Something Thrown In

The trouble with the South, said Alabama's New Dealing Aubrey Williams in 1947, was that most of its brains and talent went North. That, he added modestly, included himself. By faithfully serving Franklin D. Roosevelt in the left wing of the New Deal, Williams had risen high in the WPA, was National Youth Administrator for five years. But in 1945, when the Senate rejected his nomination as Rural Electrification Administrator because of his leftish views, his northern political star blinked out. Williams packed up his talents and headed south again.

With a loan from Marshall Field, Williams bought the decrepit old (105 years) monthly Southern Farmer in Montgomery, Ala. for an estimated $100,000. The tabloid-size Farmer, which looks more like a newspaper than a magazine, had long been against the New Deal and for white supremacy, delighted the "red necks" with its waving of the bloody shirt.

Lanky, leather-faced Aubrey Williams turned it around. He went whole hog for Harry Truman's Fair Deal, especially for his civil-rights program, hopes to make the Farmer a powerful political organ. Said he: "The Farmer is for any New Deal plan you can name." By last week Publisher Williams, 59, had about tripled Southern Farmer's circulation to 1,052,821, only a furrow's width behind the South's biggest farm publications, the Southern Agriculturist (circ. 1,103,034) and the Progressive Farmer (circ. 1,080,575),-but fields ap&rt in journalistic approach. Instead of teMing his readers how to farm, Williams gives them advice on economic matters and something to think about while farming. He crusades against such things as "the fertilizer combine and trusts" and the poll tax, runs pieces on housing, credit and taxes.

Williams has built up the Farmer chiefly by weeding out the gone-to-seed circulation lists, and harvesting new readers with contests and prizes ranging from Bibles to tractors. Says he: "I don't think very many people down here buy magazines because they want the magazine. They get a monkey wrench or something and the magazine is thrown in ... I don't know what they do with the Farmer--stick it down the toilet, maybe . . . but they continue to buy it."

Williams' campaigns often lose him subscriptions (he gets many letters threatening "to come down there and hang you"), but he gets so many new ones that the Farmer is already outgrowing the modern plant which Williams built for $100,000 in Montgomery last year. The Farmer carries little national advertising, yet made $55,000 last year. Since he has become a businessman himself, Williams takes a more kindly, if still somewhat scornful, attitude toward business than he did in the New Deal days. "Making money," says he, "is the easiest thing I ever tried to do."

-The Southern Farmer circulates mainly throughout the South, hence does not compete and cannot be compared with such national publications as Farm Journal (circ. 2,746,310) and Country Gentleman (circ. 2,329,884).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.