These principles laid out by the newspaper's founder, and particularly
the final sentence, have been referred to repeatedly over the years as major
decisions faced those running the day-to-day operations.

On the day of the first issue in late November 1908, 82,500 copies were
printed and circulated. The intent was to get as many issues of the Monitor
as possible circulated initially, with a printing run of about 38,800 issues for
the second day. ¹¹ One year later, on November 24, 1909, 250,000 copies of a
96-page anniversary issue were circulated. In an unsigned article on the
front page, the Monitor again made it clear that covering spot news and just
giving the readers the "facts" were not its intentions: "The Monitor not only
seeks to keep its readers informed of events all over the world, but to inter-
pret [italics added] those events in a way to show their relation to the great
movements that are of service to the human race." ¹² The newspaper kept its
commitment to "interpretive" journalism even as "objectivity" became the
ideal in the 1920s and beyond. ¹³

Mrs. Eddy passed on December 3, 1910. About ten years later, an event of
major significance to the future of the Monitor occurred. The controversy in-
volved a power struggle between the Publishing Society's Board of Trus-
tees and the Mother Church's Board of Directors. In March 1919 the
Trustees filed suit attempting to prevent the Directors from having the
power to remove Trustees. Not long after the suit was filed, the Massachu-
setts Supreme Judicial Court issued an interim injunction preventing re-
moval of any of the Trustees. This effectively took away power the
Directors (and the Mother Church) had over the Monitor. According to a
book on the history of the Monitor by Erwin D. Canham, the Monitor's circu-
lation of 123,080 near the end of World War I fell to 20,939 by the time the
suit was settled. ¹⁴

In November 1921, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld
the Directors and the (Mother) Church Manual (which had given the ulti-
mate authority over the Trustees and the newspaper to the Directors). It
took until the end of January 1922 to clear all the legal formalities, return
control to the Directors, and install the founder of the American Society of
Newspaper Editors (ASNE), Willis Abbot, as editor. ¹⁵ Abbot, perhaps sur-
prisingly, had worked for the Hearst chain (plus many other newspapers
and magazines) and resigned from the Chicago American staff after the pa-
per reported that the sinking of the Lusitania was a legitimate action during
war. ¹⁶ Abbot rebuilt the staff of the Monitor. By 1924, circulation climbed
back to 100,000 and by 1930 the newspaper reached about 130,000. ¹⁷ In
1927, Abbot was appointed to the governing board of the Monitor and was
involved in many groups that promoted responsible journalism and peace
for the world. ¹⁸

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