NYT: A Liberal Beacon ("The New Leader") Burns Out

A Liberal Beacon Burns Out
By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: January 23, 2006


The New Leader, which is either the most influential of the little-known magazines or the least well known of the influential ones, is closing after 82 years of publication, first as a weekly, then a biweekly and, since 2000, a bimonthly. The executive editor, Myron Kolatch, said recently that he was still working on the January-February issue, which in characteristic New Leader fashion would probably come out a bit late, toward the end of next month, and would be a retrospective look at the magazine's history. Then he plans to pack up the magazine's papers and back issues and look for an archive somewhere to house them.

The New Leader has a circulation of roughly 12,000, down from a peak of about 30,000 in the late 1960's, and like most magazines of its kind, it runs at a loss - some $400,000 a year in this case. Back in the 50's, it was said to receive occasional support from the C.I.A., but it has been more reliably sustained by contributions from, of all places, an institute financed by Tamiment, the famous Poconos resort and proving ground for the likes of Sid Caesar and Danny Kaye. When Tamiment, which began as a Socialist camp for adults, was sold in 1965, Mr. Kolatch explained, its directors decided to spend down the proceeds on The New Leader and a couple of other causes, and they have finally succeeded in doing just that, leaving the magazine without enough money to go on....

***

In its heyday...The New Leader was probably read with more scrutiny in Moscow than in New York. If you were a dissident East European, a mere appearance in its pages could quickly land you in jail, as two Yugoslav writers discovered in 1956 and 1964, respectively - Milovan Djilas, the former vice president of Yugoslavia, and Mihajlo Mihajlov, a young journalist reporting on artistic life in Moscow. In 1956, The New Leader published Nikita S. Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing the crimes of the Stalin era, and a few years later it was the first American publication to introduce readers to the work of Joseph Brodsky and Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, among others.

The magazine was also a pioneer in the civil rights struggle, publishing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter From Birmingham City Jail," for example, and an article by Carl A. Auerbach, a law professor, that successfully suggested a way of ending the deadlock blocking passage of the 1957 civil rights bill....


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/arts/23lead.html?8hpib