PUBLIC OPINION: Liberals

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Last week the pinko weekly New Republic gave itself a 25th birthday party. To its swank, Lescaze-designed Manhattan skyscraper office it invited representatives of that amorphous, shifting, elusive, body of opinion that is known as U. S. liberalism, displayed for them a 94-page supplement called The Promise of American Life. Present were amiable Robert Morss Lovett, Government-Secretary of the Virgin Islands, a New Republic editor for 18 years; Freda Kirchwey, editor of The Nation, the rival (74-year-old) liberal intellectual journal that looked exactly like the New Republic to outsiders, very different to liberal intellectuals. Present also were contributors, constant readers, free traders, isolationists, progressive educators, single taxers, practicing Marxists, disillusioned Marxists, poets, professors, publishers, all who believe themselves to be liberals, all who thus claim to fit into a category that nobody has satisfactorily defined.

History. When Herbert Croly launched his new liberal "journal of opinion" 25 years ago, definition was easier. At that seething high tide of trustbusting, muckraking, Bull Moose progressivism, the settlement house movement, the suffragette movement, the I.W.W., liberals were also many things, but they were above all hopeful. In an aged brownstone house in Manhattan's Chelsea district, with a theological seminary appropriately across the street, and a House for the Detention of Women next door, Editor Croly ran his magazine to establish a liberal credo, a way of looking at U. S. political and social life, rather than to win a practical political objective. A scholar—his field was U. S. history—and a gentleman, Herbert Croly was also almost a great editor. His unruly staff, over whom he never exercised the full powers of an editor, had one common admiration—Croly. Through the New Republic's respectable but rundown portals passed some of the most incongruous people in the world: Greenwich Village poets, workers from Chicago's Hull House, old-style Caribbean revolutionaries, retired burglars, Messianic booksellers, musicians from Wall Street, bearded atheists, Nicodemus-like lawyers, authors from Idaho, Junior Leaguers and Bryn Mawr graduates—all manner of odd types, irreconcilables, extravagants, visionaries and practical reformers who somehow were attracted by Founder Herbert Croly.