The Press: Change at the Nation

Ever since Freda Kirchwey bought the deep pink Nation in 1937, it has been almost constantly in the red. Publisher-Editor Kirchwey kept the weekly (circ. 32,726) going only by a constant begging campaign for contributions. Last week, weary of rattling the tin cup, Freda Kirchwey stepped out of her job. “I want to do some traveling and some writing,” she said, “without the burdens I’ve had.”

But there will be no change in the far-left tack of the magazine. The new editor is tweedy, bespectacled Carey McWilliams, editorial director for the last four years and a “liberal” who at times nudged close to the Communist Party line. As California commissioner of housing and immigration toward the last years of the Depression, McWilliams championed the collective farm, has been connected with half a dozen organizations since cited by the U.S. Attorney General as subversive, e.g., Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy. Last week, for a half-hearted apology, the Nation settled a libel suit against its former art critic, Clement Greenberg, who in a letter to the New Leader (TIME, April 2, 1951) had accused Nation Foreign Editor Alvarez del Vayo of “invariably [paralleling] Soviet propaganda.”

To improve the state of the Nation, Editor McWilliams hopes to expand the U.N. and Washington coverage, build up the back-of-the-book sections with better coverage of art, books, theater, radio-TV, music. How much building he can do actually depends on new Publisher George G. Kirstein, son of the former chairman of Boston’s William Filene’s Sons Co. To pay some of the Nation’s bills, Kirstein is himself putting a limited (and unspecified) sum into the nonprofit company that holds all Nation stock, hopes to raise enough new cash to beef up the Nation.