New Politics, New New Yorker

In more ways than the obvious visual ones, The New Yorker since its founding in 1925 has seemed almost immune to dramatic change. It has had only two editors in those 47 years, Harold Ross and the man who took over after Ross's death in 1951, William Shawn. The devotion to low-key fiction and gentlemanly criticism has persisted, as have the horse-racing column and such self-mocking images as Eustace Tilly and an imaginary correspondent called "The Long-Winded Lady."

So would you believe that The New Yorker is today one of the most socially activist and politically polemical among major magazines? That it vibrates in tones of tough liberalism and occasionally radical outrage?

"The President," said a recent editorial about busing, "seems determined to keep the people's fear and hatred at the peak until election time, whatever the cost to the nation's children and to its laws." An editorial on the expanded bombing of Viet Nam: "The war that this country's government is waging now is war trivialized . . . and involves us all in the dishonor of killing in a cause we are no longer willing to die for." An article about the Nixon Administration's record on civil liberties, by Richard Harris: "No one can say that the President has willfully set out to undermine the Constitution that he swore to uphold. But how would the results be different if he had?"

"The New Yorker has always run articles about public issues," Editor Shawn says; the magazine can cite such warnings as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time ten years ago. But Shawn agrees that both the urgency and frequency of political pieces have increased sharply. In his view, the turning point was the 1970 Cambodian invasion. Richard Goodwin, once a Kennedy speechwriter, wrote a denunciation of Nixon's "usurpation" of power; Shawn used it as an editorial. After that "Notes and Comment," once the fluffy lead-in to each issue, frequently became the magazine's most somber instrument.

The change coincided with some of the roughest weather The New Yorker had ever encountered in the narrow, sometimes viciously choppy New York publishing pond. Back in 1965, New York had run Tom Wolfe's satiric attack on Shawn and his magazine. Though shallow and unfair, Wolfe's article generated talk and crystallized the notion that The New Yorker had become musty and irrelevant. Then, in the late '60s, like other magazines, it began experiencing a money crunch. It continued to be profitable, but income shrank dramatically.-

Outsiders naturally assumed that Shawn's response to adversity was new politics for The New Yorker--an impression strengthened by an advertising campaign that emphasized the stinging prose. But Shawn and his staff insist that there was no connection. "Even when things were at their worst," Shawn told TIME'S Horace Judson recently, "I have never felt any pressure. I can't imagine what the pressure could have bee'n. I did hear murmurings in the background, people in the advertising community who thought we were too sedate in our appearance. But we liked the way we looked. We always felt that we were in advance in what we said."

As Shawn and his writers agree, the real reason for The New Yorker's political preoccupation lies in the subtle relation between them. The New Yorker, with hardly any hierarchical structure, could be described as a participatory dictatorship. Though Shawn shapes the magazine each week ("I approve everything we publish"), only very rarely does he initiate a direct assignment or even set a deadline. Instead, he chooses from what the writers suggest and submit.

The altered tone and emphasis have come "not because of a deliberate or calculated change in policy, but simply because certain authors--responding to the heightened sense of trouble at the end of the '60s and since--have become interested in saying certain things, and we, the editors, are sympathetic."

Brief Fantasy. Shawn deals with his writers the way he approaches the outside world--combining intellectual interest and personal detachment. In a city where editors think of themselves as public figures, Shawn, 64, is so retiring as to be invisible, a trait to which he adds a genuine but rigidly old-fashioned courtesy. "I've known him 20 years," says Richard Harris, a staff writer, "and we are still Mr. Shawn, Mr. Harris." "Behind Shawn's manner," adds Richard Goodwin, "is a fantastically acute steel mind. I've never had editing like it. He went over my Cambodian piece word by word, with me sitting by his desk. He has a great instinct for bringing out what you are trying to do."

Shawn's own profound disquiet about the dangers to mankind evidently has early roots. Born in Chicago, he dropped out of the University of Michigan, worked as a newspaper reporter in New Mexico, then in 1933 joined The New Yorker as a "Talk of the Town" reporter. He was an editor by 1935. The only piece he ever signed in the magazine was a brief and melancholy fantasy in 1936 titled The Catastrophe, which tells how a meteorite neatly obliterated "all five boroughs of Greater New York," and how the entire notion of New York eventually was forgotten. Ten years later, as managing editor, he persuaded Ross that John Hersey's account of the obliteration of Hiroshima was so important that it should take up the entire editorial space of one issue.

The recent changes seem to be grounded, paradoxically, in a kind of classical conservatism: "We have defended certain things that we do believe in and cherish," Shawn says. "We have written whenever we thought the democracy as we saw it or the constitutional processes were threatened." He thinks back: "I remember Rachel Carson, when she was working on Silent Spring, just hated having to do it. With her kind of love of nature, the sea and birds, she felt she was using up the last years of her life on something repugnant. It is often that way now. You do these things out of a feeling of duty."

-Ad pages fell 40%, 1966 to 1971. Profits went from $10.93 per share in 1966 to a low of $3.69 in 1970 before turning up to $4.02 last year. Circulation, which had hovered around 475,000 for more than a decade, also took a slight tumble in 1970 before righting itself at 474,788 last year. At the recent annual meeting, stockholders were told that both circulation and advertising would be up slightly in the first half of 1972.

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