Exploding cars, office monkeys, Watergate: The origins of Mother Jones
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War. Oil shocks. A corrupt president and a scandal-ridden administration. Civil rights abuses and government violence. An immense gap between how young and old, men and women, left and right, rural and urban people view the world. A technological revolution that no one quite understands. And, underneath all that, a sense that an era is ending, and the future looks pretty confusing.
That was the mid-1970s, and it was at that moment that a rambunctious, fearless, generous crew of journalists decided that the way to engage with a world in upheaval was to start a magazine unlike any other. One that would tell the truth without hesitation; that would be beholden to its readers, not to a bazillionaire owner; whose defiant tagline would be “A magazine for the rest of us.”
Mother Jones began publishing in 1976, but the prologue begins nine years earlier, when another magazine published an iconic cover: four hands, in men’s dress shirts peeking out of jacket sleeves, holding burning scraps of paper. It wasn’t all just a staged photo illustration: Those were the actual draft cards belonging to Ramparts’ editors and its art director—at a time when destroying your draft card was a felony.
Ramparts had begun as a magazine for “the mature American Catholic” but evolved to land at the journalistic frontier of the movement against the Vietnam War. It published investigative reporting and documentary photography, including a groundbreaking photo essay about what napalm was doing to children. (The foreword was by America’s most famous parenting expert, Dr. Benjamin Spock.) Martin Luther King Jr., who had not yet taken a position on the war, read that issue while grabbing a meal in an airport. As his associate Bernard Lee would later recall, King pushed his plate away when he came to the photos. “Doesn’t it taste any good?” Lee asked. “Nothing will ever taste any good for me until I do everything I can to end that war,” King responded. Soon after, he came out publicly against the war for the first time, and Ramparts published his speech.
Like most startups then and now, Ramparts was staffed by people who hated convention, systems, and process. Staffers (including Jann Wenner, who would go on to found Rolling Stone, and Brit Hume, now a senior analyst for Fox News) got used to seeing Henry Luce, the pet monkey belonging to Editor-in-Chief Warren Hinckle, leaping from cubicle wall to cubicle wall in their San Francisco office. The chaos was creative, but it was also just chaos, and Hinckle’s champagne tastes (he insisted on first-class tickets and fine hotels for himself and the team) kept pushing the magazine toward the brink. Ramparts’ next editors, David Horowitz and Peter Collier, declared that the system “must be overthrown. As humanely as possible, but by any means necessary,” amplified the Black Panthers, and put a picture of a Bank of America branch set on fire by protesters on the cover. (Horowitz and Collier would later become leading conservative activists, a long story stemming from the murder of a colleague they had hooked up with a job for the Panthers.)
Into this mess stepped a trio of journalists from very different corners of a changing America. Paul Jacobs, in his 50s, was a child of the Depression and the New Deal, an organizer turned investigative journalist who’d labored as a farmworker for a story and documented the aftermath of nuclear tests in the Southwest.
Adam Hochschild, barely 30, had worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, at an anti-apartheid paper in South Africa, and at Ramparts off and on; he would later write a gripping memoir about his relationship with his father, who ran an international mining company. Richard Parker, the youngest of the lot at 27, had grown up in Southern California amid the aerospace boom and had run an alternative paper in Santa Barbara.
The trio were brought in to revive Ramparts, but the politics—inside and outside the magazine—made that impossible as the revolutionary passions of the 1960s splintered into factional fights. “Presenting a coherent progressive or left view seemed impossible,” Parker says. “And so there was some sense that Adam and Paul and I and others have that, well, we’ve just got to fucking start over.”
What Substack and TikTok are to our moment, new magazines were to the ’70s, and there was a big opening to speak to a new constituency. “Those of us who were political progressives, who cared about social justice, about ecology, the environment, about stopping US military interventions overseas, we didn’t see many places where our voices could reach a large audience,” Hochschild recalls. “There were long-established magazines like The Nation and The Progressive that did a good job, but reached quite small audiences, often in a fairly drab way—just black-and-white type on newsprint-like paper.”
Their new magazine would be something else entirely: iconoclastic, colorful, unapologetically West Coast. It would print on high-quality paper so that color photography would reproduce vividly. It would be well designed and compellingly written. It would have kickass marketing and a solid, monkey-free business operation.
The trio had no idea how to do much of this, but they had a knack for attracting people who did. Louise Kollenbaum, the inaugural art director, concocted powerful visuals on a tiny budget. Photographers offered their work for little or no money, famous illustrators took assignments to be part of something cool, staffers posed for photo illustrations. Jeffrey Klein, a boyish editor with a shock of red hair and a pit bull’s persistence, brought in big pieces, including an essay by Li-li Ch’en that won a National Magazine Award for the magazine’s very first issue. John Klingel, a publishing executive who later became president of Reader’s Digest, helped them figure out how to hire a printer, buy paper, and navigate the Sopranos-esque world of magazine distribution. And Bill Jayme, a direct-mail marketing whiz, signed on to help them launch a crowdfunding campaign: They would mail out tens of thousands of letters asking strangers to subscribe to a magazine—they were calling it New Dimensions—that told the unvarnished truth.
“Investigative reporting on corporate malpractice was something very few other people were doing in a systematic way. It was open territory.”
The reply envelopes came back with a decent response, but something else came in the mail: a cease-and-desist letter from a newsletter named…New Dimensions.
“It scared the shit out of us,” Parker recalls. There were printer deadlines to meet for the next mailing; they needed a new name, stat. Parker sat down with Jayme “and our friend Jack Daniel’s” to brainstorm. Sometime after midnight, they landed on the name of a fiery labor organizer from the early 20th century.
The editors were skeptical. Who had ever heard of Mary Harris “Mother” Jones? People wouldn’t know what it meant. “That’s the point!” Jayme insisted.
Not long after, the mail carrier trudged into the cramped office the crew had secured in downtown San Francisco, a space enveloped in the smell of fries from the McDonald’s downstairs. “He said, ‘Oh, such a pisser carrying all these up the stairs’—the elevator didn’t work or something,” Hochschild recalls. The pile of envelopes was enormous. Using the name Mother Jones had doubled response over previous mailings. “When we saw that,” Hochschild says, “we knew it was a go.”
The premier issue was set to publish in February 1976. But soon, the small team had a different problem: They had assigned, edited, and fact-checked a bunch of great stories, but what, asked Kollenbaum, was going to be on the cover? Eventually, Dugald Stermer, Ramparts’ former art director, created an illustration riffing on the revolutionary flavor with a take on the iconic Spirit of ’76 painting. Like the magazine’s name, it wasn’t what anyone had planned on. But somehow, it worked.
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Reading through those early issues is equal parts nostalgic treasure hunt and shock of recognition. There are exposés on Nazi war criminals; personal essays of a generation in its adulting phase (“We are…in the midst of a great new social laboratory—the egalitarian marriage”); pieces on communes, the Austin music scene, vegetarian food (“Despite its looks, tofu can be fun”), and “Chinese eye exercises.” But there’s also a “Letter to an Israeli Friend” warning that denying rights to the Palestinian people will harm a nation still emerging from the Holocaust (“Watching Israel is like watching someone in a wheelchair racing down a path toward a precipice”). There’s poetry, short fiction, and a letters page with missives from “Dr. Hunter S. Thompson” of Colorado (confirming an $8 subscription) and Sen. Frank Church (of the eponymous committee investigating CIA abuses, saying thanks for a complimentary copy).
It’s an eclectic mix, and one that reveals a bit of an identity crisis at the young magazine. “We fought a lot,” recalls Mark Dowie, who was part of that early team. “It was all about: Were we making a service magazine for the left, or were we trying to keep the center from sliding too far to the right?”
The answer, it turned out, was something else, and it landed with a bang in the eighth issue, in November 1976. On the cover was an object that looked like a plastic beetle with a string attached but that many women would have recognized as a Dalkon Shield—a birth control device that had been implanted in millions of patients and had caused serious health issues for some. There had been lawsuits, but the story hadn’t really broken through. Dowie thought Mother Jones could change that.
As the business manager, Dowie wasn’t technically a journalist, but he’d had a stint as a reporter at a local paper. “I went to an editorial meeting and said, ‘We’ve been promising hard-hitting investigative reports, particularly corporate stuff, and we’re not delivering.’” What did he have in mind, the editors asked. “I said, ‘Look, you can walk into the lobby of any corporation in America and you have a story.’ And they said, ‘Okay, why don’t you do it?’”
Dowie, who knew a woman harmed by the shield, started digging into the story on his bus commute to work. He read piles of legal documents and research papers; he got on the phone and pestered executives, regulators, lawyers. The result was a piece, co-bylined by Dowie and freelance journalist Tracy Johnston, that read nothing like the bullet point–laden investigative dossiers you’d find in a newspaper. It had facts, names, and dates, but also characters and a plot. It married dogged reporting with New Journalism panache.
Infections linked to the shield had killed at least 17 women just in the US and left many more infertile. Dowie and Johnston showed that the research behind the device was questionable, that the doctors who invented it had made a fortune by pushing it to market, and that its maker, A.H. Robins, knew the product had issues but had continued to heavily promote it.
The story made a splash, and the little magazine suddenly walked a little taller. This (what Hochschild would later refer to as taking on “the great unelected power wielders of our time—multinational corporations”) was a mission.
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“Stumbling upon the vacuum of reporting about corporate misdeeds was the big discovery of those early years,” Hochschild says. “Muckraking, in the years before we started publishing, had been mainly conceived of with government and politicians as the target…We began realizing that investigative reporting on corporate malpractice was something very few other people were doing in a systematic way. It was open territory.”
Browsing the issues after the Dalkon Shield reveals the vibe shift. There are more stories on corporate power (a deep dive on labor conditions at a textile mill, a first-person dispatch from “the world of secretaries,” a piece on American oil company corruption in Venezuela). And there’s a media critique emerging, too: Even with investigative reporting gaining traction post-Watergate, it turns out there were still plenty of stories that mainstream media wouldn’t touch. The cover story of the June 1977 issue is about the murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles, whose car was blown up while he was investigating the mob. A team of journalists from around the country came together to finish the story, but the Republic wouldn’t print the resulting investigation (claiming it didn’t have sufficient documentation), and the big national outlets mostly shrugged it off. Meanwhile, MoJo reported, the Hearst Corporation, which owned the San Francisco Examiner and other major papers, was refusing to defend freelance journalist Lowell Bergman in a libel case connected to a murder in San Francisco’s Chinatown. (Bergman and two other journalists, David Weir and Dan Noyes, would go on to found another Bay Area powerhouse: the Center for Investigative Reporting.)
The combination of corporate muckraking and media critique solidified the magazine’s sense of its identity—and its readers’, too. Mother Jones frequently printed reader surveys, Hochschild recalls, lists of questions that readers would answer and send back. When asked what kinds of stories they would like to see, “people would always say, ‘I want more stories of activism, of positive news.’ But then when you ask people to actually rate the stories that they read, it would be exposés of corporate malfeasance at the top.”
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Corporate malfeasance could not have been more in evidence in the story that truly put Mother Jones on the map. In the wake of the oil crisis, the small-car market had been booming, and the Ford Motor Company had a bestseller in its subcompact, the Pinto. The company’s brash new president, Lee Iacocca, had brass-knuckled it into production, decreeing that it must not cost a penny more than $2,000 or weigh an ounce over 2,000 pounds. Most production lines took 43 months to ramp up; the Pinto started rolling off the line in about half that time.
One design flaw brushed off in the rush to market was the placement of the Pinto’s fuel tank. It was nestled right next to the rear bumper, where four pointy bolts would perforate the tank in even low-speed collisions. Any spark could lead to an explosion—and it did. Between 500 and 900 people, Dowie reported in Mother Jones’ September 1977 cover story, had died in Pinto fires and many more had suffered terrible burns.
Those numbers were shocking, but even more so was an internal memo that Dowie obtained: It showed that Ford had carefully calculated the cost of such tragedies versus the cost of fixing the car. An annual toll of 180 deaths and 180 serious injuries would cost about $50 million. Retooling the assembly line to add an $11 part would come out to $137 million. Ford had chosen the cheaper path.
If the Dalkon Shield story had made a splash, this one was a cannonball. Ralph Nader held a press conference announcing Mother Jones’ findings. The New York Times ran a story. Mike Wallace did a long segment on 60 Minutes. (The MoJo team felt a little salty, Dowie recalls, about CBS ripping off their earlier stories, “so when they called this time, we said, ‘Yes, we’ll help you, but you have to credit us on the air.’”) The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched an investigation. Eventually, Ford recalled 1.5 million cars—roughly half of all the Pintos it had ever sold—and ended up facing more than 100 lawsuits, including the first-ever criminal prosecution of a company for a product defect. (A jury later found Ford not guilty of reckless homicide.)
“When a little pipsqueak magazine out on the West Coast all of a sudden is getting a lot of national attention,” Dowie recalls, “that’s exhilarating and fun.”
The Pinto story cemented the young magazine’s sense of its “journalism of purpose,” as Parker called it, and left the fretting about carving out this or that position on the left in the rearview mirror.
“I’ve often been asked, ‘Where does Mother Jones stand on this?’” Harriet Barlow, a longtime activist who served on the board for nearly 40 years, told me. “The answer is: wherever the best story is.”
Going after Big Pharma or carmakers “is not, per se, a left point of view,” Parker notes. “You don’t have to use the word ‘proletariat.’ You don’t have to talk about class struggle. The idea here is we’re defending and building a community of common values, not that we’re advancing a particular party or even a particular ideology. So that gave Mother Jones a broader reach in terms of reputation and avoided allowing critics to pigeonhole it quite as easily as they might have.”
It also proved fortuitous, Parker says, that the magazine was based in San Francisco and never—despite entreaties from some of its supporters—moved to the East Coast to become part of the political media bubble. “One of the strengths is you don’t get caught up in the conventional wisdom that exercises such a powerful hold on what passes for journalism in the area between Boston and Washington.”
Indeed, many of MoJo’s biggest investigations in those early years were stories few in the Amtrak corridor had thought of as newsworthy—abuses that were perfectly legal, but outrageous nonetheless. “Smoking: The Truth No One Else Will Print,” in the January 1979 issue, started out this way:
“Every morning my husband coughs and gags for about ten minutes. Some days he wakes up choking. On others he is fine until he stands up, then doubles over retching. After 15 or 20 minutes, he can finish a sentence without gasping, walk across the room without bending over in pain, even pick up our two-year-old son without dropping him. Then he gets dressed, has a cup of coffee and lights his first cigarette of the day.”
In painstaking detail, the story laid out the science on how cigarettes hooked you more effectively than heroin. It would be 20 more years before tobacco executives admitted that they knew.
One by one, Mother Jones was biting the hands that fed America’s publishing industry: Cars. Tobacco. Booze. Big Pharma. Beauty products. Most magazines (and not a small portion of the underground press) were bankrolled by marketing budgets; no chance of that here.
But unlike other progressive organizations launched in the ’70s, MoJo didn’t have much access to big foundations—journalism was not yet seen as a worthy charitable cause. So where the magazine turned for survival, over and over again, was its readers. MoJo had begun with a determination to find and keep an audience—to compete not just in the marketplace of ideas, but in the actual marketplace, too. It had to convince hundreds of thousands of people each year to subscribe, then deliver them a quality product, and then—because the cost of subscriptions was kept ridiculously low so that more people could afford them—compel those who could afford a little extra to pitch in with a donation, and keep track of all the little transactions and expenses along the way. In a word, it needed to function as a business, but one that made change instead of a profit.
It also needed to respond to the bigger forces roiling around it—including one that the founders hadn’t quite reckoned with. Within a year of Mother Jones’ launch, a group of feminist writers announced a boycott of the magazine, demanding that it do better at including their concerns.
The women’s movement had put gender and sexuality at the center of its politics, but many in the old left viewed those as distractions, too personal and niche. At Mother Jones, however, a women’s caucus quickly formed to negotiate with the writers and resolved the strike with a commitment to solicit more articles by women, especially “Third World women,” and to feature at least one explicitly feminist article in every other issue. (In a similar vein, a demand by staff to join the United Auto Workers in 1983 soon led to the magazine recognizing the union.)
“Magazines were incredibly segregated in those days,” recalls Deirdre English, who came on board in 1978 and became editor-in-chief in 1980. “Women were not taken seriously as readers by the left magazines in general. The idea that Mother Jones would be a magazine that was read pretty much equally by men and women was a big accomplishment.”
In 1981, the magazine published an essay by writer Dorothea Lynch, who had asked her husband, storied photographer Eugene Richards, to document her breast cancer treatment. “This was back in the day where people were, unbelievably, still not talking about breast cancer,” Kollenbaum says. “Nobody had seen pictures like that in the media. It was kind of still a secret.”
The following year, Mother Jones published an essay by Nora Gallagher about another secret in plain sight—“a group of diseases that…are causing a trembling among doctors and gay men. They are known by the acronym AID, which stands for acquired immune deficiency.” At a time when newspapers were still struggling to acknowledge the existence of gay people, Gallagher described the harrowing questions men were asking themselves and each other. There was “talk of fearing a quarantine, a ‘reason to round us up.’” One man, who described his life before the illness as “Peter Pan, the magical boy who didn’t grow up,” wondered “whether I brought all this on myself.”
By the late 1970s, Mother Jones was among the fastest-growing magazines in the country. It was one of just 37 publications used to prepare the daily newsbrief for President Jimmy Carter—the circulation team even used a photo of Carter reading MoJo in its promotions, ignoring a cease-and-desist letter from the White House.
But change was on the wind. Carter was in a tight race against the ex–governor of California Ronald Reagan, who promised to roll back the social changes of the past decade. A new religious right movement was gearing up to help make it happen. And in MoJo’s Bay Area home, tech companies were building something called the “personal computer” that would change the way everyone lived.
At Mother Jones, the founders had all moved on. Jacobs died at just 59, his lung cancer widely attributed to the radiation he’d absorbed while investigating nuclear tests. Hochschild was eager to get back to writing (he has published 11 books to date, including the award-winning King Leopold’s Ghost). Parker (who went on to an acclaimed career as a Harvard economist) started a consulting firm.
This is where a story like this would normally end. The groundbreaking startup would struggle after its founders’ departure. It would have trouble finding an identity in a new political environment and its audience would drift away. Maybe it would hang around for a few zombie-esque years, coasting off the innovation and experimentation of its past.
But that didn’t happen. Mother Jones is still here, and not only that, its reach and impact have grown dramatically. Back in 1976, the magazine’s founders went after audiences and stories not well served by traditional media. Every one of the 50 years since has been defined by that mission. In 1993, MoJo became the first general interest magazine on the web. In the 2000s, when our current editor-in-chief, Clara Jeffery, and I came into the fold, we launched a Washington bureau as counter to the insider journalism that had amplified the Bush administration’s lies about Iraq.
In the 2010s, as more and more people were getting their news from social platforms, MoJo built a big footprint there; then, as audiences turned to TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, we doubled down there as well. And two years ago, we merged with our crosstown frenemy and longtime partner, the Center for Investigative Reporting, creators of the acclaimed radio show and podcast Reveal. With unprecedented challenges for independent news and democracy, having a bigger impact together seemed much more important than whatever was keeping us separate.
While our newsroom of 75 people is less than 5 percent the size of, say, the behemoth New York Times, it punches way above its weight, reaching some 10 million people a month regularly and sometimes double that. There are days, astonishingly, when more people watch Mother Jones videos than watch either Sean Hannity or the CBS Evening News.
This team has also won virtually every major prize in journalism—shelves full of National Magazine Awards, Polks, duPonts, Emmys, Webbys, etc. But the biggest reward has always been going after stories nobody else would and seeing them change the world. In the 1980s, under Editor-in-Chief Doug Foster and the tagline “People, Politics, and Other Passions,” the magazine investigated Big Tobacco and weapons makers and profiled the likes of Jesse Jackson, Spike Lee, and Bono. In the 1990s, long before Citizens United, came a string of investigations into the corrosive effects of money in politics and how Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh were laying the groundwork for what would become Trumpism.
In the 2000s, we charted the caravan of lies that led America into the Iraq War and exposed how the fossil fuel industry was undermining climate science. We’ve published manifestos that turned into movements; Bill McKibben laid out the mission for 350.org with an essay, “The Most Important Number on Earth,” in these pages. We investigated the Oath Keepers a decade before January 6. In 2012, DC Bureau Chief David Corn broke the 47 percent story that changed the course of that presidential election, revealing that GOP nominee Mitt Romney had insulted half the electorate as slackers looking for government handouts.
We sent reporters undercover into private prisons, border militias, and the Amazon shipping universe. At a time when other news outlets were treating Donald Trump’s presidential campaign as entertainment, we probed his business deals and the extremist movements he was bringing into the mainstream, and revealed the FBI investigation into his dealings with Vladimir Putin. We created the first database of mass shootings and calculated the price we all pay for gun manufacturer profits. While big publishers were making deals with Facebook, we exposed how its algorithms manipulated millions. And in a sweeping historical investigation from the Reveal team and our friends at the Center for Public Integrity, we showed how the US government took away land it had given to formerly enslaved people after the Civil War.
There were lots of bumps, and more than a few near-death experiences, along the way. Michael Moore was dramatically booted from the editor’s chair after four months in 1986 (his out-of-court settlement helped fund his breakthrough documentary, Roger & Me). The Reagan-era IRS came after MoJo’s nonprofit status (we won, but not without major legal bills and headaches). In the ’90s, we were sued by a famed Republican operative for revealing that two ex-wives had accused him of domestic abuse. In 2013 came a massive lawsuit from a dark-money billionaire and Romney campaign finance chair. (More legal bills and headaches before we won, in both cases.)
And then there’s just the struggle underneath it all: It’s incredibly hard to find the money to keep it all going. Careful budgeting (okay, often penny-pinching) has helped, and so have the hardest-working business-side professionals in the field. But what has primarily kept Mother Jones alive for these 50 years is support from hundreds of thousands of readers (and now viewers and listeners, too) who believe, as we do, that journalistic independence is one of the strongest counterforces to autocracy.
Never in recent history has that danger been as clear and present as it is right now. Enough said about that.
But also, never in recent history has it been more evident what we can do about it. Back in 1976, when MoJo was one of just a handful of nonprofit newsrooms, many sneered at the idea that public interest journalism cannot be left to profit-seeking owners. The last 50 years have put that argument to rest. Now, as much of what’s left of the media industry crumbles and caves around us, it’s time to commit to something better—journalism by and for “the rest of us.”
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Additional research was provided by Dru Sefton and by Ariel Kaplan, whose oral history of global investigative journalism is in development at Columbia University.
For more on our 50th anniversary, check out The Stunning Photojournalism That Made Mother Jones, The Cover Stories That Put Mother Jones on the Map, and Women’s Work: My Barrier-Breaking Early Years at Mother Jones. And don’t miss the More to the Story episode “Exploding Pintos, Imploding Politics: Celebrating 50 Years of Fearless Journalism” and MoJo Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery and co-founder Adam Hochschild’s conversation on KQED’s Forum.
