Other meanings of common sense
American periodicals
Common Sense was an American political and cultural magazine published from the early 1930s through the mid-1940s. Edited and founded by Alfred M. Bingham, it occupied a reformist, left-of-center position, combining criticism of concentrated economic power with debate over civil liberties, democracy, and United States foreign policy.1 It is distinct from Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet Common Sense and from the general philosophical idea of practical judgment.
Common Sense emerged during the political ferment of the Great Depression and made economic democracy and public affairs central to its identity. Alfred M. Bingham, a writer and reform-minded editor, founded the magazine in 1932 and remained its defining editorial presence.1 The publication belonged to the broad American reform tradition that questioned the power of large corporations, inherited privilege, and political machines, while retaining an interest in constitutional government and individual freedom.
Its title gave the periodical an accessible, civic tone rather than presenting it as a specialist economic journal. The magazine addressed readers interested in public policy, social reform, and international affairs, and its essays often connected domestic inequality with wider questions about how democratic institutions should operate. Its position was not identical with that of any single party or movement, which allowed it to publish arguments from several strands of American liberal and radical thought.
The magazine’s central political setting was the New Deal era, when Americans were debating the proper role of the federal government in economic life. Common Sense treated the Depression as evidence that laissez-faire assumptions required serious reconsideration, but it also scrutinized the limits and consequences of government power.2 Its concerns overlapped with those of reform liberals, labor advocates, and democratic socialists, although the magazine should not be reduced to an official organ of any one organization.
Issues commonly associated with its outlook included labor rights, economic concentration, public ownership, social welfare, and the relationship between political equality and material security. The magazine’s historical value lies partly in this mixture: it shows how overlapping reform movements argued about policy before and during the Second World War, when the meaning of liberalism, socialism, and democratic planning was still unsettled in the United States.
Foreign policy became one of Common Sense’s most consequential fields of debate as the United States moved from Depression-era isolationism toward involvement in the Second World War. The magazine provided a venue for arguments about militarism, intervention, international responsibility, and the balance between national security and civil liberties.3 Those questions placed it within a wider intellectual world that included pacifists, internationalists, socialists, and critics of both fascism and authoritarian communism.
Its pages were connected to figures and traditions associated with American reform journalism, including John Dewey and Norman Thomas, although contributors and positions changed over time.1 The publication therefore offers more than a record of one editor’s opinions: it is evidence of the arguments that circulated among politically engaged Americans during the New Deal and wartime years. Researchers generally consult individual issues rather than treat the magazine as a perfectly uniform ideological statement.
Common Sense is less well known today partly because its run was relatively short and its archive is dispersed across periodical catalogs, libraries, and collections of twentieth-century political papers. Bibliographic records place its principal run in the 1930s and 1940s, with publication ending around the middle of the 1940s.4 The exact boundaries of a run can vary in catalog descriptions because libraries record holdings, title changes, and gaps differently.
The magazine should also be separated from several unrelated uses of the same name, especially Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlet and later commercial or political publications. Its surviving importance is consequently archival rather than mass-cultural: historians use it to trace the vocabulary of reform, the contested meaning of democracy, and the changing relationship between domestic social policy and foreign affairs in the United States before and during World War II.
Publication dates and holdings may differ slightly among library catalogs because serial records reflect incomplete runs, variant records, and gaps in surviving issues.
Help improve the encyclopedia. Reports go straight to the site manager.