Human Events

Overview

Human Events takes its name from the first sentence of the United States Declaration of Independence: "When in the course of human events...".

The magazine was published in Washington, D.C., most recently by Eagle Publishing, the owner of Regnery Publishing, a subsidiary of Phillips Publishing. Thomas S. Winter was editor-in-chief and Cathy Taylor was editorial director of the print edition.

Regular writers included Robert Novak, Ann Coulter, Terence P. Jeffrey, Pat Buchanan, and John Gizzi, its chief political editor. Occasional contributors have included Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, and Paul Craig Roberts, and Cliff Kincaid.

History

Human Events was founded in 1944 by Felix Morley, who was from 1933 to 1940 the editor of The Washington Post; Frank Hanighen, and former New Dealer Henry Regnery.

In June 1949, Human Events published a letter written by Josée Laval, the daughter of Vichy France Prime Minister Pierre Laval and wife of attorney René de Chambrun, addressed to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1948. In the letter, she was critical of Churchill's support for the French resistance, and she suggested the firing squad who killed her father "wore British uniforms".

In 1951, Frank Chodorov, former director of the Henry George School of Social Science in New York, replaced Morley as editor, merging his newsletter, analysis, into Human Events. In June 1953 Freda Utley wrote an article for the publication where she criticized the awarding of the Sudetenland to Czechoslovakia, stating: "all that much-abused Neville Chamberlain did was agree to the self-determination of the people of the Sudentenland...which never would have been awarded to the Czechs if Wilson's Fourteen Points had been adhered to".

By the early 1960s, Allan Ryskind (son of Morrie Ryskind) and Winter had acquired the publication. Contributors to Human Events from the 1960s to the 1980s included Spiro Agnew, James L. Buckley, Peter Gemma, Pat Buchanan, Ralph de Toledano, Russell Kirk, Phyllis Schlafly, Murray Rothbard and Henry Hazlitt. Newsweek noted although Human Events did not have a large readership outside the Washington D.C. area, "the tough little tabloid enjoys an impact out of all proportion to its circulation".

Human Events backed US military intervention in the Vietnam War; after the war ended, the publication blamed American liberals for the collapse of South Vietnam.

Human Events supported Apartheid South Africa, describing the country as "a pro-Western bulwark that provides more in the way of freedom and wealth to its blacks than the vast majority of black African states". Human Events also described Nelson Mandela as the main obstacle to peace in South Africa: "While President Botha is moving at a fast and furious pace to end the apartheid system, Mandela remains as adamant a revolutionary as ever. He's still a Marxist, still a man of violence, still a supporter of the Communist-run ANC".

Eagle Publishing placed the magazine up for sale in February 2013, when it announced that it would close the publication if no buyer could be found. On February 27, 2013, Human Events announced that, after 69 years, it would halt publication of the print edition but would continue to maintain the websites HumanEvents.com and RedState.com with original reporting. Eagle Publishing, which acquired the magazine in 1993, said that it had been subsidizing the publication for several years but could no longer afford to do so: "the realities of the 24-hour news cycle and the brutal economics of a weekly print publication have become insurmountable."

Human Events printed 40,000 copies per week and had a staff of 15 full-time employees. A "restructuring" plan that involved layoffs had already been attempted but was insufficient to allow continuation of the print edition.

In January 2014, Eagle Publishing was acquired by Salem Communications.

Influence on Ronald Reagan

Human Events was former U.S. President Ronald Reagan's "favorite reading for years," writes biographer Richard Reeves. A loyal subscriber since 1961, Reagan said it “helped me stop being a liberal Democrat,” calling it "must reading for conservatives who want to know what is really going on in Washington, D.C." Reagan contributed some articles to Human Events in the 1970s. During the 1980 presidential campaign, Democrats released a document entitled "Ronald Reagan, Extremist Collaborator—An Exposé," in which, according to biographer Lee Edwards, "[a]mong the proofs of Reagan's extremism was that he read the conservative weekly Human Events." After being elected President, Reagan would occasionally write or call Winter or Ryskind.

"Human Events, however, was no favorite of the new men around Reagan," writes Reeves. "Baker and Darman, and Deaver too, did their best each week to keep it out of the reading material they gave the President." "When he discovered White House aides were blocking its delivery, President Reagan arranged for multiple copies to be sent to the White House residence every weekend," writes Edwards, who adds that Reagan took care "marking and clipping articles and passing them along to his assistants."

Just before his 1982 tax hike, Reagan met with what he called "some of my old friends from Human Events" (he mentioned Ryskind and M. Stanton Evans), who warned him about "disloyal" White House staff (in particular James Baker) who favored making a deal on taxes with the Democratic Congress. (Reagan subsequently made such a deal, in which for each $1 in higher taxes Congress promised $3 in spending cuts. Ultimately, both taxes and spending increased.)

At the 1986 Reykjavík Summit, Reagan told Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev that he could not give up the Strategic Defense Initiative because "'...the people who were the most outspoken critics of the Soviet Union over the years’—he mentioned his favorite paper, Human Events," according to Reeves, "‘They’re kicking my brains out’."

"Most Harmful Books" list

In 2005, Human Events published a list of "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries":

1. The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
2. Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, by Mao Zedong
4. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by Alfred Kinsey
5. Democracy and Education, by John Dewey
6. Das Kapital, by Karl Marx
7. The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan
8. The Course in Positive Philosophy, by Auguste Comte
9. Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, by John Maynard Keynes

Being voted on by two or more of their judges, twenty additional books received "honorable mention", including The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin; Unsafe at Any Speed, by Ralph Nader; and Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson.