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Privately, Coolidge favored American recognition of the Soviet Union, arguing that it was a reality unlikely soon to disappear, but his reserve led him never to make this argument directly, and to print opposing views. He himself always saw the Soviet system more in terms of Russian history than of the communist ideology, though he had no use for the latter and never fell for the fashionable glowing reports purveyed by the Webbs, H.G. Wells, or Lincoln Steffens. Basically, both he and Armstrong would today be called realists, with definite ideals but a firm sense of the constant need to judge acutely what was happening and why, and what it meant in action terms in the short and medium term. From the first, true to its credo, the magazine showed itself hospitable to authors who might not have been considered in the mainstream. One of these, a personal friend of Armstrong, was the distinguished African-American intellectual W.E.B. DuBois, whose first of five Foreign Affairs articles, in 1925, defined the "Color Line" as the key problem of the 20th century. Coolidge was delighted with this article, commenting (as Armstrong recalled in his memoir) that this was partly because it made him "squirm under the conclusions." Other issues of race and colonialism were frequently covered. Women authors were slow to appear, though several became prominent in the late 1930s (Dorothy Thompson) and after the Second World War (Barbara Ward Jackson especially). From the first, while "high policy" was the focus of a plurality of the articles in the magazine, economics and trade had a large share, and such social issues as population became prominent from roughly 1944 on, largely through Professor Frank Notestein of Princeton. A particular concern from the first, especially for the scholar Coolidge, was the Book Review section. To take charge of this, Coolidge after some failed experiments brought in a junior colleague from Harvard, who should be the third in our verbal portrait gallery. William L. Langer, coming to Harvard from Roxbury via Boston Latin, then serving in the Army as an enlisted man, had become Coolidge's prize student and de facto successor in the field of European history. Few who attended his lectures, as I did as a one-year graduate student, will forget his nasal twang, the meticulous preparation that caused his lectures to end on the very stroke of the next hour, or finding him at lunch afterward most often in the corner of a greasy spoon on Harvard Square. Genuinely shy, utterly concentrated and not easy to approach or get to know, he was at bottom a warm and compassionate man, with reciprocated devotion to an army of one-time students and colleagues. Langer transformed the Book Review section and set its shape for the next seventy years, as an attempt to note briefly but critically just about all the important books that appeared on international matters, initially in a wide range of languages. On that point he shared Coolidge's view and was famous for responding, when a student pleaded that he had not examined certain materials because they were in Czech, that the library did have Czech grammars and dictionaries! Research confirms the legend of how Langer operated. A month before the reviews had to be in, the magazine's office would assemble all the candidates for review more than 100 at a time pack them in a large crate and ship them to Langer in Cambridge. In two weeks or so back would come the reviews, all done by him alone. I hasten to add that by the late 1930s this was no longer possible and the review section was federalized into subject sections, edited at first by the Managing Editor and then by a separate Book Review Editor. It has remained a keystone of the magazine, contributing to scholarship and to current opinion alike by combining breadth and in most cases brevity. Early in its first decade, in a time that saw the launching of many New York-based magazines (notably Time and The New Yorker), Foreign Affairs was established and thriving. By 1927, the circulation had risen from an initial 1500 or so to the respectable level of 11,000 copies. Then, in 1928, Coolidge died, too early and rather suddenly, and Armstrong took over the editorship, not missing a beat. In the fall of that year, he introduced paired articles presenting the viewpoints of the opposing political parties; the writer on the Democratic side was the then-governor of New York, Franklin Roosevelt.
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