The American Heritage of American Heritage

Forbes Inc. has announced that it's shutting down American Heritage, and I sure am sad to hear that. I am sad not least because the magazine's quarterly spinoff, American Heritage of Invention and Technology, published my first real piece of writing in 1992, at the monstrous length of about 8,000 words. (I've made a career of magazine journalism since then, and I haven't come close to publishing another story that long.) A writer tends to become a fan of any editor who returns the favor, not to mention his phone calls, and Fred Allen, who bought that piece, is a mighty good one.

But my own interest aside, American Heritage is --was-- a surprising magazine more often than it had to be. And it didn't have to be: It easily could've restricted itself to nerdy coverage aimed at the Civil War Chess Set crowd. Instead, its editors strove toward real journalism within a historical framework. Just this week, for example, its Web edition published a lively story about Proposition 13, the California ballot initiative that in 1978 was a major milepost in the development of contemporary anti-tax attitudes. It's a historical subject with teeth, one that tells us something significant about what we are today.

In fact, the very fact of the magazine's existence tells us something as well. American Heritage was founded in 1954, and until 1980 was published every month between hard covers, without advertising. (Secondhand-book dealers are forever turning basement caches of those issues.) It was smart middlebrow culture at a time when a lot of people aspired to be brainier, and not the only such magazine. Quiz shows were in the ascendant, and most were nominally intellectual enterprises. Bennett Cerf, then the editor-in-chief of Random House, was a regular panelist on What's My Line?, for example. (You are unlikely to see Sonny Mehta as a judge on, say, America's Got Talent.) A tweed-jacketed, middle-aged English professor from Northwestern named Bergen Evans could grow nationally famous as the moderator of a TV program, The Last Word. A bald guy who was regularly described as an eggheaded intellectual could win the Democratic nomination, twice. (All right, Adlai Stevenson lost, both times, but he was up against the century's best-loved war hero.) The Aristotelian philosopher Mortimer Adler could write a best-seller called How to Read a Book. The historians Will and Ariel Durant sold a lot of copies of their eleven-volume The History of Civilization, too. PBS got underway.

Some of these cultural products were a lot heftier, intellectually speaking, than others, but one gets the sense that people with decent educations --high school, maybe college-- were consuming many of them, and doing so because they wanted to better themselves, get a little cultured-up. And that is an instinct that, I think, is less prevalent than it was. A great swath of Americans seem more suspicious of such book-learning than ever before, and actively prefer its opposite. Our chief executive says he decided to run for the presidency when he read that Al Gore, Bill Clinton's heir apparent, was reading (gasp) philosophy, by (second gasp) a Frenchman. That man had to be stopped! A previous generation's White House might've gone out of its way to leak that kind of information, to make the vice-president look smarter; today, it can help to lose him the office altogether. One of the best-selling lines in bookstores is called "For Dummies," its very name suggesting that, yes, we need to get smarter, but we're probably not going to.

Perhaps American Heritage was a product of its moment, a piece of that upper-middlebrow culture for which we no longer have nearly as much room. But I notice that, although it's a tough ad sell, with an older readership that isn't exactly flighty, its subscriber base is consistent at 350,000, and its renewals are pretty great. The economics of magazines are, in other words, the real problem here, since most publications have grown too dependent on advertising and not enough on their readers themselves. I also understand that AH is going to keep publishing on the Web, where enthusiasms large and small (including, yes, Civil War buffery) have free rein. If it keeps this fine institution going --and buying 8,000 words from an unpublished writer now and then-- I'm all for it.