About Metropolitan Magazine

Metropolitan Magazine

Metropolitan Magazine — also called The Metropolitan — was an American monthly magazine published in New York, New York, from 1895 to August 1925. It began under editor and publisher John Brisben Walker as a sophisticated magazine for New York theater-goers, passed in 1902 to Colonel George Harvey of Harper and Brothers, and in its maturity published politics, literature and art at a high level. Its defining episode came during the First World War, when former President Theodore Roosevelt served as an editor and used its pages to attack President Woodrow Wilson's neutrality, and when its correspondent John Reed reported from revolutionary Mexico and wartime Europe. Sold in January 1923 to Bernarr Macfadden, it ended as Macfadden's Fiction-Lover's Magazine, its last issue dated August 1925. Its contributors included Theodore Dreiser, Edna Ferber, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack London and John Reed.

Founding in 1895: John Brisben Walker

Metropolitan Magazine began in 1895. Its first editor and publisher, John Brisben Walker, was one of the most inventive magazine men of his generation: he had bought Cosmopolitan in 1889, built it into a leading monthly, and would sell it to William Randolph Hearst in 1905. The Metropolitan was his New York venture, and accounts of its earliest issues describe a racier beginning — the magazine has been characterized as starting as a "naughty picture magazine," with suggestive photographs in 1897 of the opera singer Nellie Melba and of Yvette Guilbert in her boudoir that were considered risqué for the time.

By 1898 Walker had steered it toward sophistication: a magazine for New York theater-goers, publishing writing by authors of the stature of Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad and treating the city's cultural life as its home ground. That trajectory — sensation first, respectability built on top of it — was a common path for the new mass magazines of the 1890s, which lived by newsstand sales before they lived by reputation.

The Harvey Era from 1902

In 1902 Walker sold the magazine, together with The Daily Telegraph, for $100,000 to Colonel George Brinton McClellan Harvey, president of the publishing house Harper and Brothers. Harvey's own summary of the transaction, often quoted in histories of the magazine, was that in buying the Metropolitan he had bought simply a name — the value lay in the title and its New York identity, and the magazine's chief mission, as he defined it, should be the urban life of New York. He appointed the humorist and playwright John Kendrick Bangs as editor, a post Bangs held from 1902 until about 1914.

Under Harvey the magazine consolidated as a monthly of politics, literature and art — a general magazine with literary ambitions, publishing fiction, essays and commentary for an educated urban readership. The financier Harry Payne Whitney was an owner for a time during the 1910s, one of several hands through which the property passed while its editorial identity remained recognizably Harvey's creation: metropolitan in subject as well as in name.

John Reed and the Mexican Revolution

The magazine's finest reporting hour came abroad. During the Mexican Revolution, Metropolitan sent the young journalist John Reed to Mexico, where he attached himself to Pancho Villa's forces and lived with Villa's troops for four months. Reed's Mexican reporting — later the foundation of his book Insurgent Mexico — was immersive, sympathetic and vividly written, and it demonstrated the magazine's willingness to put a correspondent inside a revolution rather than on its edges. It remains one of the celebrated magazine assignments of the decade.

When the First World War began, Metropolitan sent Reed to Europe as a war correspondent. There the partnership strained: some of Reed's European articles were rejected as showing leftist sympathies out of step with the magazine's line, an early sign of the editorial battles that the war — and Reed's radicalism — would bring to American journalism. Reed went on to write Ten Days That Shook the World about the Russian Revolution, and his passage through the Metropolitan's pages links the magazine permanently to the history of revolutionary reporting.

Theodore Roosevelt, Editor at War

In 1914 the magazine made its boldest appointment: former President Theodore Roosevelt became an editor of Metropolitan, at a salary reported as $25,000 a year on a three-year contract. Roosevelt took the post intending, as he saw it, to retire from politics into writing. The European war destroyed that intention. From the Metropolitan's editorial chair he wrote a stream of essays denouncing Wilson's policy of neutrality, arguing that the United States earned scorn if it placed peace above righteousness and demanding American preparedness and intervention on the Allied side.

The magazine became, in effect, the platform of the most famous private citizen in America, and frequently printed articles critical of Wilson's conduct of foreign policy as the United States moved toward and then into the war. In 1918 the controversy reached the mails: the New York postmaster was warned to watch for issues commenting on Wilson's foreign policy, and rumors circulated that the Post Office might revoke the magazine's second-class mailing privileges — the era's standard threat against dissenting publications. In the event, every issue was delivered. Roosevelt wrote for the magazine until his death in January 1919; his last act, by the magazine's tradition, included attending to the proofs of his final Metropolitan article and a letter concerning it to his son.

Content and Contributors

Across its thirty years the Metropolitan published a mixture of political commentary, reportage, fiction and cultural criticism. Its roster of famous contributors, as preserved in reference accounts, is a cross-section of American letters in the period: Theodore Dreiser, who contributed magazine journalism to the Metropolitan among many other journals in the late 1890s before Sister Carrie; Edna Ferber; F. Scott Fitzgerald; the essayist Katharine Fullerton Gerould; Jack London; Clarence E. Mulford, creator of Hopalong Cassidy; John Reed; and Theodore Roosevelt himself.

That list describes the magazine's position accurately. It was not the largest of the great monthlies, nor the most avant-garde, but it stood in the first rank of general magazines where a president, a revolutionary reporter and the coming generation of American novelists could all appear within the same covers — a combination possible only in the brief era when monthly magazines were the nation's principal forum of ideas.

The Macfadden Purchase, 1923

The postwar magazine business was consolidating and hardening, and by the early 1920s the Metropolitan needed new ownership. In January 1923, on the urging of supervising editor Fulton Oursler, the physical-culture and true-story publisher Bernarr Macfadden bought the magazine. Macfadden launched his era conspicuously, with an abridged serialization of Theodore Dreiser's novel The Genius — a book that had been suppressed as obscene after its 1915 publication, making its serialization a statement of intent. The first Macfadden issue was dated February–March 1923; the magazine then reverted to monthly publication. Oursler's own first serious novels, Behold This Dreamer! and Sandalwood, were also serialized in its pages.

The experiment did not revive the magazine's fortunes. Macfadden's empire was built on confession magazines, physical culture and mass sensation, and a prestige monthly of politics and literature sat awkwardly within it. Rather than close the property outright, Macfadden converted it to his own kind of publication.

Macfadden's Fiction-Lover's Magazine and the End, 1925

With the October 1924 issue, the title was changed to Macfadden Fiction-Lovers Magazine — rendered in reference works variously as Macfadden's Fiction Lover's Magazine — and the old Metropolitan ceased to exist in all but lineage. The successor, a fiction magazine under the Macfadden brand, published its last issue in August 1925. The full run of the property is therefore conventionally dated 1895 to 1925: thirty years from Walker's theater magazine to Macfadden's fiction monthly, with the Metropolitan name itself carried for twenty-nine of those years.

No revival followed. The Metropolitan name lapsed, surviving in library runs, in Roosevelt scholarship — his Metropolitan essays are a primary source for his wartime thought — and in Reed's biography. Later, unrelated publications have used similar names, and the famous Metropolitan Magazine of the British and theatrical worlds is a different lineage; the New York monthly of 1895 to 1925 stands on its own record.

Place and Identity

The batch listing places Metropolitan Magazine in New York, New York, and that is correct without qualification: it was founded there, defined itself by the life of the city, was edited there through the Walker, Harvey and Macfadden ownerships, and was published from New York until 1925. For directory purposes its identity is fixed by its editors and dates — Walker 1895 to 1902, Bangs from 1902, Roosevelt as wartime editor from 1914, Macfadden 1923 to 1925 — which distinguish it from any other periodical of the same common name.

Legacy

Metropolitan Magazine's legacy rests on two assignments and one appointment. Reed in Mexico and Reed in wartime Europe helped invent the immersive, partisan-tinged foreign correspondence that defined a century of magazine reporting. Roosevelt's editorship gave a former president a monthly pulpit from which to conduct a foreign-policy campaign against a sitting president — an arrangement without real parallel in American media, before or since, and one that made the magazine a document of the home-front argument over the First World War.

Beyond those peaks, the magazine exemplifies the life cycle of the great American monthly: founded in sensation in the 1890s, dignified by literary ambition in the 1900s, consequential in the 1910s, and absorbed in the 1920s by a mass-market empire that wanted its name for other purposes. Its final transformation into a Macfadden fiction title closes the story with a certain symmetry — the magazine that began by selling pictures ended, thirty years on, as a brand in someone else's catalogue.