Liberty

At least three American magazines since the late nineteenth century have called themselves Liberty. The most commonly known is the mass-circulation pulp magazine that reached a circulation of 2.4 million during the 1930s, when it was controlled by the eccentric publisher Bernarr Macfadden. Liberty was, however, also the name appropriately chosen by philosophical anarchist Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1864-1939) for the organ he published from 1881 to 1908. In more recent years, a small libertarian periodical that advocated tax reform and government non-interference in personal freedoms was also called Liberty.

The first issue of Benjamin Ricketson Tucker's Liberty made its appearance in Boston in August of 1881; the magazine moved to New York in 1892 where it was based until a fire put it out of business 16 years later. Its statement of purpose as expressed in the first issue was a militant one: "Monopoly and privilege must be destroyed, opportunity afforded, and competition encouraged. This is Liberty's work and 'Down with Authority' her war-cry." Tucker himself wrote many of the screeds advocating freedom of the individual from domination by the state, and promoting radical causes of the day such as birth control, free love, and women's suffrage. He believed that the state should eventually be dissolved through nonviolent means, which was to him the only way of ending the inequities of the capitalist system; he thus railed loudly against the banking and monetary system for its enslavement of labor. He also urged Americans to refuse to exercise their right to vote, believing that by participating in elections, they were implicating themselves in politics designed to maintain the power structure. In the pages of Liberty, Tucker also espoused the self-reliant philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau and defended Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass against critics who deemed it obscene. When the magazine's offices were destroyed by fire in 1908, Tucker moved to Nice in the south of France, and later to Monte Carlo in Monaco.

The second and most prominent magazine bearing the name of Liberty was ranked as one of America's three major weeklies at the beginning of the 1930s, along with Collier's, Literary Digest and The Saturday Evening Post. Liberty claimed a circulation of 2.4 million when it was purchased by Bernarr Macfadden in 1931 from its previous owners, Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune and Joseph Patterson of the New York Daily News. Macfadden, who made a fortune in publishing somewhat seamy pulp magazines of the true-confession and detective variety, was also publisher of the notorious New York Graphic, a sensation paper that was a prototype of the later "supermarket tabloid." Macfadden first placed Liberty at the serviceof Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1932 presidential campaign and then, under editor Fulton Oursler, turned it into a cheap, sensation magazine with a focus on adventure stories, sex, and scandal, printed on low-quality newsprint. Each article was accompanied by a "reading time" note to inform supposedly busy readers how many minutes and seconds they could expect to spend on the piece. Macfadden's escapist magazines were popular during the Depression, reaching a combined circulation of seven million by 1935, but Liberty began to decline soon afterwards, a victim of its fuzzy editorial focus, its "little bit of everything" approach, and its failure to define its readership. Even Macfadden's practice of donning a leopard-skin loincloth to lead his employees in morning calisthenics could not save Liberty, which folded in 1942. After leaving the publication, Oursler underwent a well-publicized religious conversion and became a senior editor of the Reader's Digest, to which he contributed inspirational pieces. He remains best known today as the author of The Greatest Story Ever Told, about the life of Jesus Christ.

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