Thirties redux.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial

It's been quite a year. I'd been looking forward to it for the last two decades, and now it's just about over. My anticipation had swirled around The Progressive 's 100th anniversary: how to honor it, how to memorialize it, how to celebrate it.

Well, we've done the best we could with all that.

First, the editorial staff went through every single issue of The Progressive from 1909 to the present to see what was there and to collect and polish the gems.

Then, we displayed some of them in our April issue, presenting a year-by-year historical tour of The Progressive , which also serves as a primer on U.S. activist history.

We held our centennial conference in May and were blessed by the participation of such great writers and activists as Barbara Ehrenreich, Martin Espada, Jim Hightower, Dolores Huerta, Jesse Jackson, Naomi Klein, Robert McChesney, Katha Pollitt, Robert Redford, Luis Rodriguez, Cindy Sheehan, Terry Tempest Williams, and Howard Zinn.

And we produced our long-form anthology, Democracy in Print: The Best of The Progressive Magazine, 1909-2009 , which the University of Wisconsin Press was kind enough to publish.

But we're not quite ready to close the book on our past. As the editors reflected on the grave economic conditions facing this country, we couldn't help but hear the eerie echoes of the 1930s. So, we thought we'd take one more look back at our archives, and we culled some more clippings we think you'll find interesting. The section is called "The 1930s--Flashback."

T hat is but a small part of this special double issue of The Progressive devoted to exposing "The Greed Economy." Our political editor, Ruth Conniff, conceptualized it, and I'm grateful to her for that. There are certain times when the contradictions of capitalism become glaringly obvious for all to see. This is one of them. And we need to pay attention...