Signers of the letter included Anne Applebaum, Margaret Atwood, David Blight, David Brooks, Noam Chomsky, Gerald Early, David Frum, Francis Fukuyama, Todd Gitlin, Anthony Grafton, David Greenberg, Jonathan Haidt, Michael Ignatieff, Gary Kasparov, Mark Lilla, Damon Linker, Dahlia Lithwick, Greil Marcus, Wynton Marsalis, John McWhorter, George Packer, Nell Irvin Painter, Orlando Patterson, Steven Pinker, Claire Bond Potter, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, J.K. Rowling, Salman Rushdie, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Paul Starr, Gloria Steinem, Michael Walzer, Sean Wilentz, Garry Wills, Molly Worthen, and Fareed Zakaria.
In a piece on Harper’s and its publisher John R. MacArthur, New York Times reporter Ben Smith explains the history behind the letter. Here is a taste:
While editors came and went, Mr. MacArthur remained serenely in the corner office. In 2019, Mr. MacArthur gave the top job to Christopher Beha, a former Harper’s intern who had been living in Paris writing a darkly comic novel about the post-9/11 American media. And so last July, when another American expatriate in Paris, Thomas Chatterton Williams, was looking for a place to publish a broadside against the āintolerant climateā to which some of the most famous writers in the world ā Salman Rushdie, J.K. Rowling and Margaret Atwood, among others ā had signed their names, he emailed Mr. Beha. The letter was already finished and approved, but Mr. MacArthur liked it enough to add his name, and Mr. Beha published it in full online.
It was, for Harperās, a sensation, receiving 2.5 million views. The magazine ā whose paywall is now more porous, but is still years behind the kind of digital subscription machine that drives The New Yorker and The Atlantic ā grew its subscription base 13 percent and bounced back above 100,000 subscribers. It is still far down from a peak of 231,670 during the George W. Bush years, and so far from breaking even that Mr. MacArthur told me he hadnāt done the math of what it would take to get there.
The Harper’s staff, since Mr. MacArthur broke the union, is not a rebellious bunch. No current staff member would speak to me on the record about the magazine. But when the letter appeared on the website, they revolted, and in an emotional Zoom meeting on July 8 (they werenāt yet back at the office), Mr. Beha took responsibility for publishing the letter and defended it. A former Harperās assistant editor who is now a New Yorker fact-checker, Shirley Ngozi Nwangwa, recalled that editors argued that regardless of its intent, the letter would be used āas ammunition against the racial justice protests.ā
Mr. Beha also told the Harperās employees they were free to speak up on social media against the letter; an editor responded that they feared Mr. MacArthur would fire them if they did. The next day, Mr. Beha wrote an elliptical email that didnāt mention Mr. MacArthur, but acknowledged that he had been trying to āmake the parts of the office that are under my control as open, respectful and tolerant of difference as I could, while insulating my staff as much as possible.ā
Harperās didnāt publish the letter in print until October, packaging it with several scathing attacks on it and one signatoryās apology for signing. In an editorās note, Mr. Beha wrote that the attacks themselves were an instance of the kind of debate the letter supported, and that āin that sense, even the letterās loudest critics were in a kind of agreement with it.ā
There are two ways to read the Harperās letter. One is to see it as a rejection of elements of the protests against racism, and a direct rejoinder to claims that some speech is physically dangerous. Thatās how it was read by many of the Harperās editorial staff members who opposed it, and also apparently how it was read by Mr. MacArthur, who signed it.
Though he has contributed to Harperās only twice over 40 years,Ā Mr. MacArthur writes an occasional column in French for the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir. (In another Harperās oddity, the column is translated back into English by someone else, then published without further editing on the Harperās website.) There, Mr. MacArthurĀ describedĀ the letter as āa public stand against political correctness and ācancel culture.ā āEarlier this month, heĀ denouncedĀ theĀ āMcCarthyism and mob ruleā at work when The New York Times forced out a veteran journalist who had used a racial slur on a trip with teenagers to Peru. Mr. MacArthur wrote the word in full, āa matter of honor, as a matter of principle, to use it informationally like he did,ā he told me.
But Mr. MacArthurās columns donāt appear in the print magazine. Relatively little railing against cancel culture does. And indeed,thereās also another way to read the Harperās letter, which is simply its plain language, which called for a āculture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes.ā Thatās how Mr. Beha said he has strained to interpret it, and why heās avoided taking Harperās down an overtly reactionary ā if commercially promising ā path.
Read the entire piece here.
