"Common Sense"

Two magazines founded on Public Discontent have cropped up in the past year. One called Brass Tacks is four months old. Another. National Spotlight, edited by muckraking Walter William Liggett, vanished after a single appearance. This week came another, a 15-c- fortnightly on pulp stock named Common Sense, in which Writer Liggett again was the most conspicuous contributor. But Common Sense was distinguished by other characteristics. Its founders and chief editors are 27-year-old Alfred Mitchell Bingham, Yale law graduate, son of Republican Senator-reject Hiram Bingham of Connecticut; Selden Rodman, founder and former editor of The Harkness Hoot, literate, insurgent Yale undergraduate magazine; and Charles C. Nicolet. able newsman who quit the New York World-Telegram to assist them. Deriving its name from Thomas Paine's 1776 pamphlet. Common Sense promised to "stand on a platform of protest, and present a forward-looking program."

Protest was crudely but plainly indicated in the cover design, labeled "Saint Andy of Pittsburgh." It showed a cadaverous, ansel-winged Andrew Mellon against a red sky, plucking a harp above a sordid panorama of smoking mill chimneys, squalid shacks, starved workers, silk-hatted bankers slipping money to corrupt politicians. This illustrated W'riter Liggett's leading, lengthy article: "Mr. Mellon's Pittsburgh--Symbol of Corruption." Other features: "News Behind The News," a querulous "debunking" of the fortnight's political and economic news; "Children Are Starving" by one Lillian Symes; political pin-sticking by Robert S. Allen (Washington Merry-Go-Round) ; a radical spectator's impressions of the four Presidential campaign rallies in Madison Square Garden by John Dos Passes; a photograph of society girls feeding sugar to horses in a hotel ballroom, contrasted with one of Chicago relief workers feeding soup to jobless in a basement.

An essay signed "A Student" apparently had been penned by one of the young editors. Excerpts: "Sounding trumpet-calls to youth is a sorry and futile gesture. . . . With the time ripe as it hasn't been in 150 years for youth really to start something, to organize and make its influence felt, nothing will happen. . . ."

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