New Dress for Dixie

The oldest Sunday supplement in the South has a new dress: the Atlanta Journal ("Covers Dixie like the dew") has a bright new four-color magazine section, designed to make Journal readers forget the charms of pseudo-science and warmed-over scandal.

For five years the Journal has included Hearst's lurid American Weekly, in addition to its own stodgy supplement. In 1939, James M. Cox (the Democratic Presidential nominee in 1920) bought the home-owned Atlanta Journal to keep, and Hearst's Atlanta Georgian-American to kill. To get the Hearst paper, he promised to keep using the American Weekly for five years, with all advertising revenue going to Hearst. Last week the deal had run out.

The new magazine section, jazzed up to hold the doubled circulation Publisher Cox has built since 1939, will nonetheless keep the old accent on the homespun and homegrown. Its first issue featured an interview with rarely interviewed Margaret (Gone With the Wind) Mitchell, a Journal alumna. Its second spotlighted another Georgia big-name, Lillian Smith, telling what happens to a Southerner who writes a controversial novel (Strange Fruit) about the South. (What happens: "I was told I would lose my friends, that my family would be injured. . . . We're all well and happy." Friends showed "wonderful loyalty.") The Journal paid Miss Smith $100 for the article, the princeliest sum Editor Angus Perkerson has forked out in 32 years. Editor Perkerson hopes that in the new, freer-spending era his old nickname will be forgotten: because of his reluctance to spend the paper's money, he has long been called "Anguish."

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