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The New Republic at 100: A Century of Bickering

The 100th-anniversary issue of The New Republic.Credit...Collection of The New Republic

The New Republic will celebrate its 100th birthday on Wednesday with a black-tie gala in Washington featuring remarks by Bill Clinton and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a performance by Wynton Marsalis and a 400-person guest list studded with boldface names.

For those in an extra-nostalgic mood, the party has brought to mind the magazine’s semilegendary 70th-anniversary gathering in 1984, when Barney Frank and Gary Hart mingled with Henry A. Kissinger, who in an after-dinner speech declared it “traumatic” to be photographed with so many liberals.

“The pictures are kind of a scream,” said Franklin Foer, the magazine’s 40-year-old editor, vicariously reminiscing about the days when The New Republic was toasting its status as the hot political magazine of the moment. “You look at them and then at Washington now, and you think, ‘Wow, that’s quite a tumble.' ”

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The Facebook millionaire Chris Hughes, left, owner of The New Republic, and Franklin Foer, its editor, in 2012.Credit...James Estrin/The New York Times

Like Washington’s cast of characters, The New Republic has also changed. Under Chris Hughes, the Facebook multimillionaire who bought the magazine in 2012 from a consortium including its longtime owner Martin Peretz, the biweekly publication has more than doubled its staff, redesigned its print edition and broadened its coverage to be less Beltway-centric. It has also vastly increased its web traffic to more than four million unique users a month, according to the magazine.

And further changes are afoot. As the anniversary arrives, Mr. Hughes has hired Guy Vidra, a 40-year-old former Yahoo News executive, for the top of masthead as The New Republic’s first chief executive. This has set off speculation in Washington journalism circles that a magazine as famous for its ferocious office politics as for its contrarian political coverage might be on the verge of another round of upheaval.

Eyebrows were raised last year when Mr. Hughes, a former organizer for Barack Obama, introduced the redesigned magazine with an editor’s letter that omitted the words “liberal” or “liberalism.” These days, while he says he remains committed to print, he is also ready to jettison “magazine.”

“Twenty years ago, no question, it was a political magazine, full stop,” Mr. Hughes said in a joint interview with Mr. Vidra in New York. “Today, I don’t call it a magazine at all. I think we’re a digital media company.”

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The inaugural issue from 1914.Credit...Collection of The New Republic

Mr. Hughes (who gave up the editor in chief title but remains publisher) and Mr. Vidra dismissed speculation that they wanted to take the magazine in a more lowbrow, BuzzFeed-like direction. But they did say there was room to increase the digital audience to as much as “tens of millions” of unique monthly visitors by focusing on a broader range of topics and on new forms of digital storytelling that “travel well” on the web.

Whatever The New Republic is today, it has been busy flogging its storied past. Mr. Foer and Mr. Hughes, 30, have been out promoting “Insurrections of the Mind,” an anthology of about 50 articles spanning the magazine’s history. Leon Wieseltier, the publication’s silver-maned longtime literary editor, has thrown out the first pitch at a Washington Nationals game (“high and away,” he admitted) and appeared on “The Colbert Report” to debate the merits of “centrist hair.”

During Mr. Peretz’s tempestuous three-decade reign, whose door-slamming fights were recalled (mostly) fondly in an article in the anniversary issue by a former editor, Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Republic enraged many on the left, including many on its own staff, with its support for the contras, the anti-Communist insurgents in Nicaragua; an excerpt from “The Bell Curve,” Charles Murray’s 1994 book on race and I.Q.; and its full-throated support, later reconsidered, for the Iraq war. (Mr. Peretz, who attacked Mr. Hughes last year in an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, is not invited to the party, Mr. Hughes said.)

These days, The New Republic’s goal of parting its hair down the middle, starting with its decision to stop running editorials, strikes some as a diminishment.

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A 2007 issue.Credit...Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times

“The magazine used to be schizophrenic,” said Eric Alterman, a columnist for The Nation and a longtime critic of Mr. Peretz’s. “But now, the most you can compare it to is a nice sailboat that usually has something smart in it but isn’t taking you anywhere.”

But others say the magazine’s direction under Mr. Hughes represents a return to the pragmatic idealism of its Progressive Era roots. “There’s a greater public-spiritedness and broadness of vision to the magazine now,” said Robert S. Boynton, director of the literary journalism program at New York University. “The fact that there’s some confusion about its identity is actually a healthy sign.”

Intraoffice fights still happen, but not always in the magazine’s pages. When The New Republic ran an excerpt from a book on the history of the pro-Israel lobby by John Judis, a longtime senior editor, Mr. Wieseltier vented his displeasure in a scathing, semiprivate email published by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website.

“Spirited debate is an incredibly important value to the institution,” Mr. Hughes said of that incident. “So is mutual respect.”

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A 1974 issue.Credit...Collection of The New Republic

That might come as a relief to Mr. Clinton, who could deliver a marathon self-roast at Wednesday’s gala simply by reading choice vituperative ’90s-era coverage of him and Hillary Rodham Clinton in The New Republic.

Not that The New Republic has gone nice. It has “dialed back on the smartypants-ness” but still runs tough pieces about Republicans and Democrats alike, Mr. Foer said, pointing to Noam Scheiber’s much-talked-about critical profile of the Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett in the anniversary issue.

And in the culture pages, long Mr. Wieseltier’s autonomous domain, no-holds-barred criticism still reigns, as in the same issue’s gleeful takedown of Lena Dunham by James Wolcott and a long essay by Mr. Wieseltier declaring, among other things, that “ferocity is as essential to our system as civility.”

Mr. Wieseltier also gets in the issue’s last word, with a closing column warning against giving technology “ultimate authority over human existence.”

To connoisseurs of old-school intrigue in The New Republic, that may sound like a shot at the magazine’s digital future. But Mr. Wieseltier, who calls himself a “platform pluralist,” waved away the suggestion.

“This is a moment to celebrate,” he said. “For a hundred years, the country has been a little less dumb than it might have been without us.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Magazine’s Century of Bickering. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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