Streit & Straight

Men of good will were busy with two wishful new publications. They hoped that their magazines might help prevent the postwar world from turning into a prewar world. One would plug federal union as the way to peace; the other was all out for U.N.

Modest Monthly. In a spare, four-room suite in Washington, spare, mild-mannered Clarence (Union Now) Streit, 50, was about to launch Freedom & Union as "the journal of the World Republic that does not yet exist." Barring printing delays, the first modest issue of 20,000 copies would go to subscribers next week.

To Missouri-born Clarence Streit (rhymes with bright), the idea of a federation of free peoples is both a vision and a career. His favorite citation of its workability: the U.S., which was once a league of sovereign states. As a young A.E.F. veteran and U.S. attache at Versailles, Streit saw the kind of peacemaking that followed World War I. As a New York Times correspondent at Geneva (1929-39), he saw the kind of peace-keeping that preceded World War II. His book Union Now urged a modified national sovereignty, an international federation of democracies. To promote the ideal of "individual liberty through union of free peoples," he formed Federal Union, Inc., whose voice will be Freedom & Union.

To help him tackle the great issue of "peace or war, freedom or tyranny, life or death," Streit has gathered an impressive array of aides, for most of whom the new monthly is a labor of love. His contributing editors: Owen J. Roberts, former U.S. Supreme Court justice; Russell W. Davenport, onetime managing editor of FORTUNE and Willkie campaign coordinator; Stringfellow Barr, president of St. John's College; A. Powell Davies, clergyman-author (The Faith of an Unrepentant Liberal); and youthful Harris Wofford Jr., founder of Student Federalists (the junior branch of Federal Union). Sparkplug of the eight full-time staffers, all under 30, is energetic Managing Editor Helen B. Hamer, alumna of Manhattan's Greenwich Villager and Science Illustrated. The "panel of contributors" includes Wickham Steed, Elmo Roper, Pertinax, Magyar Cartoonists Derso & Kelen.

For the present Freedom & Union will not go on newsstands, will sell only to subscribers (at $4 a year). To season its heavy fare of discussions, digests and editorials, there will be dashes of humor and satire, columns with titles like The Little Dog Laughed and Poor Adam's Almanack. "In short," says Clarence Streit, "Freedom & Union will be neither a timid, pallid neutral nor a narrow, humorless zealot." But it will try to count for something among "influential English-reading people" the world over.

Ambitious Weekly. The other peace-seeking periodical has given the Manhattan eyrie of the New Republic the expectant aura of a hospital delivery room--even though the birth is still months away. But the prospect is more exciting to Editor Michael Whitney Straight (rhymes with bait) than the current affairs of the New Republic, his family's journal of opinion.

In cahoots with two other millionaires' sons--Cousin John Hay ("Jock") Whitney and Nelson Rockefeller--young (30) Mike Straight planned a worldwide weekly that would report and interpret every phase of U.N. affairs. Its working title: United Nations World. This week, with a fourth founding father, Professor Max Ascoli of the New School for Social Research, they will meet to decide when their global brain child shall be born.

Already at work in the New Republic offices are half a dozen editors and writers, under the direction of Straight and William Patterson, an ex-Hearstling who helped produce the war movie The True Glory. U.N. World may essay a sample issue during the October U.N. Assembly meeting, and real production is tentatively scheduled for early next year. Present plans call for an initial U.S. edition of "about 100,000 copies," then French and British versions, with ultimate expansion to as many as 25 multilingual editions a week. The new magazine (no relation to the New Republic) will carry advertising, sell for 15 or 20-c-, offer plenty of pictures along with its news, editorials and analyses. Says enthusiastic Mike Straight: "We want to back U.N. -- not indiscriminately, but as a starting point. We'll be a commercial venture with no liberal tinge, not too much of a do-good aspect, not a PM or New Republic kind of butcher-paper magazine."

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