Nation - The Nation published its first issue 150 years ago [this month].. Yet the idea for the magazine began two years before that. On the night of June 25, 1863, a week before the battle of Gettysburg, a group of elite New York gentlemen met at the Union League Club on 17th Street to hear a presentation from one of its founding members. Frederick Law Olmsted had traveled as a journalist through the antebellum South, designed Central Park and led the United States Sanitary Commission, the Civil War–era forerunner to the Red Cross—and he was only 44 years old. Now Olmsted had a new idea: a weekly magazine of politics and culture.
He raised some money from the group, but the venture stalled. The typically restless Olmsted soon gave up and moved to California to pursue an ill-fated gold-mining scheme near Yosemite Valley, leaving what little money he had raised to his friend, the journalist E.L. Godkin. In April of 1865, as the war drew to a close, a few radical abolitionists sought to start a publication to carry the cause of equality into the era of emancipation. They hired Godkin as editor and began publishing in 1865.
The following winter, Olmsted returned to New York and joined the staff of the new magazine as an associate editor. After a struggle between Godkin and the financial backers—they deemed Godkin insufficiently radical on the question of racial equality—Olmsted took a one-sixth ownership of The Nation, which he held for a few years even after leaving the staff.
Olmsted’s “Prospectus for a Weekly Journal,” which he circulated among the attendees at the Union League Club in 1863, is the founding document not only of The Nation, but of an entire school of American journalism—“careful, candid and conscientious,” as Olmsted writes—that seems to be very much on the decline today.
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