" Even before it began publishing in 1914, the New Republic had become the focus of Progressive attention. The infant journal out of New York City seemed to speak for a generation of reformers ambitious to transform American society. Whatever its intellectual merits, it owed its prominence to the joint intentions and extensive connections of its married publishers, Dorothy Whitney and Willard Straight, who created it to fulfill the shared elements of their reform agendas and thus to give their marriage a public presence. "