The New Republic’s Implosion and the Lessons of a “Penis Poster”
At the risk of kicking a dead horse, I want to share a theory I have about how it all went bad at The New Republic between Chris Hughes, Guy Vidra and the staff. Keeping in mind that the staff meltdown may have been destined to happen, I wonder if things couldn’t have turned out differently, but didn’t, because of TNR’s internal culture of deference plus the odd way that email and chat has changed how magazine offices work.
Here’s why I think things could have been different. Back in 1987, I was a junior staffer working for The Nation magazine, another journal of opinion, when the entire staff rose in revolt against its new wealthy publisher. The trigger was the most unlikely issue: our new publisher’s vocal dislike of a classified ad for a poster called “Penises of the Animal Kingdom” which showed them, humorously, in order of size, from whale to man. Some background is in order.
Like The New Republic, The Nation was another weekly that was never much of a viable business (though that has changed in the last few years, which is a different story). It lost money every year, and a group of wealthy patrons would help make up the gap. In 1978, Hamilton Fish III, the scion of a family with a long history in politics, organized such a group, and installed prizewinning author Victor Navasky as editor. In 1985, they sold a controlling interest to Arthur Carter, a Wall Street tycoon who was bored with finance and dabbling in publishing. Carter committed to put $500K a year into the magazine for three years while Fish continued to run it as publisher. (If Navasky and Fish decided that they wanted to buy him out, they had those three years during which to exercise that option — Navasky once referred to this as the “shmuck clause” as in, if Carter turns out to be a shmuck.) Carter was anyway busy publishing his Litchfield County Times and starting to gear up to create the New York Observer during those early years of his ownership of The Nation. The official word when he came in, from Navasky and Fish, who kept the title of publisher and handled the day-to-day management of the business, was that Carter wouldn’t tamper with the editorial policies or traditions of the magazine.
For the first 18 months all was relatively copacetic. But in August 1987 Fish resigned to run for his father’s old seat in Congress, and Carter stepped in as publisher, taking a much more active role in the business side of the enterprise. And it was in this new context that the famous “Penis Poster” incident happened. I’ll let the following memo from the staff to Carter, dated October 30, 1987, tell the story:
Dear Arthur:
We are writing to convey our concern and distress about your meeting with Eamon Fitzgerald [the classified ad manager] on October 23 in reference to the “penis poster.” In response, we held an emergency meeting of the entire staff. You should know that neither that gathering nor the decision to send you this letter was initiated by Eamonn.
Because you have not spent much time in the Nation offices and do not know most of us, and because you don’t have experience in working in and with left organizations, we would like to tell you something about us. Most of us work at the Nation because we want to be be engaged in its political project. Although we may disagree about various issues and individual decisions, we share a vision of a more just and humane society, and we see the magazine as a means toward that end.
We view the Nation as a community where people respect each other and take one another seriously. On the editorial side, Victor listens to the opinions of other editors, even though he makes the final decision about whether to publish a piece. The Nation has in the past been a place in which employees are treated like professionals and colleagues.
Many of us could hear you yelling at Eamon in Neil [Black, the associate publisher’s] office. This is not the way things have ever been done at the Nation, and we hope that intimidation does not replace consultation as the management style at the Nation.
Beyond the matter of your treatment of our colleague, we are concerned by the questions that the October 22 incident raises. Our advertising policy is generally catholic, and advertising managers have in the past had broad discretion (in consultation with their supervisors and often with the staff) in accepting ads. Of course we recognize that as publisher you have certain prerogatives, including overruling the classified advertising manager and the supervisors who had approved what he was doing. However, we feel that those prerogatives also carry a responsibility to respect the intelligence of staff members, the norms of staff behavior, and the policies that have been in force here.
If advertising policy has changed, what standards of acceptability are now in effect? Who sets them? Do you contemplate other changes in structure and responsibility, in the business department or elsewhere?
Most of us see the poster itself as harmless. We view it in the contact of a tradition of poster art in the United States that goes back to the early years of this century and that flowered particularly during the 1960s. As far as we’re concerned, the ad and the poster have a countercultural flavor. As someone who does not have much experience on the left, you may not understand this perspective, but we suspect that it is shared by many Nation readers (none of whom, after all, complained about the ad.) Those of us whose politics derives from the New Left share a cultural as well as a social and economic vision. To us, the personal is political, and so is the artistic.
Insofar as any of us understand your objections to the ad, we gather that you think it damages the interests of the magazine. This troubles us, since you told us the last time many of us saw you at the staff meeting last summer that you had no plans to transform the Nation. We would like to know what interests are damaged by these ad, and exactly how they are damaged.
Although we know that you work closely with some members of the business staff, many of us hardly ever see you. Therefore your sudden and apparently arbitrary intervention was as upsetting as your browbeating Eamonn. Because we don’t know you, many of us worry that if you respond so violently to what we see as a trivial matter, what will happen in the future when something really important comes up?
We would appreciate a response to the questions raised in this letter, either by mail or in person. We invite you to come and talk to us, and to explain your policies and plans more fully than you have so far. This episode suggests that we all have an interest in getting to know each other better.
About a week later, Carter came in for an all-hands meeting, memorably wearing a leather bomber jacket. We all crammed into the magazine’s conference room for a long and somewhat tense conversation. I think Carter was, in some degree, as nervous as we were (he never took his jacket off, presumably so we couldn’t see him sweat). And for the first part of the meeting, things weren’t going very well. Various staff members struggled to explain why this dumb little ad mattered so much. Carter kept trying to tell us that it offended some sense of “middle class values” that he thought the magazine should respect.
Then Andrew Kopkind, who as senior editor was in many ways the heart of the Nation in those years, cleared his throat, and spoke. “This matters because, whatever else you might say about The Nation, and no matter how late it came to this realization, it still is a place that embraces the values of the Sixties and of the counterculture. And at a time those values are under attack and are being repudiated right and left, part of our project is to celebrate those values, the idea of liberation, and so on.”
It was an uplifting moment, not because Andy connected us back in some nostalgic way to the Sixties or because this speech finally swayed Carter. What was important, in the context of the moment, was the idea that we, the staff of the magazine, might be joined together in some common project. I remember that for hours after that meeting, people talked excitedly about that very idea. Morale soared. And though Carter still insisted on being an engaged publisher, the meeting cleared the air and he found a face-saving way to drop his objection to this ad. And as the years proceeded, he more or less left the magazine to its own devices.
Fast forward to 2014. Here’s what I don’t understand about how things broke down between Hughes and The New Republic’s staff: Most of the stories coming out now suggest that for most of the first two years after Hughes bought the magazine, people were fairly happy with him. Yes, as Ryan Lizza describes in The New Yorker, Hughes did make a series of abrupt moves at the beginning of his tenure as owner, including adopting the title of “editor-in-chief” and making some key editorial changes, including the firing of then editor Richard Just. But Hughes also brought back Franklin Foer, a well-loved former editor of the magazine, to run things and for a while everything was relatively peaceful.
If Lizza’s account is right, the Hughes-Foer relationship only really started to fray this fall, when Hughes hired as CEO Guy Vidra, whose digital experience made him attractive to Hughes, against Foer’s desire for a more traditional magazine publisher. And then Vidra made a presentation to the entire TNR staff, on October 24th. By all accounts it was a disaster. One report, by Lloyd Grove in The Daily Beast, suggests that the only people to pipe up to ask Vidra any questions were interns. “The senior people were too shocked to speak,” Grove quotes a witness as saying. Instead, it appears that backbiting just played out online, on the staff list-serve and, I’m presuming, on various personal email threads and chats.
Why was there no organized response at the meeting where Vidra was introduced, or immediately afterward? And why now, after the fact, according to Lizza’s detailed account, are people actually feeling remorse and some sympathy for Hughes (who is reportedly “contrite” and “shocked” by the meltdown)? I think because there was actually a missed moment for leadership on the part of TNR’s senior staff, to communicate en masse that “we have concerns about where you seem to be taking our beloved magazine”—an action that could have caused Hughes to reconsider how he was managing the changes he wanted to make. The speeches at the 100th anniversary gala, which took place a few weeks later, obviously show the leadership was there. It sounds like Leon Wieseltier in particular was pretty eloquent about the need to steward the magazine’s legacy. But why no organized and visible opposition in house until it was too late?
My guess? There are two big differences between then and now, and The Nation and The New Republic. The first one is structural. The Nation is a unionized shop. Back then, we were part of the Newspaper Guild. And so when the new publisher yelled at a staffer, who was just doing his job, there was a sense not only of a line being crossed, but some capacity to push back. That said, the staff memo to Carter isn’t couched in union-speak. There’s no reference to the contract or work rules. Instead, we tried to appeal to our common interest in having a productive relationship and shared vision about what the magazine was about.
Apparently, the dozens of New Republic staffers who have quit, en masse, since Hughes fired Foer and brought in Gabriel Snyder to be the new editor, also had a common vision about their magazine. But they only roused themselves to express it after the fact. (See, for example, this letter from a group of former top editors, describing TNR as a “kind of public trust.”)
Why didn’t this happen earlier? I think the way offices communicate now might also have something to do with it. Instead of gathering face-to-face, staff at places like The New Republic talk to each other through screens, and most of that is asynchronous and one-to-one. Lizza’s story shows that there were several early signs of conflict with Hughes before the final meltdown, where some of his top writers clashed with him about particular editorial judgments or ideas. But that happened mostly by email or on the internal TNR list-serv. If anything, I’d bet that everyone’s reliance on email to communicate probably made matters worse, given how poorly we understand each other without nonverbal cues. The critical move — a solidarity letter and a demand for a face-to-face meeting — never happened when it could have mattered.
Postscript: I just read Alex Gourevitch and Corey Robin’s obituary for The New Republic, and their point is spot on: years ago the magazine had ceased to have a “project” worth fighting for, beyond its own self-congratulation. “Subsisting on a diet of ginned-up controversy — The Bell Curve! Hack Heaven! The cheapness of Muslim life, most notably to Muslims! — it had become a magazine about a magazine, its “contrarianism” contributing less to the world of ideas than to the brand (and scandals) of its writers and editors,” they write. So, when push came to shove, no one there knew what they were shoving back for.
