Stout Out

A brand-new editorial management marched in this week to take charge of the Saturday Evening Post. Only a fortnight after the Post uncorked its unprecedented price boost from 5-c- to 10-c- (TIME, March 9), Editor Wesley Winans Stout abruptly quit his job, after a "disagreement on policy." With him went:

> Chief Editorial Writer Garet Garrett, a longtime Post fixture whose brooding editorials afforded the nearest thing to a bible of the isolationists.

> A(delaide) W. Neall (known to few readers as a woman), for 33 years an editorial stand-by whose name is No. 2 on the Post masthead.

New editor is mild Ben Hibbs, 40, editor of Country Gentleman, and, like Editor Stout, a onetime Kansas newspaperman. An equally significant newcomer is a smart, versatile young man (29), Robert Fuoss (pronounced Foos), who fills the newly created post of managing editor. Young Fuoss, a graduate of the University of Michigan, has for two years headed Post promotion and publicity. He is an advertising man, a protege of Curtis' Advertising Manager Fred A. Healy. This shift marked a new ascendancy in the Post for Fred Healy, crack adman who, during the last depression, extended his sway over the Post's circulation department. (An adman became circulation manager.) He then proceeded to offset normally shrinking circulation by jettisoning the ultraconservative circulation methods which had long been Cyrus H. K. Curtis' pride.

Editor Hibbs's Country Gentleman has been considerably more pro-Administration than the Post. But the disagreement which produced the shake-up doubtless concerned a great deal more than the editorial page, for fiction is still the main stay of the Post's editorial appeal. And Editor Stout, who got his training under the late, great editor, George Lorimer, was generally credited with doing a first-rate job.

A clue to the shake-up may lie in the fact that in the first eleven issues of 1942 the number of pages of Post advertising has averaged 20.2% below the same eleven issues of last year, with the decline apparently growing. A decline of 20% in Post advertising would mean a loss of about 575 pages in a year, or between $4,000,000 and $5,000,000 in revenue. (All Curtis publications made only $1,628,386 in the first nine months of 1941.) When a magazine starts taking that kind of loss, somebody has to take the rap: the business management or the editorial staff.

Meanwhile the Post debated whether to make further news by breaking one of its oldest advertising taboos and take liquor advertising.

Editor Stout, a man of determined convictions, refused to discuss whys & wherefores; but, said he: "There was not one point of disagreement but several. It was a very strong disagreement." He said he was going back to "the work I'm happiest in--a tramp newspaper man." With his wife he will head west by automobile, taking plenty of time to chin with plain folks along the way. For his first self-assignment he chose "the biggest story in America today, the story of the revolution that is taking place in American life."

Curtis President Walter D. Fuller, who suggested that the new Post policy would be considerably less anti-New Deal, was equally vague about the real reasons for the blowup. Said he: "It has been speculated that our differences rose from political viewpoints. That was not the case."

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