Pull to the Right

The goal of the fortnightly Freeman, in the words of Editor John Chamberlain, is to be "the best right-wing magazine of opinion" in the U.S. Last week, 18 months after its first issue, Editor Chamberlain reported that the Freeman had taken some big steps toward its goal. At a time when most magazines of opinion are struggling to keep alive, its circulation has been increasing 1,000 a month, from a scant 6,000 to almost 20,000.

Beginning with its next issue, the Freeman will be dressed up in a slick-paper cover. For the first time it will carry ads and go on sale on newsstands (in 50 cities) outside New York. Bossing distribution will be Alex L. Hillman, a successful publisher (Pageant, Homeland, People Today, twelve pulps). Added to the Freeman's editorial board, which includes Suzanne La Follette and Henry Hazlitt, will be Forrest Davis, an ex-editor of Scripps-Howard's Rocky Mountain News, political writer and onetime Washington editor of the Satevepost.

Ground Swell. Chamberlain credits the Freeman's upsurge to a "political and psychological ground swell in our direction," and he hopes not only to ride it but to help influence it. In the '30s, when Chamberlain was a young stalwart of the left wing, he was well aware of the force exerted on middle-of-the-roaders by the leftish press. "We are now trying," says Rightist Chamberlain, "to pull the middle-of-the-road back to the right." Thus far the Freeman's pull has been hard, but uneven. The magazine has pointed out why the Administration's weak foreign policy has failed more often than it has succeeded, has relentlessly fought Communism, and every form of statism, inveighed against materialist influences in U.S. courts and education. Among its noteworthy articles: one by Ohio's Senator John Bricker pointing out that the U.N.'s Covenant of Human Rights was full of traps for the West, and a widely reprinted piece by George Schuyler, an editor of the Negro Pittsburgh Courier, punching holes in the Communist-drawn picture of the "enslaved" American Negro.

Flotsam & Jetsam. On the other hand, the Freeman often shouts at its enemies in the same shrill tones it damns the left for using. In defending Senator McCarthy, for example, it calls his critics "mad" people who, like Pavlov's dogs, "foam" at the mouth every time his name is mentioned. It extravagantly hails John T. Flynn (The Road Ahead, While You Slept) as the "keenest journalist of our day," although many rightists think Flynn's hatred of Franklin Roosevelt has blinded his once sharp reporter's eye. The Freeman itself is often so blinded by its own extreme right-wing prejudices that it labels " 'liberal' Republicans" (i.e., those who don't think Taft can win) "illiterates."

As a reaction to this mixture, "people," says Chamberlain, "either love or hate us." But the Freeman's businessmen backers like the results well enough to give the editors a completely free hand. Though it lost $97,000 last year, the Freeman's editors confidently expect to reach their break-even point of 30,000 readers by the end of this year.

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