The Forum was an American magazine founded in 1885 by Isaac Rice. It existed under various names and formats until it ceased publication in 1950. Published in New York, its most notable incarnation (1885 until 1902) was symposium based. Articles from prominent guest authors debated all sides of a contemporary political or social issue, often across several issues and in some cases, several decades. At other times, it published fiction and poetry, and published articles produced by staff columnists in a "news roundup" format.

At its zenith, The Forum became one of the most respected journals in America, alongside Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine. It was exceptional of these in several respects, as it carried a more Southern emphasis, and was also the only journal widely accessible to Black Americans. Its articles were of such reliably high standard that they were often used as resources for colleges and universities, with the articles studied in seminar discussions. Writing in 1957, Frank Luther Mott wrote: It would be difficult to find a better exposition of the more serious interests of the American mind in the decade of 1886 to 1896 than is afforded by the first twenty volumes of The Forum...The Progress of science and industry, education in its many phases, religious controversy, and movements in literature and the fine arts gave variety to Forum content.The Forum's first editor was Lorettus Sutton Metcalf, whose skills established the magazine's reputation for academic content. The magazine became more famous when Walter Hines Page, the noted publisher, took over as editor in 1891. Later editors included Isaac Rice's brother Joseph Mayer Rice (a notable reform figure in the Progressive Era), Frederick Taber Cooper, and Henry Goddard Leach, who resumed the symposium format in 1923.

Editors Editors of The Forum were as follows: Lorettus Sutton Metcalf (1886–91) Walter Hines Page (1891–95) Alfred Ernest Keet (1895–97) Joseph Mayer Rice (1897–1907) Frederic Taber Cooper (1907–09) Benjamin Russell Herts (1909–10) Mitchell Kennerley (1910–16) H. Thompson Rich (1917–18) Edward Wildman (1918–20) George Henry Payne (1920–23) Henry Goddard Leach and Frank C. Davidson (1923–26) Henry Goddard Leach (1926–40) Daniel George Redmond (1945–50)

Early years: Walter Hines Page 1886–95

Rice founded The Forum as a wedding gift to his wife Julia Hyneman Barnett. A German immigrant musician, Rice had enrolled at Columbia University School of Law in 1878, and after graduating in 1880, became the librarian of Columbia’s new School of Political Science. From 1884, he taught classes in the law school, but after he began to practice law, he resigned from teaching. As a lawyer specializing in monopolies and patents, he began to invest in the railroad industry, and then the Electric Storage Battery Company, of which he became president in 1897.

Rice was also a writer. In 1875, he released "What is Music?", a slim volume that analysed various theories of music from across the globe, and attempted to create a cosmical theory of music based upon current knowledge. "By listening to a great composition," he wrote, "our mind undergoes the same process - first the mood, then the sentiment, then the definite thought. This order is characteristic of the perception of the beautiful in nature."

An infrequent contributor to the journal, Isaac Rice chose topics that were nonetheless eclectic. They include: July 1892: The Consumer October 1893: Public Business and the Right to Steal August 1894: Legalized Plunder of Railroad Properties: The Remedy March 1912: Every Man is His Own Banker

In its first year, the magazine had survived on a subscription circulation of around 2,000. Walter Hines Page joined the journal the following year as the new business manager, and quickly transformed its scope and ambition. Throwing himself and his personality into the work, he became critical of board members who thought that it was beneath the dignity of the journal to directly solicit manuscripts from major writers focused on contemporary issues. Page recruited a slew of celebrity experts and well known authorities – including Congressmen – in order to attract more readers. Their work, focused on national and international events, added a large degree of timeliness to its content.

Above all, Page was concerned with the state of the nation in the post Civil War period – the political landscape was dominated by the "boss system" of party political patronage, with underqualified and corrupt candidates elected to serve the local financial and industrial interests. He held hope that Grover Cleveland would signal a reformation of that system into a higher state of honesty, frugality, and sound financial policy, yet he was disappointed by Cleveland himself, who he saw as "plodding," "unimaginative," and "unaware of the forces changing the nation."

Page relinquished the editorship in 1895, over a squabble regarding control, and was hired by Houghton, Mifflin and Company, the publishers of Atlantic Monthly. A few months later he left, believing he was inadequately paid, and after a brief period working at the Harper Publishing House, he formed Doubleday, Page and Company, publishers of a new periodical, The World's Work.

Joseph Mayer Rice and educational reform

At various points in its history, The Forum concerned itself with issues surrounding the education system in America, specifically the curriculum. From January through October 1888, The Forum ran a symposium series entitled “What Shall the Public Schools Teach”, which included contributions from William T. Harris and Lester Frank Ward. Along with Rice, Ward became a major figure in the Progressive Education movement.

The Forum made its definitive statement of the education system in 1891–93 when it published a series of incisive muckraking articles by Joseph Mayer Rice. From 1888 to 1890 Rice had studied psychology and pedagogy in the German Universities of Jena and Leipzig, and had studied under Wilhelm Rein, an influential educational theorist. Rein proposed a philosophy of education that placed greater emphasis on the building of moral character over the consumption of facts.

Rice came to write for The Forum due to Page's interest in Rice's ideas about pedagogy, and the journal sponsored him as he conducted a six-month tour of thirty-six cities in the United States. He visited six to eight urban public elementary schools in each city, and spent the school hours of every day observing classroom events. He talked with approximately twelve hundred teachers, met with school officials and school board members, interviewed parents, and visited twenty teacher-training institutions.

Rice devoted the summer of 1892 to the analysis of data from his survey of schools. From October 1892 through June 1893, The Forum published a series of nine articles by Rice, where he reported tedious, pedantic teaching in traditionally structured schools, unassisted superintendents responsible for the supervision of hundreds of teachers, and board of education reports portraying deplorable conditions of schools. As anticipated by Page, Rice's study generated outraged reactions among a public that heretofore had assumed a fully functioning and effective educational system. Rice's articles earned him a reputation (not a pleasant one among many professional educators) for bringing the topic of schooling into the public's eye, and, in effect, introducing muckraking to the field of education.

The nine articles that Rice wrote for The Forum chart an exhaustive tour of public schools from the East Coast to the Midwest taken from December 1891 through first half of 1892. His criticisms mobilised parents against corrupt politicians, particularly after the articles were published in a collection called The Public School System of the United States, which incorporated the original tour with a second survey undertaken in the spring of 1894, mainly of schools that had reformed their curriculum. "It is indeed incomprehensible," he wrote, "that so many loving mothers...are willing without hesitation to resign the fate of their little ones to the tender mercies of ward politicians, who in many instances have no scruples in placing the children in class-rooms the atmosphere of which is not fit for human beings to breathe, and in charge of teachers who treat them with a degree of severity that borders on barbarism."

The articles published by Rice in this time include: December 1891: Need School be a Blight to Child Life? October 1892: Our Public School System: Evils in Baltimore November 1892: Our Public School System: Schools of Buffalo and Cincinnati December 1892: The Public Schools of St. Louis and Indianapolis January 1893: The Public School System of New York City February 1893: The Public Schools of Boston June 1893: Our Public School System: A Summary December 1893: A Plan to Free the Schools From Politics

Rice returned to the University of Jena in the summer of 1893, returning the following year. Upon his return, he was determined to further document his conviction that a Progressive education was beneficial for students. He embarked on another Forum-sponsored tour in 1895, armed with a survey which he administered to nearly 33,000 young students. In particular, Rice found no link between the time spent on spelling drills and students' performance on spelling tests. His study was far ahead of its time, both in the subject of pedagogy and overall methodology.

Articles referring to this later study include: June 1895: A Rational Correlation of School Studies August 1895: Substitution of Teacher for Text-Book December 1896: How Shall the Child be Taught? Obstacles to Rational Educational Reform January 1896: How Shall the Child be Taught? The Essentials in Elementary Education August 1897: The Futility of the Spelling Grind I June 1897: The Futility of the Spelling Grind II

American imperialism

From 1898 to 1900, The Forum analysed the implications of the United States' flirtation with imperialism in Guam, the Philippines, China and Puerto Rico. Several of the articles paid reference to the "Open Door Policies" of U.S. Secretary of State John Hay. Composed in 1899, the policy allowed multiple imperial powers to access China without committing to direct control, as was the case with Great Britain in India. Though treaties made after 1900 refer to the open door, competition for access to China continued. The term is now more commonly associated with the historian William Appleman Williams, who used it to refer to U.S. economic imperialism in the developing world.

Articles on these issues include: January 1898: China, and the Chinese Railway Concessions by Clarence Cary March 1898: The Duty of Annexing Hawaii by Senator John T. Morgan June 1898: The War for Cuba by Joseph Edgar Chamberlain July 1898: The Philippine Islands by Frank F. Hilder November 1898: Shall we Keep the Philippines? by Charles Demby February 1899: Coaling Stations for the Navy by R.B.Bradford April 1899: American Opportunities in China by Gilbert Reid November 1899: How Shall Puerto Rico be Governed? by H. K. Carrol

Lynching

Lynching of Black Americans was an issue that was discussed several times, though The Forum never took a definitive line for or against the practice.