The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank, has just relaunched its magazine (formerly known as–get this–“American Enterprise”) as The American.
The editor is James K. Glassman, who will never be able to escape the fact that he co-authored the book Dow 36,000 in 1999 but is otherwise a pretty great journalist of both business and ideas, and he has big plans for the endeavor. To quote from his editor’s letter in the inaugural issue:
Business magazines have gone tiny. Clearly, there are readers who want nuts-and-bolts stories on how to climb the corporate ladder or how to find the best mutual funds. I have read–indeed, written–such stories myself. But by going tiny, business magazines have provided us with an opportunity that Henry Luce recognized when he proposed the original Fortune magazine: “The field which lies open is as immense and as rich as was ever offered to journalistic enterprise…. Industry is a world in itself … and this World is more macrocosm than microcosm, is, in fact, the largest of the planets which make up our system.”
Fortune, in its original incarnation from the 1930s through the 1960s, largely fulfilled this mission. It made business a macro subject and used business reporting to illuminate society and culture. Fortune was also a beautiful magazine, an artifact in itself, and, without embarrassment (but also without sycophancy), it celebrated American accomplishment.
I like to think that we retain some of that Lucian approach in the pages of Fortune, but Glassman is right that we now put far more emphasis on the nuts and bolts of corporate life than did the Fortune of the 1930s and 1940s. (I’m not so sure I agree about the 1950s and 1960s.)
What Glassman fails to mention, though, is that the people who produced that magazine he admires so much were lefties: critic (and lapsed Trotskyite) Dwight MacDonald, poet and playwright Archibald Macleish, novelist James Agee, economist John Kenneth Galbraith. As Galbraith put it in his autobiography (I lifted the quote out of Richard Parker’s massive new biography, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics):
It had been Harry Luce’s reluctant discovery that, with rare exceptions, good writers on business were either liberals or socialists. To this he was reconciled. Better someone with questionable ideas who wrote interesting and readable English than a man of sound view who could not be read at all.
So there you have it. The American Enterprise Institute, that bastion of respectable conservative thought, is publishing a magazine modeled upon the work of a bunch of liberals and socialists. To quote my old boss, the late, great Ron Casey: Is this a great country or what?