Writing Wednesday: NDQ in its Regional Context

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been offering glimpses of an article that I’m preparing for the Edinburgh Companion to the Regional Magazine. My piece is a case study of North Dakota Quarterly and my post last week involved outlining its early history (from 1910/11-1933); previously, I offered an introduction.

This week, I’m trying to put the Quarterly in some regional and national context.

The Little Magazine and Regionalism

Placing the Quarterly Journal in its regional and historical context offers some key perspectives not only on the history of the regional magazine in the U.S., but also the development of distinctive strands of American regionalism in the first third of the 20th century. It is important to stress that despite some ebb and flow of regional content, the magazine remained profoundly regional in its emphasis, its authors, and its audience. Over 90% of the contributors to the Quarterly are UND faculty and the rest are from the region. Most of the non-UND contributors hailed from the University of Manitoba, often while these faculty are on exchanged at UND, and the Agricultural College (which becomes North Dakota State University) in Fargo. Members of the state board of higher education contributed, former faculty occasional wrote for the magazine, as did students and in rare instances regional authors with no clear affiliation with the university or the magazine.

The regional character of the Quarterly goes beyond its content and authors, however, and is bound up with the history of printing and the history of newspaper publishing in the state. At the time of statehood of North Dakota had well over 100 newspapers. These newspapers provided the infrastructure for regional publishing. The , the , and the provided key infrastructure for publishing in the state in the 19th and early 20th century. The , for example, printed the annual publication of the , edited by O.G. Libby, starting in 1906. They served as both printers and publishers for many of the notable works of local history as well as books and pamphlets promoting the economic potential of the region. These printers supported the occasional publication of books, such as Lewis Crawford’s 1922 book of anecdotes about the badlands, , released by the Capital Book Company in Bismarck, but printed and bound by the Bismarck Tribune. It is plausible to assume that this same infrastructure supported the printing and publication of early magazines in the state. Prominent among these was Sam Clark and C.H. Crockard whose two magazines of political satire: (1912-1929) and (1934) relied upon printers in Bismarck, perhaps associated with Sam Clark’s time with the . It is possible that the same Bismarck printers also published the (1919-1920) a short-lived and stridently anti-NPL magazine.

In Grand Forks, the , , Normandy Publishing Company, and The Page Printerie Inc. all spent time as printers of the Quarterly. In 1910, the owner to the sold his paper to his rival, the and the merged concern (going by the name and finally ) printed the through 1917. In 1918 the magazine moved its printing to the The Page Printerie Inc. which published another newspaper, the short-lived Grand Forks . From 1920-1922, the Quarterly was printed by the Normanden Publishing Co. which published the long-lived Norwegian language newspaper, as well as the magazine starting in 1924 and edited by Georg Strandvold, a sometime contributor to the . It is worth noting that when the NPL-backed Grand Forks folded in 1921, it sold its new printing equipment at foreclosure prices suggesting that printing presses were not in demand in the region (Mader 1937: 331). Considering the number of printers and newspapers in the state at this time, this is hardly surprising.

Newspapers formed part of a thriving print-media culture on the Dakota prairie dating to the 19th century (Lindell 2004). The Quarterly Journal contributed to a tradition cultivated by commercial magazines published in Minneapolis at the turn of the 20th century (Flanagan 1945). Many of these magazines had a regional focus. This includes publications such as (1892), which explicitly focused on regional voices and literature. After only one volume, the editors of celebrated how the “pages of this magazine, throughout its brief existence, have furnished the convincing proof that there are those among us who are qualified to shine in the higher walks of literature” (2 (1893): 348). (1896), was another similarly regional magazine of essays and literature dedicated to progressive politics, education, and Catholicism. (later ), featured articles on history, business, and society. The most prominent among these commercial regional magazines was William Stanley Braithwaite’s (1906-1919) which enjoyed a wide circulation and renown in part as a result of its regularly anthologized collections of fiction, essays, and poetry. It featured a fair number of regional authors, such as the poet Arthur Upson, and the professor and critic Richard Burton, who taught at the University of Minnesota and along with his colleagues contributed numerous book reviews (Flanagan 1945: 307). When ceased publication, morned the loss of a conservative voice in the Minnesota magazine world and noted that “at this writing, the Magazine field in Minnesota belongs solely to ” ( 13 (1919): 112).

Understanding the relationship between these early 20th century regional magazines, their authors, and readers is a challenging task. Unsurprisingly, no authors from the appear in over its first ten years of publication (21 (1916): 91-93). Moreover, and do not appear to specifically reference the or even the University of North Dakota in their pages. magazine, which we will discuss below, is an exception. included a “Chronicle” (in volume 1) and “Library” feature (in subsequent volumes) which offered a window into the reading habits of its editor and anticipated those of its readers. appears occasionally in those pages ( 1 (1915); 3 (1917)) and in volume 1 it appears alongsidereferences to the and the newly inaugurated and short-lived, published at the University of Nebraska. In the first issues, editors also pay particular attention to work done by regional historical magazines such as , , and as well as less formal publications such as the ethnographic magazine , which focused on stories of Native American life in the west.Later issues reveal the editor as a reader of midwestern literary magazines such as and .

In issue 16.4 (November/December 1930) of , its editor John T. Frederick lamented “Among non-commercial magazines THE MIDLAND is old, rather than young. It has outlived The Dial, The Seven Arts, The Little Review, transition, The Forge, The Bellman, Reedy’s Mirror, and a host besides: a melancholy and perhaps ominous distinction.” This list of so-called “little magazines” represented a sample of the new constellation of periodicals published across the United States in the early decades of the 20th century. These magazines often catered to small audiences, were not commercially viable, and often reflected the changing attitudes, tastes, and politics of their editors and founders. Like (1915-1933), contemporary magazines such as (1912-), (1914-1929), (1920-1939), (1920-1929), and (1922-1925) platformed a new generation of American authors who sought independence from commercial publishers and venues where they could publish more experimental and avant-garde works under sympathetic editors. These periodicals often embraced the complex currents of modernist and regional literature. Harriet Monroe’s and Jame Heap’s and Margaret Anderson’s, for example, found themselves under the modernist influence of Ezra Pound and published important work by such luminaries as T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. In the 1920s, Scofield Thayer and James Watson transformed the hoary old 19th-century magazine, into a key venue for William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore (who also served as an editor), as well as publishing Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Scholars have documented the rise, fall, and influence of these little magazines in tremendous detail.

Frederick’s magazine represented a distinctly regional approach to the little magazine tradition. Frederick founded in 1915 in Iowa City as “a modest attempt to encourage the making of literature in the Middle West”with the idea that “the region between the mountains would gain in variety at least if it retained more of its makers of literature, music, pictures, and other expressions of civilization.” Similar sentiments gave rise to the Fugitive group of poets at Vanderbilt University in Nashville whose little magazine (1922-1925) declared a new phase of Southern writing and “a literary phase known rather euphemistically as Southern Literature has expired, like any other stream whose source is stopped up.”showcased regional writers from the midwest, the west, and the south respectively. Further west, H. G. Merriam began , in Missoula, Montana began as a university magazine for students in creative writing at the University of Montana with particular interest in outputs that “breathes of the spirit of the State in which it is published.” In 1927, the Frontier pivots from being limited to university authors and the state of Montana to becoming a literary magazine of the Northwest where it hoped to expose “the ranch, the mine; the lumber camp, the range; the city, the village, these have not yielded their treasure of the comedy and tragedy of human life.” Frederick in The Midland responds to this new direction enthusiastically saying: “seems very clearly destined to immediate and permanent usefulness in the development of American literature along regional lines.”

Magazines like and offer distinct parallels to the Quarterly Journal. The former’s commitment to regional voices, which including being published at a “real frontier” in Moorhead, Minnesota ( 16.6 (1930): 371) some 75 miles south of the home of the Quarterly in Grand Forks, North Dakota. , some 1200 miles to the west of Grand Forks, shared the Quarterly’s grounding at a major state university.