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In the 1932 Presidential campaign, Liberty was almost a house organ for Nominee Franklin Roosevelt. That year 17 Roosevelt articles appeared in Liberty, culminating in a post-election Rooseveltian "message to the public" called The Election—An Interpretation. This year Publisher Macfadden, who no longer approves of Contributor Roosevelt's policies, came forward in his own person as a Republican possibility, announced with no false modesty that, if elected, he would annul "fool laws," put down "racketeers." Before the Cleveland Convention in June, Candidate Macfadden was briefly touted by friends, including Novelist Thomas Dixon. Depth of Mr. Macfadden's political thinking is indicated by his belief that Russia and Japan are planning early attacks on the U. S.
Last year Publisher Macfadden acquired one of the handsomest of cinema fan magazines in the late James R. Quirk's Photoplay. Since going under the Macfadden banner, Photoplay has lost circulation, but continues to make money.
In his Manhattan tabloid, the Evening Graphic, Publisher Macfadden thought he had the beginning of a chain of mass newspapers to rival that of William Randolph Hearst. To newsmen's surprise, the Graphic never caught on, though it did set alltime journalistic marks for sensational incoherence. In 1932, after a scheme to unload the failing sheet on its employes had been abandoned, Publisher Macfadden regretfully jettisoned the Graphic. Main money-makers for Mr. Macfadden have been the pioneer sex-confession magazine True Story, for which he claims the largest monthly newsstand circulation of any magazine on earth (total: 2,135,006), his detective magazines which feature pictures of real crooks and his "Women's Group" (True Romances, Love and Romance, True Experiences, Movie Mirror, Radio Mirror). So fat did the Macfadden fortune grow that in 1931 its proprietor was able to make the large but some-what vague gesture of organizing the charitable Bernarr Macfadden Foundation with the income from publishing properties which he described as "of the value of approximately $5,000,000."
Avowed purpose of the Foundation is "to propagate the principles of health building." Its various health institutes charge substantial fees, cash in advance. A Macfadden Foundation patron might conceivably place his son in Educator Macfadden's Castle Heights Military Academy at Lebanon, Tenn. (tuition $650), spend the winter at Host Macfadden's New Deauville Hotel in Miami Beach, and so debilitate himself in that winter sporting capital as to require a season at "Physcultopathist" Macfadden's Physical Culture Hotel at Dansville, N. Y. (rates $33.50 to $80 per week, with extras). There he might choose a Macfadden diet-&-exercise cure which is supposed to correct 150 human miseries, including acidosis, alcoholism, apoplexy, gout, impotence, lowered vitality, masturbation, ptomaine poisoning, sleepwalking, sterility and writer's cramp. Patrons showing up in "trances" are warned that they must pay their own attendants.