Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Opinion / Op-ed / Keeping Atlantic's Boston flavor

Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Opinion / Op-ed / Ellery Sedgwick : "THE ATLANTIC, which recently announced its intentions to move next year to the District of Columbia, was indelibly shaped by its birth in antebellum Boston. When the magazine was founded in 1857, Boston and its environs were in the process of producing the first major American literary culture. That culture was a distinctly regional Yankee humanism. Its values emphasized the life of the mind, liberal inquiry, intellectual engagement in moral and political issues, generally progressive views, and a self-reliant willingness to challenge orthodoxies.

The Atlantic was launched partly as a platform for the New England writers -- particularly Emerson, Longfellow, Stowe, T.W. Higginson, Whittier, and the magazine's first editor, James Russell Lowell -- to advocate the abolition of slavery. But the magazine also challenged the status quo in other forms. Editor Lowell and his successors James Fields and William Dean Howells generally rejected the sentimental, didactic literature of the time in favor of a socially engaged realism. Lowell also published the first American defense of Darwin, angering the guardians of both religious and scientific conventions.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. set off howls from the religious press when he attacked Calvinist dogma suggesting that puritanical repression of instinct, guilt, and self-condemnation caused neurosis. Emerson criticized Lincoln's gradualism, spoke for immediate abolition, and admiringly credited Holmes's Atlantic pieces with ''throwing buckets of Greek fire against acres of paunch and bottom," threatening ''all the respectabilities and professional learning of the time."

Holmes called Boston ''the Hub of the Universe" with self-conscious irony, but during the 19th century, intellectual Boston did see itself as a hub for exporting Yankee humanism to the nation as it expanded westward. The Atlantic was as much a proselytizing agent for Boston culture as the New England schoolmarm and Houghton Mifflin's textbooks.

By 1900, however, the center of literary publishing had clearly moved from Boston to New York, and there was considerable activity in Chicago and San Francisco. Increasing population, broader basic literacy, new technologies, the rapid rise of consumer culture, and advertising created a new popular mass culture.

The Atlantic's founding generation had died out and critics said that both the magazine and Boston culture had grown retrospective, genteel, and provincial. But much of The Atlantic's resistance to changing its intellectual style was a determination to maintain its integrity against the rise of commercial mass culture, including New York's mass circulation ''picture magazines." Throughout the 20th century Atlantic editors and publishers worked to maintain a balance between solvency, requiring substantial readership and advertising revenues, and the Atlantic's traditional niche of non-formulaic literature and liberal intellectual debate.

Since 1900, The Atlantic's editors have continued its ''Boston" traditions, including open inquiry, a broad range of voices, and a willingness to challenge conventional thought. Walter Page published several essays from W.E.B. DuBois's ''The Souls of Black Folk" and promoted the literary careers of Charles Chesnutt, Abraham Cahan, and Jacob Riis. Bliss Perry denounced US policy in the Philippines as exploitative colonialism, warned against Anglo-Saxon racism, and promoted cultural pluralism in the magazine.

Ellery Sedgwick, who was my grandfather, resisted literary modernism but published many essays by the iconoclasts Randolph Bourne and H.L. Mencken, early work by Frost and Hemingway, criticism of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, and editorial support for the Democrats' Catholic presidential nominee, Al Smith.

The Atlantic has been shaped by Boston for 147 years, and recent events have made it clear that, despite national homogenization, Boston remains a distinct political and cultural entity. The move to Washington may be good for The Atlantic by consolidating its operations and placing it in the center of national political action. From the beginning the magazine has aimed at a national influence in politics as well as literature.

But many of its readers hope that it will maintain its Boston heritage: a serious interest in ideas, a strong literary tradition, and a self-reliant independence from received public opinion.

If the magazine can avoid succumbing to Washington's single-minded obsession with politics, it may find Washington a good place to continue ''throwing buckets of Greek fire against acres of paunch and bottom."

Ellery Sedgwick is the author of ''A History of the Atlantic Monthly: 1857-1909: Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb.""