A great one remembered…: SCANLAN'S MONTHLY

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May 1, 2003 by Michael Learmonth

Byline: Michael Learmonth

In his memoir, Blind Ambition, former White House counsel and Watergate coconspirator John Dean remembers the very first order he received from President Nixon. "I'm still trying to find the water fountains in this place [and] the president wants me to turn the IRS loose on a shit-ass magazine called Scanlan's Monthly," he complained to a confidant.

That was in 1970, two years before the Watergate break-in, but Scanlan's, named for an Irish hog farmer, had already started a fistfight with Richard Nixon's administration. First it published a memo from Vice President Agnew's office, linking Agnew with plans to suspend the 1972 election and the Bill of Rights, and then it published a cover story arguing for Nixon's impeachment.

It was a fight Scanlan's would end up losing. Nixon sent the IRS and the FBI after its editors and investors, pressured labor unions to refuse to print the magazine, and had the December 1970 issue seized at a printing press in Montreal by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Scanlan's was a study in how a little magazine could cause a lot of trouble. But, after its noisy entrance, it came out just eight times before folding. "Can I tell you we would have survived? No," says cofounder and ex-New York Times reporter Sidney Zion. "But Nixon did this, and in that way I'm a bit more proud of us than if we had gone under any other way."

Scanlan's was founded by Zion and Warren Hinckle, whose Ramparts had folded two years earlier. "What we had in mind was a muckraking magazine," Zion says. "We just went against everything we found wrong in business or government."

Hinckle and Zion financed the magazine with a public issue of stock (Radar, Good Music, are you listening?), so as to not be controlled by the whims of Madison Avenue. More than 700 people bought shares, raising $675,000 in start-up cash.

Scanlan's published a guide to smuggling pot from Mexico, explored guerrilla warfare in the U.S., and did an investigative series on the rat droppings found in the kitchens of New York's most expensive restaurants. The magazine vowed to "take a whack at anyone, of whatever persuasion, if we think he deserves one." And readers responded - circ hit 150,000 before Scanlan's folded. But a magazine like this wouldn't stand a chance today, says Zion. Magazines are too busy pursuing their predictable orthodoxies. Case in point: Mayor Michael Bloomberg's smoking ban. "New York is going to be Prohibition City," Zion grouses. Personal freedom is at stake, and where are the magazines?