By MIKE MAGEE
Once I requested my good literary agent, Jill Kneerim, after I would know that my e book proposal was prepared for submission, she replied immediately, “It is going to be prepared after I say it’s prepared.” Eleven months later, in April, 2018, she lastly inexperienced lit the project, and two weeks after that, in an orchestrated two-round public public sale, it “offered” to Grove/Atlantic Press.
I handed over the very best bidder in selecting to earn the chance to be related to a literary and cultural publication – The Atlantic Monthly– that dates again to November, 1857, when it “rapidly turned identified for the standard of its fiction and basic articles, contributed by an extended line of distinguished editors and authors that features James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.”
Their e book publishing arm, the Atlantic Monthly Press, was integrated in 1917. A merger in 1993 with Grove Press gave beginning to Grove/Atlantic. Grove was no slouch when it got here to social activism. Based in 1951, it purposefully republished D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover: Complete and Unexpurgated, and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer as a problem to U.S. obscenity legal guidelines on the time. And in 1965, they had been the unique and first writer of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
The Atlantic Month-to-month’s title change to The Atlantic formally occurred in 2007 and signaled a broader and extra fashionable editorial platform, a digital presence and engagement with multi-platform fashionable media. At round this time, corporate offices had been moved to Washington, D.C., and the journal centered down on politics that includes a longtime journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg. A decade later, famous philanthropist, Laurene Powell Jobs, bought a majority stake within the rising empire, and Goldberg was elevated to editor-in-chief.
Now a decade later, with America’s 250th birthday upon us, the exact same Jeffrey Goldberg penned a gap editorial – “America’s Promise” – within the July, 2026 version. Meant to impress, it opens with “It’s fairly fascinating, and considerably chastening, to appreciate that crucial piece of journalism revealed throughout the 169-year historical past of this journal was not journalism in any respect, however a poem…”
That poem appeared on web page 10 of Vol. IX – February, 1862. -No. LII. It had 5 stanzas, and no title when it was submitted. The creator, an abolitionist poet and pacifist, Julia Ward Howe was a contributor and pal to then editor, James J. Fields. In November, 1861, whereas visiting Washington, D.C. along with her husband Samuel, she was drawn to a group of Union soldiers who had joined voices to sing a well-known tune titled “John Brown’s Body” with the original hymn credited to John William Steffe, a South Carolina born Philadelphia bookkeeper in 1856, and lyrics added 5 years later by Mass 2nd Infantry Battalion.
Howe was not so impressed by the lyrics which she knew nicely, however reasonably by the passion of the troopers who clearly liked the tune. And she or he questioned, what if I had been to write down completely different lyrics? May the troopers take them up as their very own and cross them alongside to others?
As she slept on the concept, she was woke up by the tune in her head within the early morning hours, and rushed to a facet desk to jot down the lyrics that had appeared spontaneously earlier than they had been misplaced.
The phrases are recognizable as poet-generated and religiously impressed. For instance: “I’ve seen Him within the watch-fires of 100 circling camps; They’ve builded Him an altar within the night dews and damps: I can learn His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps: His day is marching on.”
Julia Ward Howe wasn’t sure what she had in her arms. However she took an opportunity and delivered the phrases to her pal and editor James T. Fields. Her note to Field’s revealed her ambivalence: “Fields! Would you like this, and do you prefer it, and have you ever room for it in January quantity? I’m unhappy and spleeny…Isn’t this a melancholy view of issues? However it’s a vale you understand. When will the world come to an finish?” The remainder, as they are saying, is historical past. It made that challenge on web page 10 of the February, 1862 challenge, with no byline “as was then the customized.” She was paid $5. Subject is credited with including the “grand, martial, and commanding title.”
Historians say that President Abraham Lincoln wept every time he heard the tune. And it traveled nicely, far and large, reappearing over a century in a while April 3, 1968 on the Mason Temple Memphis, Tennessee in Martin Luther King’s remaining speech “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” the evening earlier than his assassination.
Goldberg shares his dialogue with The Atlantic historian, Jake Lundberg, on the importance of Howe’s effort. In his phrases, “By the point of the Nice Despair, the ‘Battle Hymn’ had achieved a very nationwide character. The tune’s stature is such that it may be used to make an announcement in a manner that the official anthem (The Star Spangled Banner) by no means can.”
It’s stated that each half century since America was born (1826, 1876, 1926, 1976, 2026) we as a nation have been compelled to debate anew the steep chasm between our highest beliefs as initially expressed within the Structure, and the fact which is commonly brutal and disheartening. And but, within the course of, whether or not through the years of Reconstruction, the Robber Barons, Watergate, and now Trumpism, we’re requested to recommit to the chance that we meant what we stated.
We regularly fall again on competing photographs to gauge our progress towards goodness; requested this July 4th to someway see and interpret our reflection in a now non-reflecting pool. We’re, and have at all times been, imperfect.
And but, we’re additionally the heirs of Julia Ward Howe, and her remaining phrases in stanza 5 of her unique title much less poem – “As he died to make males holy, allow us to die to make males free, Whereas God is marching on.”
Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and common contributor to THCB. He’s the creator of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex. (Grove/Atlantic, 2020)
