The New New Republic

"The magazine of opinion," says New Republic Editor and Financial Angel Michael Straight, "has a rough time nowadays. You tend to restrict your opinions more & more to make them coincide with the opinions of your readers and sometimes you find you have restricted yourself to rather small groups." As proof, Editor Straight could point to his own magazine. Once a rallying point for liberals, the New Republic has steadily restricted its opinions while swinging from the New Deal to Henry Wallace, and back to the Fair Deal when Wallace became a presidential candidate. Result: its group of readers (97,000 in 1948, at the top) dropped to 24,000, and the magazine's pages slimmed to a starvation ration.

Last week Editor Straight again changed his editorial policy in hope of enlarging the ailing New Republic's group. The magazine called for Harry Truman to pull out of the presidential race in favor of a stronger Democratic candidate. Privately, Straight is ready to go even further. "We would not assume a partisan role," says he, "if General Eisenhower should be nominated. We'd like to see him become President."

The swing toward the Republicans is not the only change. Beginning March 1, the magazine's remaining editorial offices in Manhattan will be closed and the New Republic will be run entirely from Washington. In the shift to Washington, started more than a year ago, at least two editors will be replaced and a brand-new group of contributors will be brought in. Left behind will be Mr. New Republic himself, 62-year-old Bruce Bliven, a staffer ever since he was hired as managing editor 29 years ago by the late Editor Herbert Croly, the man who gave the magazine the prestige it has largely lost. Bliven, who became top editor in 1930 and steered the magazine through some of its best and worst days, stepped up to be editorial director when Henry Wallace took over briefly in 1946. He will continue writing for the magazine from his Manhattan apartment, and take a new title: chairman of the editorial board.

As new operations boss, Mike Straight picked fortyish, Alabama-born Helen Fuller. Managing Editor Fuller, little known as a journalist, went to Washington in the early days of the New Deal, and worked for the Justice Department and National Youth Administration. After Straight took over the magazine in 1940, she joined its Washington bureau.

Another big change will be in the New Republic's coverage of the arts, its most widely respected sections. Instead of columns of reviews of books, plays, music, movies and radio, there will be "critical essays on the contemporary scene." Publisher Daniel Mebane thinks Washington, regarded by most critics as a cultural desert, may present some difficulties for the back of the book. But, says he: "Washington is becoming a kind of fourth Rome." Sizing up all the changes in staff and coverage, most newsmen guessed that they had been made less to enlarge the readership than to reduce the New Republic's losses.

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