and The New Yorker), Foreign Affairs was established and thriving. By 1927, the circulation had risen from an initial 1500 or so to the respectable level of 11,000 copies. Then, in 1928, Coolidge died, too early and rather suddenly, and Armstrong took over the editorship, not missing a beat. In the fall of that year, he introduced paired articles presenting the viewpoints of the opposing political parties; the writer on the Democratic side was the then-governor of New York, Franklin Roosevelt.

THE 1930s

In 1932, the book reviews were collected into a hardback volume a custom that continued for three more decades and finally culminated in a massive Foreign Affairs 50-Year Bibliography (1972) picking the still-significant books published over this period and reevaluating them at length. This was a projectto which Ham Armstrong was particularly dedicated, and is another of his monuments.

But of course, by 1933 the world itself was in terrible trouble, with the Depression, the rise of Hitler, and the consolidation of Stalin's rule in the Soviet Union. It was natural that the idealism of the first decade of Foreign Affairs with no less than 30 articles dealing with the work of the League of Nations, and 32 on disarmament problems should give way to steadily growing concern and resolve over the threat especially from Nazi Germany.

Armstrong himself was in the forefront of this transformation. Always following European politics closely, he managed to be in Germany in the spring of 1933 and interviewed a large number of people, including a long monologue from Adolf Hitler