The Press: Social Leader

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A little known but lively survivor of the once powerful U.S. Socialist press this week celebrated its 21st anniversary. Manhattan's weekly tabloid New Leader is a mouthpiece for many shades of liberal and leftish opinion, except Trotskyists, Stalinists and Norman Thomas Socialists. It is against the Stalin dictatorship and what the New Leader calls the "Kremlin set" of U.S. liberals.

As such, the paper draws a circulation of 42,000, gets contributions of $15,000 a year (and some $100,000 in subscriptions), cares not a snap for public reading habits.

It aims at filtering ideas and opinions from the top, through union leaders, intellectuals, government officials. Its lifeblood is a steady stream of free literary contributions from such heavyweights, high-priced or otherwise, as Hunter College President George Shuster, New York University Philosopher Sidney Hook, John Chamberlain, Max Eastman, Ferdinand Lundberg, the New York Times's Henry Hazlitt, Brooklyn College President Harry Gideonse, Lewis Mumford, Raymond Leslie Buell, William Green, Matthew Woll, Walter Reuther— some of whom would be outraged if they were called Socialists or leftists.

The New Leader's week-to-week special delight is the exposure of Communists and Communist policy in liberal organizations, unions and government agencies. In the anniversary edition a list by Max Eastman of liberals who have sacrificed ''moral character" by kowtowing to Russian totalitarianism includes Max Lerner of Manhattan's tabloid PM, Paul Robeson, Thomas Mann, Dorothy Parker and Editor Freda Kirchwey of the liberal weekly Nation.

The pinko New Republic has been found by the New Leader to show symptoms of "totalitarian liberalism" and also to be "a journal of subsidized opinion." (The New Republic, non-interventionist until a few months before Pearl Harbor, shifted to reflect the views of its owner, Mrs. Leonard K. Elmhirst. U.S.-born, she has become a British citizen, was co-founder of the New Republic with her late husband, Willard Straight.)

For the first eleven years of its life the New Leader was the organ of the Socialist Party. Since the Party's split in 1935 into militantly Marxist and New Dealish segments, the weekly has been the voice of the New Dealish group, which calls itself the Social Democratic Federation. Social Democrats combine the pragmatism of Philosopher John Dewey (a frequent New Leader contributor) with, as their name implies, a desire for "democratic socialism." They are pro-trade union and wish there were more union leaders like the garment workers' David Dubinsky. Beyond that they disagree among themselves on pros & cons.