Christmas Present

Cousins Robert Rutherford McCormick and Joseph Medill Patterson, publishers of the strident Chicago Tribune, gave themselves and each other a Christmas present last week, five years in advance. In the Tribune, over both their signatures [magnified to seven-inch lengths], they published an "estimate" of what their national nickel-weekly Liberty is going to do by way of circulation in the next few years. Always forthright, they made this "estimate" in open comparison to Liberty's staid senior in the nickel-weekly field, The Saturday Evening Post. Always cheerful, their present to themselves was to show, on a graph, the consummation of their dearest ambition--Liberty becoming as large as the Post--at Christmastime in 1934. Thereafter, they guessed, they would have "the largest magazine circulation in the world."

At present the Post's circulation is half again as large as Liberty's, some three million copies to two. In "estimating" the future, the Liberty cousins showed the Post creeping hesitantly to about three millions while Liberty reached that figure in steady upward dashes. The Post's career after the memorable Christmas of 1934 was shown continuing vaguely off the side of the graph with about four million circulation at the end of 1937. Liberty, however, was shown dashing onward and upward with such verve that it went quite out of sight at the top of the graph in the autumn of 1936. Readers could only conclude that Cousins Patterson & McCormick publish, on their own showing, a magazine where the sky is the limit.

Revolutionists

Chief of the few remaining "radical" organs is the black-typed, semi-Communistic New Masses. Once it was called the Masses and Floyd Dell, a mild-eyed young man from Illinois, was its editor. At the close of the War, the Masses was suppressed. When it was revived in 1926 as the New Masses, a Manhattanite named Michael Gold became its editor. Floyd Dell continued as "Contributing Editor," one of 48 on its letterhead.

In the interim. Fame had come to Floyd Dell. He had written some novels that sold [Moon Calf, The Briary Bush, This Mad Ideal]. Lately he biographed Upton Sinclair, the California liberty-shouter. The past winter the innocuous father farce Little Accident, based on his book The Unmarried Father, has been a money-getter on Broadway.

Last month, the now-affluent Floyd Dell wrote a letter to Editor Gold in which he said: "I at first wished to have my name associated with the magazine because it represented a partly Communistic Communist and at any rate rebellious literary tendency, with which I am in sympathy. However, what it seems chiefly to represent is a neurotic literary and pictorial estheticism with which I am completely out of sympathy, and with which I would rather not be associated. . . . Yours for the Revolution."

Last week Editor Gold published Contributor Dell's letter in the New Masses. With it he published a reply. Excerpts:

''Floyd Dell had a brief period of significance. . . . At no time was [he] a real revolutionist. . . . He was a Greenwich Village playboy.

"He made, probably to his own amazement, a lot of money in Sex. . . . It is a profitable 'racket.'

''Bohemians and soulful bourgeois, these are the heroes and heroines of all his novels . . . silly and worthless people.

"I can remember several talks I had with Floyd Dell during the past four years. . . . The impression I gathered was that there was only one writer in America who was thoroughly sane.

"Mr. Dell, the 'Revolutionist,' has not had time . . . to walk on the picket line of a strike. . . . Why? Was he so busy being a dress-suit author?

''He is no more of a Revolutionist today than Elinor Glyn. . . . Let him wear a dress suit, and fraternize around the tea tables with the literary racketeers. He is only treading the path of hundreds of other ex-radicals in America, No one really cares. The dead can bury their dead. But the dead should not sign their letters, 'Yours for the Revolution.' "

When Floyd Dell's biography of Socialist Upton Sinclair appeared, Lee Taylor Casey, Denver Rocky Mountain News editorial writer, reviewed the book for his paper. From what he read, he called Socialist Sinclair a "popinjay and renegade, ready to debate the gentility of his ancestry, perpetually seeking self-advertisement, deserting the cause of revolution one year when the cause was dangerous, posing as its champion the next." Also, said Reviewer Casey: "Of the two Sinclairs who can fail to prefer Harry F. Sinclair of Teapot Dome, who at least is loyal to his friends and not ashamed of his origin?"

Socialist Sinclair sued the News, asked $200,000 damages. Last week a Denver jury found the News not guilty of libel.

Ridders Buy

Newspapers are not easy to buy. Competition for them is keen. If they are worth buying they are usually profitable and their owners loath to sell. Chain-paper systems, therefore, grow slowly. Chain Publisher William Randolph Hearst has taken more than 30 years to buy his 28 newspapers. But during the past three years, a new name has risen rapidly in chainpaperdom. Already it publishes eight newspapers. July 1 it will take over two more.

The name is Ridder. It belongs to three brothers: Bernard Herman, Joseph Edward, Victor Frank. Like the Hearst and Scripps-Howard chains, the Ridder newspapers are not sectionalized. They comprise two German-language dailies, the Staats-Herold and Staats-Zeitung, in New York; the Pioneer Press and Dispatch in St. Paul, Minn.; the Long Island Press in Jamaica, N. Y., the American and News at Aberdeen, S. Dak., and the famed Journal of Commerce* having national circulation. The Ridder announcement last week, in a letter to press trade-weeklies, was the acquisition of the far-flung Press-Guardian of Paterson, N. J. and Herald of Grand Forks, N. Dak.

When newspapers are bought nowadays, newsgatherers automatically inquire whether any public utility money is involved. At such questions, the Brothers Ridder laugh. Says Brother Bernard: "We'd be able to buy many more newspapers if we had power-interest backing. No, we only bought these papers for two reasons. First, because we think we can make money out of them. Second, because we didn't have enough to do."

Brother Joseph added: "We might buy more tomorrow. You never can tell. We're always looking for them. If we listed all we have tried to buy, they'd fill a book. But there's one thing we won't do, and that is, pay more for a paper than it's worth."

The Ridder Brothers inherited the German journals from their U. S.-born father, the late Herman Ridder. The rest they bought themselves, starting in 1926. Brother Bernard is the oldest, 46. Brothers Victor and Joseph are twins, 43. In a big, cool, pine-paneled office in Manhattan they sit and laugh at their thinning hair and other people's troubles. They have great confidence in what Charles D. Whidden, Journal of Commerce circulation manager, will do as publisher of their new Paterson newspaper; and of what Melvin Oppegard, onetime Northwestern Associated Press manager, associate editor of the Ridder's Pioneer Press and Dispatch, will do at Grand Forks. And they are waiting hopefully until the eight Ridder sons (four Brother Bernard's, two Brother Joseph's, two Brother Victor's) will be old enough to publish newspapers.

Out on Long Island Brother Joseph has six horses, a racing stable. "You can almost always tell Joe's horses in a race," explains Brother Bernard, "because they're almost always last. Sometimes they look as though they are winning the next race." But Brother Bernard is fair, admits that his golf is no better than his brother's horses. Of Brother Victor, the other two are most proud. A director of the Boy Scouts of America, his hobby is doing kind deeds for other people. Last week he was elected president of the New York State Board of Social Welfare.

Air-Editor

When a man leaves government service, the public eye watches to see whether he will step "up" or "down" upon entering his next job. Edward Pearson Warner lately resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in charge of Aeronautics, was revealed last week as having stepped into the editorship of Aviation (weekly), oldest U. S. air magazine. In point of prestige, this step seemed to be "sideways," at least. In point of salary it was undoubtedly an up-step. Assistant Secretaries of the Navy receive $9,000 per annum. Mc Graw-Hill Publishing Co. pays its editors-in-chief better than that. Three years ago, stepping from Assistant Secretary to the editorship of an air publication might have seemed a down-step. But the work done by Assistant Secretaries for Aeronautics since they were installed three years ago to help make the country air-minded, has made air-editing an employment consider able and promising. The issue of Aviation in which the Warner appointment was announced contained 45 pages of advertising. The corresponding issue three years ago contained 16 1/2 pages of advertisements.

Since 1920 Edward Pearson Warner has taught aviation engineering at M. I. T. In 1924 he was made a full professor. Air-literary as well as air-minded, he has writ ten two volumes on engineering aspects of the industry, has also written many an article for aeronautical publications. No stranger in the offices of the magazine he is to edit, Professor-Secretary-Editor Warner helped to prepare some of Aviation's first early issues in 1916, has since con tributed to it not a few learned treatises on various phases of aircraft manufacture and development.

*Not to be confused with the Chicago Journal of Commerce, owned by Knowlton Lyman ("Snake") Ames, oldtime Princeton quarterback.