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From Pat Deveney's database:
National Transition Moonly Voice, The.
Devoted to Scientific National Reconstruction.
Other titles: The Moonly Voice
1871—1873 Monthly (at full moon), irregular
Salem/Trenton, NJ. Editor: Robert ("Bobby") Sinnickson.
1/1, 1871. 1-4 pp., 10x6. No money was to be paid for the journal but the publisher would "'trade' or exchange for equal value, for anything we can profitably use or dispose of, from family groceries or farmers' produce to a steam-power printing press." Sinnickson was one of the eccentric printers like John A. Lant and Thomas Cook who enlivened the late 19th century with their enthusiasms. The announced goal of the journal was, as Marc Demarest has discovered, to "introduce to the world a recently discovered, scientific and permanent system of National Government, which we deem a natural successor to the Republican form under which the United States of North America now exists, which appears to us transitional rather than permanent." This system, as Sinnickson explained in a letter to the editor of the Trenton State Gazetteer in 1882, was "Nationism," which would "open the way for transition from a lower to a higher national condition, in the regular course of natural development of nations or peoples, which have been discovered to governed by the same laws of progress as the rest of Nature's creations." The basic premise seems, as Sinnickson noted in the journal, to have been the conviction that what America needed was a "nationally organized and unitized action," a "motherly and fatherly government, which will impartially provide for the wants of their children." Nationism's discoverer was D.T. Jones of Iowa, from whom Sinnickson had learned in the 1860s, finally experiencing "a new mental birth, into a sphere where the 'moral monstrosities' of men on the sensual plane of perception become the beautiful forms which only those who have been born into the higher mental and spiritual worlds can fully appreciated . . . . 'To the pure all things are pure.'" The new doctrine advocated the abolition of capitalism and laws denying "woman her natural rights to an equal voice" in government, and almost some included some appreciation of free love. The journal's radical approach may have prodded the Post Office in April 1872 to deny it the privilege of free postage to other journals it shared "exchanges" with, although the official reason for the ban was that the journal did not contain matter of "general interest." Sinnickson, in a letter to the Progressive Communist in 1875 discussed the proposed resurrection of the journal that year or the succeeding. It needed, he opined, a woman's hand and he thought the Moonly Voice would thrive if combined with Lois Waisbrooker's Our Age, which had ceased the year before. Nothing seems to have come of the proposal. His search for a woman's hand seems to have been meant literally. In the surviving (and probably last) issue of the journal he writes: "Two women wanted, to conduct this periodical — one with physical, the other with mental wealth sufficient therefor." One issue (2/1, 1872) is in Seybert Commission records at University of Pennsylvania; University of Delaware; University of Alberta..
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