119 Years of The Atlantic

At half past three this morning I came across the aforementioned book and started to look through some of the articles. The Atlantic, an American magazine, was founded by a number of learned Americans in 1857 and the book that I found has an article per year until 1976 (one wonders why they decided to create it in the 119th year).

The first article that caught my attention was "Reconstruction" written in 1866 by Frederick Douglass, son of a slave. An eloquent article stating the case for universal suffrage and, more interestingly, what sounds like the joining up of Southern states into one administrative region: "The plain , common sense way of doing this work [bringing the "light of law and liberty" to the South] is simply to establish in the South one law, one government , one administration of justice, one condition to the exercise of the elective franchise, for men of all races and colours alike"

The article selected for 1867 is an attack on Darwin's theory of evolution by Edwin Percy Whipple. He says of Huxley: "Well, then, my proposition is, that nobody who reasons himself into a development from the monkey has the right to take mankind with him in his induction. His argument covers but one individual, -himself." I think we can forgive Mr Whipple for his reluctance to accept evolution, given it was such a radical theory and only a few years old.

I read only some of Theodore Roosevelt's article about the New York Police force, written in 1897, before skipping forward to 1917 where Bertrand Russell is talking about people's hostility to new, radical ideas. I thought this tied back quite nicely to Mr Whipple. Russell's article, which is entitled "Individual Liberty and Public Control", is an argument for, essentially, the liberty of individuals to carry out their "constructive or creative impulses" but for a "public neutral authority" to "control..the whole realm of the possessive impulses and the use of force to which they give rise". Does this mean that he thinks the state should control all property? His political proposal is certainly an interesting concoction of libertarianism and socialism, given that earlier in the article he stated that he did "not think this prohibition [of polygamy in America] was wise".

The last article I read came from 1963 and is entitled "The Negro is your brother" and is Martin Luther King Jr's letter from Birmingham city jail in response to a public statement of cause and concern issued by eight white religious leaders of the South. It is a magnificent piece of writing. King says around half way down his letter that "history is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily." Given Douglass' plea for universal suffrage almost 100 years before this, the resonance of King's statement and the desperate situation of the African American is astounding. It should be read in its entirety.