Taxpayers' Vicfory

Most of them do not know it, but U.S. taxpayers own a new magazine. Late this month, after preliminary experimenting that produced a trial issue last September, presses begin to grind out Vol. I, No. 2 of what may well become the Government's biggest publication: Victory, a frankly propagandistic picture magazine. Its publisher: the Office of War Information. Though U.S. citizens own it and are paying for it, they will never see it according to OWI; Victory is to be distributed overseas only.

Information about the U.S. has been extremely scarce in the Eastern Hemisphere. Newsstands in such cities as Ankara have been stacked with Axis publications. Europe has been flooded with the Nazi propaganda publication Signal.

To counter this Axis advantage, OWI first tried distributing legitimate U.S. magazines overseas. This is still being done in a small way, but OWI was not satisfied because: 1) most U.S. magazines are printed only in English,* would be ineffective in places like Turkey; 2) plain-spoken U.S. magazines, in OWI's opinion, are not always fit for readers in Allied and neutral nations because they do not always follow the U.S. propaganda line exactly.

Victory was OWI's answer. It will be printed in six languages, shipped bimonthly to all accessible parts of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia and to U.S. territorial possessions--not to Latin America. OWI Outpost Bureau men will strive to expose as many millions of readers as possible to it. Current plans: 225,000 copies in English, 50,000 in Afrikaans, 75,000 French, 75,000 Portuguese, 40,000 Spanish, 75,000 Arabic; total, 540,000. Victory will sell for the foreign equivalent of 25-c-, will be doled out free to people the U.S. wants to impress.

To do the shirt-sleeve editing, OWI's overseas director Robert E. Sherwood picked 29-year-old Kenneth W. Purdy, a Midwesterner who left the University of Wisconsin to become editor of the Oshkosh (Wis.) Fox Valley Free Press at 21. Then he joined the Annenberg publications, working on Radio Guide and Radio Digest. He went to Click in 1938, later went to Look, joined the Donovan Committee in November, 1941.

With only one full-time writer, four part-timers on his staff, Editor Purdy has a tough job, with deadlines made tougher because all his stories and pictures have to be cleared through various Washington offices, including the censors.

Editor Purdy's first Victory, printed mainly to induce Congress to appropriate enough money to finance it, was a handsome 80-page job printed on heavy slick paper. After excellent air views of New York City and Boulder Dam, a fine shot of a tree-shaded, U.S. residential street and a picture of an Indiana dirt road complete with rugged farmer, there were full-page color photos of Franklin Roosevelt (with a story about him) and Henry Wallace (with an article by him). Other features: a three-page color spread of Marines training for combat; a double-truck photo of a bomb-battered, sinking Jap cruiser; three pages of pictures showing camouflaged and bombed Berlin buildings.

But despite all this fancy filling, Victory still looked too much like propaganda. To make Victory look more like a privately owned magazine, OWI decided that it ought to print advertising to take away the Government taint. Result: a contract (prestige but no profit) with the Crowell-Collier Publishing Co., to publish and sell advertising space for Victory.

The third issue, scheduled to be shipped abroad late in March, will carry the messages of at least ten U.S. firms that want to pay $3,000 for a full page, $6,000 for a double page (no smaller ads will be accepted). All advertising must have Government approval (i.e., must be censored); only institutional advertising will be accepted.

But since U.S. magazines have been told to cut down their use of paper, and many therefore are refusing advertising, some businesses have advertising funds, with no place to spend them. They may figure that advertising in Victory is a better use for their money than to pay it out in taxes. And of course Victory can get all the paper it wants, transportation or no.

* Only privately owned U.S. magazine which is exported in languages other than English is Reader's Digest, which has editions in Spanish (800,000 copies) and Portuguese (400,000), largely for Latin Americans, and in March will bring out a Swedish-language edition to be published in Stockholm (where paper is plentiful) and called Det Besta ur Reader's Digest (The Best from the Reader's Digest).

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