Arena, The.
A Monthly Review of Social Advance.
1889-1909 Monthly
Boston, MA, New York, NY, Trenton, NJ, and again Boston, MA. Publisher: Arena Publishing Company; Alliance Publishing Company. Editor: B.O. Flower until 1896; then with John Clark Ridpath and John Emery McLean; in 1898 Paul Tyner bought the journal and assumed editorship with McLean until the next year when Alliance Publishing Company bought the journal and McLean edited the journal alone; then N.O. Fanning; then C.B. Patterson, J.E. McLean and B.O. Flower; then Flower alone in 1904.
Succeeds: Journal of Practical Metaphysics (absorbed December 1898); New Time (absorbed December 1898); Temple (absorbed December 1898); The Coming Age (St. Louis, absorbed 1900) Succeeded by: Christian Work and the Evangelist
1/1, December 1889-41/233, August 1909. Illustrated. 5 x 8.

Benjamin Orange Flower (1858-1918) was a rather typical progressive socialist (and rabid anti-Catholic) and started this journal in 1889 to replace the American Spectator which he had run to tout the fraudulent medicines, stock swindles and "salted" mining schemes of his brother until the police closed in. The new journal functioned as a forum for the Brahmin class of the Northeast to address and consider the issues of the time: anti-vaccination, prostitution as a social evil, the fate of native Americans, psychical research, eugenics, etc. He lost editorial control in 1896, sold the magazine in 1898 to Paul Tyner (who turned the journal decidedly toward New Thought and absorbed a variety of New Thought journals, including his own The Temple). In September 1899 the journal was bought by Alliance Publishing Company and moved to New York City under the editorship of John Emery McLean, late editor of Mind. Flower then regained control in 1904 when Albert Brandt bought the paper, and edited it until 1909. In the interim, Flower started Coming Age (St. Louis), and later edited the reform Twentieth Century and then Menace, devoted to opposing the influence of Catholicism. The journal's circulation at its peak was about 30,000, but it seems not to have been profitable. The Arena featured articles by many famous authors of the time, including Camille Flammarion, Max Muller, Edwin Arnold and Alfred Russel Wallace. NYPL; LOC.

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