Ramparts (magazine)

Ramparts

editor	Warren Hinckle
managing editor	James F. Colaianni
Categories	left-wing politics
Frequency	monthly
Publisher	Edward M. Keating
Year founded	1962
Final issue	1975
Based in	San Francisco, California

Ramparts was an American political and literary magazine, published from 1962 through 1975.

History

Founded by Edward M. Keating as a Catholic literary quarterly, the magazine was closely associated with the New Left. Executive editor Warren Hinckle hired Robert Scheer to replace James F. Colaianni as managing editor when Colaianni was promoted to Assistant Publisher. Contributors included Murray Rothbard, Noam Chomsky, Cesar Chavez, Seymour Hersh, Tom Hayden, Angela Davis, Jonathan Kozol, Todd Gitlin, Sol Stern, Tariq Ali, Alexander Cockburn, Christopher Hitchens, Saul Landau, David Welsh, and John Beecher. Unlike most leftist publications, Ramparts was expensively produced and graphically sophisticated. It reached an audience that may have been put off by the grittier "movement" publications of the time.

Between December 1966 and December 1969, newsstand sales increased from 10,000 to 42,250, and the number of subscribers jumped from 87,976 to 244,069. Between December 1969 and December 1970, the number of Ramparts' subscribers increased to 299,937. By July 1967, the magazine was also earning around $13,000 per month from its advertising sales. A share of the magazine was owned by New Republic magazine owner Martin Peretz, who became a critic of the New Left a few years later.

Ramparts was an early opponent of the Vietnam War. Its April 1966 cover article concerned the Michigan State University Group, a technical assistance program in South Vietnam that Ramparts claimed was a front for CIA covert operations. In August 1966, managing editor James F. Colaianni wrote the first national article denouncing the U.S. use of napalm in that conflict. One of the magazine's most controversial covers depicted the hands of four of its editors holding burning draft cards, with their names clearly visible. Ramparts also unearthed the first conspiracy theory about the Kennedy assassination, and in 1967, editor Sol Stern's interview revealed that the CIA had backed the National Student Association as part of its Cold War strategy. The magazine published Che Guevara's diaries, with an introduction by Fidel Castro, and the prison diaries of Eldridge Cleaver, later republished as Soul On Ice. Cleaver was a Ramparts editor when he witnessed a confrontation between Huey Newton and a police officer outside the magazine's office in February 1967; he soon became the Black Panther Party's minister of information.

In June 1972, the magazine printed the wiring schematics necessary to create a mute box (a variant of the Blue box). All sold issues were recalled or seized from newsstands by police and officials of Pacific Bell, causing financial loss to the magazine.

The magazine's temporary shift to a biweekly format and an expensive trip to cover the 1968 Democratic National Convention led to financial instability, as did a drop in subscriptions. With a reduced budget and a smaller staff, Ramparts continued publication, but finally closed its doors for good in 1975.

Influence

Several former staffers went on to found their own magazines, most notably Mother Jones and Rolling Stone. Robert Scheer later became a featured columnist in the Los Angeles Times and is now the editor of Truthdig and a regular participant in the NPR program Left, Right and Center. Another Ramparts editor, James Ridgeway, is a senior correspondent in the Washington DC bureau of Mother Jones and the author of many muckraking books. James F. Colaianni went on to represent the radical Catholic perspective with the books Married Priests & Married Nuns and The Catholic Left. Two editors, David Horowitz and Peter Collier, later underwent political conversions and became neoconservative critics of the left. For a brief time, the magazine's Washington correspondent was Brit Hume, now of the Fox News Channel.

The magazine also featured discussions of arts and culture. It included contributions from (or interviews with) Thomas Merton, Allen Ginsberg, Kurt Vonnegut, Ken Kesey, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gabriel García Márquez, Susan Sontag, Eduardo Galeano, Peter Ustinov, Erica Jong, and John Lennon.

Research resources

• Records of Ramparts magazine at The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

Books

• A Bomb In Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America by Peter Richardson (New Press: 2009)
• Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey by David Horowitz (Touchstone - Simon and Schuster: 1997)

Articles

• "'Ramparts': the End of Muckraking Magazines." By Adam Hochschild, Washington Monthly, June 1974, Vol. 6 Issue 4, p33-42.
• "No Longer Emerging: 'Ramparts' Magazine and the Catholic Laith, 1962-1968." RAMPARTS' MAGAZINE AND THE CATHOLIC LAITY, 1962-1968. By Jeffrey M.Burns, U.S. Catholic Historian, Jun 1990, Vol. 9 Issue 3, p321-333

External links

• Ramparts by Pam Black, Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 2004
• Back When Ramparts Did the Storming by Dwight Garner, New York Times, October 6, 2009
• Scoop by Jack Shafer, New York Times Sunday Book Review, October 8, 2009
• A Fistful of Dynamite, by Daniel McCarthy, The American Conservative, January 1, 2010
• The Ramparts I Watched: Our Storied Radical Magazine did Transform the Nation, for the Worse by Sol Stern, City Journal, Winter 2010
• Ramparts Magazine issues in .pdf format