Five Minutes on the History of North Dakota Quarterly

I’m up at 3 am to contribute a 5 minute “lightning talk” to panel on regional magazines convened by the editors of the Edinburgh Companion to the Regional Magazine. For those of you who passed on my numerous past posts on this topic (here, here, here, and here) and who retained a bit of curiosity, this is a very short way to learn about my interest.

My short talk today is about the Quarterly Journalof the University of North Dakota. First appearing in 1910/1911, the Quarterly Journal published 23 volumes before succumbing to the financial pressures of the Great Depression. These volumes represent the development of a university magazine at a crucial time in the emergence of a distinctive form of American regionalism.

First, some context. The Quarterly Journal was founded at the University of North Dakota to serve as a vehicle for both faculty researchers and regional authors. The hope was that this magazine would serve as a token of exchange with other institutions to help develop the university library. At the same time, it had more popular and regional goals to spread the work that would be of “especial interest to the people of North Dakota or of the Northwest.” The state of North Dakota was new, established in 1889 (some five years after the founding of the eponymous university!), relatively large (183,000 sq. kms), and sparsely population with a little over 3 people per square km. The city of Grand Forks, where the university and magazine were based, has a population of only 12,400 people in 1910.

Despite the small population, the state has a busy newspaper scene with over 100 newspapers and printers in the state and four or five in Grand Forks alone. These publications complemented access to magazines published in the nearest major city, Minneapolis, which produced regional magazines, such as De Vestry’s Western Magazine or The Bellman which garnered national attention. In North Dakota, printers across the state produced a small number of relatively obscure magazines which variously catered to newly arrived ethnic groups — especially Scandanavians — political commitments, and a regional interest in the past and future of the new state. In the broader region, the first decades of the 20th century also saw the appearance of regional literary magazines: H. G. Merriam founded Frontier magazine in Missoula and James Frederick The Midland in Iowa City, Iowa. Frederick’s Midland briefly relocating to Moorhead Minnesota some 70 miles south of Grand Forks. It gained a reputation as national platform for regional writers and voices.

The Quarterly Journal both sits astride these various currents in regional publication and traces a distinctive trajectory in the development of regionalism in American little magazines. Unlike The Midland, Frontier, or The Bellman, The Quarterly published mostly non-fiction and scholarly fare. Its regional focus manifest itself in various articles on topics ranging from the potential of mineral resources in the state to history, tax policies, the organization of social services, and educational practice. The first editor, A.J. Ladd was hired as professor of education in 1905. Heavily steeped in progressive values of improvement through systematic research and policy, he cultivated likeminded authors such as the sociologist John Gillette and the historian Orin G. Libby. Gillette is widely appreciated as one of the founders of rural sociology; Libby, a student of the progressive University of Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner, worked closely with Gillette and shared his values.

The progressive bent of the early contributors to the Quarterly Journal, and at the university more broadly, represented a step in the institutionalization of a late-19th century tradition of regional radicalism. Championed by regionalist advocates such as Hamlin Garland, the late 19th century saw the emergence of social, political, and economic radical populism: ranging from Georgism (i.e. the followers of Henry George) to various forms of collectivism (e.g. The Grange), antimonopolism, and utopianism (e.g. the work of Ignatius Donnelly). These movements marked a growing faith in the experience of rural life in the region. By the early 20th century, populist progressive movements such as the Non-Partisan League sought to institutionalize many of the values mooted by earlier regionalists. There was resistance to this, of course: A.J. Ladd was not only dismissed as editor of the Quarterly after volume 13, but also from the university in an attack by the administration on progressive faculty.

Subsequent editors largely maintained the Quarterly’s progressive regionalist bent, and the state developed distinctly regionalist manifestations of rural, agrarian populism such as a state bank and state grain mill. The Quarterly Journal had a place among these institutions as well as other little magazines, but unlike the mill and the bank, it succumbed to the Great Depression alongside many other early 20th century regional publications.

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The lightning conference was really invigorating and I’m really excited to develop my paper a bit more in light of what I heard today. One thing that struck me was that the articles in the Quarterly Journal are really extraordinarily boring. And they are relentlessly boring. The absence of polemic especially in the early issues of the Quarterly is striking considering occasionally roiling political debates of the day (and outside a small number of articles such as Libby’s 1913 attack on “Partisan Scholarship”, Vernon Squires’ ham-fisted critique of the “New Poetry,” or the clearly staged backandforth between William Schier and E. D. Shonberger on humor in forensics). It may be that later issues of the Quarterly saw a greater willingness to engage aggressively with ideas (and perhaps there is a greater tendency in the numerous book reviews), but this remains a line of inquiry that I need to pursue more vigorously.