I doubt that there was ever another such journalistic heaven as was The Nation in the early post-war years. I came back from France that autumn of 1919 with one ambition in all the world: to land a job on Villard's Nation. I knew what I wanted, and was blissful when I got it: half-time at first, and small pay.

Those were rousing days on Vesey Street. Every week's issue was a new adventure. The country was still in a state of war shock: it was blockading Germans, seeing Reds under every bed, crushing strikes in the name of freedom. And yet there was a breeze of hope in the air, a stirring all around the world. The British Labor Party seemed about to reshape England by a peaceful, democratic revolution; the new German Republic was giving women the vote and establishing works councils in every factory; Russia was a land of wild surmises, where every new and hopeful experiment might be tried out for an eager world to watch. Here at home we had the Plumb plan, a sort of industrial republic for the railroads; new unions about to organize the steel mills; labor banks booming, a hope of a great Farmer-Labor Party—in 1924 it seemed about to flower with La Follette. And there was exhilaration in fighting the whole wicked world.

Was there ever a day when the American press did quite as much lying? Even the “crusading” New York World waited until after the steel strike was crushed to tell a little truth about it; we on The Nation had fresh news, not printed in the big papers, almost every week. The Times and the other papers were killing off Lenin and Trotsky and crushing the Russian Revolution three times a week; we had our own reports. We were the first to print, in the International Relations Section, the new Russian constitution, the anti-imperialist treaties, new land laws in the border republics, as well as to expose secret treaties pre- and post-war, suppressed reports of pogroms in Poland, and documents on skulduggery in five continents. It is almost impossible to believe today that a world could ever have seemed so full of hope—or so full of such sinister machinations as The Nation was privileged to expose, week after week.

It was an exciting office in which to work. Most of us were young, and a little afraid of austere William MacDonald, who set our grammar straight and threw out our more extreme effusions. (But it was MacDonald himself who, when New Yorkers were sleeping in the streets, wrote that famous editorial, Seize Every Empty House, which so shocked Oswald Villard on his return from the West.) When, in 1922, the staff celebrated Villard's fiftieth birthday, it seemed to many of us that he was a phenomenally well-preserved old man. Among ourselves, we said that we admired him because he had had the courage to change his views on so many questions after reaching the hale old age of forty, when most men's minds were crusted; but when we tried to suggest that to our chief, he would thunder that he had never wavered from the true Godkin-Garrison-Villard tradition.

Albert Jay Nock was halfway on and halfway off the staff, dreaming of his brief and brilliant Freeman; he would read bits of “Wolfville” and of Artemus Ward at staff dinners. Henry Mussey, in one of his unprofessorial interludes, was our managing editor. Soon after Mussey returned to academic pastures, Ernest Gruening breezed into the office, charging in a dozen directions at once. We saved Haiti week after week, until the grateful Haitians proposed erecting a statue to Gruening's living memory. We got the troops out of Santo Domingo. It was Gruening who planned and carried out the famous series of articles on These United States. He was a man of sterling editorial principles. If memory serves me right, he persuaded both Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters to write articles on Illinois, and then rejected them both as not up to our penny-a-word standard. With difficulty we reverent juniors persuaded him not to reject Dreiser's article on Indiana.

It was Ernest Gruening's comfortable theory that an article, if you keep it long enough, always becomes timely. No matter what worldshaking event blazed in the newspaper headlines, he could always rummage in a desk drawer and come out with a “timely” article to meet the situation. In off weeks he went back to saving Haiti. Mr. Villard sometimes thought that Haiti wasn't really lead-article subject matter more than once or twice a month.

Gruening also was the staff lowbrow. Most of us were soundly in awe of Carl Van Doren and Ludwig Lewisohn; if they said a poem was good, we believed it, whether we could understand it or not. I once innocently spoiled one of Ernest's efforts to prove that we were wrong. I was closing the forms at the Nation Press one Tuesday morning, when a printer came to me querying a four-line poem at the foot of a column. It didn't make sense, he said. I thought perhaps a line had fallen out, and tried to find the original manuscript; I sought vainly to telephone Carl Van Doren. Finally, I took the quatrain out, and somehow filled the space. Carl, when located, said he had never seen the lines; Ernest Gruening, we discovered, had composed a little free verse of his own, with no meaning whatever, and believed that no reader would recognize it as different from the modern poetry selected by our literary editor.

Those were the days when “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana” won our poetry prize, Gruening and Villard's negative votes being outweighed by the enthusiastic juniors of the staff. Bob Benchley celebrated that poem with a famous parody, “Cold Mornings Have Been in Bensonhurst,” and the prize-winner had cards printed reading, “Eli Siegel, Author of Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana.”

Norman Thomas was with us for two years; shy Arthur Gleason tried for a time to match his analytic spirit with our crusading zeal. George Soule, now of the New Republic, was briefly on the staff; so was Stuart Chase, but he had a flip way of throwing custard pies in his paragraphs which irked Mr. Villard's sense of the paper's dignity. Mr. Villard was a fighting liberal who yearned to be a sound conservative. He never wanted to do what Godkin and Garrison would not have done, and he always had to be persuaded into any break with tradition. Such liberals are often more effective than those who battle on all fronts at once, yet I still think that Stuart Chase writes rousing American English.

We all had a reverence for good writing though we differed in our definition of the word “good”; and in those days proofreading was an art. George Schumm, who had given his life to proofreading for lost causes, was our tutor. (He had worked for twenty years with Benjamin R. Tucker, that philosopher of American individualism who never rated a showing in “Who's Who” but had a half column in the “Encyclopedia Britannica,” by Prince Kropotkin; Tucker died last year, without an obit in the newspapers of his own country.) I remember a succession of evening sessions—we were eager to work overtime—at which we hotly argued the more controversial uses of commas, colons, capitals, and italics. Under Carl Van Doren's leadership we reedited the University of Chicago Style Book; and Papa Schumm held us to it rigidly.

Carl Van Doren was, I still think, the greatest literary editor of this century. He had a genius for recognizing budding talent; the best young men and women in all the country's universities were proud to review for him; and when he painstakingly cut their prolix writing to the bone, and sent them proofs of his abridged versions of their scripts, they would write back thanking him, saying that they had not realized they could write so well. We believed in “editing,” and learned to do it conscientiously. It was The Nation's province, then as now, to recognize the important in a swamp of ill-written words, and to snake it out of the mire. The Nation never paid well; but people wrote avidly, from universities and from mining camps, eager to tell a story that the newspapers were missing. (Silas Bent coined the epigram: “To read The Nation is a necessity; to write for it is a luxury.”) Freda Kirchwey developed a special genius at reworking manuscripts which at first seemed impossible, preserving the personality of the writer yet organizing a mushy text into new coherence and force.

It wasn't only the inarticulate who wrote for us; some of the best writers in America appeared in our pages, often as not anonymously. I understood what style meant when, making up the editorial pages, I found it necessary to add or substract a line from Ludwig Lewisohn's copy, to bring the columns out even. Usually it was easy to insert or excise an adjective, or rephrase a sentence, to fill or cut a line. But the smallest word changed in Lewisohn's text obviously spoiled the rhythm. That was true only to a lesser extent of Joseph Wood Krutch's flowing prose.

Arthur Warner, best loved and most crotchety of the staff, had a special collection of hobbies. He hated the invading automobiles; and he loved to write of good American food. To that writing he brought a passion born of the fact that his own diet was perforce almost entirely restricted to milk toast, made with whole wheat bread. Warner was the staff handy man; it was he who exposed the “Myth of Calvin Coolidge” and therewith coined a phrase that became part of the language. Warner joined The Nation on his way out from the old New York Evening Post, then in the same building with us. He stopped on the fourth floor to report that he had been fired for writing a round-robin in behalf of a surreptitious newspapermen's union, and was promptly taken on The Nation's staff. Later, from our office, he made another effort to organize such a union; Heywood Broun became its president, and so in a sense Warner as much as Broun was founder of the now flourishing Newspaper Guild. Broun too joined The Nation as a regular when the World dropped him, and his shambling presence added a new note to our Thursday morning editorial conferences.

The Nation had inherited plenty of causes from Godkin and Garrison; each week it took on new ones. It was avowedly and outspokenly a fighting, muckraking magazine. In the early years we worked at getting the Allies out of Russia; soon we were feeding the victims of famine. We were the first to denounce the Treaty of Versailles. Ernest Gruening lived in a perpetual anti-lynching crusade, and kept a special eye on Mexico and the Caribbean. Bill Hard came up from Washington and announced his expectation of blasting five members out of the Harding Cabinet; ably assisted by the elder La Follette, Wheeler, Walsh, and others, he almost succeeded. We were always eager to second that grandest of all the old Romans, George Norris of Nebraska, in what then seemed his almost hopeless crusade to save Muscle Shoals from the spoilsmen; few then dared to dream of such a Utopia as the TVA of today. The fabulous Paul Anderson, who succeeded Hard as our Washington correspondent, of course dared anything—dream or attack—and was miraculously effective.

One morning Dr. W. J. Maloney walked into conference with a plan to scare Britain into recalling the Black and Tans from Ireland. Before noon The Nation's Committee of One Hundred on Ireland was born; within a few months the famous Commission of Inquiry was sitting in Washington, and the Black and Tan atrocities were forced on public attention. The lovely Muriel and the fierce Mary MacSwiney came to America under our auspices, and in time the Republic of Eire was born. We felt partially responsible.

We sent Carleton Beals to Nicaragua to interview Sandino, the little rebel general for whom the American army was hunting in vain; Beals found him, and The Nation scored an impressive “scoop.” Mr. Villard sent me off to China just in time to catch the leaders of both wings of the embryonic Nationalist state idling in Canton. Joseph Wood Krutch, Tennessee-born, interpreted Darrow, Bryan, and the “monkey trial” in Dayton as only an enlightened Tennessean could. Freda Kirchwey was always discovering and defending rebels in the colleges; she was also the New Woman editor, the Sex editor, and the Modern Morals editor. She edited the symposium on “Our Changing Morality” which later appeared in book form; she also assembled the series of anonymous autobiographies of “These Modern Women,” which, had they been signed, would have produced an even bigger stir. Civilization was at the crossroads every week; some flip editor suggested that as a standing head for our lead editorial.

The noble succession of Van Dorens—Carl, Irita, Mark, and Dorothy—held the journal's literary standards high; there was a strange interlude when big-hearted John Macy dealt out books to reviewers selected rather for their need of money than for their authority. Macy's own criticism was incisive, his judgment of reviewers almost purely humanitarian.

Always “the Boss” was the heart of the paper. Villard's infectious moral indignation inspired us all; his natural gift for story-telling made his every return from an out-of-town crusade an adventure for the staff; his genius for friendship constantly brought new life into our pages. He had that capacity for perpetual excitement which is the essential of the good newspaperman. Sometimes we thought him too loyal to the Godkin-Garrison tradition; it was only after a long fight that Freda Kirchwey succeeded in introducing cartoons into the paper's chaste pages. When, in 1925, we actually printed a script for a “movie”—Mr. Villard insisted that we put that word in quotation marks, or else say “motion picture”—he felt we had betrayed him in his absence.

Sometimes, outvoted by his juniors, our democratic leader turned dictator, and vetoed our frivolous revolutions—in perspective one can see that he was often right. He wouldn't let us print an irreverent, rollicking piece that Bill Hard wrote about him, exposing him as a thunderer in public, who had “made more acres of public men acutely miserable, per unit of circulation, than any other editor alive,” but a sunny story-teller in private, almost enjoying his own embittered indignations. Hard even burst into verse:

When Oswald isn't following his employment—

his employment

Of devastating all the public scene,

His capacity for innocent enjoyment—

cent enjoyment

Would make the joyous public man turn green.

We cussed him and loved him, listened and learned. The Nation of the nineteen twenties was a great school—for its editors and for America. What “Main Street,” “Winesburg, Ohio,” and “Spoon River” were in other fields of literature, The Nation was to journalism. It still is.