The Press: Christmas Present

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Cousins Robert Rutherford McCormick and Joseph Medill Patterson, publishers of the strident Chicago Tribune, gave themselves and each other a Christmas present last week, five years in advance. In the Tribune, over both their signatures [magnified to seven-inch lengths], they published an "estimate" of what their national nickel-weekly Liberty is going to do by way of circulation in the next few years. Always forthright, they made this "estimate" in open comparison to Liberty's staid senior in the nickel-weekly field, The Saturday Evening Post. Always cheerful, their present to themselves was to show, on a graph, the consummation of their dearest ambition—Liberty becoming as large as the Post—at Christmastime in 1934. Thereafter, they guessed, they would have "the largest magazine circulation in the world."

At present the Post's circulation is half again as large as Liberty's, some three million copies to two. In "estimating" the future, the Liberty cousins showed the Post creeping hesitantly to about three millions while Liberty reached that figure in steady upward dashes. The Post's career after the memorable Christmas of 1934 was shown continuing vaguely off the side of the graph with about four million circulation at the end of 1937. Liberty, however, was shown dashing onward and upward with such verve that it went quite out of sight at the top of the graph in the autumn of 1936. Readers could only conclude that Cousins Patterson & McCormick publish, on their own showing, a magazine where the sky is the limit.

Revolutionists

Chief of the few remaining "radical" organs is the black-typed, semi-Communistic New Masses. Once it was called the Masses and Floyd Dell, a mild-eyed young man from Illinois, was its editor. At the close of the War, the Masses was suppressed. When it was revived in 1926 as the New Masses, a Manhattanite named Michael Gold became its editor. Floyd Dell continued as "Contributing Editor," one of 48 on its letterhead.

In the interim. Fame had come to Floyd Dell. He had written some novels that sold [Moon Calf, The Briary Bush, This Mad Ideal]. Lately he biographed Upton Sinclair, the California liberty-shouter. The past winter the innocuous father farce Little Accident, based on his book The Unmarried Father, has been a money-getter on Broadway.

Last month, the now-affluent Floyd Dell wrote a letter to Editor Gold in which he said: "I at first wished to have my name associated with the magazine because it represented a partly Communistic Communist and at any rate rebellious literary tendency, with which I am in sympathy. However, what it seems chiefly to represent is a neurotic literary and pictorial estheticism with which I am completely out of sympathy, and with which I would rather not be associated. . . . Yours for the Revolution."

Last week Editor Gold published Contributor Dell's letter in the New Masses. With it he published a reply. Excerpts:

''Floyd Dell had a brief period of significance. . . . At no time was [he] a real revolutionist. . . . He was a Greenwich Village playboy.

"He made, probably to his own amazement, a lot of money in Sex. . . . It is a profitable 'racket.'