The Progressive - History

History

Originally named La Follette's Weekly, then La Follette's, The Progressive took on its current name in 1929. On the first page of the first issue, La Follette introduced the magazine:

In the course of every attempt to establish or develop free government, a struggle between Special Privilege and Equal Rights is inevitable. Our great industrial organizations in control of politics, government, and natural resources. They manage conventions, make platforms, dictate legislation. They rule through the very men elected to reprsent them. The battle is just on. It is young yet. It will be the longest and hardest ever fought for Democracy. In other lands, the people have lost. Here we shall win. It is a glorious privilege to live in this time, and have a free hand in this fight for government by the people.

The campaigns The Progressive has led have carried on La Follette's theme, including the fight to stay out of World War I, opposition to the Palmer Raids in the early 1920s, calling for action against unemployment during the Depression, exposing McCarthyism in the 1950s, and denouncing U.S. involvement in Indochina.

In the 1960s, it served as a platform for the American civil rights movement, publishing the writing of Martin Luther King Jr. five times, and publishing James Baldwin's open letter "My Dungeon Shook - Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation", the first section of The Fire Next Time. In the 1970s, the magazine devoted attention to the emerging environmentalist movement, beginning with a special Earth Day issue in 1970 entitled "The Crisis of Survival".

In 1979, The Progressive won national attention for its article by Howard Morland, "The H-bomb Secret: How we got it and why we're telling it", which the U.S. government suppressed for six months because it contained classified information. The magazine prevailed in a landmark First Amendment case of prior restraint, United States v. The Progressive.

In the 1980s, it published stories about U.S. support for death squads in Central America. During the 1990s, The Progressive turned its attention to immigrants, women and welfare, LGBT social movements, and prisoners. In recent years, has it advocated the end of economic sanctions on Iraq, the end of U.S. involvement in the Colombian civil war, adopting a more liberal policy toward drugs, and instituting public funding of political campaigns.