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.
Read more about this topic: The Progressive
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)