The American Mercury


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. After a change in ownership in the 1940s, the magazine attracted conservative writers. A second change in ownership a decade later turned the magazine into a virulently anti-Semitic publication. It was published monthly in New York City. 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, 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 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.

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. 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 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 stock market crash of 1929. The magazine published writing by Conrad Aiken, Sherwood Anderson, James Branch Cabell, W. J. Cash, Lincoln Ross Colcord, Thomas Craven, Clarence Darrow, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Fante, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Albert Halper, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Sinclair Lewis, George Schuyler, Meridel LeSueur, 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 other writers, 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. Mencken spiced the package with aphorisms printed in the magazine's margins whenever space allowed.

Controversy

H. L. Mencken rarely flinched from controversy. He was in the thick of it after the Mercurys April 1926 issue published "Hatrack," a chapter from Herbert Asbury's Up From Methodism. The chapter described purportedly true events: a prostitute in Asbury's childhood in Farmington, Missouri, nicknamed Hatrack because of her angular physique, was a regular churchgoer who sought forgiveness. Shunned by the town's "good people," she returned to her sinful life.
The Rev. J. Frank Chase of the Watch and Ward Society, which monitored material sold in Boston for obscenity, concluded that "Hatrack" was immoral and had a Harvard Square magazine peddler arrested for selling a copy of that American Mercury issue. That provoked Mencken to visit Boston and personally sell Chase a copy of the magazine, the better to be arrested for the cameras. Tried and acquitted, Mencken was praised for his courageous stance for freedom of the press; it cost him more than $20,000 in legal fees, lost revenue, and lost advertising.
Mencken sued Chase and won, a federal judge ruling the minister's organization committed an illegal restraint of trade. He held that prosecutors, not private activists, should censor literature, if anyone should. But following the trial, the Solicitor of the U.S. Post Office Department Donnelly ruled the April 1926 American Mercury was obscene under the federal Comstock Law, and barred that issue from delivery through the U.S. Post Office. Mencken challenged Donnelly, aroused by 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 and the case was moot.

Mencken's departure

Mencken retired as editor of the magazine at the end of 1933. 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.
In January 1935, The American Mercury was purchased from Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., by Lawrence E. Spivak. The magazine's longtime business manager, Spivak announced that he would take an active role as publisher. Paul Palmer, former Sunday editor of the New York World, replaced Angoff as editor, and playwright Laurence Stallings was named literary editor.

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 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 Common Sense. By 1950, the Mercury was owned by Clendenin J. Ryan. He changed the magazine's name to The New American Mercury. Ryan was the financial angel for Ulius Amoss, a former Office of Strategic Services agent who specialized in operating spy networks behind the Iron Curtain to destabilize Communist governments and the publisher of International Services of Information in Baltimore; his son Clendenin Jr. was a sponsor of William F. Buckley Jr. and the Young Americans for Freedom. Ryan transformed The American Mercury in a conservative direction.

Huie's experiment

—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 Thompson submachine gun Company. Rather than turn over editorial control to Maguire, Huie stepped down as editor after the January 1953 issue. He was replaced by John A. Clements, a former reporter for the New York Journal and Daily Mirror, then director of public relations for the Hearst Corporation. Within a short time, Maguire steered the magazine "toward the fever swamps of antisemitism", as National Review publisher William A. Rusher would describe it. The sale to Maguire spelled the end of The American Mercury as a mainstream magazine. It survived, steadily declining, for nearly 30 more years.
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. In 1956, George Lincoln Rockwell was hired as a writer, and later became the founder of the American Nazi Party. In January 1959, Maguire published an American Mercury editorial supporting a theory that there was a Jewish conspiracy for world domination.
Maguire did not remain long as the magazine's owner/publisher, but other owners continued that direction. Maguire sold the Mercury to the Defenders of the Christian Faith, Inc., owned by Reverend Winrod and located in Wichita, Kansas, in 1961. Reverend Winrod, tried and convicted for violations of the Sedition Act of 1918, was known as "The Jayhawk Nazi" during World War II.
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 Washington Observer, finally merging with Western Destiny. Western Destiny was a Liberty Lobby publication owned by Willis Carto and Roger Pearson, a major recipient of Pioneer Fund grants in history. Pearson was a well known neo-Nazi and pro-Fascist who headed 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.