(1) Prospectus of the Nation (June, 1865)

(1) To discuss current affairs, especially in their legal, economic, and constitutional phases, with more moderation than the party press; (2) to maintain true democratic principles; (3) to work for the equality of "the labouring classes at the South"; (4) to enforce the doctrine that the whole country has the "strongest interest" in the elevation of the Negro; (5) to fix attention on the importance of popular education; (6) to inform the country of conditions in the southern states; (7) to criticize books and works of art soundly and impartially.

 

(2) Oswald Garrison Villard, The Nation (31st August, 1927)

Massachusetts has triumphantly killed an Italian fishmonger and an Italian cobbler, but she has blackened the name of the United States across all the seas.

 

(3) Freda Kirchway, The Nation (1933)

Although the Nation has questioned the probability that in the long run it would be possible to save an industrial system by the incentive of profits, it has regarded the Roosevelt program in general as the most intelligent means that could be taken toward the end.

 

(4) Raymond Gram Swing, The Nation (20th March, 1933)

Their programs (Huey P. Long and Charles Coughlin), for all their glamorous radical sound, are capitalist radicalism. For fascism is the reorganization of society by undemocratic means to maintain the capitalist system. It is a movement, first of all, of passion and prejudice, growing out of the despair of disillusioned. Impoverished people. Then comes the collusion between demagogue and big business.

 

(5) W. A. White, letter to Oswald Garrison Villard , complaining about Freda Kirchwey's support for Franklin D. Roosevelt in his struggle with the Supreme Court (20th March, 1933)

It is unthinkable that a progressive and liberal journal should actually advocate any plan by which new judges are placed on our supreme tribunal who will decide cases on instructions, or who will be believed to have decided them on this basis.

 

(6) Freda Kirchway, The Nation (August, 1935)

It may well be that the basic conflict of the next ten years will not be between capitalism and revolution but between fascism and democracy - a struggle in which the forces of revolution must support and win the support of all the friends of democracy, while the forces of capitalism will gradually, and often unwillingly, form an alliance with the cohorts of fascism.

 

(7) Freda Kirchway, The Nation (February, 1937)

Franco's success would encourage the Nazis to go and do likewise in Czechoslovakia, Danzig, the Polish Corridor, or anywhere else. Defeated in Spain, Hitler would be sobered and checked. He would also be weakened by the expenditure on Franco of several hundred million dollars. If the fascists are beaten in Spain, they are weakened everywhere. The supreme test of an antifascist is not what he says but what he does for Spain.

 

(8) Freda Kirchway, The Nation (March, 1938)

The trial of Bukharin and his fellow oppositionists has broken about the ears of the world like the detonation of a bomb. One can hear the cracking of liberal hopes; of the dream of antifascist unity; of a whole system of revolutionary philosophy wherever democracy is threatened, the significance of the trial will be anxiously weighed.

In spite of the trials, I believe Russia is dependable; that it wants peace, and will join in any joint effort to check Hitler and Mussolini, and will also fight if necessary. Russia is still the strongest reason for hope.

 

(9) Freda Kirchway, The Nation (April, 1939)

We surrendered our chance to mind our business in Spain; we were too intent on keeping out of trouble and minding Chamberlain's business. We allowed democracy to be slaughtered in Spain. Today the United States is the grand arsenal for triumphant fascism. It is our business to stop providing these three aggressors with arms and the goods necessary to the manufacture of arms and the conduct of war.

 

(10) Freda Kirchway, The Nation (October, 1939)

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of democracy. We have not gone to war, and no excuse exists for wartime hysteria. Neither Communists nor even (German-American) Bundists are enemy agents. They deserve to be watched but not to be persecuted. The real danger is that general detestation of Communists and Bundists will lead to acts of outright repression supported not only by reactionaries but by disgusted liberals. Democracy was not invented as a luxury to be indulged in only in times of calm and stability. It is a pliable, tough-fibered technique especially useful when times are hard. Only a weak and distrustful American could today advocate measures of repression and coercion, or encourage a mood of panic. Now is the time to demonstrate the resilience of our institutions. Now is the time to deal with dissent calmly and with full respect for its rights.

 

(11) Freda Kirchway, The Nation (April, 1940)

At what moment does it become necessary to limit the freedom of everyone in order to suppress the danger lurking in a disloyal handful. The moment for drastic repression has not arrived, and the task of liberals in America is difficult but clear. They must fight to preserve the democratic safeguards contained in the Bill of Rights, while applying to Nazis and their supporters the equally democratic methods of exposure, counter-propaganda, and justified legal attack. Otherwise the Nazi invasion of Norway is likely to end in a victory for Martin Dies in America.

 

(12) Freda Kirchway, The Nation (August, 1941)

Before its total, uncompromising demands are laid upon them, the people of America must learn that this war is their war; that they cannot dodge it or buy their way out of it; that they must fight it because fighting is the only alternative to surrender.

 

(13) In March 1942 Freda Kirchwey argued in The Nation that the fascist press should be banned in the United States. In a letter to Kirchwey, Norman Thomas objected to this point of view (3rd April, 1942)

It is a rather terrible thing that liberals should now be the spokesmen for a jittery program which, if it means anything, can only be interpreted to mean no criticism of the Administration except from us. In ten years or less it won't be the people you want to suppress now who will be suppressed and stay suppressed by your theory; it will be yourselves along with many others, unless, indeed, you want to go farther than I think you do in support of a Roosevelt totalitarianism. Don't forget that neither Roosevelt nor anybody else is immortal. The principles once established are apt to outlive men.

 

(14) Statement published by the staff of The Nation in October 1944.

It is one thing to expound high principles in print week by week. It is another to put them into practice day by day. And we who work with Freda Kirchwey think it relevant to depose and say that her liberalism begins at home. As editor-in-chief she has had the wisdom and courage to establish a genuine working democracy of which the tone and temper are set by her own respect for other individuals and their opinions, her humor, and her sense of fair play. As employer her sympathy and understanding for every human problem have won for her the freely given loyalty and friendship of every worker in the shop. In The Nation world liberty, equality, and fraternity, the four freedoms, collective security, and the union shop prevail. We who work in it find it good. We recommend it to the larger world, and on this, the twenty-fifth anniversary of her connection with The Nation we salute Freda Kirchwey as editor and as human being.

 

(15) Louis Fischer resigned from The Nation after a dispute with Freda Kirchwey, over the reporting of the situation in the Soviet Union. Kirchwey replied to this charge in the journal published on 2nd June 1945.

We assume that he is charging The Nation with a bias in favor of Russia and of communism. We suppose he considers that to be our "line." We suppose he is charging us with ignoring, out of "expediency," the bad behavior of the Soviet Union; of failing out of policy to denounce the Soviet power for suppressing "small, weak states". We can only answer quite flatly that he is wrong. We say what we believe. What we believe is very different from what Mr. Fischer believes.

We believe Russian policy is primarily a security policy, not an imperialist one; it can become dangerous to the world, therefore, only if Russia decides that the other major powers are plotting against it. It would be dishonest to pretend that we think Russia's foreign policy is as great a threat to the basic purpose of destroying fascism and its political and economic roots as is the foreign policy of Britain and the United States.

 

(16) Freda Kirchway, The Nation (18th August, 1945)

The bomb that hurried Russia into Far Eastern war a week ahead of schedule and drove Japan to surrender has accomplished the specific job for which it was created. From the point of view of military strategy, $2,000,000,000 (the cost of the bomb and the cost of nine days of war) was never better spent. The suffering, the wholesale slaughter it entailed, have been outweighed by its spectacular success; Allied leaders can rightly claim that the loss of life on both sides would have been many times greater if the atomic bomb had not been used and Japan had gone on fighting. There is no answer to this argument. The danger is that it will encourage those in power to assume that, once accepted as valid, the argument can be applied equally well in the future. If that assumption should be permitted, the chance of saving civilization - perhaps the world itself - from destruction is a remote one.

 

(17) Freda Kirchway, The Nation (18th August, 1945)

The Nation celebrates its Eighty-fifth Anniversary in a sober mood. Today only one subject is important - the possibility of averting a general war which would wipe out, impartially, the institutions of civilized life and the forces that threaten them this symposium is presented as a positive contribution to the broadening of the discussion of peace or war in the knowledge that for all nations the issue is survival.

 

(18) The Nation (25th September, 2002)

Soon, you will be asked to vote on a resolution authorizing the United States to overthrow the government of Iraq by military force. Its passage, we read on all sides, is a foregone conclusion, as if what the country now faces is not a decision but the disclosure of a fate. The nation marches as if in a trance to war. In the House, twenty of your number, led by Dennis Kucinich, have announced their opposition to the war. In the Senate, Robert Byrd has mounted a campaign against the version of the resolution already proposed by the Bush Administration. He has said that the resolution's unconstitutionality will prevent him from voting for it. "But I am finding," he adds, "that the Constitution is irrelevant to people of this Administration." The Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to the Washington Post, oppose the war. Telephone calls and the mail to your offices run strongly against it. Polls and news stories reveal a divided and uncertain public. Yet debate in your chambers is restricted to peripheral questions, such as the timing of the vote, or the resolution's precise scope. You are a deliberative body, but you do not deliberate. You are representatives, but you do not represent.

The silence of those of you in the Democratic Party is especially troubling. You are the opposition party, but you do not oppose. Raising the subject of the war, your political advisers tell you, will distract from the domestic issues that favor the party's chances in the forthcoming Congressional election. In the face of the Administration's pre-emptive war, your leaders have resorted to pre-emptive surrender. For the sake of staying in power, you are told, you must not exercise the power you have in the matter of the war. What, then, is the purpose of your re-election? If you succeed, you will already have thrown away the power you supposedly have won. You will be members of Congress, but Congress will not be Congress. Even the fortunes of the domestic causes you favor will depend far more on the decision on the war than on the outcome of the election.

On April 4, 1967, as the war in Vietnam was reaching its full fury, Martin Luther King Jr. said, "A time comes when silence is betrayal." And he said, "Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak."