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Some of the most notable Leftist writers of the day wrote for Villard: Norman Thomas, Stuart Chase, Paul Y. Anderson, Heywood Broun, Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, Carl Van Doren. By 1935 they had far outstripped Villard's radical leanings, and he sold The Nation. Maurice Wertheim, a Manhattan financier and philanthropist, owned it for a brief spell, then passed it on in 1937 to Freda Kirchwey.
Publisher Kirchwey was a young woman three years out of Barnard College when she joined The Nation in 1918. In 1922 she became managing editor, in 1932 edi tor. At 43 she is gracious, handsome, sincerely Leftist in sympathy. With a circulation around 40,000, Freda Kirchwey manages to make The Nation pay its own way on a Spartan budget. Approximately a fourth of its revenue comes from advertising. Editor Kirchwey believes that with 15,000 more subscribers, The Nation could get along without any advertisers at all.
According to a recent survey compiled for The Nation by Elmo Roper, over 63% of its readers are well-to-do, less than 37% belong to the underprivileged classes for whose sake it is edited. The average Nation reader is Jewish (46%) or Protestant (43½%), lives in the industrial East, favors Government control of some or all business, voted for La Follette in 1924, for Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936.
By last week it seemed that The Nation after 75 years had passed its radical peak, was headed back toward Godkin. Wrote Max Lerner in a survey of U. S. reform: ". . . Marxian influence . . . led to an ac cent on faith which . . . could result only in a drastic disillusionment. . . . The only possible focus for an American Left is America. . . . We must re-examine Marxism. . . ."