthly in New York City.[4] The magazine went out of business in 1981, having spent the last 25 years of its existence in decline and controversy.
History
H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan had previously edited The Smart Set literary magazine,[5] 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:
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. Barnum got away with burlesque shows by calling them moral lectures.[6]
From 1924 through 1933, Mencken provided 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.[7] (Nathan was forced to resign as his co-editor a year after the magazine started.) 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."[8] 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 the 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
Mencken's departure
Mencken retired as editor of the magazine at the end of 1933.[10] His chosen successor was economist and literary critic Henry Hazlitt. Differences with the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf Sr., however, led Hazlitt to resign after four months. The American Mercury was next edited by Mencken's former assistant Charles Angoff. At first, the magazine was considered to be moving to the Left.[citation needed]
In January 1935, The American Mercury was purchased from Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., by
Radio and television
Spivak revived the Mercury for a brief but vigorous period — Mencken, Nathan, and Angoff contributed essays to the magazine again. Spivak created a company to publish the magazine, Mercury Publications. Soon, the company began publishing other magazines, including Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (1941) and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1949.
In 1945, as editor, Lawrence Spivak created a radio program called American Mercury Presents "Meet the Press". It started on television on November 6, 1947, as Meet the Press.
In 1946, the Mercury merged with the democratic-socialist magazine
Huie's experiment
William Bradford Huie[Note 1]—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 that Ryan had begun to guide The American Mercury toward that direction. He also introduced more mass-appeal writing, by figures such as Reverend Billy Graham and Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover. Huie seemed en route to producing a conservative magazine. William F. Buckley Jr., whose God and Man at Yale was a best seller, worked for Huie's Mercury, as a young staffer. In 1955, Buckley founded the longer-living conservative National Review. Buckley would succeed at what Huie was unable to realize: a periodical that brought together the nascent but differing strands of this new conservative movement.
Antisemitic and racist takeover
Huie faced financial difficulties sustaining the Mercury in this new direction. In August 1952, he sold it to an occasional financial contributor, Russell Maguire, owner of the
Maguire's anti-semitism led to controversy and the resignation of the magazine's top editors after he took control of the editorial process in 1955.[13] In 1956, George Lincoln Rockwell was hired as a writer, and later became the founder of the American Nazi Party.[14] Between 1957 and 1958, William LaVarre served as editor. In January 1959, Maguire published an American Mercury editorial supporting a theory that there was a Jewish conspiracy for world domination.[13]
Maguire did not remain long as the magazine's owner/publisher, but other owners continued in that direction. Maguire sold the Mercury to the
The DCF sold it in 1963 to the "Legion for the Survival of Freedom" of Jason Matthews. The LSF cut a deal in June 1966 with the (original) Washington Observer, finally merging with Western Destiny, a
A 1978 article praised
External links
A website called The American Mercury was created in 2010. It was criticized by the Southern Poverty Law Center in the Winter 2013 edition of their magazine Intelligence Report, which called it a "Leo Frank Propaganda Site" and described it as "a resurrected and deeply anti-Semitic online version of H. L. Mencken’s defunct magazine of the same name".[12] The Anti-Defamation League calls it "an extreme right-wing site with anti-Semitic content",[16] while The Forward referred to it as "H.L. Mencken’s historic magazine, resurrected online by neo-Nazis several years ago", which had "published several revisionist articles to coincide with this year’s anniversary" [17] of the Leo Frank trial.
Notes
References
- ^ Staff (Dec. 31, 1923). "Bichloride of Mercury." Time.
- JSTOR 26483894.
- ISSN 0021-8723.
- ^ "Newsstand: 1925: The American Mercury". Newsstand. Retrieved February 23, 2016.
- ISBN 978-0-8071-2692-9. Retrieved April 20, 2019.
- ^ Teachout, Terry (2001). The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken. HarperCollins. p. 181.
- ^ "American Mercury | American periodical". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved June 1, 2017.
- ^ Mencken, H.L. (1927). Three Years, 1924–1927: The Story of a New Idea and its Successful Adaptation. The American Mercury. p. 38. Retrieved April 20, 2019.
- ^ "American Mercury". uwf.edu. Retrieved June 1, 2017.
- ^ New York Times. January 23, 1935. Retrieved August 2, 2017.
- ISBN 978-0674395541. Retrieved July 12, 2015.
- ^ a b "Neo-Nazis Behind Leo Frank Propaganda Sites". Intelligence Report. Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center. Winter 2013. Retrieved December 28, 2014.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-7432-1797-2. Retrieved July 17, 2015.
- ISBN 978-1-61373-073-7. Retrieved July 17, 2015.
- ^ Mehler, Barry (May–June 1983). "The New Eugenics: Academic Racism in the U.S. Today" (PDF). Science for the People. 15 (3): 20.
- ^ "100 Years Later, Anti-Semitism Around Leo Frank Case Abounds". adl.org. Anti-Defamation League. August 23, 2013. Retrieved December 28, 2014.
- ^ Berger, Paul (August 20, 2013). "Neo-Nazis Use Leo Frank Case for Anti-Semitic Propaganda Push". The Jewish Daily Forward. New York: The Forward Association, Inc. (published August 23, 2013). Retrieved December 28, 2014.
Further reading
- "Blowup at the Mercury." Time (Oct. 3, 1955).
- "Number Three for Mercury." Time (Dec. 15, 1952).
- "Trouble for the Mercury." Time (Dec. 8, 1952).
- Mott, Frank Luther Mott (1968) A History of American Magazines, Volume V: 1905-1930.
External links
- HathiTrust archive of American Mercury full text of issues from January 1924 to December 1925.