Isolationist Organ

Firmly for aid to Britain is a majority of the nation's press, but one isolationist organ last week stood in splendid isolation --Scribner's Commentator, a magazine which was till recently a mumbling mouthpiece for radio analysts, crooners and comedians.

As late as last May, Scribner's Commentator had as its top name-writers Playwright J. P. McEvoy, Crooner Kate Smith, Comedian Fred Allen. But in August it burst forth with Charles Lindbergh on the cover, a flattering story about Lindbergh inside, pieces on the New Deal's international sympathies and "warmongers" in the U. S.

Since then, Scribner's Commentator has devoutly followed Lindbergh's foreign policies, denounced Franklin Roosevelt's. Of the last six issues of Scribner's Commentator, five have contained stories by or about Lindbergh. December's issue had an article by Henry Ford. Other contributors are such famed isolationists as Senators Rush Holt, Worth Clark, Burt Wheeler, General Robert E. Wood.

In its January issue, out last week, Scribner's Commentator featured a story by Columnist Hugh Johnson calling for No More Aid to Britain. A cartoon showed Franklin Roosevelt as a hockey goalie leaving his goal undefended to skate on Europe's thin ice. In other issues recently Commentator has denounced Dorothy Thompson, H. V. Kaltenborn (a onetime Commentator editor), Playwright Robert Sherwood, Harvard's President James Bryant Conant, Walter Lippmann, William Allen White, Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, and PM's backer Marshall Field III as "Internationalists" conspiring to force the U. S. into war.

A redhaired, Maine-born Manhattan lawyer, Charles Shipman Payson (whose wife is Jock Whitney's sister Joan) started it all when he started Commentator four years ago. In November 1939, he absorbed defunct Scribner's, and about that time he hired as an assistant editor a modest, handsome young Westerner, George Eggleston, who had worked on the late College Humor, the old Life and the late Listener's Digest.

Editor Eggleston got his friend Douglas Stewart, a New Deal-hating, Wall Street economist, to put some money into Scribner's Commentator. Last March they began reorganizing it. Out went Editor Francis Rufus Bellamy, Managing Editor Fred Hamlin, other editorial associates who were unsympathetic to their new policies. So far they have not only the satisfaction of promoting isolationism, but they claim it pays--that it has doubled Commentator's circulation, reduced operating losses very comfortably.

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