Erwin Knoll: July 17, 1931-November 2, 1994.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Obituary - Editorial

Today, we are in mourning. Yesterday, November 2, 1994, our beloved Editor, Erwin Knoll, died in his sleep of an apparent heart attack. He was sixty-three.

For those of us here at this little magazine, it is a terrible blow. And it is a terrible blow, as well, for the progressive movement in America.

Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1931, Erwin and his immediate family fled the Nazis and immigrated to the United States when he was a child. Even as a boy, he had an uncanny gift for language, picking up and mastering English in little time at all. He graduated from New York University and then spent a decade toiling in the mainstream media he would later denounce. He worked on the staff of The Washington Post from 1957 to 1963, and covered the White House for the Newhouse National News Service from 1963 to 1968.

Erwin wrote for The Progressive occasionally in the early 1960s. He joined The Progressive formally in 1968 as the magazine's Washington Editor, and moved to Madison in 1973 to become Editor of this magazine he believed in so fervently and worked for so passionately.

No magazine could have had a more able editor. He had a strong vision for the magazine, and for the undiluted, uncompromised politics we would advocate. He would write lucid, cogent editorials staking out progressive positions, no matter how unpopular. And he would swell with pride at particular pieces in every issue that he admired, such as Edward Said's article on Page 18 and Ruth Conniff's interview with Katha Pollitt on Page 34 of this issue.

He had exceptional skill in the behind-the-scenes, day-to-day copy work. Agile of mind, quick of pen, he handled every piece of copy that ran through this office and ended up in these pages. He lavished attention even on the most routine aspects of the magazine, reviewing every manuscript and responding to dozens of letters every week. He edited sections that many other editors would have pawned off. Two particular favorites were our "No Comment" page and the "Letters to the Editor" section.

He took great pleasure in rebutting subscriber complaints about our political views (he cared not at all about losing subscribers over political disagreements; indeed, he took a peculiar delight in it, as he understood that it was the price of independence). He was fastidious to a fault, personally proofreading every page and correcting not just typos but also such picayune details as improper or infelicitous hyphenations. And he was a stickler for the old style, insisting on spelling "per cent" as two words and referring to our region here as the "Middle West," not the "Midwest."

But Erwin's considerable desk skills were not his claim to fame, though we admired them greatly. Rather, it was his political insight and courage, as well as his unique ability to communicate left-wing ideas to the mainstream, that vaulted him and The Progressive to prominence and distinction.

Erwin believed that you either stood for principle or you stood for nothing. His overriding commitments were to free speech and nonviolence, and he would brook no compromise on either. "There is no such thing as a just war - never was, never will be," he said. And he was a pugnacious pacifist. He loved to engage in debate, to grapple with an opponent.

Erwin's commitment to the First Amendment met its greatest challenge in 1979, when The Progressive prepared to publish its famous story, The H-bomb Secret: How We Got It - Why We're Telling It. This story punctured the veil of secrecy behind our nation's nuclear-weapons...