Digester Out

When he was 33 Arthur Stimson Draper was sent to London as chief of the New York Tribune's European bureaus. Result is that, at 52, Brooklyn-born Arthur Draper sports a Guards mustache, fancies burly tweeds, puffs a briar pipe, boasts a son educated at Cambridge and is a firm believer in Tradition. Consequently his colleagues on the Herald Tribune, to which he had returned as assistant editor, were somewhat surprised when in 1933 Mr. Draper took over the editorship of The Literary Digest with the announcement: "Its columns offer unusual opportunities at this time of profound change."

Change, but not profound, was at once discernible in the columns of the Digest. Modified was the policy of surveying public opinion through newspaper editorials. Under Editor Draper the Digest published signed contributions on current affairs, staff-written articles based on newspaper news. Here & there Editor Draper whipped up leads to sound like breathless Floyd Gibbons: "This is Chapter 1--in epitome --of the Roosevelt regime. And what a chapter! What a regime!" Beyond these mutations, however, Traditionalist Draper bogged down in Tradition for fair. Circulation, which once had risen close to 1,500,000, dwindled steadily,* to the great dismay of Publisher Robert Joseph Cuddihy, 72, who had been with the Digest all his life. Last week Editor Draper announced his resignation. Cause: "Differences of opinion on matters of policy." He took pride in having "made it a paper of original rather than quotative matter." Off to his Adirondack summer home to start his memoirs, he jocularly remarked that he "always wanted to be in journalism 30 years so he could write a book called Thirty Years in Journalism."

*Digest's circulation guarantee for 1936 is 600,000, lowest since 1917. Premiums, for the first time, will be discontinued.

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