A Liberal Beacon Burns Out (Published 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.

The New Leader, which was originally a broadsheet and then became a tabloid before settling into its current magazine format, was founded in 1924 as an organ of the American Socialist Party, and it came of age in an era when American politics on the left was so sectarian that you needed a scorecard to keep track of all the factions and their publications. In 1936, Samuel M. Levitas, a charismatic Russian émigré and a Menshevik, became executive editor. Under his influence, The New Leader broke with the Socialists, and in the great schism that sundered the American left over the issue of Stalinism, it clung resolutely to the side of the liberal anti-Communists, where it quickly became a powerful and outspoken voice, reporting on the Moscow trials, the Yalta Conference, the cold war and the gulag.

In its heyday, in fact, 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.

Over the years The New Leader attracted a band of loyal contributors who amounted to a not-so-short list of everyone who was anyone in liberal intellectual circles: George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, Willy Brandt, Albert Murray, Hubert H. Humphrey, Theodore Draper, Bayard Rustin, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., George F. Kennan, Murray Kempton, Reinhold Niebuhr, Ralph Ellison, Hans J. Morgenthau, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to name just a few. All of them wrote for nothing, or in recent years for what Mr. Kolatch calls a "tangible token" of $100 or so. The sociologist Daniel Bell, whose connection to the magazine is perhaps the longest of anyone's, dating back to when he was a student at City College in the late 30's, said recently, "When you think about it, it's remarkable that The New Leader was able to sustain itself for so long."