New New Republic

Oldtime readers of the New Republic raised their eyebrows. For the first time in its 31 years, the opinionated weekly journal of opinion had daubed make-up on its sallow, paper-towel complexion, political cartoons on its restyled cover. Inside, it had jazzed up its austere format like a C.I.O. house organ, had even started a chummy column of office gossip. Recently it stepped farther out of character to buy radio commercials, brazenly courting a mass audience.

What had got into the New Republic? The change was more than skin deep. On a magazine which had gained little new blood in 15 years, a massive transfusion was under way. It had been okayed by amiable President Bruce Bliven, 56, longtime New Republic careerman, but the doctor administering it was a newcomer. Editor Michael Whitney Straight, 29-year-old son of the late NR Founder (and Morgan partner) Willard Straight, was sure that the liberal-weekly was going places. Just where it was headed, neither he nor his readers could say for sure.

It had strayed long ago from the difficult channel Editor Herbert David Croly had plotted for it in 1914. When he met Banker Straight and his wife on an ocean crossing, the shy, religiously intellectual Croly had a challenging book on political philosophy to his credit (The Promise of American Life), and a burning desire to run a liberal magazine. Impressed by his zeal, the Straights straightway became his converts and backers. His object: "Less to inform or entertain [my] readers than to start little insurrections in the realm of their convictions."

Rebel-Rouser. In his yellow brick headquarters in Manhattan's Chelsea district, next door to a home for wayward girls and across the street from the General Theological Seminary, Croly assembled a motley crew of insurrectionists. Into his journal went some of the best of Walter Lippmann, Francis Hackett, Elinor Wylie, Rebecca West, Robert Morss Lovett, Edmund Wilson. At his famous staff luncheons, everyone talked in low tones--in' deference to Croly's own shy near-whisper. In the eyes of New Republicans, Croly was a scholar journalist, and Oswald Garrison Villard, his opposite number on the Nation, a mere hotheaded warhorse. They were proud of the difference.

The magazine was often hard to read, but--like Croly's tortured editorials, written in an agonized longhand--served its high purpose for 15 years: "to goad public opinion into being more vigilant and hospitable." When Editor Croly died in 1930, his paper went from bluestocking to parlor pink, and his galaxy of talent flew apart. Often, under Bruce Bliven, the NR was peas-in-a-pod with the Nation and, for a brief period (1935), it adhered to a Marxist line.* By the time Willard Straight's son joined the staff, Croly's shadow on the magazine had faded to a faint blur.

Personable "Mike" Straight went to school at his mother's vast Dartington Hall experimental colony in England, got an economics degree at Cambridge, returned to the U.S. to work as a State Department economist. He later helped Tom Corcoran and Ben Cohen ghostwrite New Deal speeches, reported off & on for the New Republic, worked up to be the family corporation's watchdog on the staff.

Too Little for Too Few. Since his discharge last October from the A.A.F. (he was a Stateside Flying Fortress pilot), Mike Straight has wished that the never-profitable New Republic had more to say, more people to say it to. Anxious to multiply its audience (now a record 41,000) to a quarter of a million, he decided to "break the rhythm" of the magazine.

In his office, Straight posted a sign: CONFUSE THE READER. (Object: to arouse people who say, "I don't read the New Republic because I know what it's going to say.") He hired a bevy of cartoonists, brought in a new managing editor. Some of his readers, as a result, have seen symptoms of schizophrenia in the magazine, with the young blood contrasting--if not conflicting--with such old "conservative liberals" as Bliven, Stark Young, George Soule and Malcolm Cowley.

"People are liberal now in this country," Straight says. "But they don't always know what they're liberal about. We want to develop a political program for liberals, stop handing out the line with a shovel, and start using a fork."

* A word whose definition even Webster side steps. Rough approximation of its present U.S. meaning: anti-right-wing Republicans, anti-Southern Democrats.

* In 1919 it had been first to propose Herbert Hoover for President.

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