The Press: Southern Invasion

Platinum-haired, crusading Marshall Field III rode his white charger into the rural South last week. Aiming to make conservative U.S. farmers less sot in their ways, he bought the dingy, drab, 105-year-old Southern Farmer, which circulates 325,000 copies every month through the home districts of many a conservative Southern congressman. As editor and publisher he promptly installed long, lean, leftish Aubrey Williams, whom the Southern senatorial conservatives helped vote down as Rural Electrification Administrator last spring.

What Field got for his money (guesstimated price: $100,000) was an old-fashioned print shop in Montgomery, Ala. and an old-fashioned farm journal that loses a nickel on every 25¢-a-year subscription but makes it all back and more in advertising at $2.50 a column inch. Two of its eight pages are devoted to stodgy editorial matter, the rest to ads, some offering farm equipment, many hawking sex books, love drops, patent medicines.

Probable first Field moves: clean up the advertising columns, open the editorial columns to views new and strange to most Southern Farmer readers.